Succinct

Viet:

Odd, shows signs of manic depressive disorder. Prone to substance abuse. Currently addicted to videogames. Funny. Pessimistic. Oft obsessive.

Diagnosis: crazy, but functional.

A need to explain myself: I am not crazy

Well this is an explanation for exactly how it is that I am operating my life at the moment broken english horrible sentence omg what the fuck. The basics is this, and pay attention now because this is the first post in a while not facilitated by inebriation by anger.

I feel a need to fight every battle.

Every day is my last, every moment a passing breath, every second ostensibly the last second I will spend. But this is what motivates me. It's sad, but I move for conflict, I move for destruction, and it's possibly the hardest thing for me in the world to take a chance on doing something that might make me happy. I'm not going to reflect too much on my childhood, that's another post for another day, but for some reason when it comes down to the brass tacks of things I don't feel like I have a reason to live. Rather, I feel like I've been searching for an opportunity to die, or cause death.

Pessimism runs hard, you convince yourself early enough - to stave off the pain of disappointment - that the world is cruel and broken and it becomes a hard thing to shake off. I think I don't want to confront exactly how much that time period sucked, and for how long it sucked. But every fight I find, every battle I fight, I don't have an off switch. The only way I end fights is by walking away because there is no measure of escalation that I will not do, and I think... it's overcompensation for a childhood of trying to "not care" and "be yourself" when all yourself wanted to do was to hit back.

Also the news doesn't help because my pessimism is all too often reinforced. More often than not.

And Irvine.

I've spent a life I think in an area that's culled a sense of pessimism or maybe it's just me but... I don't know people, it's hard to see the light outside and it's hard to take a chance.

This much I am aware

I really only post on this motherfucker for some kind of stress valve release for my extreme emotions but there is some

EXTREME STRESS going on right now. I need to finish this shit and I just really don't want to, but I must, so I shall but GOD I NEED A REASON TO LIVE I WANT TO DISAPPEAR FROM THIS PLACE

This place being Irvine. I really need to see... life.

Prop 8, Reap the wind

Get. Over. It.

Marriage is between a man and a woman. Get. Over. It.

Really? Anonymous commenter? Get over it? Get over the fact that the FUCKING STUPID DUMBASS FUCKFACES OF CALIFORNIA JUST DISENFRANCHISED AN ENTIRE GROUP OF PEOPLE

GET OVER YOUR SMUG FUCKING DUMBASS FUCKFACED GLEE

YOU WANT ME. TO GET OVER IT?!!?!!


I have dreams. I have dreams where I drag you behind my car and throw your miserable lifeless body into a ditch. I have dreams where your churches burn down and I smear your blood across my chest like a bath cleansing the world of all its sin.

I have a dream where the dogs of religion see their institution crumble before their eyes, where christianity falls into the sea and I NEVER EVER have to listen to you talk about how much better you are than me.

This is a BATTLE?!!

This is PERSONAL.

If you EVER say that to me in public to my FACE so help me god throw me in jail because I will kill you right on the spot. I don't want change I want war.

I want you destroyed. I want your belief system extinguished. I want the end of you.

And you know what, when this finally gets overturned?

I'm going to be right there to kick you in the balls. Screaming into your old decrepit face that this is now a godless nation of sodomites, whores, and sinners. And we are all going to hell, so fuck you.

And I hope it hurts. I hope it hurts as much as I am hurting now.

I'm moving conservatives. I'm moving to kill you.

I am

going to hurt

"I do"

Heart-breaking news this morning: a terribly close vote has stripped gay couples in California of their right to marry. The geographic balance shows that the inland parts of California voted for the Proposition and the coast and urban areas voted against it.

Yes, it is heart-breaking: it is always hard to be in a tiny minority whose rights and dignity are removed by a majority. It's a brutal rebuke to the state supreme court, and enshrinement in California's constitution that gay couples are now second-class citizens and second class human beings. Massively funded by the Mormon church, a religious majority finally managed to put gay people in the back of the bus in the biggest state of the union. The refusal of Schwarzenegger to really oppose the measure and Obama's luke-warm opposition didn't help. And cruelly, a very hefty black turnout, as feared, was one of the factors that defeated us, according to the exit poll. Today this is one of the solaces to a hard right and a Republican party that sees gay people as the least real of Americans.

But I realize I am not shattered. My own marriage exists and is real without the approval of others. One day soon, it will be accepted by a majority. And this initiative in California can and will be reversed, as California's initiatives are much more fluid than those in other states; and the younger generation is overwhelmingly - 2 to 1 - in our favor. The tide of history is behind us; but we will have to work harder to educate people about our lives and loves and humanity.

It cannot be denied that this feels like a punch in the gut. It is. I'm not going to pretend that the wound isn't deep and personal, like an attack on my own family. It was meant to be. Many Obama supporters voted against our rights, and Obama himself opposes our full civil equality. The religious folk who believe that Jesus stood for the marginalization of minorities, and who believe that my equality somehow threatens their children, will, I pray, see how misguided they have become. And make no mistake: they won this by playing on very deep fears of gay people around kids. They knew the levers to pull.

But some perspective from someone who has fought this fight as long and as personally as anyone in this country. Twenty years ago, equality of gay couples was a mere idea. Forty years ago, it was a pipe-dream.

In the long arc of inclusion, we will miss our goals along the way from time to time. Today, we have full marriage rights in two states, we have many civil marriages in California that will remain in place as examples of who gay people really are, we have civil unions in many more places, and marriage rights in other parts of the world, as beacons to America. And this is a civil rights movement. It goes forward and it is forced back. The battle to end miscegenation took centuries. These are the rhythms of progress. Sometimes losing, and being shown to lose, shifts something in the minds of those watching as a small group is punished for daring to dream of full civil equality. In this battle we have already had far more defeats than victories. But each time, we have come closer to our goal. And in the hearts and minds and souls of so many, we have changed consciousness for ever.

California has full civil equality in law for gay couples. In time, full civil marriage equality - the only real measure of equality - will follow. And it will spread, state by state, more slowly now, and perhaps more organically from legislatures, rather than courts, which would not be the worst idea. And observing this backlash against us will reveal to many the cruelty of allowing majorities to take the rights of tiny minorities away.

If we had won this, this civil rights battle would be all but over. Now, it isn't. So we get back to work, arguing, talking. speaking, debating, writing, blogging, and struggling to change more minds. The hope for equality can never be extinguished, however hard our opponents try. And in the unlikely history of America, there has never been anything false about hope.

-Andrew Sullivan
Originally posted at The Atlantic Online

Gabe Newsom is an Idiot

And furthermore, so did the whiole No on 8 campaign.

You guys assumed too early you had this in the bag: you didn't

you faced off a multi-million dollar campaign and in a year where you could've tapped into Obama's message on change, you raised no money.

You guys fucking sucked, you played defense every way not once promoting the benefits of same sex marriage, how it's helped america, how it's helped bring in revenue how people should be able to love and marry who they choose.

No on 8 campaign, I could get no damn signs, irvine fuckign lit up yellow in the past week, nothing comparable.

You fucking blew it, okay, and Gabe Newsom did not help.

There was no ground game there was no movement tehre was no door to door.

you want to know why Barack Obama won? its because he had troops in the ground fighting for him.

You guys had none of that. LA county went Yes.

That is unacceptable. And Mayor Gabe Newsom, taht damn thing you said about Gay marraige is about one of the dumbest damn things i've ever heard from a politician in my life. There are so many ways you could've said it but you decided to go with the "I'm a dick" route.

That's something you say in private, not on a national stage.

Now look, California is a fucking joke. Big fucking awesome joke of a fuckign alful fuck fest.


Regardless of how this'll probably be eventually overturned, Californians, you fucking fail today

This is the first in a logn series of drunk blogs presumably

America...

This is why I will never convert to Christianity.

Really? Ban on adoption for gay parents in Alabama?

Nice. Really fucking nice.

Evolution

From R. Crutch:

Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.

Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them breaks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.

I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.

Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.

When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes."

This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this "grant money." I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion.

There can be only one.

I don't want to work today

... I just want to bang on my drum.

THE OFFICE

Holly cannot leave. She simply cannot. She makes Michael such a better person, makes him bearable, makes him AWESOME and they are FUCKING IN LOVE.

DO NOT MESS WITH ME I AM VERY COMMITTED TO THIS

CONSIDER

Ladies and gentlemen, I urge you to consider the following.

MASTURBATE

That is all

I don't post enough

I don't post enough in this and for that I apologize.

Also, when I DO post invariably it might lead some of you readers to expect that somehow, Viet has gone insane and is just going far off the deep end into Joker-esque mad runs of insanity.

While this is true, I would like to clarify.

Fact is, things have been busy, life has been busy, and if you've ever known a writer in your life you will know that ironically the one thing that writers hate most to do, is actually write. Writing seems to be a nice excuse to say "I would rather be doing something interesting, rather than doing what you would like me to do, but I will tell you an AWESOME story about it later if you let me do this awesome thing". This, and I imagine this is the case for a great many writers, is how I think and it is largely why I accomplish so very little in terms of actual work.

But I wanted to give an account of how things have ACTUALLY been going as opposed to whatever frighteningly mad thought that courses through my brain at that very moment when I would like to rhetorically burn an opponent into the ground on a forum that would most likely get me banned.

So, has anyone heard about warhammer?

First off, frigging awesome.
Second off, fucking nerf bright wizards already the bright wizard wall is so fucking powerful it's not even funny
Third off: Remake Wow, create a pvp focused game with a good idea for balance, and voila!

Somebody has angered Gork greatly

This is my most recent and beloved time sink. Though it is not very productive.

But I wanted to say reader that, frankly, I've not had a lot of time to like, talk or think, or even have time to get my thoughts together. My time is occupied.

By a lot of meaningless tripeshit, yes, but also by keeping myself informed and up to date on ye news events and the impending destruction of the world and Rachel Maddow (thank god in heaven). And between all these things I'm sorry reader, that I haven't been writing as often as I should. I still love you baby, I do! It's just hard, we don't have enough time to write anymore. Especially ever since you went to Lithuania.

Why baby, why did you leave me for that goat? He'll never love you like I did! ...sadly, ineffecably, in thirty seconds with a lot of crying afterwards.

Baby come back from Lithuania!

*wink*

(good lord I just pulled a Palin)

I will never sexually assault you again, reader, but suffice to say, things are alright.

Will be topic based later. This is my blog, I get to be as crazy as I want.

I've been okay, This America Life is awesome. Really tired and procrastinating, Warhammer is good. Why is it I can't write properly?

The Tone and Tenor of Anger

Reader, let us be candid. I do not find hope in the world.

I look at a governmental system that pursues deregulation of companies in pursuit of a disproven free market philosophy and yet bails out said companies with 1 TRILLION DOLLARS IN TWO WEEKS, when the earnings of their bad bets come to scuttle said companies.

We starve, wed die, Galveston has no electricity, people lose their houses, and high-risk empty companies is what we invest in. Our students fail, 7 years into war, every possible thing we know and do is being cut away, and this is what we spend on.

The world is built on a function of action and reaction, every action has a consequence. For too long has the consequence been disproportionately doled out on the side of the poor, while the rich have been serviced by the powerful in this country. For thirty years now, the stench, taint and broken philosophy of Reagan has poisoned this earth, spitting and demeaning and ravaging the backs and spines of programs the poor depend on to reach the middle class.

And now, even Obama's chief economic adviser was the one who masterminded the deregulation of the banking industry that led to this collapse.

We cannot take this. We shall not take this. Republicans want to say I'm inciting class warfare? Fuck yeah I am. They want to say I'm criminalizing the rich? Fuck yeah, I am.

Because you dogs, whores, and jackals ARE criminals. You are BEAST, DOGS, and BITCHES, and for too long class warfare in this country has only been waged from the top down, the rich taking from the poor and nobody stands up to the rich.

Well the time is now. We will take for us what is rightfully ours. We will mercilessly and gleefully murder any sycophantic dog that stands in our way, bathe the streets with their blood until we come pounding down the gates of the rich and burn their houses into the ground.

The only time trickle down economics ever works is when you split the throat of a rich man and he bleeds gold onto the masses of the poor.

You better run bitches, I'm raising the army.

Holy Shitballs

Jerry Springer is damn good.

Holy crap.

Um, I need to go see one of his speeches.

Not the show, the show is bullshit.

Say Yes and...

Am I ashamed of the life I am living right now?

Yes.

Today I saw people walking down the street. This bothered me. I was happy to see it but it bothered me in the sense that, wow, even here people live, and are happy, and are not living their lives as miserably as I do mine.

I had a week where my parents were completely gone. I did nothing. A week of complete isolation.

I didn't have friends over, I didn't do drugs, I didn't drink. I didn't do anything. I got asked to go to LA on a whim at a party a few months ago. I stammered out of it. I am missing opportunities in my life because I refuse to say "yes".

I feel a need in myself to disagree, for conflict, but, every now and then I wonder if really this town is the desolate morass of nothingness. Maybe I've just made it out to be that way. In the meantime, I am ashamed of the hermit-like shell that my life is.

And well, that's pretty much it.

Am I going to wake up one day at 72 and think to myself, "I've lived for nothing"?

It feels that way sometimes.

Reviews: Wall-E

Robots are a tricky subject for many people. Especially in the context of our fiction they have been most commonly represented by violently murdering automatons that go about their business of edging out humanity.

Metaphorically then, they have come to represent the demonization of the working class, the rising up of the slaves and a continuation of the capitalist narrative: the revolt of the working class. Even more though is the idea that the capitalist machine will finally turn on its masters, that the replacement of labor will finally do as people would and revolt.

Far more revolutionary than this confrontational and tired narrative sits Wall-E, the stubby cube-shaped trash compactor that goes about his business as the last remaining robot on earth. By day he wanders endless heaps of trash left behind by a hyper consumerist culture that destroyed the earth and leaving it uninhabitable for human existence. By night, he retreats back to his humble abode in the shell of a larger version of himself where he stores a miniature menagerie of knick-nacks he salvages amongst the endless piles of junk he compacts into miniature squares.

The first 30 minutes of this film are the most profound, the most endearing, and the most revolutionary of any scene depicted in recent years. The stark and brutal depiction of a ruined manhattan, nouvelle skylines constructed out of towering piles of trash cubes, is gritty, fantastic, and utterly brutal in its silent condemnation of the humans of the past that brought about its genesis. On this palette the little robot Wall-E wanders with a sort of unaware bliss, scavenging parts for his own benefit from the shattered husks of his brethren. His introduction - humming in his own mechanical tunes the opening notes to "Put on your Sunday Clothes" from Hello Dolly - forms a humanistic contrast to the depressing starkness that informs his environment. Instantly he becomes our primary focus, our vehicle into this world, even as an inanimate object.

Later details reinforce this association, Wall-E rummages through infinite piles of garbage, picking out odd trinkets that catch his attention with the particularity of a human perusing the goodwill bins near his house. And when he returns to his humble abode, shelving his belongings and turning on a recording of Hello Dolly, we are all but committed to connecting emotionally with this robot.

This is revolutionary. A silent coup of epic scale if ever there was one. Through expressions, particularities of behavior and sparse sounds the animators at Pixar have undermined the very inherentness of humanity. The primary argumentative vehicle of those opposed to sentient robots is the innateness of humanity to humans. The primacy and uniqueness of compassion and empathy to the human experience. For the most part this is a narrative continued and reiterated by robot narratives. Wall-E spins this on its head.

* TO BE CONTINUED LATER *

MMOs: Empty Space

How do we define a world? Do we define it in its spectacles? Its wonders? Its

- rest of entry truncated: we define the world in terms of the characters that inhabit it. And MMOs are devoid of characters that feel legitimately like they inhabit the spaces around them -

'Wanted' and 'Wall-E'

How does one begin?

You begin with two movies that could not possibly be any more different, and you compare the difference between the two. That being said let's proceded procedurally and take this movies apart to their roots.

Wall-E: a film for the ages. Pixar's age-old time again and again mantra is that they are not creating anything new, they are simply reinventing the wheel. It's said that in the creation of Toy Story the Pixar animators had no real film training, no idea that they were not supposed to do it, no idea of the obstacles that faced them. And for that measure they simply did as they wanted, and were rewarded handsomely.

Since then they've mostly told simple stories, returning time again and again to the old movie tropes, never innovating, but breaking boundaries at every interval in terms of what an animated could be. Walt Disney once championed this standard, before his company caved into maintaining a conservative-friendly legacy and began opting for pablum over content. With that introduction, we have Wall-E, with Pixar once again drawing on the old cinematic standards, updating them and repurposing them for a modern audience.

RIP George Carliln

World won't be the same without you you badass old motherfucker.

Here's to ya.

Marvel: Ultimate Power and the Uncanny Valley. OR. Cognitive Dissonance (Part 1)

The Ultimates, and the Ultimate continuum as it exists in the modern Marvel continuity grew out of the immense and overwhelming success of the Ultimate Spider-man continuity. A stylized, teen-centric and visually slimmer version of Spider-man, Marvel soon attempted to replicate its success in its other properties, expanded the universe to encompass both the X-men, and a short-lived teenaged Iron Man. Out of this property came Marvel's Ultimate version of The Avengers: The Ultimates.

Featuring reinterpreted avengers characters, new nervous tics and character flaws, and a neo-realistic art style, The Ultimates was (at least in my view) an unqualified success. Modern, dark, and ripe with potential, I looked forward to a continuation of the series and waited anxiously for the next of the books.

Which brings us to Ultimate Power. Ultimate Power, a mash-up of sorts within the new Ultimate continuum, brings together all the superheroes of the world into a largely incoherent plot centered around Dr. Doom as an arch-villain again. While artwork is largely phenomenal, there is a problem that comes to light due in no small part to the realistic quality of the art and that is this: the women.

Perhaps due to the innate scarcity of women to be found in comic books to begin with, perhaps the first problem with this book is that there are just too many of them: they fill up the frame. Now before anyone starts launching the slings and arrows of misogyny my way, let me clarify: all female stories are fine, but not when they're all supermodels who appear to revel in ridiculously scanty clothing. It's not even that I object to it it's just that in these pseudo-realistic portrayals, with fairly anatomically correct male and female models, to depict exclusively slender, supermodel figures on ALL WOMEN seems immensely unreal.

Stylization allows you a great deal of freedom. In a stylized media sexualized portrayals of women gel easier: it's stylized, real women clearly aren't this sexy and real men clearly don't have several hundred tumors running all over their muscles. But in realistic portrayals like the Ultimates, this doesn't quite gel anymore. Most especially when the poses and the clothing these women strike hit closer to T&A portrayals than actually realistic poses. These aren't women, they're softcore models; but they exist alongside realistic portrayals of men so we are supposed to accept this standard of femininity as normative and in concert with the realistic portrayals of the male characters.

And this creates the cognitive dissonance

A Rejection of Centrism

What is centrism? The ideological standpoint that dictates that the common neutral ground between two ideological extremes ought be the best of all possible outcomes. Centrism in the political United States has often been the greatest route to the greatest possible political recourse.

But let us give pause momentarily.

The recent FISA case as a model, centrism as it exists in the current United States has failed. After all, when the Democrats continue to appeal to the center and the Republicans appeal excluively to the insane fringe right, where does that leave us? It leaves us with a slow and steady trickle towards the mad imbecillic and utterly miserable proto-fascist regime that we've been living under for the past eight years. This was once a good place to live. FDR gave 3,000 dollars to every american citizen who went to college. In today's money I believe that's around 10,000 dollars. Once we valued education, standards, labor. Now what? What do we have in this enforced oligarchy consisting of corrupt businessmen and soulless merchants?

We have zero benefits. We have piddlings of social welfare systems, we have comparably immense disparities between rich and poor, and we have a governmental system that furthers and furthers this neo colonial global governing order called "globalization" a phenomena which no one is willing to concede, is completely artificial. Fareed Zakaria says globalization is inevitable, that it will be a boon to human society and raise the threshold of human existence globally and be condusive to a newer, better, more beautiful world. Yet what he fails to mention, conede, or note is that in the exportation fo capitalism and in the development of supposed interelated trade agreements, the disparity in power. We'll get back to that later but suffice to say: he is wrong. And were Barack Obama truly progressive he would be decrying this perverted international business entity that enforces the starvation of the masses for the benefit of the few.

But this is where we are. When the supposed "most liberal senator in Congress" toes the middle ground in between the true middle and the fascist wing of the American political system. We need a third party. Now more than ever. Even Israel which has appropriated the GOP for its own Likud has a tri party system spanning Labour, Centrist, and Likud. We need a third party, it's time for the liberals to get a say again.

John Irvine's Heaven

They made this town in one man’s vision of heaven: John Irvine’s. John Irvine set foot on this earth ‘bout sixty years ago with nothing more than a horse and a rifle. He killed forty Indian men, women, and children before he planted his feet down on the ground and claimed this land belonged to him. From there he set about creating his heaven: he built forty acres of farm stretched out across the California countryside; ruled it tightly with a hoe in his left hand and a rifle in his right. So when the Mexicans came he gunned them down and he kept his paradise amongst the fields of tomato plants he seeded into the ground.

Forty years later those forty acres had turned to forty two thousand and in those forty two thousand John Irvine had his ashes scattered to the winds all across the land he’d made in his image. His family moved on, his son went north, his wife went south, and his daughter went east to Minnesota where she and her husband raised a family ‘till she died in ’92. But Irvine stayed put, his ashes kept their roots in the ground and the company he founded kept their hands on the reigns and moved John Irvine’s heaven closer and closer to his final vision.

They started building. Girders, concrete, and bolts spurted out from the ground where just forty years past John Irvine had spilled Indian blood making the land his own. Those houses were rough: islands in a sea of ripening tomatoes and the Mexicans that manned their rows. They weren’t through: those islands sprouted brothers. Like weeds the girders sprouted from the ground, cold, earthen, and industrial, pointing their dead, unfeeling fingers towards the sky where they grasped in fruitless agony at the heaven that John Irvine foresaw. The weeds they spread more widely, adapting and changing, eating away at the water’s edge where the tomatoes lapped against the shore. Where the first few weeds were weak, their borders tenuous, their construction outdated, their colors too varied, the newer weeds were stronger: uniform, defined, matching in design, construction, in color, and in their boundaries. Most important were their new boundaries for as the weeds grow their fences became their very definition: life in Irvine came to be the distance between fences that you occupied. And it was with that defining ideological characteristic that Irvine grew into what it is today, 60 years after John Irvine’s forty acres paid for in forty souls spilled on the soil he called his.

Hillary

The failing of Hillary Clinton is that she has not been able to negotiate the tenuous distance between defining her strength as a woman and defining her strength as a man.  

As much as many Hillary supporters might be loathe to admit to it, Hillary Clinton remains as much a slave to the same gender constructs she so passionately claims to be breaking. The creed of the second-wave feminists has been breaking the gender constructs. But what does it mean to be breaking gender constructs when you are defining yourself in 'male' characteristics?

As a recent article on Huffpost noted, Clinton is demonstrating her strength by engaging in a most bizarre performance, inhabiting the attributes and supposed 'strength' demanded of male nominees in an off-putting caricature of male showmanship.  

Laying aside what this means for men in a moment, what does this mean to women?  

She has abandoned the vestiges of whatever gender construct women have ascribed themselves to. As much as women look up to Hillary it still comes across that she is trying to break this gender barrier but in doing so she de-legitimizes the female experience in this country. What does it say to tell my daughter that her strength will only be recognized if she defines herself as a man? What makes Obama such a trans-ideological trans-racial candidate is that although he is black, he has not made it the focal point of his campaign. People are not voting for Obama because he is black, they are voting because of the content of his promises, his character, and whatever record he has.  

Hillary has not done the same thing. She is not transcending the limitations society places on women but rather reinforcing them by proudly proclaiming through her actions that the only way a woman will get ahead in the world is by acting like a man.  

This is not true. It is not right and it is not true. A woman's experience is no less inferior to a man's. A woman's gender performance is no less capable than a man's to lead a country. But rather than championing these empowering, new feminist virtues Hillary remains beholden to the central irony of the second wave feminists: that they continued to define strength in largely 'male' terms.  

Eventually there will be a female candidate like Obama. Who speaks through her actions and words that a woman's perspective is no less legitimate than a man's. That the notion that just because women don't strong-arm, they are weak is foolish, and that the time of pandering to the symbolic American meta-narrative of the cowboy presidency is a time long since past. Hillary Clinton is not that woman. But I can tell you that when that woman comes along who insists - as Barack Obama has - that strength is not the exclusive property of the masculine gender, well that will be the day.

Why Is News So Negative These Days?

By Thomas Patterson

In last week’s second installment of this five-part series, I discussed how changes in the nature of campaigning have contributed to the decline in voter involvement during the past four decades. That decline extends to voting in primary and general elections and to attention to televised debates and other forms of election communication.

In this installment, I describe how changes in news reporting, including the coverage of campaigns, have diminished the appeal of election politics. Evidence for this argument comes from the Vanishing Voter Project (www.vanishingvoter.org) that I co-directed at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy during the 2000 campaign. Through weekly national surveys, we interviewed nearly 100,000 Americans during the course of the campaign to discover why they are disengaging from elections.

The Bad News Chorus

On the network evening newscasts during the 2000 general election, George W. Bush’s coverage was 63 percent negative in tone and only 37 percent positive. Al Gore’s coverage was no better. A good deal of Bush’s coverage suggested that he was not very smart. There were nine such claims in the news for every contrary claim. Gore’s coverage was dotted with suggestions he was not all that truthful. Such claims outpaced rebuttals by seventeen to one.1 Although the press is often accused of having a liberal bias, its real bias is a preference for the negative. The news was not always so downbeat. When John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon sought the presidency in 1960, 75 percent of their coverage was favorable in tone and only 25 percent was unfavorable. By the 1980s campaign, however, election news coverage had reached a point where more than half of it was negative. Since then, no major-party presidential nominee has received on balance more positive news than negative news over the course of the campaign.2 This change is attributable in part to the poisonous effect of Vietnam and Watergate on the relationship between the journalist and the politician. A larger influence, however, has been the emergence of an interpretive style of reporting. In the 1960s, this style began to supplant the older descriptive style where the journalist’s main goal was the straightforward reporting of the facts of events. Since the facts were often based on what newsmakers had said or done, they had considerable control over the coverage they received. Much of the “good press” that Kennedy and Nixon received in 1960 came from what they themselves said about their candidacies. On the other hand, interpretive journalism thrusts the reporter into the role of analyst and judge. The journalist gives meaning to a news event by supplying the analytical context. The journalist is thus positioned to give shape to the news in a way that the descriptive style did not allow. The power of the journalists to construct the news is apparent from the extent to which their voices now dominate the coverage. Whereas reporters were once the passive voice behind the news, they now get more time than the newsmakers they cover. On the nightly newscasts, the journalists covering Bush and Gore in 2000 spoke six minutes for every minute the candidates spoke.3 The shift in the style of reporting from a descriptive to an interpretive form began in the 1960s when the television networks launched their 30-minute evening newscasts and expanded their reporting staffs in order to deliver picture-based news. The networks quickly discovered that descriptive reporting was too flat for the television medium and that viewers did not have to be told things they could see with their own eyes. Gradually, the networks developed a narrative style of reporting built around interpretive themes that gave their news stories a clear beginning, middle, and an end. Several years later, the daily newspapers followed suit. To add value to stories that their readers had already heard on the newscasts, newspapers developed an analytical style of coverage that focused on the “why” as well as the “what” of news events. Interpretive reporting has unleashed the skepticism traditional in American journalism. This style requires reporters to give shape to the news, and they tend naturally to shape it around their perspective on politics. To the journalist, politics is not a struggle over policy issues. They see it largely as a competitive game waged between power-hungry leaders. Politicians’ failings and disputes are played up; their successes and overtures are played down. The 1996 Republican nominating race is a case in point. The media analyst Robert Lichter examined the GOP hopefuls’ television ads and stump speeches. Over half the ads (56 percent) were positive in tone and nearly two-thirds (66 percent) of the assertions in the candidates’ speeches were positive statements about what they hoped to accomplish if elected. These dimensions of the Republican campaign were seldom mentioned in news reports. The candidates’ negative ads and their attacks on opponents filled the news. “Forget about the issues,” ABC’s Peter Jennings said of the Republican race, “there is enough mud being tossed around . . . to keep a health spa supplied for a lifetime.”4
The tone of news coverage affects people’s opinions of candidates for public office. A study of the 1960-1992 campaigns found that negative impressions of presidential candidates increased step by step with the increase in negative coverage.5 Gallup polls provide another indicator of the effect of the increase in negative coverage. Between 1936 and 1968, Barry Goldwater was the only major-party presidential nominee who had a more negative than positive public image at the end of the campaign. Since 1968, in the era of interpretive journalism, a third of the presidential nominees have been perceived unfavorably and another third have had marginally favorable ratings. Negative news is not the only reason Americans are dissatisfied with politics and elections, but it is among those reasons and, as their dissatisfaction has risen, so has their inclination to stay home on Election Day.

1 See, Robert Lichter, “A Plague on Both Your Parties: Substance and Fairness in TV Election News,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 6, no. 6 (Summer 2001): 16; Project for Excellence in Journalism data, web download, March 7, 2002.

2 Patterson, Out of Order, ch. 1.

3 Lichter, “Plague on Both Parties,” p. 17.

4 “The Bad News Campaign,” Media Monitor 10, no. 2 (March/April 1996): 3-6.

5 Patterson, Out of Order, ch. 1.

Holy fuck shit

BBC News
San Francisco Takes Olympic Torch Off-Route
Washington Post, United States - 49 minutes ago
By Karl Vick Spooked by protests that overwhelmed the Olympic torch relays in Paris and London earlier in the week, city officials on Wednesday opted to ...
Thorpie To Run With The Torch Same Same
Olympic torch relay detoured in San Francisco USA Today
Globe and Mail - Salon - Salon - Guardian

Comment by Kai Chen, Former Player, Chinese National Basketball Team: A Sick Woman Denying China is Still Sick - 12 hours ago

This Christian Science Monitor article with my comments in it also quoted from another Chinese athlete, swimmer Lin Li who won the gold in 1992 Barcelona Olympics, saying that China is her pride for the Chinese are no longer "Sick Men of East Asia".

What a joke!! Lin Li was one of those miracle women swimmers under the East German coaches who were heavily involved in steroids and illegal drugs in order to earn gold medals for their beloved motherland. Their scheme was only discovered much later and the Chinese miracle swimmers suddenly disappeared from the international competitions for good. Yet this Chinese woman swimmer calls China no longer a Sick Man of East Asia. What a sick woman!! Now you know China is still sick as hell and here is a sick woman to prove my point, with a heavily poisoned body and mind by the Chinese sports authority, still denying the fact that she has always been sick. To wit: These are incurable diseases -- sick in the mind, sick in the body, sick in the soul as well.

There should be a thorough investigation over the Chinese miracle women swimmers using steroids and illegal drugs during the early 1990s. When the truth comes out, the world will know how sick China has always been, and China is still now.

Writing!

Howdy Folks

Well that last post was nothing short of an embarassing, sobbing mess of a post so i guess i'm just going to have to qualify it with... something.

So in the past few months i've been grappling with the question of motivation. Why am I going to classes and studying things that I literally have no interest in? it does not make sense to me. On that philosophy I have been fairly actively, not going to French and\or -okay "and"- Logic. What this means of course, is that for the most part, and with some great confidence, I am failing both courses.

Naturally this depresses me somewhat.

The dissonance occurs, of course, in the realisation that I care very little about either of these courses. And at this moment in my life i'd much rather be doing something that I legitimately love. This revelation might have sprung out of the utterly phenomenal quarter I had last year, what with my creative writing class and Rose in E105 with professor Ngugi and just all-around amazingness. But that's how it is.

This is a stupid philosophy, but these slipshod ideological trappings are simply there to convince myself that there is a guiding, unitary purpose as to why I would much rather stay at home and play videogames than go to class. It probably will not end well. My parents will probably be rather perturbed by this. At one point or another I will let it slip that "hey mom and dad, I failed two courses this spring. Intentionally... not like American superheroes that came ouf of a botched after-deadline drop attempt, but out of sheer negligence." And they'll be disappointed in me which really just

I hate these courses but I really don't want to disappoint them especially given the faith they've given me in taking care of my own studies. This feels like a betrayal of that trust because it is, and though I really do not like these courses (at all) I feel like I've failed them. and that fucking sucks.

So if you need me I'll be here in the library, trying to convince myself to stop procrastinating and get cracking so I can (maybe, hah, that's a gas) salvage my grades and not have to repeat three courses next quarter. Congratulations to failure of the century.

Run at the mind

So I've been trying to figure out what I enjoy of late. It's a question that frankly, has been evading me because in the process of figuring out what and how and why i need to do things it's been something that i need to figure out

New York was about leaving high school behind, but since then I don't quite know where to move forward. I still do know what I have a slight aptitude for but writing's a stress relief and a joy. It's a passion yes, but it still - at least for me- requires such passion and drive that I very rarely engage in it at all. Gaming is there, yes, but competetive gaming against other players is my darkest side and regular gaming - while truly a joy - remains symptomatic of my hermitude.

REally if I think about it the majority of the things I do that I enjoy revolve around mostly never leaving the house and remaining shielded, aloof, and largely absent from the world outside. Many may recognize this as the lifestyle held by Andy in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin". This awareness does not lend well to any semblance of self-confidence. I'm not proud of who I am and what I enjoy doing. I'm not proud of being a gamer and I'm not proud of being attached to that culture of internet phantoms.

Simultaneously I don't know where to go. More important than the issue of ever getting a girlfriend ( though this point leads there, one hopes ) is the question of "what do you want"? And I do not know. My current vision of happiness involves somebody to laugh and share life with and happily experiencing the mundane together. But that's largely contingent on somebody else being present and getting there entails that I need to be happy with myself first. And that's really been evident in many social situations that I've found myself in is that I am fundamentally unhappy with the way that I am but I don't know how to change that.

I don't want to be stuck in this room forever, with this computer and this harddrive, locked enternally into this masturbatory relationship with an LCD screen and the internet. But beyond that I can't think of anything I enjoy doing by myself.

You have to be okay with yourself, be comfortable in your own skin. But I haven't and I don't. I have moments where I am but for the most part I'm not. And I can't rely on anyone else to do that for me, it's got to be something that I do.

Just remembered, I do love acting.

Maybe I should pursue that more.

Writing

Few months ago I grew a beard. rather, a mustache. rather a mustache and a beard.

I grew facial hair.

at the time it was to signify to myself in some shallow and fundamentaly silly way that something had changed. And yet to think that change coul occur as such so sudenly is silly. Silly like a solipsism. Slippy Sloo Sly. Semantics aside I find myself roughly in the same place. Where and when do we signify growth or a progression? Ionno. It seems odd. I don't think i've changed much.

But on the plus side!

good changes:

• taller, apparantly mustache thing is working good on looks or at least my family says and they should know seeing as how they were all quite blunt about calling me fat.
• More self-confidence. Asked Lauren out to lunch, twice, in person too. So there's something
• Learning how to flirt in a non-flirty way. That sounds ridiculously gay, but aside from that, it's true. Ionno. Empathy seems a better word. Maybe nice guys finish last but you know even if i don't get the girl who works the stand at the Zotstore at school you made her morning a bit by making her smile so whatever.
• Better music taste. The White Stripes. Oasis. The 'Juno' soundtrack. The 'Once' soundtrack.
• Offset by a continued devotion to well-produced popular rock.
• Hanging out with friends: while a continued morning grab breakfast at the only place that is open at 9 in the morning has become a ritual that happens only after class, it's still something.

So yeah, like, thems somethings right? I mean yay! Actually trying for once, more confidente... thing. Oh wait now the list of things that I still am.

Am still:

• enjoying the Oscars way too much for a straight guy
• utterly convinced that I'm significantly more 'girly' than a lot of my female friends
• unable to find a time or place to ride my new bike
• looking for someone
• playing way too many games
• drinking way too much diet pepsi.
• not posting enough
• not getting that 'Once' dvd back from Talisa's place.
• utterly and entirely jonesing for more of 'The Office'

So yeah all in all it's not that bad a list. Um yeah. more posts later. About past present and future stuff. Maybe not future, but no guarantees. You never know you see.

Dear Reader,

Today I saw a group of three stereotypical surfer boys traversing the campus.

Together they had more perm than all of my female friends combined in the last three month.

I gagged.

RIP Heath Ledger

I feel like Ennis died. Which makes me very, very sad.