More on the Danish Mohammed cartoons: Syndicated cartoonist Ted Rall blasts the “nanny media” for failing to print the Mohammed cartoon. (For those who don’t know his work, Rall is a left-of-center cartoonist.)
As the only syndicated political cartoonist who also writes a syndicated column, my living depends on freedom of the press. I can’t decide who’s a bigger threat: the deluded Islamists who hope to impose Sharia law on Western democracies, or the right-wing clash-of-civilization crusaders waving the banner of “free speech”–the same folks who call for the censorship and even murder of anti-Bush cartoonists here–as an excuse to join the post-9/11 Muslims-suck media pile-on. Most reasonable people reject both–but neither is as dangerous to liberty as America’s self-censoring newspaper editors and broadcast producers.
“CNN has chosen not to show the [Danish Mohammed] cartoons out of respect for Islam,” said the news channel.
“We always weigh the value of the journalistic impact against the impact that publication might have as far as insulting or hurting certain groups,” said an editor at The San Francisco Chronicle.
“The cartoons didn’t meet our long-held standards for not moving offensive content,” said the Associated Press.
Bull—-.
If these cowards were worried about offending the faithful, they wouldn’t cover or quote such Muslim-bashers as Ann Coulter, Christopher Hitchens or George W. Bush. The truth is, our national nanny media is managed by cowards so terrified by the prospect of their offices being firebombed that they wallow in self-censorship.
Precisely because they subvert free speech from within with their oh-so-reasonable odes for “moderation” and against “sensationalism,” the gatekeepers of our national nanny media are more dangerous to Western values than distant mullahs and clueless neocons combined. Editors and producers decide not only what’s fit to print but also what’s not: flag-draped coffins and body bags arriving from Iraq, photographs of Afghan civilians, their bodies reduced to blobs of blood and protoplasm, all purged from our national consciousness. You might think it’s news when the vice president tells a senator to “go f— yourself” on the Senate floor, but you’d be wrong–only tortured roundabout descriptions (like “f—“) make newsprint. “This is a family newspaper,” any editor will say, arguing for self-censorship–as if kids couldn’t fill in those three letters in “f—.”
As if kids read the paper.
(My mom sent me that link. When you’re a reporter, everyone you know eventually turns into a media critic. Fortunately, most of the people in my life no longer blame me for something that CNN said — or didn’t say — or whatever idiocy occurs on the LA television news shows.)
Interesting, the Columbia Journalism Review, one of the most respected (and most harsh) of media critics, has been silent on the issue, despite banging the drums for better journalism on every other subject (including lots of chatter about the Cheney shooting coverage). That’s both surprising and disappointing.
On the cutting edge of 2004, a prostitutes’ political action group (supply your own jokes here) wants Grand Theft Auto banned, because of how it portrays those employed in the world’s oldest profession:
Though the organization admits to being “adamantly opposed to any and all forms of censorship,” as concerned parents themselves, they “wish to inform other parents of the potential danger extremely violent video games pose to children.” Likewise, in the interest of promoting the rights of sex workers, the organization is opposed to the depiction of the rape and murder of prostitutes.
In the games, players can solicit “services” from prostitutes by driving their cars slowly near them. No sexual acts are in clear visible view, but during the “transaction,” the player regains health and loses money. Though the player cannot actively rape prostitutes in the game, a possible rape is alluded to once during the storyline of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The prostitutes, like every other character, are also subject to homicide at the hands of the protagonist.
You know, I’d like to think of a funny punchline here, but really, reality has me outgunned this time around.
It’s either a good sign or a bad sign, depending on your view of such things, that 90 percent of the dialogue in Wedding Crashers sounds like the stuff I heard around the fraternity house back in college. That goes for both the mature stuff and the immature stuff alike.
Now, some folks will read a paragraph like that, and go screaming for the door. Bye!
The others will go to the door, pause, and wonder “mature stuff?” Come back on in, folks. We’ve got a juvenile comedy about getting your ya-yas off and then growing up.
Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson (and the luminous Rachel McAdams and the kind of fascinating Christopher Walken) absolutely sell this buddy movie, about buddies who have discovered, they think, the ultimate way to hook up with girls. But crashing weddings and nailing emotionally vulnerable women only works until the guys fall for some of the girls. And when that happens, the emotionally retarded is totally unprepared to deal with the consequences.
Wonderfully and believably profane while still being sweet and even kind of smart, Wedding Singers is a great movie for every aging frat boy out there, and those that love us despite all that.
Strongly recommended.
There’s a group sport aspect to piling on a movie, a mob mentality thing. It’s hard to always know why one movie is tagged as “it,” but Elizabethtown was. (I’ve heard some critics say it was because of a bad longer cut at the Toronto Film Festival, where all the critics saw it, and then never bothered to see the final cut, and just ran with the review of the — announced as such — unfinished product.)
The truth is, this isn’t a bad movie. It’s not, say, Con Air or Deep Blue Sea or Instinct. But it’s also not a great movie, the kind that Cameron Crowe is capable of, like Almost Famous or Singles. (Or even Jerry “Show me the money!” Maguire.)
It features, like all of Crowe’s movies, sharp dialogue (although Crowe may be a touch too in love with it here), quirky characters, some clever bits (Claire’s road trip map is simply awesome) and, as always, amazing, wonderful, terrific music.
Unfortunately, this time, the whole is equal to a touch less than the sum of its parts. Orlando Bloom is OK. Susan Sarandon is great, but seems to have dropped in from a different movie. Kirsten Dunst is alternately wonderful and exasperating.
Elizabethtown is probably one more severe edit away from being a great, tight, touching movie, the kind Crowe is eminently capable of.
But this DVD isn’t quite it.
A recommended rental for fans of Crowe or Dunst, and stalker-level fans of Bloom.
At least, that’s what Wired says:
According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.
“That’s how flame wars get started,” says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. “People in our study were convinced they’ve accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance,” says Epley.
The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.
Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.
“People often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they ‘hear’ the tone they intend in their head as they write,” Epley explains.
At the same time, those reading messages unconsciously interpret them based on their current mood, stereotypes and expectations. Despite this, the research subjects thought they accurately interpreted the messages nine out of 10 times.
Given how many stupid fights I’ve seen over e-mail and on message boards, I’m surprised this percentage isn’t even worse.
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