Category Archives: Culture War
Dead Potheads
Just another dead pothead:
Robin Prosser, a Missoula woman who struggled for a quarter century to live with the pain of an immunosuppressive disorder, tried years ago to kill herself. Last week, she tried again. This time, she succeeded.
After her earlier attempt failed, Prosser wound up in even more trouble after investigating police found marijuana in her home. She used the marijuana to help cope with pain.
That marijuana charge was eventually dropped in an agreement with the city of Missoula, and Prosser had reason to rejoice in 2004 when Montanans passed a law allowing medical use of the drug.
She was a high-profile campaigner for the Montana Medical Marijuana Act, and like others, she was dismayed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that drug agents could still arrest sick people using marijuana, even in states that legalized its use.
The ruling came to haunt Prosser in late March, when DEA agents seized less than a half ounce of marijuana sent to her by her registered caregiver in Flathead County.
At the time, the DEA special agent in charge of the Rocky Mountain Field Division said federal agents were “protecting people from their own state laws” by seizing such shipments.
Another casualty in the War on the Sick. George Bush, Alberto Gonzalez, John Ashcroft, John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia – there is blood on your hands, you puritanical Constitution-raping assholes.
Friday Morning Linkorama
Some optimists say that in Army Gen. David Petraeus, Bush has finally found his Gen. Grant. That may or may not be true, but it is beside the point. The problem is that Petraeus has not yet found his President Lincoln.
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip, Lee).
Rosh Hoshana Linkorama!
I’m not supposed to think today (not that I do anyway), so I’ll just link to those who do:
There’s a related link from Sully about how geeks have a better perspective on tragedy. Just wait until the Gates money starts pouring into these efforts.
Thoughts on the surge later tonight.
Weekend Linkorama
Additionally, the allegation that polygyny creates Muslim terrorism out of poor woman-less men flies in the face of the well-off physicians who were attacking Britain last week.
Linkorama
What does a baby-driven sleep-deprived blogger do? He links!
Reason has more on the students punished for excessive celebration. It makes some good points, but I am still sympathetic to the students. Stopping “Students crossing the stage were dancing and flashing hand signs; friends in the audience were jumping up, whooping and raising a racket with air horns.” does not mean you stop all cheering.
Cato fisks Romney on health care. I swear. This election is looking like a choice between the little socialists and the big socialists.
I suspect the rise in violent crime has little to do with Bush. Social factors are critical here – especially the rise of Meth. Yeah, the libs will go on about poverty and race and Katrina or something. But our economy is healthy. No, I don’t think this is Bush’s fault.
But you KNOW that if violent crime had gone up under Clinton, the Right would have blamed him in a heartbeat.
This is why things like TABOR, which set strict spending limits and refund tax excess to the taxpayers, are critical.
The typical Fairfax homeowner is paying $4830 a year in property taxes. The FCTA points out that “if during the past seven years the Supervisors had held real estate tax increases to the rate of inflation, which averaged three percent per year, the typical homeowner would be paying $3,079.” … The supervisors–in Fairfax County and everywhere else–respond, “Would you have us close fire stations or fire teachers or throw widows out in the snow?” Somehow they never discuss, as another item in the FCTA newsletter does, the fact that salaries and benefits have increased far more than population growth or any other measure over the past seven years.
If you give government money, it will spend it. Part of the reason for our massive federal deficits now is because Congress responded to the budget surplus with an orgy of spending rather than a tax cut. And when revenues dropped to normal growth, deficits returns — as every Libertarian predicted.
Even thought I somewhat support the death penalty, I have to disagree with SCOTUS on death penalty juries. Jurors judge the case and the law and a prosecutor’s fucking job is to persuade them that the defendent deserved to be killed. Banning jurors who even question the death penalty is rigging the deck and very likely to produce “hang ’em high” juries that have very high false conviction rates.
Michael Moore. As pig ignorant as ever.
Another sex crime outrage.
This is fricking hilarious.
Pills
Reason on a drugstore that refuses to stock contraceptives. This is becoming a weird battleground where Leftists assert women have a “right” to get the pill and Rightists assert pharmacists have a “right” not to dispense medication they don’t agree with.
To me, the issue comes down to ownership. The people who own the store get to decide what medication is sold there. If you don’t want to give birth control to women, don’t work there. You don’t have a “right” to pick and choose the medication you dispense for your employer any more than I have a “right” to tell my boss I won’t do the work he assigns. But I both of us have the freedom to quit and get a different job.
But by the same token, if a store refuse to carry birth control, don’t shop there. Women don’t have a “right” to demand a store carry birth control any more than I have a “right” to demand McDonald’s sell healthy salads. But we do have the freedom to go to another store.
Use it.
Linkorama
I’m working on two big posts on immigration. In the meantime….
In a recent study, sociologist Diane Felmee found only a third of women said looks were the first thing that attracted them to a man. Most preferred a sense of humour or financial and career success.
This has never been my experience. And I mean ever. I have known precisely one woman in my life who preferred geeky men. She was also my first girlfriend (and eventually moved on to better looking ones).
No, these are women who want to have their cake and eat it, too. When they’re young, they want to have sex with hot men. And now that they’re older, they want to settle down with the other ones. And the plain or ugly men are supposed to settle for never having a wild and crazy youth. Garbage.
Christian Hysteria
The latest. Apparently, book sellers can sell both Christian books and porn. The horror. The horror.
I wonder what they’d do if they found out the my library of 1100 books includes the New Testament, three copies of the old, the Koran, commentaries on all of the above as well as Lolita, Gravity’s Rainbow and the Origin of Species.
Hangings too good for me.
Good for Him
The governor of Mass has ended abstience only education. I despise the way this is portrated as an either-or. The programs that teach about condoms and birth control also teach about absitenence. Of course, they don’t do it with “Monster in Your Bed” stories about catching AIDS from tears, so there you go.
Partial
I’m not sure what to make of today’s Supreme Court decision on partial birth abortion. While I oppose the procedure I get nervous when the government starts deciding what methods may be used. In this case, these feti will just be aborted by a different and, as I understand it, more dangerous procedure. Government doesn’t know medicine. If they want to ban late-term abortions, that’s one thing. I might even support that on the state level. But having a bunch of lawyers decide approprate medical methodology is asking for trouble.
I also think this puts the lie to the standard Republican talking point of “We just want to the decision on abortion to go back to the states!” This is a very anti-federalist law and tells me that, if they had the votes, they would ban abortion on the Congressional level and screw federalism. After all, that’s what they did on medical marijuana.
I do think having these things debated politically is better than having the Supreme Court impose a unilateral ruling on the nation. We’ll get better debate on the subject. And as I said in this space, if Roe vs. Wade were ever struck down, it would be he best thing that ever happened to the Democrats.
Expect Planned Parenthood and NARAL to shit bricks. But the court is still at least 5-4 pro-Roe, as Kennedy is usually an abortion supporter. And we’ll see how Alito and Roberts rule on more restrictive laws. I suspect that, as with everything, the GOP will make sure that they can get abortions when they need them. It’s the rest of us that are in danger of hellfire.
Lawyers
Read this story about the how the Bush Justice Department has been recruiting heavily from Pat Robertson’s law school. Regent has actually improved its reputation remarkably over the last few years but was a bottom-tier school when Bush began recruiting from it.
The law school’s dean, Jeffrey A. Brauch, urges in his “vision” statement that students reflect upon “the critical role the Christian faith should play in our legal system.” Jason Eige (’99), senior assistant to Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell, puts it pithily in the alumni newsletter, Regent Remark: “Your Résumé Is God’s Instrument.”
This legal worldview meshed perfectly with that of former Attorney General John Ashcroft—a devout Pentecostal who forbade use of the word “pride,” as well as the phrase “no higher calling than public service,” on documents bearing his signature. (He also snatched the last bit of fun out of his press conferences when he covered up the bared breasts of the DoJ statue the “Spirit of Justice”). No surprise that, as he launched a transformation of the Justice Department, the Goodlings looked good to him.
The problem here is not so much where Bush is recruiting from or what battles they choose to fight. If they think “persecution” of Christians is more worthy of being investigated that blacks being denied votes, that’s their perogative. What bothers me is the same thing that always bothers me about the Religious Right. When you think that God is on your side, anything is justified. How can laws, the Constitution or fundamental rights stand up to the Will of God? How can you can accept an election that will turn out his chosen candidate?
A lot of the problems in the Bush Administration become clearer when they are seen through the lens of religious dogma. The insistence on loyalty and having “our guys” in charge, the treating of unbelievers as though they were subhuman (Abu Ghraib, etc.).
As I have said many times, I have no problem with a religious President. But I get concerned with one who thinks God talks to him.
Get That Off My Silver Screen!
My favorite movie critic, James Berardinelli has a fascinating post on the recent apperance of explicit sex scenes in mainstream movies. He doesn’t think this is the beginning of a trend. To wit:
Then there’s the question of how a graphic sex scene impacts a movie. People generally watch porn for stimulation. People watch legitimate films for less primal reasons. Confusing the two can lead to frustration. The conflict is evident. There’s also an issue of pacing. No movie can afford to take a several-minute “timeout” to show a sex scene, unless the movie is all about sex in the first place (in which case it’s almost certainly straight porn rather than art-porn). There’s another issue that Roger Ebert once raised. Graphic sex is documentary in nature. As he wrote in Roger Ebert’s Book of Film, speaking about Norman Mailer: “Mailer, like so many before and since, awaits the cinematic marriage of Sex and Art. I am not convinced such a thing is possible. In traditional fiction films, art involves the filmmakers in creating a fiction about characters whose lives we care about. Sex, to the degree that it involves nudity and explicit detail, brings the whole story crashing down to the level of documentary. The actors lose not only their clothes but their characters, and stand (or recline) revealed only as themselves.”
Here’s the response I e-mailed to him:
I’m afraid I have to disagree with you and with Ebert. It seems to me that you are still stuck in thinking of any explicit sex as porn and not as what we’re seeing — a more explicit extension of the sex scenes that have been in mainstream films since the fall of the Hays Code. A number of the films in your top 100 include scenes that are fairly explicit — albeit mostly in a disturbing context (War Zone or Requiem for a Dream, for example). These would have been considered pornographic — hell, they would have been banned — just a few decades ago even though they don’t “show everything”.
I think our perception of art-porn has been heavily tainted by the disastrous Showgirls foray into this. But just as there is a difference between the soft-porn that shows up on Cinemax and the erotica that shows up in, say, Secretary, I think there can be a similar difference between pure pornography and art-porn. An example that you didn’t mention and doesn’t show up in your archive is Sex and Lucia, a movie which is fairly graphic, although not pornographic, but compelling, interesting and romantic. I don’t see that the movie would have come to a screeching halt had it been slightly more explicit.
I think the word we’re both scrounging around for is “tasteful”. There is a way to make porn tasteful, but the political situation in our country has branded all explicit erotica — and most non-explicit — as evil. But films like Secretary and Lucia show that it can be done.
Of course, there’s always Sturgeon’s Law. Most movies that blur the line between art and porn will be crap, because most movies are crap anyway. And the best talent will shy away from “art-porn” because of the stigma — which is why we’re seeing the new wave emerging in countries like France and Spain, which aren’t as hysterically puritanical as we are.
Back to blog-Mike:
Sex and Lucia is a movie I have a lot of arguments about. Some people think it’s just a skin flick. I enjoyed it. Not that those two things are mutually exclusive, of course. But I do think any trend that breaks us out of “sex bad, sex evil, violence OK” mentality that has gripped his nation for the last three centuries is a good thing.
Die Hippies!
The US government would rather you die screaming in pain than smoke pot. Interesting note:
What becomes abundantly clear from Baum’s reporting: Everything, everything about the prohibition of marijuana is and has always been political. It basically boils down to Richard Nixon needing a wedge issue and a hammer with which to beat the dirty hippie anti-war protesters over the head. With just a bit of research, even hardened drug warriors in Nixon’s own administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s quickly realized marijuana was basically harmless.
From that, we have descended to a point where the government has determined it’s better that sick, crippled, suffering people (a) die, and (b) die in pain, than to give those dirty hippies the smallest of victories, even 35 years later.
I have another take on this. I think we are seeing the witch-trial mentality.
Huh? Bear with me.
The people who tortured, burnt, drowned and hanged witches in the last millenium always justified it by saying they were saving the witch’s soul. Yeah, they were going to die in pain and terror. But that was a small price to pay for the eternal salvation of having the demons driven from them.
(Whether they actually thought this, or just used it justify/rationalize a process that, not coincidentally, gave them the condemended witch’s property, is another issue.)
I see this in the drug warriors and the teetotalers — especially when it comes to denying Angel Reich marijuana or Richard Paey percocet. Yes, they will die in pain. But their souls will be saved because their minds won’t be cloud by those filthy drugs. Well, that and the pathological need to enforce the letter of the law beyond any boundaries of common sense.
I can’t find the link here, but when the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous was dying, he asked for a drink. He was denied. That is, a man who was quite understandably scared of what was happening to him was denied even a modicum of comfort. Because it would save his soul.
Hogwash. One of the most scared duties of a human being is to comfort the dying. It is something we will all need at some point. And if that comfort involves a drink, a pill or a joint, so be it.
Especially if that drink, pill or joint might keep them around for just a little bit longer.