Bowdler old skool.
Thomas Bowdler thought of the children, and rewrote the distressing bits of Shakespeare and the Bible to gentle them for civilized folk. Anthony Comstock, who got his start harassing saloon-keepers who violated Sunday blue laws, made his name by poring through the mails and the penny-dreadful press, confiscating and burning anything obscene. In Saudi Arabia, pseudonymous blogger Alhamedi Alanezi tells us they use magic marker:
One of the few pleasures in life is to go to the larger bookstores here and buy a copy of an English-language newspaper. Usually it’s one of the British papers, occasionally the IHT or USA Today. They come on that very thin airmail paper. And invariably, they’ll contain apparently random splotches of black. Closer inspection reveals that a young western lady was showing some leg or shoulder, but has been “Magic Marker’d” vigorously, and of course it soaks thru the thin paper to obliterate the other side as well. My wife gets especially annoyed because her copy of Good Housekeeping suffers even worse; all those adverts for showers and “ladies’ things”, you can imagine.
So who’s responsible for poring thru the tens of thousands of magazines and papers that come into the country? Well, in the north of Riyadh there is a certain college of theology, the The Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University.
Read, as they say, the whole thing.
In which, out of a desire to leap aboard a train after it has left the station, I cite the Gospel According to Mark.
And he said unto them in his doctrine, Beware of the scribes, which love to go in long clothing, and love salutations in the marketplaces, And the chief seats in the synagogues, and the uppermost rooms at feasts: Which devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayers: these shall receive greater damnation.
And that is Atrios’s basic point, and it’s a God-damned shame he then has to explain himself at such length. —But since the only King James we have in the house is the Barry Moser, which is big and bulky and almost as much fun to consult as our OED, let’s go ahead and bag another Bible verse, because this, I think, is what Messrs. Drum and Nielsen Hayden and Currie and the Rev. Brill are getting at (if an especial a-theist may be so bold as to quote scripture for his purpose)—
Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
(Which is not to say one must always have charity at all times. You will slip; it’s to be expected, but not celebrated. —And you can also launch a broadside with charity, and most charitably dismast those who work against you, even burn them down to the waterline, with charity. Why are there no progressive religious voices in the mediasphere? Why has the reflexive definition of “religious” become “fundamentalist”? That’s the nut to crack. Everything else is just a game of let’s you and him fight.)
“Not even the sun will transgress his orbit but the Erinyes, the ministers of justice, overtake him.”
With purity, holiness and beneficence I will pass my life and practice my art. Except for the prudent correction of an imminent danger, I will neither treat any patient nor carry out any research on any human being without the valid informed consent of the subject or the appropriate legal protector thereof, understanding that research must have as its purpose the furtherance of the health of that individual. Into whatever patient setting I enter, I will go for the benefit of the sick and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief or corruption and further from the seduction of any patient.
—from the modern rendition of the Hippocratic Oath
Doctors or other health care providers could not be disciplined or sued if they refuse to treat gay patients under legislation passed Wednesday by the Michigan House.
The bill allows health care workers to refuse service to anyone on moral, ethical or religious grounds.
The Republican dominated House passed the measure as dozens of Catholics looked on from the gallery. The Michigan Catholic Conference, which pushed for the bills, hosted a legislative day for Catholics on Wednesday at the state Capitol.
The bills now go the Senate, which also is controlled by Republicans.
The Conscientious Objector Policy Act would allow health care providers to assert their objection within 24 hours of when they receive notice of a patient or procedure with which they don’t agree. However, it would prohibit emergency treatment to be refused.
Three other three bills that could affect LGBT health care were also passed by the House Wednesday which would exempt a health insurer or health facility from providing or covering a health care procedure that violated ethical, moral or religious principles reflected in their bylaws or mission statement. [...]
Paul A. Long, vice president for public policy for the Michigan Catholic Conference, said the bills promote the constitutional right to religious freedom.
“Individual and institutional health care providers can and should maintain their mission and their services without compromising faith-based teaching,” he said in a written statement.
—“Michigan Preparing To Let Doctors Refuse To Treat Gays,”
365Gay.com staff
What god or power divine hears thee, breaker of oaths and every law of hospitality?
Take that, Massachusetts.
With a two-steps-forward-one-step-back ruling, Oregon has become the first state in the union to recognize same-sex marriages. —Multnomah County Court Judge Frank Bearden ruled as follows:
- because Oregon state law does not allow for same-sex marriages, Multnomah County must stop issuing same-sex marriage licenses;
- because Oregon state law in this regard clearly violates Oregon’s constitution, the legislature must remedy this blatant discrimination within 90 days of the start of the next session;
- because the social benefits of marriage are intangible, a state-sanctioned civil union that guaranteed all the legal benefits of marriage would be an acceptable remedy;
- if the legislature cannot remedy this blatant discrimination in 90 days, Multnomah County may resume issuing same-sex marriage licenses; but
- no matter what, the state is required to recognize those same-sex marriages already performed.
So Multnomah County must rejoin the rest of the country however temporarily in the 20th century. And there’s a lot of legal dancing to avoid remembering the inherent inequalities of separate-but-equal, whether it’s water fountains or familial compacts. And we’re still waiting for the Oregon Supreme Court to weigh in—there’s many a possible slip yet betwixt this cup and lip. But thousands of same-sex couples were just done right by the state. Congratulations! —You take ’em where you can get ’em. (Me, I got most of this from the One True b!X and Ampersand. While you’re at Alas, by the way, check out this hoot-worthy flip-flop from a foe of same-sex marriage, confronted with a possible legislative solution:
“This is something that should be decided in the courts before it ever comes here,” said Assemblyman Pat Bates, R-Laguna Niguel, who voted no.
(Massachusetts begins wedding same-sex couples on 16 May. Brimstone has yet to fall. Heterosexual marriage is as strong as it ever was. Civilization shows no signs of collapsing. —Over this issue, at least. Hey! Look! Somebody said “Shit!” on television!)
We are all Frank Grimes now.
Oh, I, I can’t stand it any longer. This whole country is insane. Insane, I tell you! Daahh! Aaah! I can be crazy too! Look at me, I am a partisan hack, just like the Bush administration! I can obstruct the 9/11 commission and selectively release classified documents to make critics look bad! Give me votes! Ooh, I totally skimp on securing ports and supporting first responders, but nobody minds! I’m secretly plotting a war without telling Congress or the Secretary of State. Support me! Now I’m sending the armed forces into battle with armor they bought on eBay. But it doesn’t matter, because I’m the Bush administration! I don’t need to worry about jobs or the economy or health care, ’cause someone else will suffer. D’oh! D’oh! D’oh! Ha ha! I’m better than okay! I’m the Bush administration! I’m the worst presidency ever! Time to go openly rig the world’s oil market for an October surprise. What’s this? A lazy mediasphere ruled by an embedded punditocracy? Well, I don’t need to worry about the fact that I speak French fluently, because I’m—
Sorry. Something just snapped. (All due apologies to John Swartzwelder, who wrote “Homer’s Enemy.”)
You think I’m not serious?
Look: I hear one more person call a press conference a “presser,” I’m gonna get up and start busting heads (in some metaphorical, prescriptivist fashion). —Leave that kind of talk to Variety, would you? They manage to pull it off, though God alone knows how. Anybody else, it looks fucking ridiculous.
Oh, God, I need a drink.
On the bus on the way home the driver was listening to The Press Conference. I couldn’t hear everything, but I heard enough: our president just said that we went to war in Iraq because we told Saddam Hussein in no uncertain terms to disarm, and he didn’t do it.
I’m so sorry. I’m so, so fucking sorry.
Billmon points us to criticalviewer’s Cliff Notes. I think I need another drink.
Is our pundits learning?
Hey! Y’all parse this sentence real quick-like and tell me what’s wrong:
President Roosevelt waited until after World War II to put in place a commission to investigate what mistakes led to Pearl Harbor.
Now, go let the National Review know that this sentence is still to be found in Clifford May’s column dated 8 April, with nary a correction in sight. I know, I know: Atrios told them, Roger Ailes told them, Eric Williams ripped ’em a new one, and they’ve done nothing about it yet. Maybe there’s some postmodern dripping-with-“irony” “depends on what the meaning of ‘after’ is” defense they’re testing on focus groups. Maybe they’re lazy. Maybe they’re incapable of shame. But we can still have some small fun with the pointing and the sniggering.
None of us is as dumb as all of us.
I’ve never been a big fan of the process known as “Fisking”; it’s a lazy and intellectually dishonest practice, and I refuse to accord it any legitimacy by lowercasing the “f,” as if it had somehow achieved common currency in our day-to-day language. (A quixotic, canutian gesture, to be sure; then, I do so love stubborn futility, except when I don’t.) And really, if we were to be honest with ourselves, go back to Fisk’s original, celebrated, storied report, and read what actually happened—
Kila Abdulla was home to thousands of Afghan refugees, the poor and huddled masses that the war has produced in Pakistan. Amanullah went off to find another car—there is only one thing worse than a crowd of angry men and that’s a crowd of angry men after dark—and Justin and I smiled at the initially friendly crowd that had already gathered round our steaming vehicle. I shook a lot of hands—perhaps I should have thought of Mr Bush—and uttered a lot of Salaam Aleikums. I knew what could happen if the smiling stopped. The crowd grew larger and I suggested to Justin that we move away from the jeep, walk into the open road. A child had flicked his finger hard against my wrist and I persuaded myself that it was an accident, a childish moment of contempt. Then a pebble whisked past my head and bounced off Justin’s shoulder. Justin turned round. His eyes spoke of concern and I remember how I breathed in. Please, I thought, it was just a prank.
Then another kid tried to grab my bag. It contained my passport, credit cards, money, diary, contacts book, mobile phone. I yanked it back and put the strap round my shoulder. Justin and I crossed the road and someone punched me in the back. How do you walk out of a dream when the characters suddenly turn hostile? I saw one of the men who had been all smiles when we shook hands. He wasn’t smiling now. Some of the smaller boys were still laughing but their grins were transforming into something else. The respected foreigner—the man who had been all “salaam aleikum” a few minutes ago—was upset, frightened, on the run. The West was being brought low.
Justin was being pushed around and, in the middle of the road, we noticed a bus driver waving us to his vehicle. Fayyaz, still by the car, unable to understand why we had walked away, could no longer see us. Justin reached the bus and climbed aboard. As I put my foot on the step three men grabbed the strap of my bag and wrenched me back on to the road. Justin’s hand shot out. “Hold on,” he shouted. I did. That’s when the first mighty crack descended on my head. I almost fell down under the blow, my ears singing with the impact. I had expected this, though not so painful or hard, not so immediate. Its message was awful. Someone hated me enough to hurt me.
—we’d have to agree: a process that fancies itself “logical” (or at least aiming to be; an “E” for effort, then?) doesn’t quite resonate with the all-too-human fury and outrage that lashed out at Robert Fisk, a pale mean substitute for the retribution it sought (yes, yes: how to find a mob’s IQ, none of us is as dumb as all of us, we’re better than that, honest—which is why we band together and jackboot anyone who dares suggest otherwise). —An individual administering “a thorough and forceful verbal beating of an anti-war, possibly anti-American, commentator who has richly earned this figurative beating through his words” by “quot[ing] the other article in detail, interspersing criticisms with the original article’s text”—that hardly rises to the rich metaphorical possibilities of chucked rocks and anonymous mob violence. (To say nothing of imposing a regrettably partisan spin on the procedure: can we on the monolithic Left not Fisk? Such a shame…)
No: it’s what’s being done to Nathan Newman and Kathryn Cramer that richly deserves the term “Fisking.”
(Meanwhile, that rough beast just keeps slouching: the American-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps opened fire on American troops; our Marines are being airlifted out by Blackwater “civilians”; it’s increasingly obvious that the folks nominally running the show have “no concept of how to manage the crisis, no plan in place likely to work”; and our President is as chipperly clueless as ever. “I mean, in other words, it’s one thing to decide to transfer,” he said. “We’re now in the process of deciding what the entity will look like to whom we will transfer sovereignty.” —I suppose that’s one way to spin a civil war…)
Altogether elsewhere.
No, I haven’t said much about same-sex marriage of late. (No staying power, that’s me.) (If you’re curious about the progress of the only place in America where same-sex couple are accorded the same basic respect in the eyes of the law as differently-sexed couples, your best bet is the One True b!X; he is, quite literally, a one-man newsroom.) —I’ve also been remiss in not immediately telling you that my old friend S.K. Elkins has started up a journal; nor have I managed to sit down and patiently make the case that proves Elkins is hands-down bar-none the best writer I know, full stop. But hey: it’s my lucky day: today’s entry lets me pluck all those pesky birds from the bush at once and offer them up to you.
Perspective.
Muqtada’s words before he went into retreat in his mosque: “Make your enemy afraid, for it is impossible to remain quiet about their moral offenses; otherwise we have arrived at consequences that will not be praiseworthy. I am with you, and shall not forsake you to face hardships alone. I fear for you, for no benefit will come from demonstrations. Your enemy loves terrorism, and despises peoples, and all Arabs, and muzzles opinions. I beg you not to resort to demonstrations, for they have become nothing but burned paper. It is necessary to resort to other measures, which you take in your own provinces. As for me, I am with you, and I hope I will be able to join you and then we shall ascend into exalted heavens. I will go into an inviolable retreat in Kufa. Help me by whatever you are pleased to do in your provinces.”
The bit about going into a retreat (i`tis.am) and hoping to join his followers later so that they could ascend to the heavens shows an apocalyptic imagination at work. The US is facing another Waco, and what we know is that military sorts of force are the worst way to deal with apocalyptic groups like the Branch Dravidians and the Sadrists. That approach only confirms their conviction that the forces of this world are attempting to prevent them from attaining paradise.
US authorities in Iraq announced Monday that a murder warrant was out for a radical Shi’ite Muslim cleric leading violent anti-American protests, but his followers swore to fight back if he was arrested.
Dan Senor, a senior spokesman for the US-led authorities in Iraq, said an Iraqi judge had issued an arrest warrant for Moqtada al-Sadr several months ago in connection with the killing of another Shi’ite cleric last year.
Sadr, surrounded by armed followers, is staging a sit-in at a mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad. Asked when he would be arrested, Senor said: “There will be no advance warning.”
No, the Islets of Bloggerhans Popular Front!
Personally, I think it’s all because Kos got his photo in Vanity Fair and Instapundit didn’t.
(Yes, the title’s an inside joke so tightly curled on itself that it pops Planck’s length, and weird sniglets of not-quite-meaning are left to straggle out of its quantum foam. Consider it the short form. I’m working on the long form. Here’s the medium, happy or not: when I launched myself into the blogosphere, I had a basic ground rule for adding links to my linchinography: if the site spent what I judged by my all-too-subjective criteria to be an inordinate amount of time slagging on the Greens for the 2000 debacle, I didn’t bother to add it. Say whatever you like, I didn’t need the grief, and so. —Which is why I never added the Horse, and why I never added Altercation, and why I never added Kos, and if I added a site or two or three that did spend an inordinate amount of time slagging on the Greens, well, there were probably extenuating circumstances, and would you look at that? I contain multitudes! —But this crap with overreacting to Kos’s reaction to the lynching of the mercenaries in Fallujah is just that: crap. He has very good and very strong reasons for feeling the way he does and you can say how he said it that one time was dumb or stupid if you like but pulling ads and yanking links and generally tutting about, fanning yourself over the faux outrage of it all because if we stoop to their level what makes us better than them, my God, is all just following the script, doing their work for them, biting a good man on the ankles and cutting a powerful posse off at the pass because, oh dear, there’s a little clay between the toes. If you’re going to cut and run over something like this, then fuck the shoulder-to-shoulder stuff: this is still the goddamn bush leagues. You know?
(So into the linchinography with the Daily Kos, an excellent site, community, resource that I’ve skimmed on a nearly daily basis for lo these many months, even if I never got over myself enough to reflect it hereabouts. —Like you care. Like he’ll even notice. Still. Sometimes the choir’s got to preach back. It’s not much, granted; then, I don’t have a radio station that can air wall-to-wall clips of Bill Kristol accusing the 9/11 widows of moral blackmail, and I don’t have a TV show that can rerun every sneering Fox report that compared our soldiers’ deaths with traffic accidents and murder rates in Washington, DC; I don’t even have tens of thousands of readers. [Not hardly.] But a link is pretty much the least I can do. The most, that I’m still working on. You got any ideas, hey.)
—One more thing: if you’re still all het up to get incensed at the deaths of four mercenaries and how dare anyone be angry at them, I suggest you get a new set of scales. Tens of thousands dead since 1991 that didn’t have to die, and where the fuck were you?
Facetiæ under contract of the King.
It’s National F-Word Day! So take one fuckin’ moment to send a fuckin’ memo to FCC Chairman Michael fuckin’ Powell and tell him to fuck off and stop fucking us over by clearly departing from past fuckin’ precedent in important fuckin’ ways. —Mercy!
(Yeah, I know. Late to the party. Fuck.)
Especially since the FCC wants broadcasters to implement a set of voluntary guidelines to define and police indecency. Well, hell, there’s plenty precedent for that.
Fuckin’ idiots.
The pros from Dover.
Bob Somerby is as ever on the case, and Lord knows the media is providing him with every reason in the world to howl, and Atrios is all over Jack Kelley and the festering illness of which he’s merely a symptom, but it’s the pseudonymously lower-case skimble with the perfect parable to put the journalistic integrity of today’s fourth estate into proper perspective:
Sometimes it’s not an ethics dilemma, just dumb stuff, that tarnishes credibility. MSNBC got gigged last week when Deborah Norville reported a federal study that supposedly said 58 percent of all exercise done in the United States occurs in those TV infomercials for body-sculpting workout machines.
But the story was a spoof from The Onion, a satirical newspaper and online publication. The network said it inadvertently dropped the attribution in picking up the story, but c’mon—most of the exercise done in America is on TV? Shouldn’t somebody in the control room have said, “Hey, wait just a minute …”
Oh, pshaw. Why start now?
Toast.
So my father. He’s very proud of his long-standing membership in the fraternity of Gamma Damma Iota (“The goddamn independents!” he bellows), but he’s also terribly rocky of rib; as an entrepreneur and a Southerner, this is, perhaps, not unexpected. He’s got a strong thick streak of leave-me-the-hell-alone, but looks to his bottom line first (only sensible; that’s where the government’s most likely to hit him, after all), and so he’s voted for an overwhelming assortment of Rs in his day: Ford, Reagan, Reagan, Bush, Bush, Dole, Bush, as a few for instances.
Anyway. Called the folks yesterday to let them know I’d broken my first bone in about 20 years. My father was pounding away in the background, putting the finishing touches on a pressed-tin ceiling for the downstairs den: they’d bought the tin from a shop in Nevada, apparently, that had stopped making pressed tin tiles back in the 1930s, and only recently started up again, blowing the dust off the 70-year-old molds and picking up pretty much where they left off. He came to the phone and teased me about breaking my elbow and we half-joked about suing the city and then he said, “You know, I really don’t know what I’m going to do in November.” Bush stubbed his toe on the economy, you see, and Bush stubbed his toe in Iraq—Dad doesn’t know whether they’re liars or woefully stupid (me, I say both, but he’s pretty much in the “they wanted a little too hard to do what they thought was the right thing” camp), but whichever—Bush isn’t making him very happy at the moment.
“I’m starting to think,” he said, “that maybe the best thing is a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. Just tie the whole country up for a few years so nothing gets done and we have a chance to sort it all out.”
And hey: who am I to disagree with my father?
Paging Michael Graham.
Yo. You with your oh-for-fuck’s-sake-not-this-bullshit-again about how liberals are humorless and how it’s obvious in that “Where’s the WMD?” bit all the nabobs laughed at that the President’s just joshing about something he madly, truly believes so could you liberals just lighten up, please. Your ass just got handed to you.
(“Please,” Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, “don’t kill me.”)
To do:
The homosexual agenda:
0800 – Breakfast
0900 – Work day begins
1000 – 1st coffee break
1200 – Lunch hour
1210 – Go to local deli
1230 – Plot to convert world to queerness
1300 – Back to work
1500 – Coffee break
1700 – Work ends
1800 – Dinner
1900 – Walk dog
1930 – Scrub kitchen
2000 – Read book
2200 – Bedtime
—with thanks to them.ws
The feminist agenda:
0800 – 0815
Introduction, Opening Remarks
0815 – 0915
Plot to Overthrow World Leadership
0915 – 0930
BREAK – Coffee and donuts
0930 – 1030
Undermine World Religions
1030 – 1200
General Attacks on the Institution of the American Family
1200 – 1300
Catered Lunch and Fashion Show
1300 – 1330
Plot to Remove All Men From The World
1330 – 1400
BREAK – Cake and Champagne
1400 – 1500
Leave Husbands (If Applicable)
1500 – 1530
Kill Children
1530 – 1700
Become Lesbian
1730+
Evening Mixer; Open Bar
—with thanks to Monster Island
The fundamentalist agenda:
Five Year Strategic Plan Summary
The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a “wedge” that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the “thin edge of the wedge,” was Phillip ]ohnson’s critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds . Michael Behe’s highly successful Darwin’s Black Box followed Johnson’s work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.
The Wedge strategy can be divided into three distinct but interdependent phases, which are roughly but not strictly chronological. We believe that, with adequate support, we can accomplish many of the objectives of Phases I and II in the next five years (1999-2003), and begin Phase III (See “Goals/ Five Year Objectives/Activities”).
—with thanks to the Panda’s Thumb
