Amazon.com recently started tagging gay-themed books as “adult,” meaning they’re removed from sales rankings and don’t show up in general searches. (Conical hat tip to Neil Gaiman.)
According to Amazon management, it was a glitch.
According to Amazon employees, it wasn’t a glitch.
At times like these it’s worth remembering that there are other places to buy books online besides Amazon ….
Often topics arise in the comments sections that are only tangentially related to the original post. In case you missed these:
My post on cultural literacy has generated a debate on feminism; my post on W’a L’ma R’t has generated two pages of debate on left-libertarianism (I’ll try to answer some more of the comments tomorrow); and the L & P version of my post on the Atlas Shrugged movie has provoked a whole new post there by William Marina on Rand’s awful awfulness.
Check out this 1916 poem by Amy Lowell (of the same family as fellow poets James Russell Lowell and Robert Lowell).
Last night I watched the new Wonder Woman animated movie. As usual, Bruce Timm and his merry minions don’t let us down – it’s exciting and fun, and a far cry from the dreadful tv series of my youth. (Plus, terrific music by Christopher Drake: I didn’t want to start the film because I was enjoying the music on the menu screen so much.) [Note: MILD SPOILERS follow.]
Here’s a trailer, though as it’s just a bunch of quick clips from fight scenes it makes the film look more formulaic than it really is:
(Ironically, as those who recall WW’s origin story can attest, the trailer’s tag line “Some heroes are made – this one was born” is precisely, literally false.)
Here’s a more representative clip. That’s Keri Russell as WW, Nathan “Mal Reynolds” Fillion as Steve Trevor, and – I believe – the Timm himself as the mugger:
I like takes on Wonder Woman that remember that she’s essentially a badass pagan warrior from an Iron Age culture who’s not afraid to maim and kill (hence I also liked her portrayal in Justice League: The New Frontier – a great flick until the last couple of minutes when we have to listen to a harangue from the fascist-lite JFK), so I was particularly fond of this exchange from the new film:
Wonder Woman: What’s wrong, little one?
Little Girl: They won’t let me play pirates with them.
Wonder Woman: And why not?
Little Girl: Because I’m the girl, and they need someone to save. It’s okay. I don’t even know how to swordfight.
Wonder Woman: Neither do they. In battle they’d be slaughtered instantly. Would you like me to teach you how to swordfight? They’re using the horizontal cut. But in close as they are, the thrust is a better move as it’s more likely to cause real injury and less likely to be blocked by your opponent. Do you understand?
Little Girl: Uh-huh.
Wonder Woman: Now go. Unleash hell.
(Oddly, although the girl then sends her male playmates scattering with a sword attack, she doesn’t actually use a thrust! A screw-up by the animators? Or an incompetent attempt to mitigate the “bad influence” of the preceding dialogue?)
Another of my favourite scenes is actually truncated in the movie and explained only in the audio commentary. Apparently the original plan was for WW to complain about the impracticality of high heels when she’s in her civilian identity; then later when she’s fighting the baddy’s henchman they both smash into a clothing shop and she grabs the nearest object – a high-heeled shoe – and jabs the heel into her opponent’s eye, thereupon remarking that maybe these shoes aren’t so impractical after all. This sequence was shortened in the final film for time constraints, so that while WW still jabs the guy’s eye with a shoe heel and then glances briefly at the shoe with interest, there’s no longer any dialogue on shoes either pre- or post-jabbing.
On the down side, the film’s attempts to deal with feminist and gender-relations issues are often, predictably, rather inept. (Newsflash to scriptwriters: it makes no more sense for someone from an Amazon culture to say “we may be warriors, but we are also women” than it would for Leonidas of Sparta to say “we may be warriors, but we are also men.”) But the film has some virtues from a feminist perspective too; this post by Sarah Warn (who likewise picks up on the dumb “we are also women” line) does a good of scoring the film’s hits and misses (there are plenty of both) in this area.
Incidentally, fans of Ninotchka may find this bit of dialogue familiar:
Wonder Woman: Must you flirt?
Steve Trevor: It’s only natural.
Wonder Woman: Suppress it.
In the original:
Ninotchka: Must you flirt?
Léon d’Algout: Well, I don’t have to, but I find it natural.
Ninotchka: Suppress it.
Most of the arguments against the Conscience Protection Rule are bogus – they make it sound as though the government is forbidding the firing of employees who refuse to provide care that violates their consciences, when all it’s doing is threatening to yank federal funding.
What do you mean, this picture has nothing to do with the story? Velociraptors have to reproduce too, don't they?
The other night on Maddow’s show, her guest was criticising the Conscience Protection Rule on the grounds that it would prevent Wal-Mart from firing a store clerk who refused to sell contraceptives. Maddow didn’t bat an eye at this. What? Is Wal-Mart a federally-funded health care provider? I mean, I know I’ve argued that Wal-Mart benefits from various government privileges, but most of the direct subsidies are local and most of the federal ones are indirect.
It also makes me chuckle to see lefties who are ordinarily – rhetorically at least – on the side of workers suddenly demanding that employers be allowed to fire them. (Can we call the workers who’d replace the fired ones “scabs”? Or would that cause too much cognitive dissonance?)
Some libertarians, like Ronald Bailey, seem confused about this too. (Conical hat tip to Stephan Kinsella.)
But while most of the arguments against the rule are confused, the rule is no great thing either. When so much of the health care system has been unnaturally sucked into the federal embrace, such selective de-funding unfairly limits people’s choices in a way that they would not be limited in a free market. If I and my gang use the violence of the state to gain a near-monopoly of some good or service, our decision to refuse to provide that good or service to people we don’t like begins to look not so innocent.
So I can’t get excited about either the critique or the defense of this law. Indeed, it’s a great example of how the Rawlsian/Dworkinian [Ronald, not Andrea or poor Gerald] dream of a state apparatus that is neutral among its citizens’ competing conceptions of the good is ultimately incoherent. Federal funding for contraception and abortion violates the rights of taxpayers who oppose those practices on moral grounds; selectively de-funding those practices in the context of a heavily statised health care industry threatens people’s reproductive freedom. The only way to avoid injustice is to abolish the state’s entire mass of subsidies, mandates, and prohibitions.
Here at last (in PDF format – HTML versions to follow in futuro) are two broadly left-libertarian articles I wrote in the 90s that I’ve been promising for some time to post here. (The second one is broken into two parts because I can’t upload files greater than 5 MB.)
1. Immanent Liberalism: The Politics of Mutual Consent
2. Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class, Parts One and Two
[Originally published in Social Philosophy & Policy 12.2 (Summer 1995) and 15.1 (Summer 1998), respectively; © 1995 and 1998, Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation; posted by permission of the Foundation.]
The first article critiques mainstream liberalism for privileging indirect and hypothetical forms of consent over direct, actual consent; the second explores the relation between big government and big business and argues that the malign power of the latter depends mostly though not entirely on that of the former. Both articles attempt to overcome the dichotomy between “capitalist” and “socialist” versions of antistatist radicalism.