Category Cultural Note

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Pravda On The Potomac

Dec 29, ’07 11:02 AM

According to this Washington Post story, Muslim women are having a hard time of it in homeless shelters:

When Muslim women are sent to shelters that serve the general population, they are often exposed to lifestyles that challenge their faith, such as drinking, abusing drugs, eating pork and undressing or bathing in front of others [...]

This seems kind of interesting. I’m pretty sure that all homeless shelters ban drugs and alcohol, not just on ideological grounds but in the interest of keeping order. And most Americans — particularly women — aren’t exactly bullish on the ides of undressing and bathing in front of others.

And as far as pork goes: why haven’t we heard anything about homeless Jews having problems with pork served in homeless shelters? Jews in the U.S. tend to be rather under-represented among the down-and-out, but I’m sure that there are more than a few homeless Jews, and that some of those are observant at least to the point of not eating pork. Interesting that the Post has never felt the need to run a story on the front of the Metro section about that.

The real gem, though, comes from one Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Stoops said most shelters are privately run. The largest shelter organization is Catholic Charities, he said, followed by the Salvation Army and the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions. Traditionally, Stoops said, many Christian-oriented shelters — he called Catholic Charities an exception — have offered clients “soup, soap, sleep and salvation.”

Stoops added: “I’ve always found that to be offensive. Shelters in this country need to get with this century.”

Well, then, maybe you should RUN YOUR OWN GODDAMNED SHELTERS instead of being ‘offended’ by the nature of the help that other people provide.

Some Islamic leaders have begun to raise money to establish more shelters that cater to the Islamic community. There are now just two serving the Washington-Baltimore area, according to local mosque leaders. The leaders said they were unaware of any in Northern Virginia.

I wonder whether Mr. Stoops is offended by these shelters. Conspicuously unanswered by the Post is the question of whether these shelters will admit non-Muslim women, and, if they do, whether they require residents’ adherence to Islamic principles.

This story from The Muslim Link suggests that the al-Mumtahinah shelter in Baltimore, at least, does discriminate on the basis of religion:

The center will be monitored by a “house mother” to ensure religious obligations are met, and to encourage the cleanliness of individual living spaces.

Emphasis added. That kind of seems like an important point, doesn’t it? I mean, the story complains, in its first paragraph, about Christian-run shelters ‘hold[ing] prayer meetings or services at odds with [the Muslim women's] own religious beliefs’. Do the Muslim shelters hold prayer meetings which would be at odds with the religious beliefs of Christians? Are Christians even eligible for admittance? Are Jews?

If Muslims want to run homeless shelters that are only open to Muslims, I don’t have a problem with that. If the Salvation Army wants to make Bible-study classes and prayers a condition of staying in their shelters (which, according to the Post‘s story, they don’t), I also don’t have a problem with that.

But it does seem like a failure of the Post to write a story about how hard it is for Muslim women to be homeless because most homeless shelters are run by Christian organizations, without even touching on the question of whether the Muslim-run shelters are open to all. It’s probably safe to assume that these shelters are in fact not open to non-Muslims, because if they were, the Post would certainly have trumpeted that fact.

So it is possible to get information out of Washington Post articles, but only if you inspect them as you would have done Pravda in 1965.

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More Voice Mail Fun

Oct 16, ’07 10:49 AM

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Hinkiness

Apr 26, ’07 10:20 AM

Bruce Schneier writes today on ‘hinkiness’, specifically on the security benefits of looking out for ‘hinky’, or ‘not right’ behavior, rather than screening for weapons, bombs, etc. El Al famously screens passengers for hinkiness, while the US TSA takes the bomb-screening approach.

Schneier is and has always been in favor of hinkiness-screening, and I think he’s right. To paraphrase the NRA: bombs don’t kill people; bombs in the control of hinky people kill people.

Nevertheless, I think that Schenier gets it wrong today. Based on what he’s written, I think that Schenier is a political liberal, and that this is coloring his judgement. He writes:

Here’s a story that illustrates this: Last week, a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology was arrested with two illegal assault weapons and 320 rounds of ammunition in his dorm room and car:
“The discovery of the weapons was made only by chance. A conference center worker who served in the military was walking past Hackenburg’s dorm room. The door was shut, but the worker heard the all-too-familiar racking sound of a weapon, said the center’s director Bill Gunther.”
Notice how expertise made the difference. The “conference center worker” had the right knowledge to recognize the sound and to understood that it was out of place in the environment he heard it.

The original article that Scheneier quotes mentions that “it is illegal to possess assault rifles and keep them on campus” at RIT. It doesn’t say anything about non-’assault’ rifles, but it’s probably safe to assume that they are forbidden in the dorms as well.

But Schneier goes on to say:

He [the conference center worker] wasn’t primed to be on the lookout for suspicious people and things; his trained awareness kicked in automatically. He recognized hinky, and he acted on that recognition. A random person simply can’t do that; he won’t recognize hinky when he sees it. He’ll report imams for praying, a neighbor he’s pissed at, or people at random. He’ll see an English professor for recycling paper, and report a Middle-Eastern-looking man leaving a box on sidewalk.

Where I think he really goes off the rails is where he makes reference to the praying imams, and to the English professor.

First, the imams: this is about a group of six imams who were thrown off a US Airways flight in Minneapolis last November. They’d been praying ‘loudly’ in the terminal before the flight, but the Washington Post reports:

Police and airline officials say the imams, who attended a national conference of Muslim clerics, were removed after exhibiting suspicious behavior, including uttering anti-American statements, changing their seat assignments so that they would be scattered around the airplane and asking for seat-belt extenders, which could be used as weapons. Valerie Wunder, a spokeswoman for US Airways, said yesterday that the airline has completed its investigation of the incident and has concluded that the flight crew was justified in its actions.

And the English professor. First, it’s important to note that this guy is a professor of English named Kazim Ali. On April 19, he was observed taking a heavy box out of his car, carrying across the street, and leaving it next to a trash can at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

He was observed doing this by an ROTC cadet, who reported this to the police. It might be worth noting that this was three days after the shootings at Virginia Tech, and that the general level of paranoia might have been a little higher than normal.

Ali puts this all down to ‘racism’, of course, and the ignorance of the ROTC cadet. He says:

That man in the parking lot didn’t even see me. He saw my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent. This is ironic because though my grandfathers came from Egypt, I am Indian, a South Asian, and could never be mistaken for a Middle Eastern man by anyone who had ever met one.

This is pretty confusing. He might be using the term ‘grandfathers’ metaphorically to mean his ancestors in general — because if both of his actual grandfathers were from Egypt, that would make him cumulatively half Egyptian, which is reasonably if not precisely Middle-Eastern.

So: three days after what can really only be called a terrorist attack at a university a few hundred miles away, a young Indian/Egyptian/Born-in-London/American guy is seen getting out of a car with out-of-state license plates. He carrys a heavy box across the street and leaves it on the sidewalk.

An ROTC cadet observer calls the cops.

This is used by Schneier as an example of a ‘random person’ reporting a ‘foreigner whose customs are different’ and of ‘profiling’, rather than as an observer reporting ‘hinky’ activities.

A number of passengers and airline crew members reporting what by all accounts I’ve read is extremely suspicious behavior on the part of a number of ostentatiously Muslim men on an airplane is also just down to racism and a lack of training, apparently.

But a ‘conference center worker’ hearing a suspicious sound through a door is to be praised for calling the cops. Schneier does not mention that the student in question is apparently a licensed gun dealer in New Jersey, where he legally bought the guns in question.

Hackenburg [the gun guy] was one of several RIT students who came to the Rochester Brooks Gun Club to shoot. The owner tells us the kids were well behaved and even took safety classes to make sure they could shoot properly. The owner tells us he doesn’t know if Hackenburg used those assault rifles at the club but says if the guns aren’t allowed in NYS, they can’t be used at the club either.

“He took really good care that we were always safe when we went out shooting,” said [Hackenburg's friend James] Ko.

Which suggests that these sounds at RIT were not in fact a sign of anything dangerous. Illegal, yes, but apparently not threatening.

So Schneier uses this — the detection of a weapon where it shouldn’t be — as an example of looking for strange behavior as opposed to just looking for weapons; while reporting Muslims praying on an airplane and asking to be supplied with what are essentially flails, or abandoning heavy boxes on sidewalks, is just racism.

The real shame is the Schneier is right in that looking for odd behavior is a much better strategy than looking for weapons. In this case, though, he’s perfectly willing to dismiss extremely odd behavior if the people behaving oddly happen to be members of a certain ethno-religious group.

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Warren Brown, Automotive Philosopher

Feb 24, ’07 10:55 AM

Warren Brown writes the car column for the Washington Post; I’ve written about him before, when, on vacation in Alaska, he wrote that the fine inhabitants of that state were more virtuous than Washingtonians, because they didn’t drive SUVs or fancy cars at the same rate. This is not just wrong but almost prefectly wrong; Alaska has more cars, and more roads, per capita than any other state, and its SUV-to-licensed-driver ratio is the third highest in the nation, after Colorado and Wyoming.

Today’s column is nominally about the 2007 GMC Sierra 1500: that is, a pickup truck, but most of the copy is actually about what Warren Brown supposes are the thoughts and feelings of people in rural America.

I have a theory about big pickup trucks and why there are so many of them in places such as Luray and the swamp and bayou towns of my home state, Louisiana. Trucks are practical. They carry and pull lots of stuff, much of it heavy and unglamorous. Terrain and weather in those regions often are challenging. Two-wheel-drive wimpmobiles don’t measure up to conditions. And most of the people in those areas are workers, people who turn wrenches, plant fields, lift bales and use hammers and saws as part of their daily regimen. They need vehicles that work as hard as they do.

My experience bears this out. In the boonies, more people are effectively Independent Contractors, distances are relatively large, and profit margins are slim. This means that a lot of people have personal cause to move large amounts of relatively low-value stuff around.

So people drive pickup trucks, which are cheap and useful: they’re also generally the cheapest vehicles you can get with four-wheel drive, which comes in handy for a lot of the same people. Figuring this out is not rocket science. Brown has another idea, though:

But, in a way, those rural truck drivers and owners are as much victims of automotive illusion as their paper-pushing, word-processing cousins in the city, where sports cars, luxury sedans, and super-bling sport-utility vehicles reign.

Everyone’s a victim. The Washington Post says so. Nobody buys anything because they like it, or because it meets their needs. No: they’re victims of illusion. How bleak it must be for Warren Brown to live in such a world. He lays out, quite elegantly, the precise reasons why people drive pickup trucks, and in the next paragraph he discards that reasoning in favor of believing that what’s really going on is that everyone has been tricked.

Cars and trucks are more than the sums of their parts. They have a meaning far beyond themselves. The city slicker in the high-end sedan is telling the world that he or she has arrived, if only at an elevated place in his or her own mind. The owner of a pickup truck in small-town America is declaring his or her just-folks status — a sort of down-to-earth ruggedness, an awareness that getting close to nature also means getting dirty, dented and scratched, a belief that only trucks are worthy of that bruising communion. That is why there are so many pickup trucks in rural and small-town America.

“The owner of a pickup truck [...] is declaring his or her just-folks status.” Declaring. Because it is entirely beyond the comprehension of Warren Brown (or of most of the Washington Post staff, actually, to judge from the paper) that people are what they are. That, for some people, everything isn’t a pose.

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Idiocracy

Jan 27, ’07 5:46 PM

Radley Balko observes that Fox’s failure to promote Mike Judge’s Idiocracy was rooted not in the knee-jerk corporate censorship that everyone (including Tino) suspected, but in the fact that the movie sucks.

The basic premise of the movie is that stupid people outbreed smart people, and so in 500 years the world is on the brink of starvation because the idiots are watering their crops with Gatorade. Our hero is a 2006 soldier of perfectly average intelligence who has wound up in the future as a result of an experiment gone wrong. He is now the smartest person in the world.

Balko is right: the movie is dumb, possibly because Judge takes a strange view of stupid people. The future elite aren’t a collection of insistent bureaucrats who just don’t know their asses from holes in the ground — something we’ve certainly got a present-day model for — but rather a bunch of hillbillies. The future White House:

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Now, that’s funny, but it’s hard to go anywhere with it. The future stupid people don’t know that they’re stupid, but then they don’t think that they’re particularly smart, too. That’s a lot of comedy being left on the table, right there.

Other would-be jokes are kind of baffling. In the movie, one of the few things that actually appears to function is an enormous Costco, miles on a side. It’s so large that it’s got its own mass-transit system inside it.

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I don’t get the joke. Costco sells things at bargain prices in an atmosphere that manages to be bare-bones and at the same time not nearly as horrible as a Wal-Mart. (Wal-Mart entrances, where they keep the shopping carts, have the strange property of always smelling like someone took a dump in there.) To make effective use of Costco, you have to be able to plan ahead; in general, people who shop at Costco are smarter and wealthier than the average person. Maybe that’s why Costco is one of the few semi-functional things in our grim moron future; it’s not very clear.

There are some good gags: in the future, nearly every business has turned into a thinly-veiled front for prostitution, because the idiots are only interested in sex:

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That’s funny, but it’s not enough to build a movie around.

And it’s interesting, because Idiocracy seems like a real departure from everything else Mike Judge has done. Hank Hill, the plodding, ordinary guy who didn’t go to college, always triumphs over the pencil-necked geeks.

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In Office Space, Lawrence, the next-door redneck played by Diedrich Bader, is shown in the end to have the answers (and the useless Milton winds up rich). Even Beavis and Butthead usually came out ahead. In the Judge universe, the cardinal sin is condescension, and it is always punished.

In Idiocracy, there’s nobody who even considers themselves superior to our hero, average Joe. This not only throws Judge off his game, but it confounds the suspension of disbelief as stupid people never know, or accept, that they’re stupid.

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Employee Empowerment, Customer Service, and Tantrums

Dec 14, ’06 1:47 PM

I don’t like to use the word ‘empowerment’, because it’s a buzzword. It’s a handy one, though, because the normal English phrase ‘allowing subordinates to make their own decisions and to solve problems themselves’ is cumbersome.

I watch a show called The Tube, an ITV show about the workings of the London Underground. I think that the thing must be underwritten somehow by the London transport workers’ union, because most of the show seems to be about how unbelievably hard everyone works, and how earnest they are. Or maybe they just do this to maintain access. In any case, the recurring theme is that the Underground people do their best, but that they would be able to do their jobs a whole lot better if it weren’t for all these passengers, who are a total nuisance and who just get in the way of the smooth operation of the system. It would be so much easier to keep the stations safe and clean, and to run the trains on time, if it weren’t for all these pesky people who insist on using them.

As such, the whole thing is a wonderful illustration of a libertarian’s feelings about public transport. The LU people are wonderful people, I’m sure: but they have no effective competition, and they’re working in a highly bureaucratic, highly unionized field. All of these factors tend to produce an environment where individual decision-making is strongly discouraged.

With no competition, there’s no special reason to deliver services more efficiently than anyone else. The whole purpose of bureaucracy is to establish Procedures, and to centralize decision-making power. And unions tend to favor limiting their members’ authority to make decisions; if there’s a clearly-defined Procedure, and if the employee is trained in and follows that Procedure, then the employer can’t find his actions at fault.

Add to this the general bureaucratization of modern British society and the general emphases on safety, security, and Not Giving Offence that now take precedence over everything else, and you have something like a perfect storm of customer disservice.

Consider this short clip from the show (MPEG4):

At the King’s Cross station, they’re doing construction and so don’t have room inside the station for the normal number of passengers. LU’s solution for this is to close gates at the entrance to keep the platforms from getting overcrowded. Eminently sensible.

However, after watching the video, consider:

1. The LU employee’s contempt for passengers when talking to the camera: “…they think the platforms are empty. Now, how do they know that? Because I can’t see from here, so how can they see? I think it’s the fact that they’re all in a rush, they all want to get to work.”

Not only does he seem to consider wanting to get to work on time some particularly inconvenient eccentricity, but he considers that the passengers’ frustration at being made to wait on the sidewalk as being due to their belief that the station is empty. There’s no particular evidence to back this up.

2. When a passenger complains, the immediate and sole reaction of the employee is to tell him to put his complaint in writing and to send it to LU at an address he can find on a poster in the station.

Now, ask yourself: is this going to help? No: it’s just going to piss off the customer even more. When a union employee of a monopoly tells you to send a written complaint to the head office, he means: I have adhered to the official procedure and therefore cannot be held at fault; send a letter and maybe get a response in eight weeks, and fuck you very much, sir.

It’s probably not even our intrepid employee’s fault: he’s probably forbidden to do anything other than close and open the gates, and to tell anyone with a complaint to write a letter to HQ. If he had any discretion in his actions, he might do the wrong thing, and neither the union nor London Underground want that.

In the process of relieving them of the burden of — and the ability to — make decisions based on the circumstances of the moment, LU dehumanizes its employees. Is it any wonder that the passengers then tend not to treat them with proper human respect?

Cyberman
Humans must mind the gap or be DELETED!!!

What if the employee had said, “I’m sorry for the delay, but with the construction in the station we don’t have enough room in there, and so have to hold people at the entrance until the previous crowd thins out”, and then told the guy to write a letter if he argued about it?

What if they increased the fare for people getting on at King’s Cross £1 while the construction was underway? If you absolutely had to get on there, you’d pay the surcharge; everyone else would walk down to Euston.

But LU doesn’t do these things: why should they? Are they going to lose customers to a competing system of subterranean trains? Are all these people going to buy cars, find somewhere to park them in central London, and then deal with the traffic? No. They’re totally powerless to do anything, so they assault the employees. And the response to this is measures that make the passengers feel even more powerless. Give ‘em any lip, and they immediately start reaching for the Button that will bring in the Hired Goons. (At LU, they first suggest that you write a letter: so that’s a progressive policy, then.)

Children throw tantrums because they have no control over their lives. Adults don’t throw tantrums often because, to a large degree, they do control their own lives. What’s more, they’re used to controlling their own lives. Deny them any of that control (as on an airplane) and they throw tantrums, just like children. More force, more authority, more procedures, and more hair-trigger hired-goonery can only make things worse.

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Offense

Dec 2, ’06 2:21 PM

A Taiwanese company called BenQ is running a website for one of its products that features a guy standing in front of the rubble of the World Trade Center:

200612021213

According to Gizmodo, The Chinese text allegedly says something along the lines of:

Even if the world is destroy to dust, I still believe in music

Now, this is pretty tasteless. Or, as the Chinese aren’t really known for being particularly cosmopolitan or particularly aware of other cultural values, it’s pretty tone-deaf.

I’m not offended by the use of the image, because I don’t think that BenQ is aiming for offense. China isn’t a particularly cosmopolitan place, and so I don’t think it ever occurred to them that the use of that image might be in bad taste in some places.

More interesting than the use of the WTC rubble as an advertising backdrop is the reaction in the discussions attached to the Gizmodo posts, particularly in relation to other discussions recently about Wal-Mart selling a T-shirt with the SS Totenkopf on it.

Totenkopf

The skulls on the Wal-Mart shirts say ‘Since 1978′ under them, so it doesn’t seem too likely that they’re trying to make an actual Nazi reference, and the consensus seems to be that whoever designed the shirt was just clueless.

But that doesn’t get Wal-Mart off completely, of course. 1978 could be a code for letters, meaning ‘A.I.G.H.’ — Adolf Is Great Hitler! Or The Turner Diaries! That was written in 1978! There must be some connection, a lot of people write, and even if there isn’t, the people involved should lose their jobs for their insufficient knowledge of history.

The reaction to the WTC image, on the other hand, is a lot more muted. While the Wal-Mart buyers and designers ‘should have known’ about the Totenkopf, a good number of people maintain that the image being used by BenQ isn’t the World Trade Center at all.

Most of the Totenkopf comments are of the ‘this is unfortunate but not deliberate’ variety, which is probably the most rational position with the WTC image. Unfortunately, it’s not a common one. Most of the WTC commenters seem to be of the opinion that the use of the image was the result of a clueless designer, but that this is perfectly okay and that Americans need to suck it up.

A couple of comments pretty much sum up what bothers me about this. On person says:

http://www.benq.com.cn/musiq/ points to a Chinese site for a Chinese audience who strangely enough might not be quite as offended as you are at the depiction of tragic events that happened in a largely alien nation 10,000 miles away whose social mores they largely do not share. Kinda like anti-porn protestors buying access to cable and complaining about the amount of flesh they now have access to. It’s a Chinese site for Chinese people so looking at this in order to be offended is foolish at best. Move along, there is nothing to be seen here (unless you actuallly WANT to be offended).

Another says:

This reminds me of the Mohammad cartoons that sparked so much controversy last year. To most Americans it just seemed like a bunch of people getting too worked up over something that seems pretty benign to our senses, and we can’t figure out why anyone would be so uptight about some image.

(Though of course nobody in the U.S. has called for anyone at BenQ to be murdered.)

The underdogist position in a nutshell: Americans must be sensitive to the cultural requirements of everyone on the planet; but if Americans think that using the image of the World Trade Center in an ad for an MP3 player is tasteless, well, they’re just being imperialistic.

Consumerist has been running regular updates about the shirts still being available in stores despite Wal-Mart’s promise to pull them. Somehow I doubt that Consumerist’s sister site Gizmodo will continue to track the BenQ website.

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Washington Post: Pro-Sprawl

Jul 24, ’06 11:00 AM

The Washington Post has, in its editorial and news writing, what you might call a generally ‘anti-sprawl’ position. The paper reflects the values of its culture, and its culture is that of downtown Washington, where it’s based.

So when it comes to urban planning, the Post favors the It’s-The-Greedy-Developers school of thought on what causes sprawl. The argument goes something like this: Housing developers, many of which are organized as limited-liability corporations, want to make as much money as possible. Therefore, it’s in their interest to build each house using as much land and as many materials as possible.

This is insane, of course: the general idea is to build things as cheaply as possible, and then sell them for what the market will bear. Specifically, you want to build condos or townhouses, because those actually produce the greatest return on investment.

The Post doesn’t see it that way, though, and they seem to willfully ignore, most of the time, the simple fact that county zoning boards more or less require developers to build sprawl. The counties like residential sprawl because it allows them to spend a hell of a lot of money per pupil on schools, which in turn makes their statistics look good. It’s a lot easier to spend a lot of money per pupil when you don’t have all that many pupils, and when those you do have all live in million-dollar houses which are generating quite a bit of property tax per family. So the counties essentially ban the construction of anything but million-dollar houses (or ‘active adult communities’, which they love because they produce tax revenue but don’t generate any kids for the schools) and then complain that the huge demand for housing for all the teachers they’ve hired isn’t being met because of… wait for it… greedy developers.

Anyway, so you would think that a developer buying up shoddily-built houses that straddle two lots each, in a neighborhood without sidewalks, and replacing each one with two houses would be something that would meet with the approval of the Washington Post, or that would at least merit a straight story without any moralizing.

But, of course, you would be wrong. The Post, like almost all of American society, utterly lacks any vision when it comes to the human habitat, and so it prefers stasis above all. That the status quo here embodies precisely that which the Post doesn’t like in other places is unimportant.

For $700,000 cash, a corporation named Hall Hollin LLC is offering to purchase Mark and Nancy Welch’s brick Cape Cod, built after World War II in one of Fairfax County’s oldest neighborhoods. No contingencies, no inspection, immediate closing. As is, because the house would be knocked right down.

In its place would rise not just one four-bedroom manse with granite countertops, ceramic tile, hardwood floors and a two-car garage, but two — towering 3 1/2 stories on the 13,000-square-foot lot and selling for $1.4 million apiece.

Four bedrooms! Ceramic tile! Wood floors! A two-car garage! What sybarites these mansion-dwellers must be! When they move in to the neighborhood, surely everyone will crowd around to see whether they’re made of gold, or rubies, or some kind of platinum-iridium alloy: because certainly people made of flesh could have no possible use for such luxuries.

The houses will tower 35 feet above grade! Such height! Perhaps God will confound the language of the builders, so the houses won’t get built.

Here’s a picture of Tino Manor (Mid)West:

Tino Manor West

Counting the porch and the terrace in the front yard, it ‘towers’ over 35 feet above the sidewalk. It ‘looms’, even, no? No? Huh. How about that.

The term ‘McMansion’ has officially been devalued. The Post applies it twice in this article, outside of quotes, to four-bedroom houses with two-car garages on 1/3-acre lots.

If we examine the article a little more, some clues emerge:

A red Hummer rumbles behind Mount Vernon Parkway, a showy hulk charging through humble rows of Cape Cods and ramblers.

Debbie Goram slides out of the driver’s seat, a real estate agent clutching a potential windfall for an unsuspecting homeowner. She crosses the modest front yard at 8036 Washington Rd. and shoves six pages under the front door.

[...] A dozen houses on double lots have sold so far, and developers are eyeing about 40 more — a bonanza for builders meeting buyers’ demands to live close in.

[...] They’re fighting the two-for-one plans every way they can: with protests, community meetings and glares at the neighbors who’ve sold. Like many residents watching old suburban values clash with new real estate values, they feel helpless.

To the Post, this is all about ‘values’, and it goes without saying that the ‘values’ of the people who live in the neighborhood and who don’t want to sell are inherently superior to the values of the people who have sold, the values of the developers, and the values of the people who will buy the new houses. The people living in the old houses are modest and humble; the real-estate agent working for the developers drives — no, charges around in — a Hummer, and a showy hulk of one at that. The Post doesn’t see fit to mention the cars that the residents drive, presumably because it’s irrelevant to the story. That didn’t keep them from using the agent’s car as the lead, though.

It’s interesting that the Post didn’t seem to illustrate this story — which appears on page B1, the front of the Metro section — with a single photograph of any of the houses in question. I found a picture of one under construction here, in a story about the redevelopment in a local newspaper:

Hollin Hall Village

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your McMansion: a two car garage and four windows and a door across in front. Not a particularly big house these days: but, to paraphrase Jimmy Carter, it’s big in his heart. It’s uppity, in short. It puts on airs.

And the Washington Post doesn’t like that.

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Protecting Us From Ourselves, Part 943

Dec 26, ’05 3:13 PM

I have read a number of things about the Whoopi Goldberg disclaimer — called an ‘introduction’ for some reason — on the new Looney Tunes DVD collection. I only saw the introduction — ‘disclaimer’ would be a better term — yesterday, because Santa left a copy of the collection for Nicole.

For two and a half minutes, Ms. Goldberg tells us that these cartoons are great. However.

However, the Looney Tunes and their irreverent brand of humor are products of their time. Unfortunately, at that time, racial and ethnic differences were caricatured in ways that may have embarrassed and even hurt people of color, women, and ethnic groups.

Now, nobody intended it, but that’s what happened. Now, some of the cartoons here reflect some of the prejudices that were commonplace in American society. Especially when it came to the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities. Now, these jokes were wrong then and they are wrong today. But removing these inexcusable images and jokes from this collection would be the same as saying they never existed. So they are presented here to accurately reflect a part of our history that cannot and should not be ignored.

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Ms. Goldberg goes on to pat Warner Brothers on the back for how progressive its polices really were back then, woof woof woof.

You can see the video (in iPod video format, which should be playable by any computer with Quicktime 7 or the most recent version of iTunes) here.

I have mixed feelings about this disclaimer. If this is what’s needed for companies to be able to release cultural products from the past which are now regarded as entartete Kunst, so be it. Big companies like Time Warner live in stark terror of being accused of even seeming to be discriminatory in any way, probably because it’s almost totally impossible to defend oneself or one’s company against such charges. Time Warner is attempting to do so preemptively, by hiring famous black person Whoopi Goldberg as their aplologist. If they couldn’t do this, they wouldn’t release the cartoons at all.

If this works, it might be possible one day to again see Disney’s Song of the South.

But at the same time I’m personally offended by this disclaimer, because it seems to carry with it the implication that I, Tino, need this warning: that without it, I might think that it is suddenly okay to make fun of ethnic groups. Because certainly there’s nothing else in the culture that would indicate otherwise. Cough.

I must say that the only ethnic group I’ve seen made fun of on the discs so far is hillbillies. I’m sure, though, that there’s ten seconds somewhere on these four DVDs of a porter or bellman drawn to look like a monkey saying ‘Yazzuh, Mistuh Fudd, I’se sho nuff seen dat rabbit what yo lookin’ fo!’ or some such: and for that I have to listen to Whoopi Goldberg for two minutes and thirty seconds every time I put one of the discs in.

And I think that this has helped me locate the origin of most of the discontentment I feel and write about here: In too many of my daily interactions, I am given no credit for not being a child/moron/criminal/racist/jackass/scam artist/drunk/junkie/etc. — I’m assumed to be all of these things until I prove otherwise, and then that proof is only accepted grudgingly, and with suspicion. And I’m tired of it.

It’s not just me, of course, but the fact that you are also not given credit for not being a child/criminal/etc. is not my problem. But we have reordered, and we seem to be continuing to reorder, our society to primarily serve the needs of people who don’t really contribute to it. Children are nice, but they’re not in a position to make any meaningful contribution to society for twenty years or so: this is why we don’t let them vote.

Criminals by definition do not make a contribution to society, but take from it. And morons — which I mean to include real drooling idiots as well as people who cannot figure out that just because Bugs Bunny made fun of the Japanese in 1942 does not mean that we still have anything against those fine people — will only sporadically be useful to anyone else.

And yet things are arranged primarily for them! If only there were some setting on the DVD player where I could affirm that I am willing to take on the risk of Bad Mojo myself, and that would allow me to skip not only the Whoopi Goldberg variations, but the threats that inform me that this is one of those rare DVDs that may not be legally copied and distributed to all and sundry.

If only there were a chain of convenience stores with signs on the door that said ‘WE CARD UNDER 21 because after all those are the people we’re trying to protect from themselves and all’ instead of ‘WE CARD UNDER 30′, meaning that they fully intend to inconvenience a lot of legal adults lest they sell beer to a few particularly mature-looking 20-year-olds.

If only there weren’t even any need to put signs on the doors of establishments that would rather that your children not have fits on the floor: why on Earth isn’t ‘behave yourself’ just understood to be the rule everywhere?

All of this might be acceptable if it produced a new golden age, but I cannot help but notice that teenagers still drink (in increasing numbers, actually, depending on whose statistics you believe), that people still pirate movies and music, and that plenty of people are still racists. Perhaps it’s time to think about a different approach, rather than just continuing to ratchet up the surveillance, threats, and lectures another notch.

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Hooker Doll

Dec 14, ’05 7:54 PM

Now available at K-Mart in Front Royal, VA (and presumably elsewhere):

Hooker Doll

I have no idea what the hell this doll is supposed to represent, unless it’s a prostitute. You can’t see it in the photo, but those are very high heels, those pink shoes are.

And she’s not wearing any underwear (I checked).

Most problems that people have with These Kids Today, their clothes, their hair, their toys, and their music really come down to forest-for-the-trees issues. But I have to wonder whether this isn’t ridiculous and bad anyway.

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