Author Archive for JJ Berg
Via Hemant, seems like god was a little trigger happy back in the day. And yeah, someone actually read through and counted all of those up. Ugh, how boring would that be. Somebody just punch me in the face instead.
This, originally from Joe Scalzi, but reposted at DailyKos:
Back in the day – you know, when presidential candidates were respectably white – news organizations called potential First Ladies “wives.” But now that black folks are running, we can get all funky fresh with the lingo, yo. So it’s basically fine for Fox News to use “Baby Mama” for Michelle Obama, slang that implies a married 44-year-old Princeton-educated lawyer is, to use an Urban Dictionary definition of the term, “some chick you knocked up on accident during a fling who you can’t stand but you have to tolerate cuz she got your baby now.” Because the Obamas are black! And the blacks, they’re all relaxed about that shit, yo. Word up. And anyway, as the caption clearly indicates, it’s not Fox News that’s calling Michelle Obama “Baby Mama,” it’s outraged liberals. Fox News is just telling you what those outraged liberals are saying. They didn’t want to use the term “Baby Mama.” But clearly they had no choice.
Meanwhile, over at her personal site, Michelle “Fox News’ Ethnic Shield” Malkin defends Fox News’ use of the “Baby Mama” phrase by essentially making two arguments. First, Michelle Obama once called Barack Obama her “baby’s daddy,” and as we all know, a married woman factually and correctly calling her husband her child’s father is exactly the same as a major news organization calling a potential First Lady some chick what got knocked up on a fling. Second, the term “baby-daddy” has gone out into the common culture; heck, even Tom Cruise was called Katie Holmes’ baby-daddy, you know, when he impregnated her and she subsequently gave birth while the two were not married, which is exactly like what happened between Michelle and Barack Obama, who were married in 1992 and whose first child was born six years later.
So by Malkin’s reasoning it’s perfectly fine for Fox News to call Michelle Obama the unmarried mother of Barack Obama’s children because an entirely different phrase has to her mind entered the common culture, and there was this one time that Michelle Obama once uttered something that sounded like that entirely different phrase, which is not the phrase that Fox News used. But wait! Malkin also points to someone in her comment thread saying that one time, Michelle Obama actually used the phrase “baby daddy”! No apostrophe! It’s in a comment thread, so it must be true. Therefore, Michelle Obama apocryphally using a piece of urban slang makes it perfectly okay for Fox News to use an entirely different piece of urban slang. And that’s why, you see, it won’t be a problem for Bill O’Reilly to refer to Barack Obama as “my nigga” on the next O’Reilly Factor.
This clip is a minute and a half long. Multiply it out by 525,600 and that what we just sat through for 18 months. Sheesh!
(from 23/6)
Unreasonable Faith has an excellent little guide to help those of us not so versed in the language of evangelicals understand what they mean. Just a few of the many gems he has:
“Hate the sin, love the sinner.”
Translation: “I’m a flaming fundamentalist.”
Acceptable Response: “Amen.”
Unacceptable Response: “That’s a relief, because I’m a homosexual transvestite in an interracial relationship.”“We’re in the end times.”
Translation: “My pastor said we’re living in the end times.”
Acceptable Response: “God will punish America for our sins!” Or, “America isn’t mentioned in the Bible because we’re going to crumble soon!”Unacceptable Response: “Did you know that out of the millions of times Christians have claimed this throughout history, they’ve always been wrong?” Or, “If you’re so confident, I’m sure you’ll be confident in putting some significant money towards a bet on that.”
Plenty more if you follow the link.
Wow, it’s been a while since I last posted. More on that later.
I just had to finally come on here and post something though when I stumbled across this tonight. Of course John McCain has gone from having a good bit of my respect (for a republican) to getting nothing but absolute disgust, but this is really pissing me off:
One should at least have a cursory understanding of the subject they are supposed to be talking about before going on national TV, otherwise you wind up looking like this idiot.
Just tonight I finally began reading the 9/11 Commission Report, published by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States in 2004. I’ve only read the first 14 pages, but undoubtedly those are the most riveting and gut-wrenching. It’s very much like reading a thriller about an airliner hijacking, only the people described in it were real individuals who died that day, and I can remember walking into art class that beautiful Tuesday morning to see two smoking towers on a TV set, while passengers aboard United 93 fought for control of their airplane, ultimately plunging to their deaths. I watched as those towers collapsed, killing thousands of people. Frequently we talk about 9/11 as simply an event, one that marked a shift in US foreign policy. But it was much more tragic than that, and I feel that sometimes we need a reminder.
I have to say that those 14 pages were very difficult to read. I find it simply incomprehensible how anyone could be motivated to carry out such an act against innocent civilians.
Hehehe. It’s funny cause it’s true. (and I love the fact that I just put “What Would Jesus Do?” and “NSFW” in the same title)
(via Friendly Atheist)
I’ve finally gotten around to reading the excerpt published from Matt Taibbi’s new book, The Great Derangement, documenting his infiltration of Pastor John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church and his experience at one of the church’s Evangelical “Encounter Weekends.” The entire story really is a terrifying look at the massive, orchestrated con job that is megachurch evangelical Christianity.
I pulled into the church parking lot a little after 6:00 p.m., at more or less the last possible minute. The previous half hour or so I’d spent dawdling in my car outside a Goodwill department store off Route 410 in San Antonio, clinging to some inane sports talk show piping over my car radio — anything to hold off my plunge into Religion.
There was an old-fashioned white school bus in front of the church entrance, with a puddle of heavyset people milling around its swinging door. Some of these were carrying blankets and sleeping bags. My heart, already pounding, skipped a few extra beats. The church circulars had said nothing about bringing bedding. Why did I need bedding? What else had I missed?
“Excuse me,” I said, walking up to an in-charge-looking man with a name tag who was standing near the front of the bus. “I see everyone has blankets. I didn’t bring any. Is this going to be a problem?”
The man was about five feet one and had glassy eyes. He looked up at me and smiled queerly.
“Name?” he said.
“Collins,” I said. “Matthew Collins.”
He scanned his clipboard, found my name on the appropriate sheet of paper, and X-ed me out with a highlighter. “Don’t worry, Matthew,” he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. “A wonderful woman named Martha is going to take care of you at the ranch. You just tell her what you need when you get there.”
I nodded, glancing at his hand, which was still on my shoulder. He waved me into the bus.
I had been attending the Cornerstone Church for weeks, but this was really my first day of school. I had joined Cornerstone — a megachurch in the Texas Hill Country — to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush. The church’s pastor, John Hagee, is one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country — not because his ministry is so very large (although he claims up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons) but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.
I totally need to get one of these. Hell, if he can build one that can solve linear systems of differential equations I’ll have to get one airmailed here by Thursday.
(via Greg Laden)
It’s 1:00am as I begin this post. I’m 693 words into a 1000 word essay, due, of course, tomorrow afternoon, and I’m stuck. So, what do I decide to do but go write something else. I’m annoyed that I haven’t been able to post much of anything lately, but as I said in an earlier update, finals begin next week, and the workload this week was kind of ridiculous. I’ve actually been churning some thoughts over in my head over the past few weeks, and I’d like to get some of them down on (cyber)paper. I kind of feel like just typing them out right now, but I know if I do that it’ll be two 1000 word essays in one night, and then I’ll likely be up til five in the morning. I’ll probably just be posting whatever funny or relevant images or videos I run across in my limited free time over the next few days, although I may have a really huge announcement early next week (fingers crossed), but I don’t want to get my hopes up too much.
Alright, sufficient time wasted…now it’s time to somehow come up with 300 more relevant words…
Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks
by Sam Harris
Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become the latest projectile in the world’s most important culture war: the zero-sum conflict between civil society and traditional Islam. Wilders, who lives under perpetual armed guard due to death threats, recently released a 15 minute film entitled Fitna (”strife” in Arabic) over the internet. The film has been deemed offensive because it juxtaposes images of Muslim violence with passages from the Qur’an. Given that the perpetrators of such violence regularly cite these same passages as justification for their actions, merely depicting this connection in a film would seem uncontroversial. Controversial or not, one surely would expect politicians and journalists in every free society to strenuously defend Wilders’ right to make such a film. But then one would be living on another planet, a planet where people do not happily repudiate their most basic freedoms in the name of “religious sensitivity.”
Witness the free world’s response to Fitna: The Dutch government sought to ban the film outright, and European Union foreign ministers publicly condemned it, as did UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Dutch television refused to air Fitna unedited. When Wilders declared his intention to release the film over the internet, his U.S. web-host, Network Solutions, took his website offline.
I don’t mean to make this blog a simple surrogate for TED, but when I come across a great talk, I just feel I have to share. Below is an incredibly moving talk by eminent physicist and pioneer of quantum computing, David Deutsch about the place humanity enjoys in the cosmos, and how we are simultaneously an insignificant spec of “chemical scum” and the hub of all existence.
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