Dead Man Walking

This is deeply disappointing. Obviously without seeing Season 2 it's far too early to start declaring this to have been a idiotic decison by AMC, but as I noted at the time, you could divide each episode of the first year of Walking Dead into two mutually exclusive groups: "spectacularly fucking awesome" and "not written by Frank Darabont".

When Life Gives Other People Lemons...

I'm so glad our capital's civil unrest can help out American conservatives wanting to smear President Obama.  I tend not to head over to The Corner, since it has a pretty poor reputation, but curiosity got the better of me on this occasion.

Turns out, that reputation was very much deserved.  The progression of this article is as follows:

1. Some people are comparing the London riots to the LA riots.  Let's assume the comparison is a reasonable one;
2. President Obama may or not agree that the original flash-point of the two riots can be considered similar.  Let's assume he does;
3. Obama wrote something about the LA riots almost twenty years ago, which he may or may not still stand by.  Let's assume he does;
4. What he said was that the riot demonstrated deep distrust and dissatisfaction in the current system of power.  Of course, someone who actually wanted to use the proletariat to destroy capitalism would say the same thing.  Let's assume Obama is one of those people.

If all that's true, then Obama is clearly a terrifying threat to the American way of life!  You know, unless acquitting cops who were proved to have lied after beating a black guy to within an inch of his life is different from a drug-dealer getting shot, or Obama's positions have changed have changed in two decades, or there's a logical fallacy in arguing Obama is anti-capitalist because of a quote I've assumed he meant as anti-capitalist, because of how anti-capitalist he is! [1] 

A couple of days ago two of my friends were staying in London, and had to barricade themselves in the bedroom because they heard a looter trying to break into the house downstairs (mercifully, said miscreant was unsuccessful).  I'm sure they'd have gathered up their belongings and handed them over immediately if they knew it would help Stanley Kurtz pretend Obama is plotting to destroy America, or money, or whatever.

Oh, and for the record, whilst its using the current crisis to fuel his lunatic agenda that's making me despise Kurtz right now, he can fuck off for co-opting the LA riots as well.  A jury (which was five-sixths white and contained no black people) exonerated four cops of blame for a vicious assault which had been captured on camera [2].  Pretending Obama was out of line for suggesting the resulting riots had nothing to do with a mistrust of power is quite simply historical revisionism, and its historical revisionism at the expense of black people in an attempt to smear the first black US president.

[1] Bighead would want me to point out that this is what the phrase "begging the question" actually refers to.

[2] The cops claimed their actions were justified because King was tripping on PCP and tried to resist arrest.  The video shows him crawling along the ground during a beating that lasted over a minute.  A drugs test for PCP came back negative.

1.6 Matriculation, Part 3: Q & A

Ooh!  Can... of... worms.  Torqual better watch out; those Watercarvers can really hold a grudge!

 1.7                                                                      1.5

Captain America

In general, I don't have a great to add to MGK's take on this: it's basically somewhere between an updated Boy's Own adventure and a militarised Indiana Jones film, with the bonus of some very strong acting.

One thing I did want to say though was how pleasantly surprised as to how little America mattered in the film.  It mattered a great deal as a place, of course, and only-just-post-Depression New York made for a very effective and atmospheric backdrop.  Moreover, Colonel Phillips, Senator Brandt, and Howard Hughes Stark all positively drip '40s America in their own different ways.  Finally, the stage routine Steve ends up being dumped into is a brilliant rendition of US WWII propaganda.

But all of this is about how America was.  It's just set dressing.  What I was worried about was how the film would make Steve Rogers Captain America, as oppose to, say, Captain Britain or Captain France, or even Super-Soldier I.  If there was ever an opportunity to show numerous interminable Independence Day-style speeches about the indomitable nature of Americans, this was it, after all.

Captain America doesn't do that.  Indeed, by giving Rogers his nickname as part of a corny fundraising tour/USO show, the film flirts with the idea that calling him "Captain America" is really kind of silly.  This isn't a film about why America needs Captain America, it's about why America needs Steve Rogers - the legend of Captain America is just a by-product.

This refusal to use Cap as a metaphor for the States is a welcome idea.  One of the film's best moments comes when Doctor Erskine tells Steve that Erskine originally hailed from Germany, and asks whether that's a problem.  From Steve's reaction, I'm not sure that question had ever occurred to him before.   Steve has no interest in a war between Americans and Germans.  He's desperate to join a war between bullies and those who won't let bullies get away with it.

Obviously, that's a very simplistic view to take, even if the film sidesteps issues of moral grey areas by  introducing a group of fascists that even Hitler thinks are kind of dickish, but the point here is that Erskine isn't looking for an American, he's looking for a good man; the fact that Steve is American is entirely irrelevant.

This is what I loved about this film.  It's pro-America not because their namesake super-hero defeats Hydra and punches out fascists left, right and centre.  It's pro-America because the man smart enough and good-hearted enough to become the symbol of hope and goodness was born and raised there.  Erskine created the super-soldier serum, but America created Steve Rogers.

One could fashion this into a larger point, actually, regarding the horrible tendency of American nationalists to believe that their claims of superiority justifies their actions, rather than realising that their actions will be used to justify (or not) their claims of superiority.  I'll save that for another post, though.  For now, though, we should just note that this film is clear in its message: it is Captain America that lends weight to his homeland, not the other way around.

Slaves Of The Womb Cave

There's a lot of stuff that Republicans in Congress say that, whilst it's obvious bullshit, I can at least understand what might be going through their heads. "We need to end employment benefits so as to dissuade leeching" is a vile sympathy-wasteland of a statement, but I can at least comprehend what is making the people who espouse it tick.

At other times, though, parts of my brain just shut down in confusion.  Take this, for instance; the video, not the article.  King makes three points here, which I'll introduce in order of how much they made my head hurt. Note that the quotes below are my paraphrases.

"Contraception should not be called a medicine."  In the narrowest sense, this at least is arguable.  Of course, plenty of women do take contraception medicinally, and preventing oneself from acquiring a sexually transmitted disease seems like a process for which "preventative medicine" fits perfectly.  I think King could actually phrase this better and at least approach what I think his main point is; that contraception cannot be automatically considered a medicine, preventative or otherwise, and he doesn't want to have to pay for what we'll call for the purposes of this post "exclusively recreational use".

Of course, if such use was covered by US health insurers, I'd be pretty surprised, and if it did, that would be where to aim the argument, rather than attempting blanket bans.  At least arguably, though, on this he's not crazy, merely wrong.

"Some people don't or can't have sex, but are being asked to fund contraception anyway".  This is crazy, though.  Show me where I can get the NHS form where I can tick a box labelled "Give none of my taxes to smokers with lung cancer.  If some idiot goes skiing and breaks his leg, I won't have a penny of my money spent on setting the bone.  Because these fuckers chose to be at risk."

The NHS is not the American system, of course.  But either a private US insurer will offer coverage for smokers, and for skiers, and for those who offer reasons why they need access to contraception, or they won't.  The idea that the government should get to stick its nose in and decide certain offers cannot be allowed seems... well, as hypocritical as anything else these supposed lovers of freedom spout off about every few hours.

This, though, is my favourite.

"Contraception can't be medicine, because if we used it too much, we'd die out as a civilisation."

Arrrgh!  Brain... dying! Starved... of... logic!

What does Steve King think will happen if we used too much paracetamol?  Or insulin?  Hell, I hear Viagra isn't something you want to mess around with.

Second, how could we ever get to a point where King's argument is of relevance?  Sure, if humanity gets itself bitch-slapped by the Cylons and we end up with less people than show up to the average Boro away game, then we might want to think about easing back on the dick-sheaths.  But can we at least all agree that whatever else the US is having problems with right now, it has no need to worry about only surviving because they're above a critical number of unwanted babies being born each year?

Because that would be a start, at least.  Once we've gotten that out of the way, we could move onto, ooh, basic arithmetic, or something.

Proof Of Purchase

Just in case people thought I'd taken 1200 squids from my department and spent it all on booze, here's a selection of photographs from Austria.  First, some general scene setting:

Get Lost. Also, Fuck Off

Kevin Drum points out a small section of the Guardian's interview with JJ Abrams yesterday:

Do woebegone Losties give Abrams an earful about the finale?
"Oh my God, yes," he groans. "For years, I had people praising Lost to death, and now they say: 'I'm so pissed at you for the end of Lost.' I think a lot of people who were upset with the ending, were just upset that it ended. And I've not yet heard the pitch of what the ending should have been. I've just heard: 'That sucked.'"

 Drum's response is pretty good:

We weren't demanding that the whole series be wrapped up in a nice, neat bow, but we were hoping for at least most of the major plotlines to be resolved. We were hoping for at least most of the major mysteries to be explained. We were hoping that at least the whole thing didn't turn out to be a St. Elsewhere style fantasy world. And we were sure as hell annoyed when they pretended they had run out of time to tie this stuff up after wasting the entire first half of the final season with a brand new plotline that came out of nowhere, went nowhere, never got resolved, and had no purpose at all.

For the record, I thought the last season was poor rather than disastrous, and that there was a lot in the finale that was quite nice, or at least not actively terrible.

Still, though, there's no question in my mind that the show dropped the ball in the final year, for all the reasons Drum cites, and also because after five years of telling us thinking the show was set in Purgatory was "silly", the show finishes with fully fifty percent of its final season being set in fucking Purgatory. 

I despise practical jokes, as a rule, because the people who play them have no interest on their victim enjoying the joke.  And that's what the sixth year of Lost reads as to me: a joke played on a massive and faithful audience by writers who had painted themselves into a corner.

And if there's anything worse than someone who's idea of humour is to make someone else become uncomfortable, angry, upset or massively disappointed, it's that guy who then turns around and says "I don't know what your problem is, it was only a joke".

That, right there, is JJ Abrams.  I don't actually know how much input he had in the storyline of the final season, in fairness, but even if he didn't do a damn thing on it, he's still telling people that the colossal contempt his friends showed for the people who had invested enormous time (and frequently non-trivial amounts of money, given how much the DVD sets went for when they first came out) is somehow their fault.

Oh, and bonus twat points for implying that it's somehow the job of the viewer to explain to the writers how they should have done their own job better.  Does Abrams think this should be applied to other occupations?  If my defense lawyer fails to get me off charges of which I am innocent, do I have to point to the specific legal tactic they should have used to exonerate me, or can I just flat out tell him (I can say "him", because it would be my Dad) that he's a bad lawyer.  Do I get to send an undercooked steak back in a restaurant if I can't operate my own grill at home?

This isn't a way of addressing criticism, is my point.  It's a way of dismissing it [1].  The fact that Abram's argument that no-one has suggested how the final season could have been improved is transparently, laughably false, makes it all the worse.

(Oh, also: "Just upset that it ended"? There is no limit how much Abrams needs to pull his own head out of his arse, and not just so he can count his massive piles of money and cackle evilly.)

[1] If Abrams point was that no-one is able to pin down what it was they disliked, that would be different.  "It sucks and shut up!" isn't too helpful as a critical appraisal.  Again, though, I've read or skimmed dozens of online articles that pin down what people saw as the precise problems.  Abrams doesn't experience thoughtful criticism of his show entirely because he doesn't care to listen to it.