TK

The “fucknosocialjusticewarriors” tumblr is curated by an eighteen year old boy, which,...

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:09:54 -0400

The “fucknosocialjusticewarriors” tumblr is curated by an eighteen year old boy, which, of course it is.

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Thu, 09 May 2013 08:31:02 -0400

grimelords: the best argument for Video Games As Art is resident evil because the end of 4 is you...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 08:39:38 -0400

the best argument for Video Games As Art is resident evil because the end of 4 is you riding into the sunset on a jetski with the president’s daughter and the start of 6 is you shooting the zombie president in the face.

twitterthecomic: Classic tweet by @boyfrnd_materia

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:11:55 -0400

twitterthecomic:

Classic tweet by @boyfrnd_materia

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Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:00:48 -0400

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Sun, 14 Apr 2013 22:11:12 -0400

thugkitchen:

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:31:20 -0400

thugkitchen:

No, that’s not what I meant.

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:42:10 -0400

No, that’s not what I meant.

Found poetry from the comments section of a National Post article about a proposed "Men's Centre" at SFU:

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:34:59 -0400

“My friends and I sit on the dock. We drink margaritas, beer and wine, eat steaks hot off the bar-b-que, wave at the babes as they cruise by, their long blond hair waving in the breeze. Listen to rock songs like bad to the bone, Rolling Stones stuff, old fifties dowop, tell lots of off color jokes, pass around the odd spliff while listening to BobMarley, go fishing for walleye, pan fry ‘em in hot butter, est potato salad with loads of mayo, sit in the sun without hats. Our dock is popular with the local ladies. At night we play our instruments, piano, guitars, hand held drums, and sing every eagles song we can remember. The ladies sing the high parts, the men the low parts. We put fires on in the cool nights and eat hot popcorn with tons of butter. We talk snarkily about all the lefty tropes. Discuss the merits of off shore banking in Singapore as opposed to Chile or an island which shall remain unnamed. Discuss the merits of establishing trusts and holding companies in which jurisdictions andvhowvto obtain different passports. Everyone in cyber space is liberated. Oppressive government action to steal property and redistribute it to socio/economic nut bars motivates the efforts. Forget gender politics and sick oppressive school teachers who drug the kids whom they do not have the skills to teach. My son will teach his children himself. After all his xpensive education has provided him with the intellectual wherewithall to do a better job than any system. My high school was plainly and simply a jail. The real revolution is to just walk away. My ancestors did it. Cyberspace is the new frontier.”

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Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:22:32 -0400

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Sun, 24 Mar 2013 11:58:33 -0400

Famed cookie maker Mr. Christie ventures into the world of...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:42:28 -0400

Famed cookie maker Mr. Christie ventures into the world of genetic parentage assignment.

why i will never sleep with an on the road fanatic

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:10:46 -0400

why i will never sleep with an on the road fanatic:

toriedactyl:

an article i like about a point that i find myself constantly making concerning the downsides of kerouac fans.

somuchscience: Phylo! The ecological, biology-based trading...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 11:18:52 -0400

somuchscience:

Phylo! The ecological, biology-based trading card game

Officially the NERDIEST GAME EVER!!!

Build ecosystems, food chains, webs of competition, parasitism, and coexistence. Learn more and print out your own cards (FREE) and your very own deck (FREE!) here.

steadyleanin: DOWNLOAD: Deniro Farrar - The Patriarch...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:25:19 -0400

steadyleanin:

DOWNLOAD: Deniro Farrar - The Patriarch [Album]

The Patriarch by Deniro Farrar

Haven’t listened to this yet, have no idea if it’s even remotely good. BUT holy fuck, what a cover. Such a good cover.

This is what I came up with in my first ten minutes using...

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 15:38:17 -0400

This is what I came up with in my first ten minutes using Inkscape.

theatlantic: When Conservatives Try to Talk About...

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:09:36 -0500

theatlantic:

When Conservatives Try to Talk About Rap

Conservatives who talk that way don’t just forfeit the chance to influence the social norms surrounding the genre. They reinforce the perception that their views are shaped by little more than cartoonish stereotypes. One needn’t dig deep into obscure rap albums to find “human feeling”. Multi-platinum singles will do. Try “December 4th” by Jay Z or “Stan” by Eminem. All across America, kids are listening to rap lyrics that resonate with them more than anything else in their lives, capturing the way they feel about their absent father or the bliss of a long afternoon spent in the park with friends or how parenthood changed their perspective or the effect incarceration has on their community, or just about any other emotional situation people encounter. What do they think when a man capable of meticulously analyzing Hammerstein expends so little effort grappling with the genre that he doesn’t even grant that it has human feeling?

Read more. [Image: Flickr]

Vena Cava: RICK ROSS FOOD PARTY

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:05:39 -0500

Vena Cava: RICK ROSS FOOD PARTY:

venacavanyc:

The Boss Is Hungry: Every Food or Drink Name-Dropped in a Rick Ross Song

By Sarah Lawson and Amanda Dobbins

BREADS

* Baguettes (“Hustle Hard Remix” (Ace Hood song): Rolex embedded with princess and baguettes)
* Biscuit (“This is the Life”: Started with a biscuit now I got a loaf/ Hoes wanna slice I wann tell her no/ But I can’t I get a rush blowin dough)
* Bread (“All the Money in the World”: Bust his ass his whole life, just want to break bread with him)
* Dough (“Fountain of Youth”: From the churches I rose, only loving the dough)
* Loaf (“Mafia Music 2”: My last loaf was gift wrapped by Castro)
* Toast (“Told Y’all” (Trina song): East to west coast I’m the best wit toast)

BREAKFAST

* Cap’n Crunch (“Deeper Than Rap”: Shotty all in the kitchen, heard over a bowl of cereal/ This deeper than rap/ I guess a box of Cap’n Crunch get you deeper than that)
* Pancakes (“Heavy Artillery” (Game song): My shit pancakes, my shit three wheels)
* Trix (“BET MMG Cypher”: Now my watch fruity colors like Trix in a box)
* Turkey Bacon (“Sixteen”: Waking up to turkey bacon and my thick queen)

CARBS

* Rice (“On Top of the World”: I put it on my life/ Chickens put me in position to donate the rice)
* Rice (“White Sand Pt. II”: Got cooked up, scrape right from out the bottom of that rice pan)
* Spaghetti (“Molasses” (Raekwon song): Sparkin’ purple once a nigga done spaghetti slurpin’)
* Spaghetti (“Summer’s Mine”: You niggas is petty, you niggas spaghetti)
* SpaghettiOs (“The World Is Ours”: I’m just making ends meet with this plate of food/ Went from SpaghettiOs to a new set of Vogues)
* SpaghettiOs (“Usual Suspects”: Feed the fam boy, I put that on these canned goods/ As my fetti grow, fuck her, feed her SpaghettiOs)

CHEESE/DAIRY

* Blue cheese (“Mafia Music”: Trunk full of white, car smell like blue cheese)
* Butter (“Cross That Line”: Can’t cut it stay choppin’ through the butter nigga)
* Cheddar (“Here I Am”: More better, more cheddar)
* Cheese (“Colors” (Sean Kingston song): Gettin cheese out a rat trap like I’m that close)
* Cheese (“MMG Untouchable”: A nigga cheese dripping, I like my nachos hot)
* Chocolate milk (“I’m Only Human”: He never knew chocolate milk make you fart real bad)
* Yogurt (“White Sand Pt. II”: First time I whipped it, that shit looked like some yogurt)

CHIPS

* Chips (“I Swear to God”: Salty, we the only niggas eating chips)
* Chips (“Beat Build” (T-Pain song): Sweet tea mob, We up to no good/ I bought the ice cream, I bought the hot sasha/ I bought potato chips, but now it’s Red Lobster) *Note, cross reference with sweets, dairy, general meals

CONDIMENTS

* Grey Poupon (“I’m Ballin’” (J Money song): Own restaurants, croissants, my Grey Poupons)
* Mayo (“I’m So Hood” (DJ Khaled song): Mo’ money, mo’ mayo, the yayo in millions I made ‘em)
* Sauce (“Lights Get Low” (Freeway song): Maybach that’s my flying sauce)

DRINKS

* Champagne (“Boss”: Pour that Champagne, boss)
* Champagne (“Amsterdam”: Crack game, Champagne, kilos on the stock exchange)
* Champagne (“Hard in the Paint Freestyle”: I’m rolling up the purple and I’m sippin pink/ Champagne drown a bitch til she gotta pee)
* Ciroc (“Even Deeper”: Ciroc in my margarita in Mexico)
* Ciroc (“MMG Untouchable”: Panamera parade, sippin’ Ciroc lemonade)
* Cointreau (“All I Have in This World”: Sippin on that Remy outside of the club)
* Coca -Cola (“Perfectionist” (MMG song):” Coca-Cola minx, canary yellow stones”)
* Dom Perignon (“Mafia Music 2”: I’m the don inshallah, now pour me my Dom)
* Moët (“Mafia Music”: Celebratin’ wealth, pourin’ Moët in her hair)
* Mojitos (“I Swear to God”: Or Colombians, sipping mojitos with leaves, nigga)
* Purple (“Hold Me Back”: Then I start sippin’ purple, got my shit screwed)
* Rosé (“Ashton Martin Music”: A lot fo quiet time pink bottles of rosé/ I don’t drink every bottle I own. I be agin’ shit)
* 7Up/Coca-Cola (“Maybach Music III”: I’mma 7Up, and needa Coca-Cola loan)
* Tea (“On Top of the World”: I watch ‘em snort a powder all while I’m chillin’ sippin tea/ Lemons and honey, millions and money)
* Soda (“Bag of Money”: It’s just my soda mixed with brown)
* Syrup (“Last Breath”: Still sippin’ that syrup, might front you a block)
* Vodka/Rum (“Anything to Find You”: I feel for you, vodka, rum on my arm)
* Wine (“Mafia Music remix”: Cracking rabs at the tables, count the cash, crack the wine)

EATERIES

* Chick-fil-A (“Magic”: Them bricks be jumping fast/ Call me a Chick-fil-A)
* Chuck E. Cheese (“Mafia Music 2”: If she fucking me she lucky just to get some Chuck E. Cheese)
* Crustaceans (“Finest Hour” (Jay Rock’s song): When I’m in L.A. we meet at Crustaceans)
* Krispy Kreme (“Now That I’m Paid”: Parked the Chevy in that thing, glaze like Kris Kreme)
* Popeyes (“Billionaire”: It’s all the same gang, posted up in front of Popeyes in the Maybach, nigga)
* Prime 112 (“Comfortable Freestyle”: Big belly mon still eatin’ this shit don’t stop/ that Prime 112 it’s a delicacy)
* Publix (“Bricks”: My attitude is “Fuck it,” house big as Publix)
* Red Lobster (“O Let’s Do It Remix” (Waka Flocka song): Took my bitch to Red Lobster, I cain’t feed no friends, ho!)
* Wingstop (“MC Hammer”: She thinking Phillipe’s, I’m thinking Wingstop/ Fiending lemon pepper, I got my thing cocked)
* Wingstop (“Trap Boomin’” (Gucci Mane song): When I hit a lick it I bought a Wingstop (twenty of em)/ I sprinkle lemon pepper in that re-up)
* Wingstop (“Do Sumthing Strange” (Ludacris song): She super sexy so I treat her to my Wingstop)

FRUIT

* Bananas (“Bananas”)
* Banana (“High Definition”: When they talkin’ slick I double back with that banana)
* Berries (“Made Men”: Wiz Khalifa papers smoking my favorite berries)
* Cantaloupe (“100 Keys”: The game a bitch, but at times she sweet like cantaloupe)
* Grapes (“Prayer”: One, the grapes on the plate/ Two, the tags on the feet)
* Key limes (“Cigar Music (I Do It): As I recline cut em like key lime/ We both came now its right back to the tea time/ I wanna soda with no vogo and no cheap wine)
* Peach (“This Me”: When the beef’s over might see the peach rover/ We eats but we try to reach each quota/ No soda Rolls roller one on her)
* Peaches (“Blood Money (DJ Khaled song)” Far from peaches and cream/ Niggas deceased on the scene)
* Pineapples (“Diced Pineapples”)
* Pineapple (“Heavy Artillery”: I pull up at the light, pineapple in your car)
* Strawberry (“Mirrors Remix”: Strawberry swisher sweets with my Aston)
* Watermelons (“911”: I remember picking watermelons)

GRAVY

*Gravy (“I’m Just Doing My Thing”: Making sure my lil’ misses out here living gravy)

LEGUMES

* Beans (“Way Mo”: Rollin on two beans in them new blue jeans)
* PB&J (“Pandemonium”: No more peanut butter sandwiches/ Now we looking at loaves)
* Peanuts (“Brand New”: (Yung Joc song): Air train and peanuts, it’s time to slide ho)

RED MEAT

* Beef (“Mafia Music”: That boy get salad, beef bowel movements/ Beef I’ll make you dinner, take a seat so we could eat/ A Farrakhan aura, pause on the pork/ You eat from the bowl, while your dog need a fork)
* Pork (“By Any Means” (Wale Song): Pork on the fork, white in the pot)
* Steak (“Gunplay”: I’m a boss Champagne with the steak/ pink Rosay Jason, ace by the cake)
* Steak (“Hold Me Back”: Everything whipped well, I’m eatin’ steak, no more soup)
* Steaks (“Southern Gangsta” (Ludacris song): I used to serve shake, now I serve steaks)
* Whopper (“Choppa Choppa Down” (French Montana song): I call my chopper my whopper/ you get it just like you want it)

POULTRY

* Chickens (“Hustlin’”: I feed ‘em steroids to strengthen up all my chickens)
* Chicken (“King of Diamonds”: Pop a chicken in that grease and make one into two)
* Chicken Wings (“I Love My Bitches”: 50 cash in the Louis for the chicken wings)

SEAFOOD

* Assorted crustaceans (“Maybach Music”: And the muscle be that muzzle, when I stuff it in your grill/ Stuffed shells — thanks to crack, I crack / Crab and lobsters, not al all mobsters)
* Caviar (“BMF”: Blunt tip, orange like caviar)
* Crab legs (“New Bugatti”: Order crab legs with the heavy butter)
* Crab meats (“Mafia Music”: Now I’m in the suites and I’m eatin’ crab meats)
* Fish (“Yacht Club”: I’m into fine fish with a slight lime twist/ Veggies on the side of course, kush appetizers)
* Lobster bisque (“I Love My Bitches”: Am I really just a narcissist/ Cause I wake up to a bowl of lobster bisque?)
* Lobster salad (“Down in Tha Dirty” (Ludacris song): Pimp, ask Khaled, lobster salad)
* Lobster tails (“Hit U From the Back”: Flippin chickens for the sushi/ Look at me I cook for her/ Then I make her cook for me/ She make me cooker her lobster tails/ I maker her go and cook a key/ Excellent pimp salty the shrimp)
* Shrimp (“Mafia Music 2”: Now it’s mo shrimp, nigga order more shrimp)
* Yellow tail/ red snapper (“Fire Hazard”: Time to feed all my niggas this Columbian fish/ Yellow tail, red snapper, wood chopper, gold yacht master)

SEASONINGS

* Lemon pepper (“King of Diamonds”: Take your bitch to get lemon pepper in a new Lotus)
* Salt and pepper (“Boss”: Sprinkle soft cause I’m the pepper and the salt)
* Salt and pepper (“Push It Remix”: Cause in ’95 I used to push it like salt n’ pepper/ Graduated to baking soda”)
* Sofrito (“Harsh” (Styles P Song): Link with Dominicanos, straight to sofrito)

SWEETS

* Butterscotch (“On Top of the World”: Burnin’ butter got it smellin’ like it’s butterscotch)
* Cake (“If I Die Today” (Lil Wayne song): Ain’t it funny, mama, only son be baking cakes)
* Cake (“In Cold Blood”: Make a lil cake, haters wanna envy)
* Cake (“Yella Diamonds”: I’m whippin’ cake up like I’m Jacob, nigga)
* Candy (“For Da Low”: Candy all in da paint, rims deep in da dirt/ Gotta car full of work, nigga pocket’s full of herb/ Choppa on da front seat, sucka if you want beef)
* Caramel (“Albert Pujols”: Talking caramel with them asses like the strippers)
* Carrot cake (“I’m a Boss Remix” (Meek Mill Song): When the work clean, cut it like it’s carrot cake)
* Cheesecake (“Amsterdam”: Slice of cheesecake before my niggas all decease)
* Cheesecake (“Comfortable Freestyle”: Aventura Mall top it off wit cheesecake/ Sweet lemonade help a nigga ventilate)
* Cheesecake (“I’m a G”: Need cheesecake like Fredrick)
* Cream (“Mirrors Remix”: Now I deal with big cream theme Maybach)
* Cream (“Mafia Music remix”: My Coretta Scott-King in the tub full of cream/ Pink Champagne seem to take away the pain)
* Doughnut (“Shawt Bus Reloaded”: I just found a doughnut under my breast/ I’mma tell you something and don’t think that I’m weird/ I eat leftover food that gets stuck in my beard/ Powdered doughnuts, leftover chili/ Sit in the back of the bus and make it pop a wheelie)
* Marshmallows (“Get Away”: No marshmallows, we let the dro burn)
* Pie (“I’m Not a Star”: I got a bake sale, bitch it’s 30’ for the pie/ 9 for the slice, dummy that’s a Dan Marino)
* Pie (“Money Make Me Come”: Let her count the cheese let her see the pies)
* Pie (“This Me”: I need a slice of the pie fo five six)

VEGETABLES

* Broccoli (“Here I Am”: Job like roxy, spark that broccoli)
* Cabbage (“Addicted to Money”: I ain’t eating Jacksons when I be in over town/ Bitch I’m eatin lavish/ look up ho it’s snowing now/ I just throw the cabbage
* Caesar salad (“Speedin”: Caesar salad, Caesar’s Palace)
* Carrots (“Lay Back”: Her flavor superb, I pay her with carrots)
* Collard greens (“John Doe ”: I’m peeling collard greens, that 30 carats)
* Lettuce (“Mirrors Remix”: Got a yellow carat now I smoke lettuce)
* Spinach (“Yacht Club”: Okay who rolling spinach? Cause I’m reeling the anchor)
* Spinach (“Colors”: He green as spinach just another lame middle man)

PEOPLE

* You (“I’m Just Doing My Thing”: Eat you like a plate of food)

Matt Taibbi: 'Zero Dark Thirty' Is Osama bin Laden's Last Victory Over America

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:20:16 -0500

Matt Taibbi: 'Zero Dark Thirty' Is Osama bin Laden's Last Victory Over America:

“I went to see Zero Dark Thirty this weekend with great anticipation. I’ve always loved Kathryn Bigelow’s movies – I’m a fan to an almost embarrassing degree. Like most people I liked the Busey-Keanu surf-and-bromance film Point Break, but I also loved the The Weight of Water, as well as Strange Days, The Widowmaker… Bigelow’s movies are visually engrossing, innovative and smart, and I couldn’t wait to see what she did with a real-life subject matter that had the potential to be both the greatest detective story and the greatest action-movie plot of all time.

So I went to see the movie and like most people I know who watched it, I was blown away. On a pure whodunit level, the bulk of the film was an unbelievably compelling thriller, and purely on the level of action cinematography, the final scene – with all its real-world drama and consequence, plus the unique fact the movie revealed secrets about one of the shadowiest, most highly-classified operations ever – was about as pulse-pounding and exciting as movies get.

The way Bigelow shot that last sequence in Abbotabad, constantly declining to Michael-Bay-ize the action sequences with goofball explosions and kung-fu battles, and not glossing over the brutality or the mission’s mistakes (God, what a screw-up to crash that helicopter!), it was ingenious. For however long it lasted, you felt exactly how long 14 or 15 minutes can be, with so much on the line, crowds beginning to form, Pakistani jets on the way.

And when they dragged the big prize with its blood-soaked beard back into the copter and flew off, well – the triumph the characters felt at that moment exploded into the theater, there were gasps and patriotic applause, and even I got caught up in it. The only thing I can compare it to was seeing Rocky or Star Wars in theaters as a kid, the way the crowds went wild over the ass-kicking ending.

On the way home I felt buzzed and high, like one always does after seeing a great film, but then various things that had bothered me about the movie started to float to the surface.

Apart from the queasiness from the opening “enhanced interrogation” scene (more on that in a minute), there was the letdown purely on the detective-movie fanboy level I got from the fact that the “heroes” got their key information from torture. It was like watching a fishing show where the host throws dynamite in the lake to get the bass. In all the detective films and books I grew up watching and reading, the meathead cop who uses the third degree is always the villain – or if not the bad guy exactly, the sap, the klutz, who screws things up by swinging a fist when just talking would have worked fine.

In classic detective tales, the thug interrogator is even sometimes introduced as a parallel character to the hero, to show how things aren’tdone – think the Victory Motel scenes in L.A. Confidential, or the cops in Raymond Chandler’s novels. Take the character of Captain Gregorius in The Long Goodbye, who gets tough with Marlowe when he didn’t need to, trying to get him to fink on his friend in a murder investigation. Chandler couldn’t have known how much a passage from his great P.I. novel would have relevance to the War on Terror decades later:

Gregorius bared his teeth at me. They needed cleaning – badly. “Let’s have the exit line, chum.”

“Yes, sir,” I said politely. “You probably didn’t intend it, but you’ve done me a favor. With an assist from Detective Dayton. You’ve solved a problem for me. No man likes to betray a friend but I wouldn’t betray an enemy into your hands. You’re not only a gorilla, you’re an incompetent. You don’t know how to operate a simple investigation. I was balanced on a knife edge and you could have swung me either way. But you had to abuse me, throw coffee in my face, and use your fists on me when I was in a spot where all I could do was take it. From now on I wouldn’t tell you the time by the clock on your own wall.”

For some strange reason he sat there perfectly still and let me say it. Then he grinned. “You’re just a little old cop-hater, friend. That’s all you are, shamus, just a little old cop-hater.”

“There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn’t be a cop.”

Back to the “enhanced interrogation” in the first scene: conducted by chameleonic Australian actor Jason Clarke’s “Dan” character while Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain’s Maya character looks on, it’s shocking, horrific, disgusting, and it was obviously supposed to be all of those things.

By graphically depicting the sexual humiliation (“You don’t mind if my female colleague sees your junk?” Clarke says, ripping the suspect’s pants down as he hangs by his wrists), the walking around of suspects in dog-collars Lynndie-England-style, the putting of people in boxes, the waterboarding and the flat-out punching in the face (which Maya resorts to later, with help from another interrogator), Bigelow made it clear that she wasn’t making any half-assed Rumsfeldian claim that what went on after 9/11, in thousands of grimy rooms around the world with thousands if not tens of thousands of people, somehow wasn’t torture.

No, Bigelow wrapped her arms all the way around that subject, which makes sense now. She has since been praised, almost excessively, for being brave enough to “tell the truth” about torture in Zero Dark Thirty. As Manohla Dargis of the New York Times put it:

However unprovable the effectiveness of these interrogations, they did take place. To omit them from “Zero Dark Thirty” would have been a reprehensible act of moral cowardice.

Here’s my question: if it would have been dishonest to leave torture out of the film entirely, how is it not dishonest to leave out how generally ineffective it was, how morally corrupting, how totally it enraged the entire Arab world, how often we used it on people we knew little to nothing about, how often it resulted in deaths, or a hundred other facts? Bigelow put it in, which was “honest,” but it seems an eerie coincidence that she was “honest” about torture in pretty much exactly the way a CIA interrogator would have told the story, without including much else.

There’s no way to watch Zero Dark Thirty without seeing it as a movie about how torture helped us catch Osama bin Laden. That’s why I was blown away when I read this morning that Bigelow is now going with a line that “depiction is not endorsement,” that simply showing torture does not amount to publicly approving of it.

If Bigelow really means that, I have a rhetorical question for her: Are audiences not supposed to cheer at the end of the film, when we get bin Laden? They cheered in the theater where I watched it. And is Maya a good character or a bad character? Did she cross some dark line in victory like Michael Corrleone, did she lose her moral self and her humanity chasing her goal like Captain Ahab, or is she just a modern-day Sherlock Holmes (or, hell, John McClane) getting his man in the end?

It seemed to me more the latter than anything else. I barely caught a whiff of a “moral journey/descent” storyline in this film – the closest they came to that was in the first scene, where Maya looks a little grossed out by Clarke’s methods. A few minutes later, though, she’s all street and everything, wearing a hijab and getting some henchman to throw fists at her suspects on command. She went from queasy to hardass in about ten seconds and we didn’t linger on the transformation at all.

Bigelow is such a great storyteller that she has to know, deep inside, that the “depiction is not endorsement” line doesn’t wash. You want audiences gripped to the screen, you’ve gotta give them something to root for, or against. This was definitely not a movie about two vicious and murderous groups of people killing and torturing each other in an endless cycle of increasingly brainless revenge. And this was not a movie about how America lost its values en route to a great strategic victory.

No, this was a straight-up “hero catches bad guys” movie, and the idea that audiences weren’t supposed to identify with Maya the torturer is ludicrous. Are we really to believe that viewers aren’t supposed to be shimmering in anticipation for her at the end, as she paces back and forth with set-fans whooshing back her beautiful red hair, waiting for her copter to come in? They might as well have put a cape and a Wonder Woman costume on her, that’s how subtle that was.

Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal clearly spent a lot of time with sources in the CIA who were peddling a version of history where the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” program, though distasteful, scored us the big prize in the end.

In Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s agonizing and affecting documentary about EIT called Taxi to the Dark Side, he talks about the phenomenon of “force drift” in torture, when interrogators start using harsher methods when the permitted ones don’t work. Well, in journalism, what happened with Boal and Bigelow is what you might call “access drift” – when you really, really love the drama of the story you’re hearing, you start leaning in the direction of your sources even if the truth doesn’t quite cooperate.

Obviously, torture does produce some information, maybe even some good information. If you really squint hard, it may very well be that, technically speaking, there’s a lot of truth in the plot of Zero Dark Thirty. It may be that we wouldn’t have found bin Laden without torture. And as such, any movie about the hunt for bin Laden that excluded scenes of torture would have been dishonest.

But that’s not what’s messed up about this movie. The problem had nothing to do with the fact that Bigelow showed torture. It was the way she depicted it – without perspective, and in the context of a pulse-pounding thriller where the audience is clearly supposed to root for the big treasure find.

For one thing, Gibney put out a compelling argument in a Huffington Post piece that the ZD30 storyline is not accurate in the sense that it excluded crucial information. He points to several facts that Bigelow and Boal chose to ignore (and remember, this was supposed to be a “journalistic account,” according to Bigelow), like for instance:

1) Mohammed Al-Qatani, the so-called “20^th hijacker,” who may have been some part of the inspiration for the “Ammar” character who was tortured in the opening scene, might have been the first detainee to mention the name of bin Laden’s courier. But as Gibney points out, al-Qatani gave that information up to the FBI, in legit, torture-free interrogations, before he was whisked away to Gitmo for 49 days of torture that included such insanities as forcing him to urinate on himself (by force-feeding him liquids while in restraints), making him watch a puppet show of him and bin Laden having sex, making him take dance lessons, making him wear panties on his head, and making him wear a “smiley-face” mask, along with the usual sleep and sensory deprivation, arm-hanging, etc. In other words, the key info may have come before they chucked our supposed standards for human decency.

2) The CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times, and throughout this “enhanced interrogation,” the former al-Qaeda mastermind continually played down the importance of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the man who led the CIA to bin Laden. But the CIA was so sure KSM was telling the truth under torture – so sure waterboarding was a “magic bullet,” as Gibney put it to me – that they discounted the lead. So torture may have actually delayed bin Laden’s capture.

3) The CIA took another detainee, Ibn al-Sheik al Libi, and duct-taped his head, put him in a wooden box, shipped him off to Cairo to be waterboarded, and got him to admit under torture that there were links between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden. This “intel” became part of Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N. on the need to invade Iraq. So while torture might have found us bin Laden, maybe, it also very well might have sent us on one of history’s all-time pointlessly bloody wild goose chases, invading Iraq in search of WMDs.

A more accurate movie about the torture program would have been a grotesque comedy that showed grown men resorting to puppet shows and dance routines and fourth-rate sexual indignities dreamed up after spending too much time reading spank mags and BDSM sites – and doing this thousands of times to thousands of people, all over the world, “accidentally” murdering hundreds of people in the process, going to war by mistake at least once as a result of it, and having no clue half the time who they’re interrogating (less than 10 percent of “terror suspects” at places like Bagram were arrested by American forces; most of the rest were brought in by Afghanis or other foreigners in exchange for bounties).

I mean, this is real Keystone Kops stuff, on a grand scale, only it had the minor side effect of destroying everything America purports to stand for, in addition to being comically stupid and ineffective.

Zero Dark Thirty is like a gorgeously-rendered monument to the fatal political miscalculation we made during the Bush years. It’s a cliché but it’s true: Bin Laden wanted us to make this mistake. He wanted America to respond to him by throwing off our carefully-crafted blanket of global respectability to reveal a brutal, repressive hypocrite underneath. He wanted us to stop pretending that we’re the country that handcuffs you and reads you your rights instead of extralegally drone-bombing you from the stratosphere, or putting one in your brain in an Egyptian basement somewhere.

The only way we were ever going to win the War on Terror was to win a long, slow, political battle, in which we proved bin Laden wrong, where we allowed people in the Middle East to assess us as a nation and decide we didn’t deserve to be mass-murdered. To use another cliché, we needed to win hearts and minds. We had to make lunatics like bin Laden pariahs among their own people, which in turn would make genuine terrorists easier to catch with the aid of genuinely sympathetic local populations.

Instead, we turned people like bin Laden into heroes. Just like Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, there were a lot of people in the Middle East who were on the knife-edge about America after 9/11. Yes, we were hated for supporting Israel, but the number of people willing to suicide-bomb us was still a tiny minority.

The EIT program changed that. We tortured and humiliated thousands of people across the world. We did it on camera, in pictures that everyone in the Middle East can watch over and over again on the Internet. We became notorious for a vast kidnapping program we called by the harmless-sounding term “rendition,” and more lately for an endless campaign of extralegal drone attacks, through which 800 innocent people have died in Afghanistan alone in the last four years (the Guardian claims we’ve killed 168 children in that country in the last seven years).

Now we have this movie out that seems to celebrate the use of torture against Arabs, and we’re nominating it for Oscars. Bigelow can say that “depiction is not endorsement,” but how does she think audiences will receive it in the Middle East? Are they going to sell lots of popcorn in Riyadh and Kabul during the waterboarding scenes?

This film got nominated for Best Picture – it could even win. Has anyone thought about how Zero Dark Thirty winning Best Picture will be received in places like Kashmir and Waziristan and Saudi Arabia?

But forget about all of that. The real problem is what this movie says about us. When those Abu Ghraib pictures came out years ago, at least half of America was horrified. The national consensus (albeit by a frighteningly slim margin) was that this wasn’t who we, as a people, wanted to be. But now, four years later, Zero Dark Thirty comes out, and it seems that that we’ve become so blunted to the horror of what we did and/or are doing at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and Bagram and other places that we can accept it, provided we get a boffo movie out of it.

That’s pathetic. Bin Laden was maybe the most humorless person who ever lived, but he has to be laughing from the afterlife. We make an incredible movie that celebrates his death – a movie so good it’ll be seen everywhere in the world – and all it does is prove him right about us.

Editor’s Note: Since I seem to be taking a lot of heat for this one, a few notes. Many emailers are telling me this was a movie that “examined the moral costs of victory” and showed many scenes of regret and internal conflict. One pointed to the fact that “Dan” went home, another pointed to Maya’s tears at the end as being “symbolic” of America’s ambivalence about all that messy torture stuff.

First of all, Dan went home because he was tired. If you want to argue that he really went home because he was sick of torturing people, good luck with that one, because he went home to stay in the CIA and oversee the same goddamned torture programs! How’s that for moral disgust! Forget John Paul Vann, dude is practically Gandhi. There’s no actual evidence for any kind of moral wrangling in Dan’s case – it’s much more likely that he just felt like wearing a tie for a while.

As for Maya’s tears, anyone who reads in regret or ambivalence there is doing just that: reading in. I saw that scene as being identical to the ending of The Princess Bride, when Inigo Montoya says, “I’ve been in the revenge business for so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.”

All the “examining the moral cost” stuff people seem to be seeing is, by an amazing coincidence, unspoken and implied in this movie. All the stuff about how torture helped us catch bin Laden is, by yet another, equally amazing coincidence, explicit and shown quite graphically.

Some wrote in and said that all Bigelow was doing was telling an “objective” story and leaving it to us to sort it out. That’s bullshit. All storytelling is a series of editorial decisions. You decide what to leave in, what to leave out. In doing so you reveal a point of view. They kept to a very narrow storyline that ended in the triumphant capture of bin Laden. The posters don’t say, “WE SOLD OUR SOULS TO GET HIM,” they read, “THE GREATEST MANHUNT IN HISTORY.” There’s no Das Boot-style shock-bummer ending where Maya steps off her transport plane and gets blown to hell.

My last comment is going to be this: To all the people defending the movie, what do you think Dick Cheney’s review is going to be? Isn’t it just a crazy coincidence that he’s probably going to love it?

This Is: Mass Effect made me sad I wasn’t born in the future. I know, I know,...

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:40:03 -0500

This Is: Mass Effect made me sad I wasn’t born in the future. I know, I know,...:

thisis:

Mass Effect made me sad I wasn’t born in the future. I know, I know, that is the most hugely nerdy thing to think. But seeing all those space ships and holograms and aliens was enough to get me a little bummed out that I wouldn’t be around to see any of that. Especially the aliens. I want to hang out with glowing religious jellyfish, dammit. I want to be friends with the slow-talking elephant people. Who knows what kinds of sarcastic rock formations or overly sensitive ostriches are out there in the real universe? There are species whose language is composed of different wavelengths of light, and I’ll never get to see their celebrity gossip. It’s just not fair.

So I was sad for a little while. Until some time later on, when it occurred to me that being alive pre-alien had some benefits. Namely, now I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about being bigoted against the super-intelligent cockroaches we would one day build strong diplomatic ties to.

Everyone would talk about how their food was delicious and how they’re decent people trying to make an honest living here on Earth (because their planet was overpopulated, obviously), and I wouldn’t have any response to counter that, logically speaking. All I’d have is, “Giant bugs are disgusting! Look at their little feelers wriggling around! It’s grotesque!”

People my age would yell at me for being backwards, and my kids would be embarrassed to have me around their friends. My future family would all be eating dinner, and then a cockroach family of four with a couple of cute cockroach toddlers would walk into the restaurant and I’d start making jokes about Raid and about how back in the day we’d smush the little fuckers. Everyone would be horrified, and rightly so.

Then of course, my daughter would grow up and start dating a cockroach software engineer. And I’d try to be nice to him, and to not visibly gag whenever I saw him, because I love my daughter and want her to be happy. So there would be this argyle-wearing bug person just hanging out at my house, drinking beers, talking about space football, and I’d have to pretend like I was okay with it. He’d vomit enzymes onto his dinner and slurp it up, and I’d be digging my nails into my arm to keep myself from screaming. But it’s cool! This is the 28th century! Multiculturalism is great! It’s interesting meeting people who aren’t like you!

After he left, my daughter would ask me what I thought and I’d, you know, not say anything about him being a cockroach because I know how well that would go over. Instead I say “Hmm he seems nice but I don’t know, he doesn’t seem to have much ambition for someone his age. And what is with those tattoos?”

Things would get real quiet then. Really, really quiet. She’d be visibly hurt. “We all know what this is really about,” she’d say. At first I’d pretend like I didn’t know what she meant, but I’d eventually have to own up a little bit. Like, “You know, he seems like a decent dude and I have nothing against bug people, personally. But they’re so different from us and I don’t know that he could ever really be a part of our family. And it’s not all about you — what if you guys have kids? Did you ever think about how they’ll be treated growing up?”

She’d cry and yell at me about how all my reasons were bullshit, I just hated him because I thought cockroach people were gross. And what could I say to that, really? It was true. It was all true.

So yeah, there are pluses and minuses to not being in the future.