What He Said 2

Glenn Greenwald talks about (surprise!) empathy and the Republican Party. He ties it in to their constant assertions that Americans are objectively the bestest people ever from the bestest country ever ever (assuming they're white and straight, natch), but the piece is of most interest for demonstrating how their obnoxious unwillingness to consider how their policies affect other people miraculously vanish when they start to impinge on themselves or their families.

For all the mockery over empathy, look at what happens to right-wing figures in those rare cases when they become personally affected by the ideology they advocate. They quickly abandon it. Dick Cheney objects to the injustice of gay inequality because his daughter is burdened by it. Nancy Reagan deviates from social conservative dogma to become a leading advocate of stem-cell research because she suffered through her husband's Alzheimers (sic). Jane Harman instantaneously transforms from Surveillance State authoritarian to raving civil libertarian upon learning that her own telephone conversations were intercepted by the government. They advocate their views up until the point that it begins adversely affecting not only others, but also themselves.

Read the whole thing.

In Fairness, It's Also Gonna Be 3-D

I have a disturbing and embarrassing secret to confess to. Of my own volition, I went to see the remake of Friday The 13th. It should go entirely without saying that it was bullshit on toast. If the toast was made of shit, that is. And the bullshit came from a Nazi bull.

Inevitably, then, a sequel is in the works. But not just any sequel, my friends, a sequel set somewhere that's really fucking cold.

Now, this may seem like a strange call to some of you. After all, those of us who are true horror film aficionados (or who simply pay attention) will already know that Jason has already been into motherfucking space. Watching him hiding behind a snowman is unlikely to impress anyone.

So what is the hidden agenda behind forcing a dozen teenagers to don three layers of clothing (which surely must interfere with the regular tit explosions the slasher genre is "famous" for) and head off to be slaughtered in the snow? There can be only one answer. The Friday The 13th series is now to be used to debunk global warming!

Think about it! Every time it snows on a conference on climate change Sean Hannity's tiny dead eyes light up like two flies on fire. An entire blockbuster film dedicated to snow will inevitably lead to the cinema-going public (almost all of whom, remember, are twats) over-estimating the amount of snow left in the world. Moreover, this is a perfect opportunity to suggest that, even if GW is happening, then there's an upside. Sure, lakes are drying, fish are dying, people on the coast are going to drown, but if you stay in the snow then Jason will fuck you up.

And this is only the beginning. The second remake sequel (Christ, that's a phrase that makes me nauseous) could be about Jason slashing the Hell out of a town that's given up its guns. In the next one, he could spend his time murdering anyone who managed to squeeze a gay marriage in in California, during the brief period between the authorities being douches and the majority of the entire state being unfeeling fuckers of the worst kind (even the Nazi bull has the excuse that it's ultimately just a dumb animal). By the fourth film, Jason could team up with Muslim sleeper terrorists and President Obama and try to slash out a new caliphate in Orange County.

Or maybe I'm wrong; maybe after snow it'll be sleet with brief hail showers. Hardly anyone uses hail in movies anymore. Consider the potential, and consider further that it is untapped.

h/t to MGK, which I mention mainly because the relevant link came halfway through a rant on remakes and sequels which is bound to increase Big G's blood pressure.

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #23: The Swamp Rat

I am delighted to announce that this post will continue my new policy of not thinking all female X-Men are total vacuous wastes of ink.

After the latest Star Trek movie I briefly dipped into a discussion between Chemie and S. Spielbergo over whether Uhura required any more than two words to describe her "strong woman". Spielbergo (quite correctly) pointed out that Hollywood is littered with characters that can be encapsulated in two words. Of course, the obvious counter is that when one of those words refers to their gender, then you're really in trouble.

I slammed Jean Grey and Storm for being "strong women." Polaris received similar treatment, though with extra bonus slamming for periodically oscillating between the strong woman mid-point and the extremes of helpless damsel and psycho bitch-queen. Shadowcat fared better, because even if having "teenager" in the description doesn't strike me as all that much better than "woman", there are a number of other adjectives in there as well.

Rogue is different. Partially its because she's the first woman in this list who feels like her character traits came first, before expressed through the prism of her gender, rather than her gender being decided first and her characteristics slapped crudely on top.

Mainly, though, it's because she's almost impossible to describe at all, and for good reason. On the face of it, she's hard to pin down because she spends so much time under the influence of other personalities. The real reason is more subtle, and much more interesting. Rogue works because, as with so many of the best superhero characters, her powers are simply part of the human condition writ large.

This is true in three different ways. Most obviously, we have Rogue's baseline assumption, underlying almost everything she does, that if she could touch people, her life would become suddenly OK. It's not hard to understand where she's coming from on that, who doesn't like touching people (some people, obviously, usually the ones that wash regularly). In truth, though, much of her desire to touch and be touched likely comes from a deeper problem, her difficulties of self-definition. In that light, being able to touch people wouldn't help her any more than being able to see, hear and smell can. If you can't trust the reality inside your head, then no amount of external stimulus is going to help you. We all have moments where we question how accurate our conception of reality really is, whether we truly are who we think we are, and whether anyone else sees us the way we see ourselves in the mirror. Rogue has taken those moments of doubt and smothered herself with them. This is probably why her personality is as loud as it is; Rogue practically bleeds over everyone she meets. Everything she does, from her weird hair coloring to her constant chase for an adrenaline high, screams "I'm here! Tell me you can see I'm here!". It's nowhere near as irritating as Marilyn Manson's tired "shock" tactics, or for that matter the arse in the office who insists on describing himself as "zany", but it's born from a similar desire, to see yourself reflected in other people (the irony that Rogue feels the need to do this is one of the reasons I love her).

Secondly, and not entirely without connection (see above RE irony), there's Rogue's desire to separate herself from the influences of the personalities she has absorbed, and the traumas they brought with them. I don't think I'm over-generalising when I suggest that everyone, at some time or another, wonders what they would have been like had they not met certain people, and not have them spew their poison all over them, or wonder how things would be had their mother (or indeed their dog) hadn't died.

In Rogue's case, this is clearly futile. Her constant stated desire to just be herself, without anyone else rattling around in her head, is pointless. That amalgam of memories and emotions and assorted misery is what she is. It's all she's known for years. There's no reason whatsoever to assume life would be better for her without all of that. Worse, whatever remained would lack context, the remnants would just float anchorless through her cerebellum. Once you experience something, however unpleasant, it becomes part of you, and whilst in serious enough cases it might still be necessary to remove the memory in order to function, as a general rule losing those influences risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As James T. Kirk might say: we need our pain. We're all just cobbled together from the people who've affected us, and the traumas we've shared with the people we love. Rogue has a more obvious reason for wanting to get away from that fact, but it's as true for her as it is for anyone.

The final way in which Rogue's character taps into human psyche in general involves one of my favourite subjects: chaos. Rogue is an obvious personification of chaos. Not only can she not control her powers, but those powers frequently lead to her reality fracturing. At any given time, dozens of different psyches might be pressing in on hers, or even trying to wrest control entirely. One moment you might be talking to Rogue, the next it's Carol Danvers, or Mystique, or Wolverine. The great tragedy here is that Rogue is desperate for the change to stop, for stability to arrive, but the only way she can manage that is through change. It's quite the paradox ( especially since it was suggested in UXM #239 that Rogue's inability to control her mutant abilities was an entirely psychological problem. For all her talk of wanting to learn to control her powers, most of her time is spent pretending those powers don't exist. She dreams of the day when that one final change will bring her happiness, but she deliberately avoids any attempts to make that day arrive. It's always easier to hope for your dreams than to try and achieve them, because it's only when you really try to grasp them that you realise how far away they are. Another case in point (and I'm quite impressed with myself for having gotten so far without mentioning him) is Gambit. In the early stages of their relationship Rogue constructed a fantasy for herself that if they could learn to trust each other, then perhaps they could make it. When Gambit finally offers to reveal his past crimes in X-Men #45, though, she turns him down, and leaves the X-Men. She knew where she wanted to end up, but she was too scared to take the only route that lay in-between. When his crimes were revealed to her during "The Trial of Gambit", she was so outraged she left him to die (though in fairness that was partly due to elements of Gambit's guilt that she had absorbed). Better to cherish a dream than to work for it.

In truth, I can't blame Rogue for that attitude. She spent years wishing Cody would wake from the coma she had put him in the day her powers first manifested. In the event, he never woke up, the coma only ended when he was murdered by Gambit's ex-wife. The woman has extensive experience of change bringing the worst.

The thing is, of course, that this doesn't matter in the least. Hoping to avoid change is silly, and hoping certain specific changes will occur in order to protect us from other, unwanted changes is even sillier. All we can do is identify what we want, decide whether pursuing it is worth the risk, and, if the answer is yes, strike out into the void and hope we hit our target. You either push through the roadblocks that almost inevitably seem to appear, or you don't. What you can't do, though, is use those roadblocks as an excuse to not put your feet on the road in the first place. That just means going nowhere. No, worse, it means only ever going anywhere that fate decides to take you, which is a pretty bad idea considering it can be mathematically proved that fate is a big fucking dick. We're all already far too similar to driftwood in a strong current without us helping it along. "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans", as John Lennon said, but I don't think he was implying that makes all plans useless, just that we need to try things out that we don't know in advance will work out.

I hope that ultimately Rogue figures that out. Frankly, I hope we all do.

Next time: I join a pretty big club in not being able to say anything interesting about Rachel Grey.

Memorial

Following a horrible accident yesterday afternoon, we've had to put one of our dogs down this morning.

Josh was only our second ever dog (our first, Storm, is mercifully still going strong), so there's not a lot to compare him to. He was more boisterous than his older sister, and harder to handle, but that same troublesome streak made him far more obvious in his affections as well. I spent Friday and most of Saturday at my parents house, trying to recover from the gribbles, and Josh sat by my side the whole time. Losing him so suddenly is a terrible blow.

Good News And Bad News

Have crawled from my sick-bed for just long enough for this post.

First, the bad news, Obama's DoJ are kind of dicks regarding the Defence Of Marriage Act. You can tell their dicks because their argument relies on not recognising a gay marriage is equivalent to not recognising a marriage between a man and a child. This is a rather more developed version of Bill O'Reilly's constant insistence that allowing two men to wed would open up the possibility of unholy unions twixt man and duck). It deliberately conflates a situation in which two people are clearly consenting adults but there is a question as to whether their gender allows for marriage with a situation in which two people are clearly of opposite gender, but there is a question as to whether both are consenting adults. Bonus dick marks can be added for once again arguing that DOMA does not discriminate against homosexuals because it also states non-married heterosexual couples don't get marriage benefits either (the relevance of Anatole French's observation that "[t]he law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread" should be obvious here).

Here's the good news, though; I don't think DOMA matters, long term. Thanks to this handy graph, shamelessly stolen from Andrew Gelman via Kevin Drum, it looks like support for same-sex marriage is increasing across the board. It's only a matter of time (and not necessarily very much time, either) before the States hits critical mass, and it will be game over for the bigots.

Urg

Bleurgh. My gribbly virus has struck again; I just don't seem able to fight it off. I probably won't be posting for another day or two.

In lighter news, my car once again passed its MOT, so at least I can continue to make the roads of the North East that little bit more hazardous.

It's Like A Dream

Thanks to Jamie I have learned that Fantasy Flight are indeed producing an expansion to the BSG board game. Interestingly, the expansion covers both the arrival of the Pegasus and the colonisation of New Caprica. Since these additions will now cover everything BSG ever actually did well, I can't help wondering where they plan to go next.