Who here likes Westboro Baptist?

Let us take as an initial supposition that the population of those who agree with the Westboro Baptist Church, the group who grabs headlines every quarter by conducting the laziest protests imaginable, literally writing "God Hates Fags" on a sign and yelling, is zero. While satirists may appreciate the lampooning of organized Christianity or America, and journalists may appreciate having something to cover—and individuals certainly appreciate having something in the media to define their identities in opposition to—no measurable quantity exists who agree with both the ideology and the tactics of the church. If this is true, then even members of the church do not, and we are faced with a puzzle. Why do they do it?

Before we can answer that question, we must first holy shit, I hate these fuckers. Look at those signs! “Pray for more dead soldiers.” “Thank God for 9/11.” “You're going to hell.” This is unfucking acceptable. Funerals for soldiers, 9/11, and my right to think I'm going to Heaven are all sacred. Is this legal? How can this be legal? I'm having to ignore them and I can't, it's taking all my energy giving them as much attention as possible. Hold on, I'm going to post a link to coverage of their opinions on my facebook, reddit, imgur, twitter, etc. Maybe then they'll switch tactics aarrrrg I can't even think straight. Why doesn't someone do something about them?

Well, there was that law that got passed by Congress in 2012. The Honoring America's Veterans Act restricted funeral-related access for protests, a direct response to Westboro and only Westboro. But getting statutory language through Congress in 2012, a miracle on par with transubstantiation, is insufficient. These Westboro Baptist Church shenanigans are still popping up on my facebook, reddit, imgur, and twitter feeds. What else can we do to target this one specific group?

But the quarter-million signature effort to recognize Westboro as a hate group is also getting a boost from two other petitions calling for the congregation's tax-exempt status to be revoked. Both of those have also crossed the 25,000 signature threshold needed to prompt a response from the administration. -source-

Gogogadget unwieldy machinery of democratic governance! Lets break the law to target a specific group. It's definitely in my best interest if government can act more capriciously. While this insufferable commitment to justice and fairness goes on there are people planning to commit harm with signs. I don't want my children to grow up in a world where the Westboro Baptist Church can express itself publicly, even if preventing that means leaving the world in a smoldering political ruin. Tolerance has limits, you know. That limit is where your voice meets my ears.

This said, we return to the original supposition, in which Westboro Baptist Church either exists solely in our heads, or as a minority. A powerless minority, whose protests are so insubstantive they only reach us through the concerted effort of their opposition. Only because their signs and shouting are made “news” do they even exist to us. Because they pose no real threat to our way of life, any action we take against them can be nothing more than a misguided waste of time, and through the strictures of law, possibly something much more harmful. I think once online petitions become an occasional means to have tax statuses modified we might wish we could go back to when the only thing Westboro achieved was grabbing a headline.

"Freedom of speech includes the freedom to offend someone." - Brad Thor

"Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection." - Neal Boortz

"First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me." - Martin Niemöller

There's more than one way to be "educated."

Made my own spoken word. Please supply your own sweeping musical score to accompany your reading.

I had a little trouble in writing this rebuttal. I was confused when David Beckham was held up as an example of something higher. Adidas shoes and FIFA balls...is it satire? Are we to include athletics within our educational horizon? Is footballing a path to transcending the system's oppression?

Our society is built on pipes pumping water, electricity and information into the walls of our buildings and shipping calories to places where we can pick them up with minimal labor. That leisure enables man to poeticize or philosophize or just feel awesome. I feel like paying no honor to those who, through ignorance or choice, serve this system, is a bit solipsistic.

But that's okay, the system will pay them. And our poet will give voice to the Zuckenbergs of the world, the people who go on red and stop on green and help us achieve this make-believe of thinkin' outside the "box." It's a comforting thought. That building someone else's dream to help yourself is a paradox. But it's not. That's a trick. The leisure afforded the poet is what helps create the Matrix. When I hear "redefine education" in this spoken word I don't see a road around my "mental suppression," I feel like a bird. I see how I'm in a cage, surrounded by wire, and how each one of them is a poet trying to make me feel inspired.

"No rational person could ever possibly believe that there is any tension between 'mainstream' and 'alternative' culture. Cultural rebellion is not a threat to the system--it is the system." -Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter, two PhDs, teaching at university.

If you seek to undermine education (in some small, reasonable way), you need institutional power, because otherwise you're just a derivative of this guy, down to the fonts and camera angles. And if you have that power, and can change system, prepare to have it assimilate your view point and teach it within. That's what the academy does, it co-ops whatever is persuasive, and through the strictures of "school" makes that idea invasive. I agree, the implementation of school by small minds is abrasive, but if you can make it through to the other side, you can actually change the system.

Raul Lezgo Gomez: Yup dats me still DBZ lol

This image is a powerful and concise depiction of the impact of consumption of entertainment on our childhood psyches, specifically, the way we handicap little girls with pernicious stories which portray them as passive actors with no interior life and meanwhile allow boys to remain developmentally stunted all the way into adulthood.

It found me on Facebook via a group called "Nerds do it better." Well, that changes the meaning. I guess lifetime Dragon Ball Z (DBZ) cartoon watching is better than even brief Twilight watching.

What's it called when someone tries to say one thing, and says something else altogether? When someone tries to celebrate something as cool, and instead celebrates something totally fucked up? When they promote a particular understanding of reality, and expose their blindness to particulars of reality? Is it satire?

Voluntary work stressed at University of Bahrain

“Voluntary work can be conducted in all fields and this can contribute to the society’s development,” he said. He added that volunteers felt the taste of giving and communication with other fellow citizens. Abbas, then, listened to the students' suggestions and thoughts about voluntary work."

Personally, I prefer non-compulsory work, but then again, I love the taste of giving. I also noticed that all the women in that photo are wearing black while the men, in the minority, sport a little more diversity. They're getting college educations and wear burkas—that isn't surprising—but they're all uniform, save their colorful lanyards. And that room looks as inviting as an abraded womb. I've excerpted this part of a press release/blog post from the University of Bahrian webpage because I found this photo more compelling than any that might go along with the real subject of this post.

Andrew W.K. & U.S. Department Of State: Entertainer Named Cultural Ambassador To The Middle East
This link, which I assumed would take me to the Onion, goes to a post on Huffington Post, announcing "Andrew has been invited by the State Department to travel to the Middle Eastern country of Bahrain and share his music and partying with the people there. Andrew will begin his journey the first week of December, 2012 and will visit elementary schools, the University of Bahrain, music venues, and more, all while promoting partying and world peace." Andrew W.K. is this guy:



At first I was shocked, then I realized I was staring at the Huffington Post. HuffPo is hardly authoritative. In fact, it seems to be little more than a link aggregator at this point. Demonstrating its deep committment to quality, The first link in the Huff post looks like this:

In bizarre news of the day, the U.S. Department of State of has named Andrew W.K. the Cultural Ambassador to the Middle East.

Referencing the Department of State, in fact, linking directly over its name, would suggest the link goes to something authoritative about the Department of State, or at worst, a link to http://www.state.gov/. Inexplicably, it goes to an almost identical post on Pitchfork.com, a website about music and not the State Department or cultural ambassadorships.

Would the U.S. really send a post-career hairy rocker to another country as a cultural ambassador? Especially a country in the Middle East? While it behooves me to mention that Bahrain is the most liberal country there, doing so feels kind of like mentioning I was oldest person in my kindergarten class--it's not untrue, but might help us miss the truth. Don't we have gatekeepers in the Department of State whose job it is to keep people like Andrew W.K. away from cameras? Perhaps an entire office tasked with selecting around real American culture while projecting it abroad? I'm fully aware businesses will thrust their cultural products anywhere someone will take them (I once had a Tibetan tell me about his favorite Martin Lawrence movies for an hour), but I assume cabinet level departments do not typically lend their stately imprimatur to:



What the hell though, that video makes me smile my ass off. Still, determined to discover if HuffPo and Co. were trying co-opt Onion copy as a means to greater page views, I went to Andrew W.Ks website. Though the most likely source of any satire shenanigans, it also was probably the most likely place to find it important to provide evidence of official collaboration. The opening line of this post had some important nuances.

The US Department of State in partnership with the US Embassy in Manama, Bahrain, has invited Andrew to visit the Middle East to promote partying and positive power. In the tradition of the American Jazz Ambassadors who traveled the world in the mid 20th century as examples of American culture and spirit,

It's a partnership with Department of State, not a request by Hilary Clinton. The embassy in Manama probably has substantial leeway in directing its own programs, and while partners, could be pulling the cart on this decision. Moreover, Andrew W.K. isn't coming so much as a consultant on head thrashing and partying as he is a musician. Oh, well that makes more sense. He's a muscian who isn't so popular he's appearing at halftime shows but isn't so underground he's never been on MTV. Also, he's not a pop star whose tits contribute to album sales, or a rap star whose message rarely intersect with family values. By the way, if you google for "lil wayne," the related searches are: lil wayne quotes, lil wayne smoking, lil wayne album, lil wayne haircut, lil wayne jail, lil wayne shot. With that in mind, its harder not to support Andrew W.K. representing the U.S..

The problem is, there's no other evidence on Andrew W.K.'s site that this invitation is for real. Nor is there on the State Department webpage, the U.S.-Bahrainian embassy, or even on the page of University of Bahrain, where he is supposedly performing. Granted, there's almost nothing on the University of Bahrain's English webpage, not even a working link to the site map.

At the moment, there's no evidence Andrew W.K. is really going to Bahrain as a cultural ambassador. Perhaps within the week or the first week of December after he arrives. But after learning more about the nature of his "appointment," it's not as big a deal as suggested by the HuffPo headline that's making everyone ask, is it satire? (Andrew W.K. as a cultural ambassador, not Huffington Post as a news site)

Time to tell any Democrats you know to fuck off and die

Eric Dondero, a Libertarian Republican you have no reason to know exists, is trying to get your attention. He has a message about the election results he wants to share with you. The message is simple, ostensibly for easy communication and not because a more nuanced outlook is outside his capability.

"I am going to un-friend every single individual on Facebook who voted for Obama, or I even suspect may have Democrat leanings. I will do the same in person. All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt.

I strongly urge all other libertarians to do the same. Are you married to someone who voted for Obama, have a girlfriend who voted 'O'. Divorce them. Break up with them without haste. Vow not to attend family functions, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas for example, if there will be any family members in attendance who are Democrats." -source-

Eric Dondero can pull off this extreme protest because he has no girlfriend, wife, family, or facebook friends, having reduced them all to charcoal outlines on the walls around his compound with his brilliant ideological purity. He cannot control the rays of his righteous zeal anymore than Cyclops can control his optic blast without a ruby-quartz lens. Nor should he have to. This democratic republic was founded on, and achieved greatness, as consequence of its refusal to tolerate differences of opinion. Our forefathers, oppressed by the universal tolerance in England and impoverished by the prices in the marketplace of ideas, left to form a more perfect union. A union of one. One people, united by sameness, led by the self-evident truth that debate is a waste and governance is easy. Individuals who disagreed back then were denied the right to exercise free speech, and individuals who disagree now deserve to have their bodies vaporized by blasts of the Truth from Eric Dondero's mouth. Or, he suggests, "you could take a crap on their lawn," anyway.

Eric Dondero unironically advocates boycotting participation in civil society by utilizing the same political tool wielded by Gandhi, the 1960's civil rights movement, and Occupy. He views new ideas as a threat and hopes to pressure those who entertain them to abandon that fool's errand. He is counting on intellectual poverty being more attractive than never receiving another one of his forwarded emails again. His boycott puts a price on your Democratic intransigence; that price is that he will never again swoop down onto your facebook wall and make a careful comparison between the United States and Nazi Germany.

If you are willing to break the chain anchoring you to Obama's throne, Eric Dondero will forgive you, anoint you with oil, and then rise up on wings of glory, to resume his stoney perch atop liberty's tabernacle and keep a vigilant lookout for our future.

"There were UNITED NATIONS POLL WATCHERS at our polling places yesterday. If that isn't proof enough how far we've gone towards the dark side of international socialism, I don't know what is."

But if you don't, prepare to be proven a hater by the hater-prover.

If we don't acknowledge that most Americans are now liberty-haters we will never, ever progress as a movement. We have to look in the mirror now, and fess up. Most Americans are fascists, socialists, communists, and at the least welfare moocherists.

But if he's harsh, he's not unfair. His criticism extends to all haters of liberty, even those closely associated with the GOP.

What I fuckin' hate are all these pussy conservatives like Sean Hannity now saying, "Aww, it ain't that bad. We will bounce back... American will turn to the right again... It's just one bad election." Bull-fucking-shit! America died yesterday. It's over. There's no coming back. 236 years of history gone in one single day and night. SPARE ME YOU'RE FUCKING GOOD TIDINGS YOU CONSERVATIVES. This is a castrophe for libertarians and conservatives. The worst of our lifetimes. The Nazis and Communists have just seized control of the United States of America, and you fuckers are trying to convince me it ain't that bad!

We have to consider the possibility, however, that Eric Dondero is wrong about some things.

I say we've got two to three years left before they start rounding up dissenters and sending us off to Nazi-style concentration camps. I've got a little more time, cause I live in Texas.

And if he's wrong, perhaps very, very wrong, we have to wonder whether anyone has alerted him to this fact.

John Denver said... You do realize that real communists and socialists laugh at you people when you talk about America being taken over by communists, right?

Eric Dondero said... John, no sir. I will not be a "decent human being," from here on out. As I say in the post, it's pure unadulterated hatred for everybody and anybody I know or ever run into who is a Democrat. I will spit on the ground in front of them. I will shun them. I will badmouth them. I will cuss their very existence. Republicans, Libertarian Party people, Conservatives, other Rightists, even some moderates, are my friends. Democrats are now my enemy til the day I die.

It seems that his position operates not on a level of policy or basic connections between words and their meanings, but on a sort of philosophical plane. Eric Dondero seems to forgo knowledge in favor of Cartesian skepticism: I am partisan, therefore I am. If I am, then I exist. If I exist then what I think is True. If I can't comprehend an idea, then it is false.

In a black and white dichotomy, extreme libertarianism is actually a sensible position. The problem is, there's no reason to think Eric Dondero is being serious.

Not sure Obama is a communist or socialist. In my eyes he's more like a Nazi. One look at his pals in the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, is all you need to know on that.

There are no connections between the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas, and Nazis. Eric Dondero is just sayin' stuff. The question is what he gets out of being a sort of Godwin's 8-ball. Is it simple entertainment, or does he have artistic intent? Is Eric Dondero trying to challenge his reader's assumptions by saying the most insane things he can come up with? Is he trying to disparage Libertarian Republicans by posing as one of them? Is he trying to drive page views, which I and many others are happily sending him in exchange for the chance to react to something unabigously ridiculous? If we criticize Eric Dondero for his facile ideology and insane presentation, are we just sublimating our own compulsion for black-and-white beliefs? Is Eric Dondero an excuse to act like Eric Dondero? Is it satire?

Avant-Garde Frog Fractions

If you went to school anytime in the late 80's to early 90's, you probably participated in the heralded age of "edutainment."  The age where computer software would combine entertainment with education and capture young minds, laying the crooked areas straight and the rough places plain.  The power of interactive experiences would transform the educational setting, helping to turn repetitive tasks into games and facilitate exploration of complex subjects at the speed of the student.  Instead, we got Math Munchers.

The revolution will not be televised.

But a new generation of post-modern students requires a new generation of educational software. For that we have the multi-genre title, Frog Fractions.  Spanning fractions, interactive fiction, and text adventure, it explores the philosophy of educational software, as well as boxing, and like any good sci-fi, humanity itself. This game shines a light into your soul.  But is it satire? 

Hot Cheetos and Takis

The first thing you'll notice is that this video is visually and aurally authentic.  The corner store location provides the urban backdrop for shaky cam cuts of the crew while the beat, I dunno, sounds like it came out of a machine that makes beats for popular BET artists. The second thing you'll notice is that street fashion evidentially doesn't change between ages ten to thirty. So it looks real.   But as we must always ask of reality, "really?"

It's kids, doing rap.  Rappin' 'bout snacks as they are want to do, specifically by brand name.  As evinced by multiple locations, post-editing, and cornucopia of snacks, this is video was not paid for by the screen talent.  It likely was paid for by someone who saw it as an investment.  And who stands the most to gain from some talented kids showcasing their products?

Hot Cheetos
Takis
Lemonade Brisk
Elmo
Orange Fanta
Fritos
Skittles
Starburst
Doritos

I've taken the pleasure of tracking these products up the company chain, to see which, if any are competitors.  Fritos, Doritos, and Cheetos are all created by Frito-Lay.  Frito-Lay is owned by PepsiCo.

Brisk tea is a Lipton co-creation with PepsiCo, but Lipton is owned by Unilever.  I think if you buy a Brisk tea PepsiCo makes the profit, but if you buy a box of Lipton tea Unilever does.

Takis are evidently corn flour fried rolls made in Mexico and distributed in the US.  They are the beloved and palatable creation of Grupo Bimbo.  As they say, "This industrialization of Mexico’s gastronomy has been characteristic of Grupo Biimbo." 

Fanta is a Coke brand.

Skittles and Starburst are a Wrigley brand, and Wrigley is a subsidiary for Mars.

Elmo is a Sesame Street character, which is intellectual property owned by Disney.

Now that I've sat through 10 minutes of website flash intros for our mutual edification, back to the mission at hand.  All these products are mentioned in the lyrics, but they aren't all brands from the same company.  A company attempting to use online conversations to virally market has probably learned by 2012 that you can't control the conversation completely, so perhaps this mix of brands demonstrates a savvy to not to transparently exclude the competitor; they're mostly Pepsi brands.  But still, it's less than half the same company, so we can probably rule out that this is corporate marketing.

That's not to say it's not marketing though.  Many companies, Doritos for instance, offer contests for user-submitted content which advertise their product.  We may recall a particularly egregious example from a couple years ago, the awful Four Loko song which thematically matched Four Loko's awfulness by infusing insipid choreography with faux hoodery.  It's not hard to imagine Hot Cheetos and Takis was made to submit for a prize.

But Hot Cheetos and Takis is not shitty like the Four Loko song.  It's well done.  Make no mistake, it's disturbing--like, I want at least 4 bars addressing childhood obesity or diabetes--but a well made package musically and visually.  The question is who paid the production team?  It might perfectly capture the expression of childhood as one writer has said, but Ben 10 and Fizzy Fee didn't rent professional grade cameras or pay for studio time with their allowance. If we take them at their words, they spend their money exclusvely on snacks and nobody can stop them. One's mom even hit the ATM because she know he need them. Who would enlist a crew of corn-addicted tweens to write an anthem to snacks?

According to this Is It Satire?-spoiling expose at Grantland, the kids are part of a Beats and Rhymes afterschool program. They are part of a young rap group (collective?) called YN Rich Kids, which with different members than those neccesarily featured in the video, have produced eight albums. So to answer the question, who pays? If it's an after school program, probably a combination of the state and the parents. Meaning, 1) this video could become part of a political squabble in the near future as conservatives ask “should public funds be going to the black arts?” (or Joe Biden, accidentally) and 2) this is the St. Paul, Minnesota version of Rebecca Black's Friday, where the indulgent parental vanity is replaced by youthful exuberance.

The video is H-O-T like a bag of some hot Cheetos,
Lets hope the inevitable PepsiCo co-optation is mutually beneficial/