Commentarium

Senor Spielbergo asks in comments:

Here’s a question (one I don’t know the answer to, I’m genuinely asking). Is the standard of news coverage in America actually lower than Britain? I mean everyone can get behind making fun of Fox News, but I’ve certainly also made fun of ITV news, The Sun (the most commonly read newspaper in the UK by the way), The News of The World etc etc. The only bits of American media we tend to get are the bits where they make an utter hash of it, so I’m wondering if that’s not a fair representation. They clearly have lots of other stations and newspapers, so is the overall standard actually any better than ours?We obviously read / watch the news sources we like, and ignore all the ones we don’t (in terms of British news), so I’m wondering if this biases our view when we look at American media.

Tomsk responded to this whilst I was writing my own reply (raising an excellent point regarding OFCOM), but I think it's worth going over this in detail.

First of all, it's important to note that comparing FOX News to ITV isn't necessarily helpful because it's comparing outlier to outlier. I mean, on it's worse day it would be an intolerant insult to suggest ITV resembled FOX News in any way, but that's besides the point. One of the major problems regarding FOX is that, in addition to being a right-wing noise machine that should be wiped from existence and history with all possible speed, it does things so badly, so objectionably, and with such glorious disregard for objectivity, that it colours the entire discussion. Any time a conversation starts on the quality of American news media, you have to wade through people saying "Well, sure, there's FOX, but we know they're crazy." It's as if FOX's blatant worthlessness means everything else looks better by comparison, and that if anyone raises an objection to how the US handles news, it must be based on what we've seen from O' Reilly, Beck, and a bunch of Barbie Dolls (I'm not being sexist; I mean it literally).

So let's not talk outliers. Let's talk about the average state of the American media. The average state is: it's fucked.

There are a number of reasons why this is the case, some of which are across the board, and others of which are specific to TV. Firstly, Tomsk is entirely right when he points at the fact that American news sources don't need to avoid bias, and it's worth following through on that a little. If you don't need to avoid bias, and you don't need to admit bias, then the end result is that the news itself becomes nothing more than he-said, she-said argument. This would be damaging enough on its own, but at some point the right managed to persuade enough of the population that the media was biased to the left for the idea to become "conventional wisdom" (read "an idea so commonly believed no-one need ever provide any proof for it") and once that happened there was no way out. No-one could point out the accusation was unsound, because that was proof they were on the left in any case (it's unfair to blame Americans for the "if you attempt to debunk lies about X, you must be X" formulation, but they've taken it to dizzying new heights; there are still people out there who think McCarthy's biggest flaw was that he eventually gave up, and that those who brought that about were Commie traitors). At this point, most of the major news outlets are under constant pressure to prove they aren't biased to the left, which they can only do by becoming biased to the right, or at least becoming over-representative of the right (both in terms of hosts and guests), which isn't exactly the same thing but is still legitimate cause for concern.

The next problem is in the difference between news shows and news channels. We have individual news shows that need to consider ratings, of course, but in America the competition between channels is so dogged and desperate that their shows are under far more pressure to come up with the goods. And what the goods turn out to be is sensationalism and scandal. Not the sort of scandal that comes from having broken the law and the Geneva Convention for years whilst President, of course, the scandal that comes from having had some blow-jobs whilst President. [1]

The Drudge Report has a lot to do with this; a vicious, low-brow partisan site which manages a massively high update rate (an advantage available only to those who ignore such details as fact checking and critical thought) and which specialises in the grubby sort of story that people claim to dislike but in reality gobble up in droves. The success of Drudge has led to almost every major news outlet to one degree or anther beginning (or continuing, or concluding, depending on who we're talking about) the slide into becoming nothing more than squalid gutter-press peddlers of smut. Often this is embarrassing, but it can spill into rather worse forms. Take Lou Dobbs' show on CNN, for example, on which he repeatedly expresses his belief that Obama was not born in the US, and is thus an illegitimate president. CNN itself has declared this rumor discredited, but Dobbs won't stop banging on about it, and CNN don't dare muzzle him for whatever reason, despite the rather ugly racial undertones that he's dragging in with all the crazy. [2]

This is another problem with the ratings wars, it has thrown up news personalities. These people attempt to make the news more interesting, but as a result the actual facts get mixed up in the editorialising, because you're not watching the news, you're watching Dave Randomname's take on the news. You have O'Reilly and Beck on the right, Maddow and (to a lesser extent) Olbermann on the left, and various people in the centre (which usually actually means the right to all intents and purposes). Now, Maddow doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as O'Reilly and Beck in terms of quality and intellectual honesty, but the problem of battle lines remains. Once you decided on which personality to tune in to, you run the risk of seeing the world through their eyes. The stratification of news into "liberal" and "conservative" shows also means that the focus rapidly becomes the combatants themselves, and not the causes, which makes for good ratings, but shitty, shitty news (it's the severity of the problem and of the battles that makes the difference between these people and, say, Paxman over here).

Jon Stewart mentioned something along the above lines when he visited Crossfire, as a matter of fact. I mention this because the video of that encounter is kind of revealing, in that Tucker Carlson responded by trying to claim The Daily Show isn't a perfect example of news reporting either. He was attempting to defend his own low journalistic standards by comparing himself to a comedy show (a comedy show that actually does a better job informing the public than so-called "serious" news shows, but that's beside the point). The constant refusal of media personalities and journalists to hold themselves accountable for their own standards has become endemic in America. Perhaps most famously, MSNBC reporter David Gregory argued, apparently with a straight face, that it is not the responsibility of journalists to tell the public when they are being lied to. This is the case even when the lie is transparently easy to detect; just last week psychotic GOP members told the country there is language in the healthcare bill that will lead to the euthanising of old people, and I read a column that stated "Democrats state that this provision is not in the bill." You know what? Check the bill! This is your goddamn job! [3]

Once you combine the left-right war (which I think the media is probably more responsible for than the actual parties, which makes Gregory's suggestion that its the public that has to do its own damn fact checking all the more egregiously offensive), the sensationalist quest for ratings, the desire to titillate rather than educate, seemingly an entire generation of journalists who don't think they need to do anything more than spell-check press releases [4], and an associated problem that American politics reporters don't actually seem to like politics [5], and you have the mess US news is in right now.

Finally, on the topic of more general media, consider the Washington Post, which is supposedly one of the best newspapers in America (only the NYT and arguably the LA Times could be considered better, or so I'm told) but which regularly runs editorials by some of the most embarrassingly ill-informed people. Remember when George Will used that "no global warming in your adult life-time" bit? That was in the Post. Bill Kristol was also there for a while, which has to rank as one of the worst journalistic decision in the last ten years. Most of their editorials are written by conservatives, which again is an attempt to dispel the "liberal media" myth, but what baffles intelligent observers is how transparently false so many of the claims made within those editorials are.

The Post was also recently was discovered to be selling tickets to "informal" dinners where various high-influence people could buddy up to Post underwriters. My point is that this is (or was) one of the most highly influential papers in America, and it's become reduced to letting idiots give its opinions, and requesting money in exchange for making friends of its underwriters.

Again, this is one of the top three newspapers in a country of 300 million people.

So, yeah. Spielbergo's original point that we might only hear the worst of American news, whilst observing the entire range in our own country (or its Crown Dependencies) is a fair one, but once you spend some time immersed in this stuff, it actually ends up looking worse, rather than better.

[1] One hundred years from now, assuming this planet hasn't become a ball of radioactive dust ruled over by giant cockroaches who worship the few nukes that didn't go off, history scholars are going to have to explain to their students why Clinton avoided impeachment by one vote, and the idea of impeaching Bush was laughed at by almost everyone, and the poor kids will all lose their faith in humanity and become Republicans, or worse, French.

[2] Another issue in all of this is that American libel laws work in such a way that you can't sue someone unless you can prove what they said was false, which is pretty hard (an unfortunate consequence of valuing free speech above not having your name dragged through the mud for no fucking reason), so media personalities have almost no fear of the law (though the FCC will slap them for saying naughty words, or accidentally losing pieces of their clothing) . Why their bosses don't slap them down for this kind of stuff isn't clear, though a desire for sensationalism would seem the most likely conclusion.

[3] Bob Somerby spends a lot of his time cataloguing the reasons why Gore lost in 2000 (or to be more specific, why the count was so close that it was possible to steal the election from him in Florida); and he pretty much blames the media throughout, which is pretty fair. For now, though, I'm just going to highlight the second debate, in which Bush lied about his tax policy, and then told the room and the public that Gore was lying when the Vice President corrected him. You know how I know it was Bush who was lying? From reading a breakdown of his tax proposal. Wouldn't you expect the journalists covering the debate to check who was in the right? Well, tough luck, I'm afraid; they told the public "Bush and Gore claim the other is lying", and then went onto whether Gore was "too boring". I seem to remember someone saying correcting Bush made Gore look "arrogant" as well, which surely must put us at the nadir of journalism, not only will they not tell the public when they're being lied to, they'll also complain when other people do.

[4] This joke stolen from Stephen Colbert.

[5] First noticed, as far as I'm aware, by Digby (who lives here), who noted that sports journalists like to talk about sports, and entertainment journalists like to talk about entertainment, but politics journalists like to talk about blow-jobs and barbeques. Just this week we've heard journalists complaining that Obama seems to be too invested in the details of the problems America faces, and how to solve them.

Shake #16

Today's shake: Blackberry Jam

Taste: 3
Texture: 5
Synergy: 2
Scorn: 5
Total Score: 3.75

General Comments: This shake received a Scorn of 5 mainly because the very idea of it simply defined rational analysis. The combination of ingredients required to create the drink are so incongruous that my mind could not grip onto the possible consequences of mixing them, the fingers of my psyche kept slipping off the smooth sides of the hypothetical construct sphere of this shake's concept. Or something.

Anyway, it made no sense before I tasted it, and it made no sense afterwards either. It reminded me of the time I ate green apple ice-cream whilst in Slovenia. It wasn't that it was bad, really, so much as it made no sense in my head; I was tasting apple flavour (as in the one they use in boiled sweets, rather than anything that had ever actually been grown) and ice-cream at the same time, and it didn't make any sense. Imagine ordering a pizza, only for a beef chow mein to arrive instead. You might like chow mein, but you ordered pizza, and it's a pizza guy that's shown up, and he's given you a small pot of garlic sauce to put on the noodles [1]. It was a bit like that.

Anyway, the blackberry jam shake has the same problem. Only in this case it was bad, so I guess in the above analogy the pizza guy punches you in the nuts, or has slept with your sister. Whatever. Don't drink this shake, is what I'm saying.

[1] I am not discounting the possibility that putting garlic sauce in a chow mein wouldn't work. In my experience there is almost nothing that can't be improved with garlic sauce.

We Also Train Rottweilers To Savage The SEN Kids

As a follow-on from Palin's total melt-down into unquestionable evil: the tragic horror story of UK healthcare.

All I can say is: fuck Stephen Hawking. If he ever decides to visit Britain, and I don't know if he ever has, I say we kill him and use the wheelchair for a British citizen. That'll save us enough money to give three hundred healthy Anglo-Ubermensch their hayfever tablets! Hooray!

h/t to Kevin Drum.

P.S. Like everyone else with a brain in their head, I would love to know why, even if these stories were ever true, the government denying you healthcare is "a price tag on human life" but an insurance company denying you healthcare is "the free market in action." I'm not holding my breath, though. After all, I could pass out, and a faceless Durham bureaucrat could judge my life unworthy of a few chest compressions.

Holy Atheist Pope, but I hate this crap.

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #25: Magnus

It’s not easy finding a good villain, sometimes.

This is problematical to say the least, because good villains are essential. Interesting, powerful protagonists are all very well, but unless they can face off against an impressive adversary with a dastardly plan, you’ve only got half a story. There’s a reason why you don’t see Plant-Man threatening the X-Men anymore. I’m sure there are no lack of opinions and theories as to what makes a comic villain great, but my own personal take on it is that you need two things: a decent hook, and a bit of time.

Magneto has both in spades. Over the years I’ve read various people lament the fact that Marvel can’t create new villains like him anymore (usually this sort of thing appears in comic book letter pages, which you really shouldn’t read if you want to retain any faith in human nature whatsoever), which rather misses the essential point about Magneto, which is that his brilliance as an adversary is intrinsically linked with the amount of time he’s been around. You can retcon villains into your heroes' pasts (most obviously Sinister, for example), but you can’t write familiarity. Of course, the Magneto first encountered by the X-Men at Cape Citadel is almost totally unrecognisable from the multi-layered character he became, but that helps to prove my point. Once in a while, a truly great character may spring into being fully-formed, but ninety-nine times out of hundred, they with time.

The maturation of Magneto is particularly interesting, because it mirrors the development of the franchise itself. It doesn’t seem at all unfair to suggest that the initial USP of the X-Men was squandered somewhat. Why introduce the concept of mutants if each one of them is simply going to be a standard superhero or super-villain? Hell, most of them had origin stories for their powers in any case. Sauron; Sunfire; Mimic; Xavier himself, all of them had their own tales of how they acquired their uncanny abilities. [1] Magneto was another victim of such traditional thinking, a carbon-copy super villain. Basic Story-telling 101 tells us that the best villains are often dark reflections of the heroes they oppose. The truth of this with respect to what Magneto’s relationship with Xavier became is obvious, but in the beginning, the X-Men’s “dark mirror” was nothing more than an opposing team of mutants. It was impossible for Magneto to become more until the comic became more in itself, which didn’t genuinely happen until the arrival of Claremont.

As terrible as Magneto was in those early appearances, though, they are not entirely without insight into his character. His endless taunting of Toad and manipulation of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch might be simple 60’s evil short-hand, but it reveals a deeper problem. Actually, it reveals two. The first, which I’ll come back to later, is that whilst he cares deeply about mutants in the abstract, it is almost impossible for Mageto to give a damn about them as individuals. The second, which we’ll start with, is this, for a man determined to shape the future of the world, Magneto is impossible of thinking more than one step ahead. This one of the perils of trying to mould the future entirely from the desire to escape the past.

Of course, if anyone has just cause to not have dealt with his personal history, it’s Magneto. Pretty much anyone with the slightest interest in comics knows that he’s a Holocaust survivor, but there’s a good deal more to it than that. Some of it I didn’t even know until I was reading up on him. Growing up as a teenager in Auschwitz was only the second worst thing to happen to him during the war. First, he watches his entire family gunned down by SS soldiers, passes out from the exertion of subconsciously using his as-yet-unused powers to save himself, and is buried in a shallow grave with the victims of the massacre. He actually digs himself out by crawling upwards through the bodies of his dead family, only to be captured when he breaks ground and sent to a concentration camp. The hideous, pitch-black symbolism is difficult to miss; Magneto began his struggle for his right to exist by literally clambering over the bodies of the dead, some of whom were once people he loved, and his only reward was greater torment. The entirety of the tragedy of Magneto’s life (and it is a tragedy, even if the man often goes out of his way to avoid seeming sympathetic) is summed up right there. Every day is a struggle to climb the bodies, only to reach the top and find another pile to scale (and if his first brutal experience at the hands of the Nazis didn’t teach him that, spending his time in Auschwitz burning the bodies of the dead must have).

We perhaps see this revealed most clearly in Scott Lobdell’s Eve Of Destruction storyline; even with a safe haven for mutants guaranteed on Genosha, an island nation once on the brink of total collapse that Magneto has remoulded into something that, while far from paradise, at least constituted a functioning state, his first act upon receiving fresh recruits (thanks to Colossus curing the Legacy Virus with his sacrifice) is to declare war on humanity in general. Ruling Genosha was the absolute highpoint of a campaign that has lasted decades, and his response to that was to keep on climbing. The less charitable reading of this truth is that Magneto cannot rest until all of humanity is enslaved or dead, but I think the truth is more simple: Magneto cannot rest. His failure to save his family; the death of his daughter Anya, who burns to death before his eyes whilst he is restrained by corrupt policemen; the loss of his wife and fellow Auschwitz survivor Magda (later discovered to have been pregnant at the time with twins who grew to be Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch), who flees in terror when he takes his revenge on his captors; the combined effect is simply too much. He claims he strives to ensure the horrors of the past will never be repeated, but in reality I suspect he keeps climbing because the horrors of the past can never be undone.

It is this congenital inability to see the future in any other way than through the warped lens of his youth that traps Magneto. It is also one of the most obvious ways in which he is does in fact represent the dark mirror of Charles Xavier, or at least the polar opposite. Xavier has a crystal clear vision of the future, total integration of human and mutant, including mutual understanding and co-operation. Magneto has on many occasions decried this dream as exactly that, and nothing more, but the reality is more subtle. Xavier’s problem is that he knows where he wants to get to in twenty years, but has an almost impossible task in working out the exact right way to fight for that future now. Magneto, on the other hand, knows exactly which battles to fight now, i.e. all of them, but his reactionary blood-thirst betrays the fact that he has no clear idea where he wants the planet to become, only where he will not permit it to go. Like all terrorists (which is what Magneto frequently is, which is what makes his occasional attempts to leave that life behind so poignant, albeit inevitably doomed), the reason behind the violence has long ago simply become an excuse, the demands made so impossible for anyone to comply even before one considers the behaviour of the one making those demands, that endless warfare is all that remains. And so, inevitably, Magneto hastens the future he claims to so desperately want to avoid. Hell, at this point, thanks in no small part to his constant belligerence, mutants as a race are all but extinct. His own daughter managed more in one desperate sentence than Hitler achieved in half a decade. To say nothing of the fact that it takes some major fucking idiocy to end up in a situation that by your own standards is worse than the Age of Apocalyse. [2]

In the end, a lot of this comes down to ego. When you engage in debate with Charles Xavier and he comes off looking humble and unsure of himself in comparison, I would submit that you’ve crossed a fairly important line somewhere. Which brings us to Magneto’s second great flaw; everything always has to be about him.

This is most obvious on the personal level. In his mind, people never fail Magneto, they betray him. The punishments for disobedience are always severe, and the rewards for following orders almost non-existent. Small wonder Toad once sold him out to an alien power after one incident of abuse too many, or that Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch abandoned him (this required a fairly complex and, to be honest, implausible plot to retrieve them from the Avengers, but Magneto gave no sign of having learned from his mistake; like I said, he can’t see more than one step ahead). Fabian Cortez betrayed him too, though Cortez is such an inveterate douche it’s unfair to blame Magneto entirely for that one. As a race, Magneto is desperate to save mutant kind, but on an individual level he frequently seems to see and treat mutants as tools at best, and cannon fodder at worst. In fact, he ultimately realises this himself, after a pitched battle with the X-Men leads to him almost killing Kitty Pryde. Faced with almost having murdered a child (and a Jewish one at that) leads to the beginning of a period of atonement for Magneto lasting several years, which we’ll discuss later.

As well as the personal level, though, Magneto’s self-regard damages his overall struggle. I hesitate to bring US politics into this, but Magneto’s world-view is eerily reminiscent of the most hawkish neocon, in that every action taken with him in mind, no matter how indirect, or how entirely defensive, is seen as a direct and intolerable attack. No country, or organisation, can have it’s own independent interests, either they follow Magneto’s vision, or they are the enemy, and are plotting against him (much in the same way that Kristol and his ilk believe Russia doesn't have its own desires and concerns, and just wants to piss of the West all the time). The most extreme example is perhaps the Magneto Protocols, an attempt by various governments to erect a satellite grid that would render Magneto harmless should he ever attempt to return to Earth (at the time he was using Asteroid M as a haven for mutants seeking “peace”, which naturally translated into “dictatorship under Magneto”). Despite having forsaken Earth, this attempt to separate Asteroid M from the planet more permanently (which was ostensibly Magneto’s goal anyway) is seen as a direct attack. And direct attacks against Magneto cannot be countenanced. His retaliatory strike, in which he takes control of the magnetic field of the Earth, kills thousands. Statistically speaking, that might well have included a mutant or two, but all Magneto can see is an attack against him. Years later, he decides to once again harness the magnetic fields of the planet for his own ends, and decides to put an unknowing human “on trial” to determine whether or not he is doing the right thing (X-Men #85, probably Alan Davis' best issue ever). Of course, as soon as the chosen homo sapiens demonstrates a desire to simply live and let live, Magneto reveals himself, terrifies the man by detonating a nearby car and flinging him into the air, and then declares his point proven when the poor man admits he wants Magneto dead. Not mutants dead, Magneto, but by this point Magneto literally cannot understand the difference. He may believe himself as working for mutant-kinds best interests, but the truth is obvious, he works for his best interests and then repeatedly assumes that the two things are the same. This is another factor common to terrorists, and to hawkish demagogues.

In this sense, the comparison so commonly made between Magneto and Malcolm X seems rather unfair on the latter. It works on some fuzzy level when comparing him with Xavier/Martin Luther King Junior [3], but when viewing Magneto alone, it holds less water. X looked back on two hundred years of slavery and subjugation for one group of people and decided they were oppressed as Hell, and they weren’t going to take it anymore. Magneto looked back on who knows how many years of suspicion and persecution of the Jews, added it onto a decade of outrageous horror and death, and extrapolated that to a totally different group of people. The most pertinent question to ask X might well have been “Do you really think this will work for black people?”. For Magneto, the question is “Do you really think this would have worked for the Jews”? X’s doctrine was almost certainly self-defeating, but the underlying argument that black people had waited long enough, and that the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t really getting the job done, was understandable on its own terms. Magneto took it upon himself to start a war on behalf of a group of people most of the world didn’t even believe in with the stated aim of stopping mankind from treating mutants the same way Nazi Germany treated the Jews. The fact that this hasn't happened yet is irrelevant, and the fact that Magneto gives every indication that his desire to stop it is to simply utilise similar tactics in reverse just as ignored. The Santayana quote above is, of course, entirely true, but it is wise to bear in mind that you can end up repeating the past by remembering it, but learning all the wrong lessons.

Quite aside from that, though, the logical problem in Magneto's thinking is obvious. If mutants really are as politically and militarily weak as the Jews were in 30’s Germany, then poking the hornet’s nest would be a psychotically stupid thing to do. If, though, mutant-kind is possessed of a greater power (and who could doubt that these days, with so many Alpha mutants running around), then Magneto’s worse-case scenario is either impossible, or liable to come around for reasons other than the ones he imagines, i.e. the mere existence of mutants. It would take something like, say, taking mutants and associating them with crazy and belligerent thugs.

This is where we get back to the American hawks. Magneto operates on the paradoxical belief that mutant-kind was so weak and scattered it had to be protected from the massive majority of “normal” humans, but so strong and powerful that they could achieve that protection by declaring war on the entire world. It’s a comic book re-enactment of the inside of Bill Kristol’s head (with further shades of the GDR’s paranoia that their manifest awesomeness was so obvious that jealous foreigners would bring it down by being a bit mean about it in pamphlets); in which America is so much better than anyone else it must be protected from all slights, however benign, by making new enemies, and preferably bombing them into powder. "We’re so obviously strong that we need to make new enemies, so that we can protect ourselves from things we're too strong to be hurt by, and also to prove to our old enemies we’re not weak, so they won't try and hurt us!!!". [4] Magneto suffers from the same lapse in critical thinking. It’s understandable, because in his head the faceless masses of the mutant population are as helpless as the Jews of Europe, but all his belligerence and search for power ever achieves is to push the arms race a little further along the path. Each new Sentinel or battle-suit or mutant cure leads to another confrontation, another vow to destroy humanity, and the whole cycle starts up again. It is ironic in the extreme that it was Magneto’s X-Men that defeated Apocalypse during the AoA, and that Magneto’s last words to En Sabah Nur before tearing him to pieces is a reminder that “survival of the fittest” always ends in those that have been deemed weak rising up and taking control. It’s a lesson our Magneto would do to remember; uniting mutant-kind is one thing, but uniting humanity against them would be disastrous.

I don't believe Magneto ever really came to understand any of this, in general, but at the very least almost being personally responsible for killing an innocent mutant in the same room (as oppose to killing a human in the same room, or finding out he'd killed a mutant elsewhere, or killing a mutant for some slight against him) leads to him reconsidering his approach. So too does the revelation not long after that Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are his children, and that thus he has a human grandchild (Luna, the daughter of Quicksilver and the Inhuman Crystal), tying him to humanity by blood (his phrase, one would assume his parents were human, even if the idea of humanity and mutant-kind having different blood wasn't fairly dumb to begin with).

Again, though, all of this is about him. His failures. His family. It still seems almost impossible for him to show any real emotional connection to anyone not already tied to him one way or another. This is not to say he feels no love, or loyalty (Lee Forrester receives the first for a time, despite being human, and Xavier has been saved by Magneto on more than one occasion), simply that his goal to keep mutants safe, while clearly of overriding importance to him, only occur in the abstract. If ten mutants need to be sacrificed to save eleven, Magneto will make the call instantly; and he will kill ten more mutants if they stand in his way. Somehow, his struggle is both intensely personal and disturbingly clinical.

Having said all that, once he chose to fight on the side of the angels, he gave his all to it. Those years (starting sometime just before UXM #200 and lasting for some four years or so, or I guess eight months or so from the character's perspectives) was the most interesting in his long history. At this point comparisons between Xavier and Magneto become truly meaningful; here we have two people who aim for the same thing, but disagree on how to achieve it, a contrast that became even more immediate when Magneto became headmaster of the New Mutants. Specifically, it demonstrates that it was never their differences in approach that separated them, or at least that those approaches stemmed from far more fundamental differences in temperament. Whilst Charles deals with his failures with stoicism and what Bertrand Russell would call "calm autumnal sadness" (sure, that eventually leads to him becoming Onslaught, but that was partially Magneto's fault in any case), Magneto deals with it with anger and force. Since his sincere desire to follow Xavier's example (at least upto a point) means he can no longer turn that force against humanity, he simply turns it inwards instead, becoming a taciturn, unfeeling drunk, desperate to find a way to protect the New Mutants as once he tried to protect all mutant-kind, and with no more success. Doug Ramsey is murdered, and the other New Mutants drift from his care, sickened by his involvement with the Hellfire Club as the "White King" (an attempt by Magneto to both keep an eye on the organisation and to use their resources against the X-Men's enemies) and his refusal to allow them to try and prevent the X-Men's "death" in Dallas not long before Inferno. Ultimately, the New Mutants demand to leave his charge, and Magneto accepts. Within months, he has returned to his villainous ways, leading to a set of events that incorporate the Magneto Protocols event mentioned earlier, and concludes with him extracting the adamantium from Wolverine's body (another ultimately self-destructive act of revenge) and having his brain shut down by Xavier.

There are many, many more things one can say about Magneto. I've skipped over Genosha almost entirely, to say nothing of the Magneto War, his clone Joseph (who will at least get his own article), his reduction to infancy by the mutant Alpha and Moira MacTaggart's subsequent attempt to rebuild his DNA, but I think we've covered the essentials [5]. Magneto is a man who has seen the absolute worst humanity has to offer, and he has allowed it to change him into something monstrous. He is a man who can deal with the failures of the past only by making new mistakes in the present. And, above all, he is a man who cannot separate himself from his cause, but separates the cause from its cost all too easily. In all but the first, those things probably makes him more like everybody else than we would like to admit, and certainly more human than he would dare to concede. But then, that's always the problem with dividing people up into us and them; they always turn out to act exactly like us.

Next time round, we consider Psylocke. Will I be annoyed at the implication that a reserved British woman can't last as a super heroine? Or will I mainly concern myself with the fact that she's a brutally hot ninja? Who can tell? WHO!?!

[1] Whilst I continue to maintain that M-Day and the events preceding it represent an opportunity wasted rather than a bad idea altogether, but the fact that Quesada justified it as an attempt to make it harder to create new characters rather makes me wonder whether the man has any idea what the fuck he’s doing, partially because it didn’t (and couldn’t) work, but mainly because all you need is a cool idea and the line “they’re a mutant” and you’re off and running. Why you’d want to intentionally block that is beyond me.

[2] Say what you want about that particular alternate reality, they weren't running out of mutants any time soon.

[3] Particularly after a cursory glance at the respective childhoods of the two men. They were in no way as far removed from each others experiences as Xavier and Magneto, of course, but at the very least you could hypothesise that the two men might have shared or even swapped their political philosophies had they swapped their early experiences. In the Marvel Universe, Charles never needed to fight for his food, and never could fight in order to stop his abusive step-father and bullying step-brother. Magneto, on the other hand, is only alive at all because he chose to kill rather than lay down and die.

[4] The short-hand to all of this is that the only way to not be destroyed is to demonstrate fearlessness, and the only way to demonstrate fearlessness is to deliberately flirt with situations that would lead to your destruction.

[5] He also tried to take the world over using mind-controlling lava, once, but we don't like to talk about that.

In Which I Am Compelled To Once Again Discuss Buses

Remember the Atheist Bus campaign I spent a few posts discussing (and twisting to my own childish ends) at the start of the year? One of the major bones of contention was whether "There's Probably No God: Now Go Out And Enjoy Your Life" was too strong a phrase (it should surprise no-one to learn I thought it wasn't, though other phrases were suggested that might well have worked better).

Well, compare that message to the one being used in Des Moines: "Don't Believe In God? You Are Not Alone." Well, I say "being used", they've already been taken down after a storm of complaints. Iowa Governor Culver approves, saying "I was disturbed, personally, by the advertisement and I can understand why other Iowans were also disturbed by the message that it sent." He also claimed to be "offended".

Disturbed by the message? Offended? This is the democratically elected Governor of the State of Iowa, and he's offended to learn that atheists might want to remind each other they're not on their own out there.

Apparently the ads are going to go back up again, which is good news. My point here is two-fold, though. One, there is apparently no atheist message (and this one is about as obvious an attempt to help out other atheists as possible, bypassing the already very weak argument that such ads are aimed at Christians themselves) non-confrontational enough to avoid people complaining that it's disturbing and/or offensive. Two, whilst Des Moines is not London, the questions raised previously about why atheism would need to advertise are answered pretty quickly here. If people live in a society where being reminded that atheists exist constitutes an offensive message, atheists need all the reassurance they can get.

Every Time I Think We've Reached Rock Bottom...

Is there a word to describe a mother who drags her baby with Downs Syndrome into a political fight in order to defend a system that denies heathcare coverage for babies with Downs Syndrome? I mean, it's not like I have a small vocabulary, or a tendency not to call it like I see it, but I'm genuinely struggling to not agree with straight-up "evil". Taking your own family's suffering and exploiting it to make other families in the same position suffer more?

I'm not saying her situation requires she back reform, og of course. Palin could tell the public why she opposes the proposed health care legislation, despite the fact that it will help families who are dealing with children with Down Syndrome. That, at least, is a mature stance; if the good the bill would do over this one subject would be overwhelmed by problems elsewhere, then by all means let's hear about it. Failing that, she could have just kept her mouth shut.

Someone once said that the interesting thing about liberals and conservatives (as the terms are understood in America right now) is that conservatives tend to take liberal positions on issues that directly affect them. Say what you want about Cheney (and God knows a more hideous example of humanity is not easy to find outside the realms of fiction), but having a gay daughter meant he never played ball with the GOP over gay-bashing (if only he'd had three other daughters, one black, one Muslim, and one the anthropomorphic representation of law and Constitutionality). The link between this observation and wider discussions on the subject of empathy are left as an exercise to the reader, but my point for now is that this particular conservative has gone the other way; she is currently experiencing first-hand the exact sort of struggle that liberals point to when they argue health-care insurance should be easier to acquire, and she is deliberately using it to make that argument harder (in a way that makes no fucking sense, of course, but her total disconnect from reality is one of her least crimes at this point). It make me long for the good old days when all Palin was doing was telling people her daughter had chosen to keep her baby, as though that somehow made it OK that the potential McCain administration would have attempted to deny her the right to make that choice from the very moment they got to the Oval.

The more I think about what could have happened had McCain taken the White House, the harder it is to sleep at night. The fact that the TPM article linked to above suggests that this might be a trial balloon for 2012, much as I doubt that such is the case, makes my head hurt.

Jessie's Video Games

This week, I 'ave bin mostly playin: Plants Vs. Zombies.


This is because it is awesome.

The basic idea is fairly obvious from the title; the only clarification required is that you are on the side of the plants. Or, more accurately, the plants are on the side of you, since they are all that stands between the zombies and a delicious brains-croque-monsieur, of which the principle ingredient is you.

In practice, the game is not a million miles away from Desktop Tower Defense, which I've mentioned before, except that the zombies can only arrive from one direction, and the available defences are far more varied and interesting. And funny, as well, which is impressive. Being able to write 50 biographies for different zombie-killing plants and make them all amusing (to say nothing of the descriptions of the dozens of zombie sub-sets themselves) requires a special kind of creativity.

Oh, and it also has one of the best credit sequences in living memory, though you probably have to experience the game to appreciate it fully. Still, J-Pop + shambling undead? Sign me the fuck up!

I acquired this genius for the bargain price of eight quid from Steam, and it was worth every penny. Alternatively, there are demos you can download. I recommend that you do. The only obvious flaw with the game is that it's kinda easy; I only had my brains eaten four times over the course of the whole thing, and three of those were on the final set of levels (stoopid bungee zombies!). Regardless, it still took me most of a day to complete (and there are many bonus levels I haven't gotten around to yet), and for the price of less than four pints (which continues to be the only sensible way to measure fiscal strain), you could do a whole lot worse.