Utilitarian Review 3/16/13

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Qiana Whitted on Blues Comics.

Chris Gavaler on the silence of Black Bolt and the silence of Clarence Thomas.

Peter Suderman interviews me briefly about imperialism and pop culture.

Betsy Phillips on Jake Austen and Yuval Taylor’s Darkest America, about the black tradition of blackface minstrelsy.

Michael Arthur interviews the artist Corinne Halbert about basements, lust and foxes.

I argue that Anne Bronte also liked assholes.

Vom Marlowe on Yun Kouga’s Loveless #10.

Jog on Akshay Kumar and subversive Bollywood.

Friday music sharing post featuring psychy Stones vs. grungy Stones.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

I talk about the ethics of mashups at the Center for Digital Ethics.

At the Atlantic

— I talk about Stephenie Meyer’s the Host and the invasion of the lovey-dovey body snatchers.

—I argue that Stephenie Meyer is a feminist, just like she says.

—I argue that we’re in a good place when even not very insightful political hacks like Rob Portman support gay marriage.

At Splice I discuss research suggesting that C-sections are often performed without medical reason.

And also at Splice I got to talk about my favorite Pink Floyd album.

You can now read my article on Junji Ito in Italian.
 
Other Links

David Brothers on Spider-Man turning fifty.

Chris Orr argues with me about rom coms (there’s some back and forth in comments too.)

Very satisfying takedown of Bob Woodward.

As a freelancer who writes for the Atlantic, this hurts. (HT Caro)
 
This Week’s Reading

I finished Stephenie Meyer’s The Host, read Kathryn Tanner’s “The Economy of Grace” about applying theology to economic matters, read the 1983-84 Peanuts volume.
 

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10 thoughts on “Utilitarian Review 3/16/13”

  1. Don’t worry, Noah, I’m sure your ponies from The Atlantic are in the mail.

    On Portman: I’m with Yglesias, Chait, Krugman et al; Portman’s conversion (so to speak) marks his moral failure, not his success. Something similar happened just the other week here in Australia, when Tony Abbott — leader of the federal opposition, deeply religious, super-conservative*, target of that feminist attack from our PM that went viral a few months back, and all-round dickhead — noted that he’d experienced a similar Damascus moment when he learned that his own sister was gay. Not that he now supports gay marriage — heaven forbid! — but that he’s now more sympathetic to gay people.

    To which I say: fuck you, Tony Abbott, and your lack of basic human empathy so strong that you can’t imagine the experience of people unlike yourself. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

    * super-conservative, at least, by the standards of mainstream Australian politics. Which is another way of saying that in America he would be a centrist Democrat, lambasted by Fox News for being a Marxist lunatic.

  6. Ah, okay…

    Portman’s better than that, at least. Not self-reflective, but at least actually changing his policy position and not just claiming some sort of vague sympathy with the cause….

  7. This week, I finished reading up through volume 19 of One Piece (v20 is waiting for me at the library as I write this…), and that awful Fables graphic novel, Werewolves of the Heartland. I need to write something about it, because it was really bad, and one could argue that it’s also a rare example of Bill Willingham’s conservative politics making it into the series, somewhat incoherently.

    Movies: I watched a bunch this week, probably because I’ve either gotten a bit ahead in some of the TV series I’m watching (in the case of Deep Space Nine) or am taking a rest between seasons (Doctor Who)(I’m still working my way through Buffy though; I’m up to the back stretch of the second season, right after Angel turned evil). So, I saw Killer Joe, a southern-fried noir stage adaptation from William Friedkin and the guy who wrote Bug (a rather enjoyable little movie with an excellent performance from Michael Shannon), featuring what is probably the best performance of Matthew McConaughey’s career. He’s seriously awesome here, a seemingly professional killer whose psychosis gets slowly revealed as the film goes on. I recommend it.

    I also watched the Julie Taymor-directed version of The Tempest, which was enjoyable, Tales of Masked Men, a documentary about Lucha Libre wrestling, and Compliance, the based-on-a-true-story film about an incident in which a guy called a fast food restaurant posing as a cop and claiming that a teenage cashier had stolen some money, and convinced them to perform a disturbingly invasive strip search on her. It’s kind of a fascinating exploration of what people can be convinced to do through the sacrifice of moral decisions to what seems like a higher authority. Good performances too. Recommended.

  8. That Bob Woodward article is indeed excellent. (Thanks for the link, Noah!)

    Woodward’s tactics in “Wired” are just another example of “technically accurate (sometimes only faintly so) yet so wrong” descriptions and perceptions one sees everywhere.

    Whether it’s rhetorically pushing a point (i.e., defense lawyers describing their client, a brutish, muscular 6-foot-tall rapist as a “child” because he’s under 18 — or for that matter, anti-abortionists referring to a fetus as an “unborn child”) or twistedly misperceiving a detested group, people delete context, the “big picture,” unwanted complexities, in order to shape reality into a satisfyingly simple narrative.

    Speaking of simplifying “things” (namely, women):

    ————————-
    March is Women’s History Month, a time to celebrate the many contributions that women have made throughout history. If you’re a local Fox affiliate in Connecticut, it’s also a time to break out some very questionable b-roll footage focusing on the breasts of faceless women walking on the street….
    —————————
    http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/03/14/fox_connecticut_b_roll_local_network_plays_b_roll_of_breasts_for_women_s.html

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