Enough with this serious talk: via Jonathan Last, ten of the greatest minutes Hollywood has ever produced:
This video was preceded by ten minutes of spirited discussion in the office about the various merits of Val Kilmer. I, for one, am firmly in the pro-Kilmer camp: his portrayal of Doc Holliday is one of the single greatest performances of all time. Add to that expert turns in Heat, Top Gun, and The Doors, and you’ve got a superb actor. I even enjoy his schlockier stuff like Red Planet and The Island of Dr. Moreau.
For more on the man, the myth, the legend, check out Chuck Klosterman’s profile of the actor in Esquire from three years back. Good times.
This is a post that might get me in trouble, but here goes. From the NY Times today:
The Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund filed suit in October in State Supreme Court in Manhattan against Caliente Cab, asserting that she was the victim of gender discrimination.
While Ms. Farmer has always identified herself as a woman, the defense fund took up the case because it touched upon many issues that transgender people commonly face and could set an interesting legal precedent, representatives of the group said.
Emphasis mine. And here we come upon one of my biggest pet peeves: men are men, and women are women. There are clear biological differences between the two. I feel an intense amount of pity* for folks who consider themselves transgender, but wanting to be a member of the opposite sex doesn’t make you one, and no amount of cosmetic mutilation to your genitals will cause you to become one.**
Remember when there was all that hubbub a few weeks back about the “man” who was pregnant? Yeah, that wasn’t a man. She was a woman–one who has taken hormone therapy and had radical surgery to look more like a man, but a woman nonetheless. I’m something of a pedant when it comes to words–they have definitions for a reason–so why don’t we look at the dictionary definitions of male and female:
male: a person bearing an X and Y chromosome pair in the cell nuclei and normally having a penis, scrotum, and testicles, and developing hair on the face at adolescence; a boy or man.
female: a person bearing two X chromosomes in the cell nuclei and normally having a vagina, a uterus and ovaries, and developing at puberty a relatively rounded body and enlarged breasts, and retaining a beardless face; a girl or woman.
Our “pregnant man” clearly fits under the second definition, so it’s really not much of a story: just another woman giving birth. Anyway, coming back to my original point about the New York Times’s article: Ms. Farmer has always identified herself as a woman because she has always been a woman and can never be anything other than a woman. No amount of PC indoctrination will get me to change my beliefs in this regard, and I refuse to call the transgendered by any sex other than the one they were born with. Feel free to call me an unenlightened bigot in the comments.
*Pity inspired, largely, by Paul McHugh’s piece in First Things back in ‘04 on sex change operations and why he urged putting a stop to them at Johns Hopkins, where he was psychiatrist in chief.
**South Park nailed this issue in the first episode of season nine. You can watch the full episode, “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina,” here.
It’s one of those issues I try to tiptoe around as carefully as possible, but I promised my Doublethink overlords I would comment on the issues of the day, so comment I shall. First, gay marriage in the abstract. As a conservative, I fear, despise, and loathe change, especially fundamental change to society’s fundamental bedrock, namely the family unit. Furthermore, I don’t see where the change stops. Why deny polygamists the right to their conception of a family? Why deny family members the right to marry each other? Worrying about a slippery slope is not the same thing as making an argument, but I think it’s something that must be considered in this case.
As a libertarian, however–especially a younger libertarian–I have no real objection to two chicks or two dudes getting married. It doesn’t really impact me, so hey: live and let live. Furthermore, there’s no stopping gay marriage. In 100 years, people are going to look back on this debate and laugh. A man will sit there with his four wives and 25 children and regale them of stories from a day when their, and their gay neighbor’s, lifestyle was both reviled and illegal. Being on the “right side of history” is even less of an argument than “hey, look out for the wet grass on that steep hill!” but I’m more than happy to claim the moral high ground by saying I’m looking towards a future free from discrimination.
Enough with the abstract: What about the California decision in particular? I don’t know nearly enough about the state, the state’s court system, or the history of the law under review to offer an informed opinion. If you want the pro, go read Andrew, if you want the con, go read the Corner. But I would like to draw your attention to James’s thoughts on the degradation of language as it relates to law:
Look carefully at this phrasing:
…because of the long and celebrated history of the term “marriage” and the widespread understanding that this word describes a family relationship unreservedly sanctioned by the community, the statutory provisions that continue to limit access to this designation exclusively to opposite-sex couples…
The key terms here are ‘marriage’, ‘widespread’, ‘understanding’, ‘family’, ‘relationship’, ‘unreservedly’, ’sanctioned’, ‘community’, ‘limit’, ‘access’, and ‘designation’. The term ‘marriage’ is the one under controversy, and so has been stripped of any prefab definition. The term ‘widespread’ is impossibly vague. The term ‘understanding’ fails to capture the depth and character of public judgments about marriage. These judgments are sometimes mere ‘opinions’, sometimes are fiercely held ‘convictions’; sometimes they are well thought through, sometimes they are not. To declare that some unquantifiable but sufficiently large number of citizens share some unqualifiable but sufficiently coherent mental characterization of marriage as an unreservedly community-sanctioned family relationship is to abstract bizarrely away from the way plain people think about marriage. God knows what a ‘community’ means in this context. A state? A county? A town? ‘Community’ is a wholly meaningless term here. ‘Unreservedly’ is similarly nebulous. And if we all know what ‘family’ means, why must the term be thrown into ambiguity by the qualifier ‘relationship’? How is a family different from a family relationship? These sorts of verbal curlicues are not mere flourishes. They are acts of cluttering up and evasion which are decisive to the reasoning, such as it is, of the majority opinion.
In other words, this decision is based on verbal gobbledygook; worse still, indecipherable legal gobbledygook that could mean anything. Again, I’m pretty ambivalent on gay marriage…but I think we can all agree* that this is not the process by which it should be made legal.
*And by “can” I mean “should” because I know those on the left think that the judiciary is a perfectly acceptable vehicle for pushing public policy and making laws. Original purpose of the court be damned: Judges are more than qualified to make up rights as they see fit!
Specifically, the creative and commercial failure of Speed Racer. I don’t particularly enjoy writing nasty reviews of movies–some critics really get off on tearing a film down; I just find it depressing–but I couldn’t help myself this time. One thing I would like to emphasize here, though, since I didn’t get a chance to in my piece: I respect the idea behind this movie, namely its cartoonish look. As I said in my review,
Stylistically, the film had great potential and was certainly a bold experimental project. The Wachowskis spent nine figures creating a flesh-and-blood cartoon. I don’t mean a live-action adaptation of a cartoon, something akin to the abominable Scooby Doo franchise. No, the Wachowskis, with the aid of CGI and limited only by their own imagination, crafted a world that looks like a cartoon but is inhabited by real people. It is, to say the least, an interesting aesthetic.
The problem is, it just doesn’t work. Imagine the horrible green screens that dot the last three Star Wars films on steroids. The Wachowskis deserve praise, I guess, for trying something entirely over the top–as well as scaring studio execs from trying to produce anything that looks this horrible ever again.
Just his mindset. John Podhoretz is 100% right: Bush’s speech–especially the bit drawing fire–was pretty much anti-terrorist boilerplate, the purest distillation of the Bush Doctrine. He and his surrogates and the press have been saying this stuff for years. Five minutes on Nexis brought up the following examples of similar comments/thoughts in the past, none of which had anything to do with Barack:
From the Nov. 28, 2004 LA Times:
Snapshots of the Conservative Camps
Neocons
What they’re reading: Israeli Cabinet member Natan Sharansky’s new book “The Case for Democracy,” which argues that the world is “divided between those who are prepared to confront evil and those who are willing to appease it.” Sound familiar? Sharansky met with President Bush and Middle East advisor Elliott Abrams on Nov. 11 to discuss his book, which Bush is reading.
From the Nov. 20, 2004 NY Times:
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. The Bush administration creates a false sense of urgency about a nuclear menace from a Middle Eastern country. Hard-liners talk about that country’s connections to terrorists. They portray European diplomatic efforts to defuse tensions as a feckless attempt to appease a rogue nation whose word can never be trusted anyway. Secretary of State Colin Powell makes ominous-sounding warnings about new intelligence, which turns out to be dubious.
October 19, 2004, NY Daily News:
A scornful Bush branded Kerry a do-nothing senator who would try to appease terrorists and expose Americans to greater danger.
Kerry would lead America into “a major defeat in the war on terror,” Bush told a wildly cheering audience of about 1,000 who rocked a basketball gym in South Jersey.
September 1, 2004, The Irish Times:
Mr Giuliani, who enjoys hero-status among Republicans for his post-9/11 leadership in New York, told delegates that terrorists had learned they could intimidate the world community, “and too often the response, particularly in Europe, was accommodation, appeasement and compromise”. Under the Bush doctrine the war would not end “until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated”, he said.
What all this nonsense comes back to is the fact that both of the candidates in ‘08 (and their campaigns) are trying to take every single issue on the table and label it as “out of bounds.” So Bush isn’t allowed to criticize Obama’s weak-willed and naive foreign policy. McCain’s critics aren’t allowed to bring up the fact that he’s older than chocolate chip cookies. No one can mention the fact that Hamas wants Obama to win. And on and on. It’s silly and it needs to stop. These aren’t smears or attacks (or, in Bush’s case, even about the election). Just drop it already and get to campaigning. It’s going to be a long enough six months as it is without constant whining about below-the-belt attacks that are neither below the belt nor attacks.
I’m not asking that question rhetorically, or with an excess of snark. I’m honestly interested to know. Have you, loyal readers, ever decided who to vote for based on their endorsers? Do you know anyone who has?
We’ll have a chance to see the real-life impact of Edwards’s endorsement of Obama next week in the Kentucky primary, a state similar to West Virginia in that it’s comprised largely of white folks with blue collars. Hillary has led in that state consistently since polling started: according to RCP, her lowest total of victory in the polling was 25%. The average right now sits at a 28.7% spread, and SurveyUSA has predicted a margin of victory as high as 34 points.
I think it’s fair to say, then, that Clinton is favored by anywhere from 25-34 points. The question is this: will Obama beat that spread? And, if he does, will it be the effect of the Edwards endorsement? Let’s say Obama manages to lose by ‘only’ 15 points (a pretty rare feat for a presumptive nominee, but I digress): Does he owe the extra ten points to Edwards?
I tend to think not, that there are other factors in play (increasing recognition among Dems that Obama is the nominee and rallying behind him would be the main one). Furthermore, I think that endorsements, like justifying a VP pick based on electoral college math, are entirely pointless. I’d say it’s fair to point to the example of Edwards himself as proof of that: not only did John Kerry lose Edwards’s home state, North Carolina, by five more points than Al Gore did, a cursory glance through my Almanac of American Politics suggests he lost the entire region of the South more vigorously than his predecessor.
But I don’t know. Is anyone aware of any statistical proof that the endorsements by other politicians matter? Note: Some endorsements do matter. Union endorsements matter, for example. But that’s because unions already control a large bloc of voters who rely on their leadership to tell them what to do. Having transcended the age of the political machine, politicians control no such loyalty and can deliver far fewer votes.
Peter Suderman was spot on when he said that the villain in Speed Racer, played by Roger Allam, is a dead ringer for Christopher Hitchens, both in appearance and accent. Check it out:
Which is which? No man can tell.
I’ll be writing about Speed Racer later in the week, and I don’t think I’m spoiling too much by saying that I think it’s a massive failure on every level. But I will say this: This film could do a great deal of good in the world by making acid obsolete. I’ve never done LSD (it holds no appeal for me), but this movie looks exactly what I imagine a bad trip to be like. The Wachowskis were throwing colors up on the screen I never knew existed. So, y’know, it’s got that going for it.
Rod Dreher says no, Andrew Sullivan says yes, and Rich Lowry’s source explains why it’ll never happen.
Gotta say: I’m with Rod on this one. Somalia was a giant CF, and anyone who doesn’t remember that fact needs to watch Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down immediately.* If the UN decides to lead some sort of expeditionary force, fine–let the blue helmets do their thing, and the U.S. military should provide whatever logistical support they request (short of troops). But there’s a limited amount of good a unilateral U.S. invasion of Burma could do, short of overthrowing the junta and occupying the country indefinitely. And I don’t think the United States has the stomach for any more nation-building.
*Just curious: Does anyone else get intensely angry when they watch that movie? The behavior of the Somalis and the ineptitude of the UN commanders both infuriate me to no end.
According to exit polls, that’s the percentage of West Virginia voters in a Democratic primary that would support Barack Obama over John McCain. From Fox News:
Both Clinton and Obama beat Republican John McCain in general election matchups, Clinton by a much larger margin. But, when asked about a matchup between Obama and McCain, just 53 percent of voters today said they’d side with Obama — and he will need far more than that to be competitive here in November.
I appreciate the fact that Democratic partisans like Matthew Yglesias get frustrated by talk of electability, since this is an increasingly terrible year for the GOP; as Fred Barnes points out, they have good reason to be gloomy. But Obama can’t win without recapturing the Reagan Democrats (and, as the Clinton campaign says, since 1918 no Democrat has won the presidency without winning WV). Taking 99% of the black vote isn’t enough; Obama needs to pick off those white, working class voters Hillary does so well with in order to beat McCain.
Much like James, I find those who traffic in psycho-babble kind of annoying. But is there a more succinct way to describe this line of thinking?
“Why set aside money specifically for a conservative?” asks Curtis Bell, a teaching assistant in political science. “I’d rather see a quality academic than someone paid to have a particular perspective.”
Exchange “admission slots” for “money,” “minority” for “conservative,” and “admitted” for “paid.” See what I’m getting at here?
While I’m busy railing against affirmative action, I’d like to associate myself with Andrew’s and Richard Kahlenberg’s call for an income-based AA program over a race-based AA program. If Obama really wanted to transcend race and put to bed the demons of the past, he’d call for this. I don’t see it happening.
(h/t Jonah)
