Echopraxia

If the perpetrator of the massacre at Virginia Tech had been white, we'd be hearing a bunch of tiresome hand-wringing about "suburban alienation" (OK, that's happening anyway) and "angry white males" - possibly even the "militia movement", remember them? - and someone would probably end up managing to blame Trent Reznor. If, God forbid, he'd been a Muslim, the asshole wing of the American right would be vigorously dancing around the question of whether it's safe to allow such people on a college campus in the first place. When it emerged that the man responsible was a Korean national, that seemed to derail a number of promising narratives. (At least he turned out to be a resident alien: this meant that the British papers could spend a pleasant few days wanking about how the iniquities of life in this terrible country had driven someone to commit mass murder, while Sean Hannity could go on TV and wonder how come the guy wasn't stripped of his green card and summarily deported after writing a terrible play in college.)

Still, the show must go on.

Police investigating the Virginia Tech killings are looking at whether Cho Seung-Hui was copying parts of a violent film when he murdered 32 people.

Park Chan-wook's Oldboy has the misfortune of being the most prominent Korean film to be released in the US in the last five years (or perhaps ever). Literally the only connection between the Virginia Tech killings and the film Oldboy is that both can be ascribed to people with Korean citizenship - although notice that the Sky News story does not mention that Oldboy was the work of a Korean director. It's a very, very good thriller which has nothing to do with a crazy person killing thirty-two people in Virginia.

And to think that this took three whole days. At this rate, the first lawsuit against Trent Reznor should be filed by the end of next week.

Posted by zerlesen at 7:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Sometimes political comedy is nuanced and subtle, and other times a group called "March Together for Life" puts up a post called "Murder Without Conscience" in which they take serious issue with a seven-year-old Onion opinion piece entitled "I'm Totally Psyched About This Abortion!" Then six hundred people line up to kick them.

On another note, the subhead at the March Together for Life blog is

We will end abortion through our unity and the monthly call for life.

UPDATE: A thousand and forty three people. I'm amazed that folks are still coming up with points that hadn't already been made in the first thousand comments, but there it is.

Posted by zerlesen at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Op-ed from the New Republic's Jonathan Chait on this year's fractious Connecticut senatorial race, here. Given that the left-netroots have for the most part thrown TNR under the bus during this whole business - Markos Zuniga even referred to them as part of the "vast RIGHT wing conspiracy", which made me slowly blink twice - he's unsurprisingly harsh:

The whole anti-Lieberman blog campaign has a self-fulfilling quality: They charge that Lieberman isn't a Democrat, they drive him from the party, and they declare themselves to be correct. The more ex-Democrats they create, the more sure of their own virtue they become.

(Ah, good times:

Dean tries to spin his outburst as evidence of his being "willing to say things that are not popular." But the problem wasn't that Dean said something unpopular. The content of what he said was fine--"EEEEEEYYYYAAAHHHH!!!!" is not, per se, an unpopular sentiment--but the form was problematic.

Posted by zerlesen at 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are a number of anonymous academics in this harsh, damp, endless world of blogs, virtually all of whom update more often than I do. I can certainly understand why the practice is so widespread: even when there's no particularly good reason to blog anonymously, there's still an undeniable sense that you don't want a collection of personal nonsense showing up on page one when your students Google you. It'd be even worse than that awkward feeling you get when you run into them in bars.

Anyway, that's off the point. The reason I'm typing this is to say that, no matter how you feel about anonymity, avoiding your students in bars, and so forth, one thing's for sure: doing this is a really, really terrible idea.

UPDATE: In response, a constructive outlook on the world is proposed:

Deb, these right-wing terrorists will never, ever stop attacking you; you don't talk nicely to rabid animals or ask them to please stop biting you, you execute the damned things.

They're hate junkies, and the best way to deal with them -- other than taking a baseball bat to their heads -- is to overdose them with hate.

(Incidentally, the folks who are determined to interpret Frisch's original comments as a serious threat against the life of Goldstein's kid are milking this one way too hard. "Gotcha" doesn't take long to become a fairly tedious game, especially when you're playing it with someone who clearly has very serious problems interacting with other people. The woman is deranged: how much outrage is it really possible to feel about this fact?)

Posted by zerlesen at 9:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Before my head explodes, here is a charming little folk ballad about the troubled life of an NBA general manager.

It's not all good, but the line

Encouraging teams to stay below the tax threshold allows them flexibility to re-sign their draft picks!

Posted by zerlesen at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few months ago, being given a ride up I-5 by the artist formerly known as e-rocky-confidential, I was turned on to the Mountain Goats. I was, I have to confess, sceptical. I react very badly to other people trying to play me music that they like, despite the fact that I am a evangelical asshole about music that I have decided is the best thing ever this week.

Anyway, it turned out to be this fantastic minimalist thing of acoustic guitar and tape hiss, and what sounded like a concussed folk singer on top of it. Again, not a good omen: I have an incredibly low tolerance for people who sound like folk singers. I think the thing that won me over for good was the guy muttering offhandedly

But selling acid was a bad idea... and selling it to a cop was a worse one... and the new law said that seventeen year olds could do federal time...

Anyway, the upshot is that now I am tremendously excited about this going on a short way up the road from my apartment. They even observe, in passing

Our love for you is an unquenchable fire! We cannot sleep!

Posted by zerlesen at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I love it when politics blogs start talking about sports almost as much as I hate it when sports blogs start talking about politics. Imagine my delight, then, as in this astonishing thread MyDD guy Chris Bowers launches an early salvo in the Pennsylvania governor's race. Since Republican candidate Lynn Swann is locally popular in his capacity as a Hall of Fame wide receiver for the '70s Pittsburgh Steelers, the logical thing to do is to start arguing that he shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame. And this Bowers does quite passionately.

As always, the amusement value comes from the fact that, if Lynn Swann were running as a Democrat, Bowers would be outraged - outraged - at any aspersions that might be cast on his athletic bona fides, and some other douchebag would be running around casting them in much the same manner. "An attack on Lynn Swann," would then come the defense, "is an attack on the very institution of blah, and how typical of the whoever to engage in such underhanded etc."

To be fair to the frequently unhinged MyDD crowd, the ensuing discussion mostly consists of sensible comments to the effect that this is not the way to go about disqualifying a candidate, and Bowers does later reconsider slightly. Interspersed, though, are classic comments like:

We ARE talking about why he shouldn't be Governor. Undermining the notion that he was a legitimate Hall of Fame player is Step #1.

Posted by zerlesen at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)