The Rain Of Blame Falls Mostly On The Cain

At the time of writing this post it's not clear whether or not Herman Cain will shut down his campaign for the Republican presidential candidacy over allegations of a thirteen-year affair (he's "reassessing", something he might have tried after he accidentally revealed he doesn't know which country Libya is), but given the howls of outrage coming from his former followers, it's worth revisiting what I said three weeks ago: far, far too many people consider a man committing adultery to be a much worse activity than a man pressuring uninterested women into sleeping with them.

Adultery is a "sex scandal", and as such, I don't give a shit about it.  I feel bad for the man's wife, because it's not going to be much fun for her in the next few weeks/months.  But that's it.  Maybe she knew, maybe she didn't.  Maybe she'll forgive him, maybe she won't.  Maybe there'll be a divorce.  Hell, maybe it isn't even true (though apparently Cain's lawyer's statement is somewhat damning - I've not read it myself).

Sexual harassment is not a "sex scandal".  It is merely scandalous behaviour which happens to involve the pursuit of sex.  And it's scandalous not because it offends the Victorian mores of certain groups of the population, but because it's the deliberate refusal to respect the feelings and motivations of another person on an intimate subject in order to get exactly what you want without any of that complicated business of actually finding out how someone feels.

And every time someone tries to equate the two, they're implicitly making the argument that all that matters is whether a man is attempting to cheat on his wife, and any other women in the story is simply a mechanism by which that man's goal can succeed or fail.

See also.

The Xth Iteration

Depending on how one looks at it, Uncanny X-Men #1 has either two jobs, or three.  The first is the most obvious: it has to work as a jumping on point for new readers.  The second and third jobs are to still be recognisable as part of the progression of a book now in its forty-second consecutive year, and to justify the fuss and bother of a) removing half of the characters and setting them down on the other side of the country and b) renumbering a book which was only five months away from reaching UXM #550 [1]. One could argue that the second task is contained within the third, but whatever.  This book has shit to do.

(Spoilers after the jump)

Retronica

I've been playing a lot of Streets of Rage 3 lately, since I bought it three years ago and still haven't gotten around to finishing it (or even getting more than halfway through).  My initial opinion was that it was a big disappointment, but I decided to give it another chance whilst sober, rather than just playing it at 1am after everyone else has passed out, as I've been doing up until now.
 

(Note how the black kid has been left off the cover art
in favour of a marsupial.  That's some racist BS right there.)

 Turns out I was right the first time.  I can't believe how successful Sega were in making literally every aspect of the game worse than its predecessor.  The previously wonderful music (one level's music was so good that I used to pause the game at that point and sit and read with it in the background) is now a nightmarish jumble of nonsense - apparently a random note generator was employed, and my God you can tell.  The sprites have been enlarged for no real reason, meaning the limited frames used in animation are more obvious and, more critically, you can have fewer opponents on screen at any given time.
That ties into another problem.  The real fun in Streets of Rage 2 lay in cranking up the difficulty so that the screen became flooded with a host of villainous scumbags all practically begging to be punched in the face.  This game has drastically downgraded the damage each of your moves does, meaning the game is both harder (though some of that might just be my difficulty in shaking the tactics I settled on in the first game), and features significantly fewer enemies.  Moreover, there's fewer kinds of foes, which is completely unforgivable.  Even the naming conventions are less interesting: the prancing shuriken-throwing ninjas from the last installment are back, but back then they all had their own names.  Not anymore.  There also seems to be less variety even of moves, the Thai kickboxers (all with their own names, natch) have been replaced with flame-haired fashion victims with a fraction of the repertoire.

The only slight improvements are the ability to run and roll, which speeds the game up, and the inclusion of more interactive backdrops.  Even this causes more problems than it seems, though, the controls (at least in the Wii version) are too sensitive, meaning that all those lovely new pits and cargo-carriers are too difficult to avoid - one moment you're happily kicking some fat fucker in the gonads, the next you've dropped into a forward roll and tumbled yourself into the path of an oncoming vehicle.  Plus, once you get past the increased interaction, the backgrounds themselves are massively boring.  Gone are the days of stabbing muggers on a pirate ship, I can tell you.

Still, it's not a complete write-off.  You do at least have the option to play as a violence-crazed slap-happy kangaroo (a master of the... martsupial arts?)  On the other hand, you don't have the option to play as a character in a particularly good game.  Which is a shame.

Requiem For Podsixia

This may require knowledge of two entirely different cult TV shows to work at maximum effectiveness, where "maximum effectiveness" is defined as "laughing your ribs through your lungs".  On the other hand, you may just have to be a BSG fan.  Let's find out.



(As soon as this video started, I knew Gaeta was going to end up being Hesh).

h/t to Gooder, for finding this and bringing it to my attention.

Mitt & Al

Steve Benen (amongst others) pulls Mitt Romney up on the latest of lapses of truthfulness.

Benen notes that claiming that your middle name is actually your first name is hardly a big lie.  I'd go further, in fact, and say it's a total non-event, especially when, as in this video, it's at least arguable that Romney is making a joke.

Basically, there's no "there" there.  So why am I even mentioning it?  Because the incident brings to mind two thoughts.  Firstly, had Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. claimed that his first name was "Al", would it have been ignored, or would the press have sunk their teeth into it as another piece of evidence that the man was a congenital liar?  (Hint: it's that second one.)

Second, why is the "Mitt is a liar" narrative not caught on the same way it did with Gore in 2000.  It's certainly not been totally ignored (once George Will calls a Republican a liar, you know things have gotten bad), but it's not reached anything like the lunatic fever pitch that Gore went through.  Is it because Romney is merely the presumptive nominee right now, as oppose to the chosen candidate?

And if the latter is true, what happens when (and it surely is when) Romney gets the nod?  Will the storyline take hold, or will it actually be dropped entirely as "old news" (which, of course, means "a storyline we're bored of and OH LOOK YOU GUYS A SHINY PENNY!").

I'm guessing it will be, actually.  Someone needs to keep an eye on Bob Somerby; I'm not sure his heart can take what's coming.

Still Unsupported

Sorry for the paucity of posts around here right now.  I actually had something in mind to write about last night, but I got caught up fighting with my CD drive again.  Through the application of a knackered external CD-RW drive I found buried in my gubbins, I have now successfully demonstrated that my computer can recognise CD drives (unfortunately said drive is too knackered to be of use otherwise).  The hunt for why it refuses to recognise the internal hard drive continues.

Also, thanks for the various offers of tech support and suggestions for what to try next.

True Facts

Insomnia, insomnia
There's clearly something wrong wi' ya
Tomorrow I'll be a zombie, yeah
Just shoot me in the head.