Andrew Klavan had a truly batshit (that’s a pun, there won’t be more) editorial in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend in which he argued that The Dark Knight vindicates the Bush administration as noble heroes, left to defend a world that doesn’t understand them. It’s absurd on its face, of course- Batman is a fictional vigilante who stalks around at night and punches out bad guys in his pajamas, while George W Bush was elected to serve a nation by its people. The two aren’t comparable on any terms. But you call the Joker a terrorist in the script, and people like Klavan rush to put on their thinking caps and explain how George Bush is just like Batman. It gets really dumb, though, once he starts asking rhetorical questions about liberal Hollywood. I’m feeling charitable today, and I’ll help him out:

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth?

There’s no need to "put on a mask" if your point is to explore the complexities of a situation. If you want to examine the military policy in the Iraq war, you don’t need to re-shoot Star Wars from a viewpoint that’s critical of the Jedi council’s tactics against the Sith. You can just set the damn thing in Baghdad. But if you want to claim that Lyndie England was a hero and George W Bush is the bravest man to ever walk the face of the planet Earth, you need a lot of layers of allegory for people to not laugh (or spit) in your face.

Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense — values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right — only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?

Because the idea that those values can be determined without any messy moral ambiguities only exist in worlds created by people who are specifically trying to have easily identifiable good guys and bad guys. You have to create a world in which the right-wing "reality" applies. It’s easy to know who the bad guys are in Lord of the Rings because they’re orcs led by a giant evil eye. It’s easy to know who the villain is in Spider-Man 3 because he’s named Venom and wears an evil black costume. If the world actually worked that way, then right-wingers would be welcome to make their films as direct and realistic as they liked.

The answers to these questions seem to me to be embedded in the story of "The Dark Knight" itself: Doing what’s right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified.

Don’t look now, but I think that this guy just made the claim that the first person to make a film in which George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld personally beat up Saddam Hussein will be the next Jesus.

Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They’re wrong, of course, even on their own terms.

And for evidence, witness how successful caped vigilantes have been at protecting major world cities from supervillains.

The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them — when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love.

What’s awesome about statements like this is that, when you decide that intolerance, unkindness, and hate are useful tools for a better world, you become indistinguishable from those who use them for purposes you don’t find quite so noble.

It’s almost like you become two-faced, using your unambiguous moral certainty that you’re doing the right thing to commit unspeakable acts. I don’t know if this guy actually watched the whole thing, but the self-righteous, unquestioning character convinced of his own goodness is Harvey Dent, not Bruce Wayne. And dude, I’m pretty sure he was a bad guy.

(cross-posted to www.dansolomon.com)

Shorter Climbing Out Of The Dark:

Alleging something and saying something are two very different things, and this proves that the Globe and Mail is a dirty Commie rag.

Shorter Matthew Siscoe:

Since Al-Qaeda is Sunni and Saddam Hussein was Sunni, it therefore stands to reason that a small, disorganized and mostly loathed band of religious fanatics can achieve exactly the same result as a Western-backed secular strongman starting out from a position of centralized government power.

Shorter Halls of Macadamia:

There was a violent incident in the city yesterday, so this obviously disproves any “statistical evidence” of “dropping crime rates.”

Shorter Right on Course:

An Australian computer programmer with no expertise in climatology said there’s no such thing as global warming in a newspaper devoutly supporting denial of global warming theory, and this gives us cause to re-evaluate carbon taxation.

Shorter Celestial Junk:

A progressive is anybody I don’t like.

“Shorter” concept invented by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all internet traditions.

Finally, there’s enough information available to make an informed decision on the US Presidential election! Or, at least, there will be soon. IDW is publishing Presidential Comics, a flip-book biography of Barack Obama and John McCain, in October. The Obama side is written by Jeff Mariotte, who will presumably not indulge his tendency to have his protagonist fight vampires, and drawn by Tom Morgan. John McCain’s bio, meanwhile, features Stephen Thompson on pencils and Andy Helfer on the script. J Scott Campbell is responsible for both covers.

A few thoughts:

I’m going to go ahead and guess, based on the fact that he drew John McCain as the chubby Joker, while Barack Obama looks like he could have been an IO Agent with a heart of gold in a mid-90’s issue of Gen 13, that J Scott Campbell prefers the Democratic nominee. If Campbell’s McCain popped up in the pages of Danger Girl, you can be pretty sure that he’d be leering over Silicon Valerie’s tank top and secretly trying to have the girls all killed.

If they weren’t being published as a two-fer, by what margin do you think the Obama issue would outsell the John McCain book? I’m guessing it’d be at least 3-1 from Diamond, which means Obama can probably rest easy among the crucial people who do the orders for comic book stores demographic. This is kinda funny, too, because McCain’s is the one which’ll have all the action and airplanes and stuff.

Will it be a single conservative blogger looking for a fresh angle, or a big-name Michelle Malkin-type who cries foul at the fact that McCain looks like Mister Rictus from Wanted while the interior art for the Obama book is from an ex-Captain America artist? The answer to this depends on how very slow the news day is when someone visits the IDW site.

How awesome would it be if this is a big hit and IDW starts putting out books like this for minor-party candidates? Who would you want to draw the cover for the Ralph Nader and Bob Barr biographies? Also, if they did one about Ron Paul, would his fans buy multiple copies each in an attempt to prove that he’s more popular than either Obama or McCain based on his Diamond sales figures?

(cross-posted to dansolomon.com)

To the fine folks of Muslims Against Sharia (located in the well-known Islamic enclave of Omaha, Nebraska – not that I am questioning their Islamic credentials, because god knows if there’s one thing moderate Muslims like doing, it’s defending Michael Savage). They’ve seen fit to issue a drive-by comment, reprimanding all of us who might believe that Omar Khadr be given such trivialities as “due process” and “an actual trial.”

And yes, it is a shame that Sgt. Christopher Speer was killed in Afghanistan. I mean, sure, the “eyewitness” accounts of Omar Khadr killing Sgt. Speer with a grenade might have been tampered with and were uncertain in the first place, but we know that Khadr’s father was definitively a bad person and most of his family aren’t pleasant either, so it’s obvious that he too is a bad person. It’s genetics, you see.

So welcome, Muslims (Definitely Not White Conservatives, Actual Muslims) Against Sharia! We hope you have a lot of fun here.

Regular readers will know full well that I have no love for Stephen Harper, considering him a feckless, short-sighted and generally mean-spirited individual. His stance on the repatriation of Omar Khadr does nothing to change this opinion.

Let us recap: Omar Khadr was arrested as a child soldier in the Afghanistan war when he was fifteen. International commitments signed by both Canada and the United States recognize that individuals below the age of eighteen cannot be legally considered “soldiers,” and even if you ignore the optional protocol that was signed in 2002 (and is thus a binding commitment on both countries) Khadr would still be toeing the line of the 15-year-old age limit for child soldiers. But he’s still in Guantanamo.

His lawyers have shown that evidence against him – specifically the evidence responsible for his charge of killing a soldier with a grenade – has been altered after the fact. The Pentagon itself has accidentally released conflicting evidence. But he’s still in Guantanamo.

We know that Khadr has been subjected to extended sleep deprivation. Extended sleep deprivation is torture – it deliberately and systematically breaks down a person’s mental health, forcing them into a state akin to psychosis. But he’s still in Guantanamo.

And Stephen Harper’s defense for allowing this to continue? “The previous government took a whole range, all of the information into account when they made the decision on how to proceed with the Khadr case several years ago.” Yes, Stephen Harper’s argument is that the Liberals didn’t do anything when they were in office. By this logic, of course, no elected official can ever do anything about a situation that began before they took office. It’s idiotic and cowardly, which coming from Stephen Harper should prove no surprise.

But one more point:

“Harper added that Canada: “frankly, has no real alternative” to the U.S. legal process. “

This is a lie. Plainly and simply, it is a lie. We know this because Omar Khadr is the sole remaining prisoner in Guantanamo who is a citizen of a Western country. The Brits and the Aussies have already removed their citizens and dealt with them as they see fit. Canada has “no real alternative” because its Prime Minister doesn’t want there to be an alternative.

Hi, Mightygodkingers. My name’s Dan Solomon. I’m one of the new guest posters around while MGK’s ISP is down. I’m an American writer currently living in London. I keep my own blog at www.dansolomon.com. And I have all sorts of weird things to talk about.

Like, check this out! Toddlers Who Dislike Spicy Food Racist, Says Report… A government-sponsored body puts out a report that says that kids who don’t like food from other cultures must not like it because they’re racist. That’s so fucked up! Let’s check in with some bloggers and pundits and make sure that they’re aware of how crazy the “PC Police” have gotten.

The USA Today ridicules the fact British authorities are on the lookout for racist attitudes among the nation’s toddlers.

James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, agrees that the notion that one’s taste in food has anything to do with one’s attitude toward groups of people is far-fetched to begin with.

Instapundit thinks tar and feathers are too good for these people who claim that if your kid doesn’t like foreign food, it’s because you’re racist.

Even the BBC seems to think that telling nursery staff must be alert for racist remarks among toddlers, a government-sponsored agency report is fairly absurd.

And boy, who can argue with that? It’s really just common sense, when you think about it. Surely a government-sponsored agency has better things to do than demand that day-care and nursery workers tell toddlers that they’re racist because they think curry is yucky! We can all agree just how absurd this is.

Except take a step back. The “government-sponsored agency” in question is the National Children’s Bureau (whose name is decried as “Orwellian” and “Kafka-esque”, variously, by outraged bloggers). The “report” that they put out is 366 pages, and the bit about food appears in two sentences near the end. The NCB is indeed funded in part by government grants, but the Telegraph story that started this sweeping outrage throughout the Internet wrongly claims that its £12million annual budget comes “mainly from Government funded organizations”. The “report” is actually a book that was written by a woman who is not employed by the NCB, and it was printed on a variation of print-on-demand, where the profits from book sales fund the publication.

You can find the operating budget of any UK charity here. If you do that, you’ll learn that less than half of the budget from the NCB comes from government sources. If you go to the organization’s website, you’ll learn that, rather than being a product of big government, they’re actually a mid-sized charity that employs a staff of 20 (plus some full- and part-time fundraisers, who are paid a commission). They had an operating budget of £12million, which sounds like a lot, except that even the Donkey Sanctuary has a budget of almost twice that. The UK government awards grants to a very wide array of charities (what would be called non-profit groups in the US) and it doesn’t make the NCB a government body any more than it makes the Unicorn Theatre or the Oxfam one.

And the context of the quote that’s sent everyone’s blood pressure through the roof?

a child may react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying, ‘yuck!’. that may indicate a lack of familiarity with that particular food, or ‘more seriously a reaction to a food associated with people from a particular ethnic or cultural community’.

Why, it states outright that maybe the kid just hasn’t had it and doesn’t like it. It turns out you can actually not like foreign food because you don’t like it, so everyone can sleep easy.

The point of this section of the book is to examine the attitudes kids may be getting from their parents, and to be on the lookout for certain clues. It may be that a kid just doesn’t like curry, or it’s possible that the kid’s parents told him that Indians are dirty and he shouldn’t eat their food. This is listed as one of very many possible warning signs, and is meant to be examined in context- if a kid refuses to sit near or play with kids of another race, learned from his dad that it’s okay to call them “pakis”, and refuses to eat food from other cultures, then maybe it’s something to consider. Now who’s got common sense on their side?

And all of this is based on the notion that nursery care workers shouldn’t be bothering with stuff like this, that it’s somehow Big Brother stepping in and telling kids not to speak their minds. And you know what? That’s a fine opinion, and if it’s yours, you’re welcome to it. In that case, I strongly recommend not putting your kids into a nursery. Adults have every right to correct the behavior of children, and when they’re entrusted with the care of those kids, they’ve actually got a responsibility to do it.

So, just to summarize-

The book isn’t a “report” by a “government agency”. The woman who wrote it is an independent author who doesn’t even work for the charity that published it, and she wasn’t funded by any government money. The book never claims that kids are racist if they don’t like certain foods. Can all these people be outraged by something real next time?

There’s been a recent spate of right-wing blogs all saying the same thing:

“Now, I’m not racist, but how come all those small-town Iowans are so much more supportive and self-reliant than those big city New Orleans folks were during their disaster?”

Examples range from Tigerhawk’s relatively polite, only implied comparison, to Girl On The Right’s naked white triumphalism.

It’s important to make a few points here.

1.) Reports of looting and violence during Katrina were wildly exaggerated during news coverage of the storm and aftermath. The murders at the SuperDome? Didn’t happen. The shooting at rescuers? Didn’t happen. The widespread looting? Was largely confined to food and fresh water, which in time of crisis is legally allowable. After all the dust (and water) settled down, and police went through all their reports, the total number of murders in New Orleans over the course of the hurricane and immediate aftermath was four – not unreasonably high for a city with New Orleans’ crime rate.

So right off the bat, when someone complains that those horrible New Orleans folks (who just happen to be black) were so horrible with their looting and murdering, feel free to smack them. Given the size of Katrina’s wake as compared to Iowa’s flooding (and this isn’t to dismiss Iowa’s flooding damages as “small”, because they obviously weren’t, but come on, the two events simply aren’t comparable in size – Katrina turned the entire Gulf Coast into one big disaster area while the Iowa floods left Des Moines, the largest city in the state, relatively untouched), New Orleans residents largely behaved in an orderly and civic-minded fashion.

The point here is simple: it’s entirely fair to congratulate Iowans for their civic pride in failing to loot during a much smaller disaster. But comparing to New Orleans, even ignoring the respective difference in scale, is kind of stupid because for the most part New Orleans residents were just as proudly conscious of their duty towards their fellow citizens.

2.) Iowa residents had the good sense to evacuate, while those stupid N’awlinsians stuck around for the hurricane. First, let’s completely toss aside the fact that Iowa residents had Katrina as a fairly effective learning experience. While we’re at it, let’s ignore all those Floridians who survived Hurricane Andrew and then decided to stick around for the next one when given the chance.

No, instead let’s discuss something really, really simple: hurricanes and floods are different things! I realize this might be revelatory to some, but bear with me.

See, hurricanes, before they are hurricanes, are tropical storms. Nobody is going to evacuate for a tropical storm; no politician would order it and most citizens, other than the most storm-paranoid, aren’t going to bother. Because it’s a tropical storm. If you’re not out at sea, that means a lot of rain and probably some wind damage, but stay indoors and you’ll probably be fine. Katrina, like most serious hurricanes, upgraded from tropical storm to category 1 hurricane (rough, but probably not worth evacuating) to category 3 hurricane (time to beat feet) in rapid succession, so much so that New Orleans’ mandatory evacuation was only ordered with less than 36 hours’ worth of notice to get out of Dodge. And when the damage happened, it all happened at once, quickly and with very little opportunity to prevent damages – primarily because of the massive levee breaks.

Now, Iowa. Iowa wasn’t a flash flood; when flooding began on June 8th, it was a steady, lengthy process. People could see the danger coming because floods, unlike hurricanes, are relatively predictable, and this in turn let them do things like reinforce levees and evacuate people by moving them to high ground. (FUN FACT: moving to high ground is not that useful in a hurricane!)

And of course, there are those piddling little details like there being only one major traffic artery in and out of New Orleans (the I-10) whereas Iowa, as a state, is basically roads and fields; the fact that Katrina victims were largely and systematically prevented from fleeing the city, sometimes at gunpoint; and that 20 percent of N’awlinsians don’t own a car as compared to 6 percent of Iowans, and in both cases those percentages tend to be the people too broke to easily afford, say, a bus ticket.

3.) Iowans are self-respecting, self-reliant salt-of-the-earth folks who don’t need no government dollar to get their lives back on track. It’s entirely possible that Iowans believe this, but they’re entirely too happy to apply for that federal aid they don’t need and don’t want (nearly 15,000 applications in the first week), which incidentally is currently estimated to top out between $3 and $4 billion.

Now, don’t get me wrong; it’s good that they’re getting that money, considering that’s probably close to the total damages suffered. But it takes a special sort of blinded gall to ignore Iowans getting reimbursed almost entirely for their damages and then complain that Katrina victims are sucking on the government teat when total damages from Katrina are estimated between 125 and 150 billion smackers and Katrina’s victims have received only $114 billion, or in between 70 and 90 percent of damages depending on whose damage estimate you believe.

All of this, incidentally, ignores the fact that Iowans are about as likely as New Orleansites (Orleanians? Orleandos? I dunno) to be on welfare or to receive food stamps, so in that regard they likewise suck about the same amount of government teat. Of course, Iowans are a lot more likely to receive giant agricultural subsidies, but I understand that accepting such money does not in any way make you less self-reliant or salt-of-the-earth.

The Liberal Party released their carbon taxation plan today, and I’d say it’s… okay. It does a lot of what a carbon taxation scheme should, of course, but it misses two major points.

Firstly, there’s no tax on gasoline. I understand that gasoline taxes are unpopular, but the lack of a gas tax in a carbon taxation plan when you are taxing literally every other fossil fuel seems like staggering pandering to me. I don’t even think a gas tax is unsellable – say “look, we’re going to tax gas, yes, but the gas taxes are going to be specifically redirected into a fund to improve public transportation so that in five years you can take a hybrid bus from Chilliwack to the Bay of Fundy or from your home to your grandma’s back yard.” The longer you let people think that their old lifestyles are sustainable – and they just aren’t – the harder it’s going to be to tell them the truth.

Secondly, the tax is revenue-neutral, erring on the side of costing a bit of money. I understand that the Liberals want to make carbon taxation as painless as possible by lowering income taxes at the same time. But this idea is flawed for two reasons:

1.) We desperately need massive energy infrastructure investment. Canada has too much oil power generation as it is; we need to replace that with solar, tidal and wind ASAP, and additional revenues created by a carbon tax in the short term could help fund these initiatives.

2.) Carbon taxation in the short run is revenue neutral, but in the long run it is presumably revenue-lowering because given time everybody will find ecological ways to avoid paying the tax. Which is good, but that means eventually you have to jack income taxes back up to compensate. I don’t look forward to the squabbling when that happens.

Still, on the whole, it’s an all-right plan, a solid B+ effort. Could have been much, much worse.

Also: 350.

Insta-click send-a-letter (not just an email, but a hardcopy) to all significant government parties regarding the new Canadian copyright bill (which is bad). Register your discontent! You know, if you’re Canadian.

One of the Harper government’s big national security hullaballooes has been the arrest and trials of the “Toronto 18,” a band of Muslim supposed-terrorists who were conspiring to blow up Parliament. (Of course, they had no idea how to do it until undercover RCMP officers explained to them how to do it, but that is neither here nor there.)

One of the “Toronto 18” is a youth of 17. At his trial this week, it was explained by the RCMP’s own informant that this young man, a recent convert from Hinduism to Islam, had no idea what the group was planning, and believed that the training camp the group set up was a religious retreat.

But wait, it gets better:

Court has heard how the youth was among a dozen people who attended a military-style camp about two hours north of Toronto in December 2005.

“They sat in the tent terrified,” court heard of the other campers. “They ended up huddled, shivering in the tent.”

Wolf and bear noises.

A mock-Tijuana Bible featuring John McCain and George W. Bush.

Explicit, NSFW, and more than a little gross, frankly.

Pick one:

A) Racist people making “fun” of Barack Obama

B) The most incredibly stupid boosterism ever

So, the Tories managed to pass Bill C-50, the new immigration law bill, yesterday. Nobody outside of the Tories thinks this is a good bill; it doesn’t really do what it aims to do (increase skilled worker immigration to Canada), and it directly impedes reunion of immigrant families, which nobody thinks is a good idea outside of diehard nativists.

Canada’s immigration laws have problems, of course – the most notorious being the fact that wait times for immigration review are horrendous. Of course, the Immigration and Refugee Board is 35 percent unstaffed, and they directly attribute the largest part of wait times to that fact in their report on the matter, and you’d think that if the Tories were serious about improving immigration they’d appoint new people to the Board.

But this isn’t about improving immigration; it’s the same as everything the Tories do, which is to rubberstamp their vision of what Canada should be through legislation, be it “family-friendly” filmmaking backdoored into Bill C-10 or reopening the legal status of the fetus with Bill C-484. Now, if Canadians had actually voted the Tories into a majority government, I would be angry, but I’d have less cause to gripe; if Canadians desperately wanted the Tory way, that’s how democracies work.

But these bills aren’t passing because the Tories have a majority government. Because the Tories have a minority government. These bills are passing because the Liberal Party is abstaining on every single goddamned vote that has the potential to be even slightly contentious. This is because Stephane Dion is in charge of the party, and Stephane Dion is playing chickenshit politics. Every contentious vote becomes the same question: “can Stephane Dion win an election?”

And the answer given is always “no,” even though Dion – probably the least liked Liberal party leader of the last, oh, fifty years or so – at the helm of the Liberal party puts the Grits only three points behind the Tories in countrywide polling right now. It’s a death spiral, because every time Stephane Dion refuses to fight the Tories on a contentious vote, the public becomes increasingly more convinced that he can’t lead the country. Which is fair, because if you don’t think you can take on a dink like Stephen Harper, what the hell business do you have trying to run a nation?

At this point I think the Liberals have to pull the emergency play: boot Dion, put in an interim party leader that would scare the shit out of Tories trying to call an election while the Liberals are getting organized (Gerard Kennedy or Ken Dryden are good candidates in this regard), and then have their convention and immediately challenge the Tories, who honestly aren’t that popular at all any more in Quebec and whose support elsewhere in Canada outside of Alberta is mostly soft and due to Dion’s immense wimpiness as a party leader. (I’m already hearing from friends within the low levels of the Liberal party infrastructure that this plan is gaining popularity rapidly in the ranks; the MPs want to fight the Tories on these stupid bills and Dion won’t let them.)

Because right now it’s just Dion getting the bad press; soon, though, it’ll be the Liberals’ fault for letting Dion walk them down the path to electoral suicide, and then it’s real trouble.

The infamous, rumoured tape of Michelle Obama screeching a hate-filled tirade against “whitey” has finally leaked onto the interwoobs. I present it here in the interest of full disclosure.