Zeitgeist

So this is what social protests would look like if our friends from south of border took over the country: pinata bashing for the kids, while the hard Right smears re-fried beans into Swastikas. 

Quick -- let's integrate these social conservatives and budding entreprenerus into the Republican Party as soon we can!   

Karen de Coster reports terrible news: Constantin Films, which owns the rights to the bunker movie Downfall, is trying to get YouTube to pull all "Hitler meme" videos that use footage from the film. 

Anyone who doesn't know what the "Hitler meme" is, please leave the room now.

My two favorites are Hillary and the Housing Bubble. Clearly such videos must be protected under the parody clause, right!?!

Don't ever parody the therapeutic welfare state. You'll just give it ideas! 

Parody Become Law
By Hans Bader
April 22, 2010


Florida is now poised to join Maryland and Maine in treating crimes targeting the homeless as “hate crimes,” with increased penalties of up to five years for assaults on a homeless person.

The idea started out in Maryland as a parody.  The legislation’s author, a socially-conservative state senator, was by his own admission “motivated by cynicism: He was offended by legislation adding sexual orientation to the list of protected categories, which includes race, religion and national origin.”  So to parody it, he proposed adding all sorts of groups like the homeless to the protected list.

But his idea unexpectedly took off, as anti-poverty groups and homeless advocates backed his legislation to add the homeless to the state’s hate crimes law.  And he came to view it as a good idea, based on what you might call “hate crimes envy”: wasn’t it only fair to add the homeless if gay people were already included, especially since homeless people were allegedly more “vulnerable,” more deserving, and had less political “clout?”   (There is a related phenomenon called “censorship envy” that results in foreign hate speech laws getting broader and broader over time, as each minority group demands its own protection against political blasphemy.)

Damn women drivers...  

If you live in one of America's "vibrant" big cities, you've probably become aware of an alarming new trend in violent marauding -- flash mobs. If you're a tech geek, you've also probably become aware of this term, though in a far more benign context. More on that below -- but first to the kinds of flash mobs that threaten your life.

This is one of those social phenomena, like immigrant crime, that the national media either ignores or else treats with heavy doses of misdirection and euphemism. One must thus turn to the less refined local news for the raw footage -- such as these image from last summer captured by a Philadelphia drugstore's surveillance camera.

The BBC reports that Scrabble is now easier:

The rules of word game Scrabble are being changed for the first time in its history to allow the use of proper nouns, games company Mattel has said.

Place names, people's names and company names or brands will now count.

Mattel, which brings out a new version of the game containing amended rules in July, hopes the change will encourage younger people to play.

Until now a few proper nouns had been allowed which were determined by a word list based on the Collins dictionary.

Mattel has failed to account for Americans' creativity in naming their offspring. Indeed, the store of possible names would seem limitless and fluid. There must be three or four different spellings of "Shaniqua." Though granted, few Chaniquas play Scrabble.

Tonight's NCAA Championship is shaping up to be one of the most watched college basketball games in history. This certainly has a lot to do with the match-up between a perennial winner (Duke) and scrappy underdog (Butler) -- "Cinderella" and "David vs. Goliath" have been mentioned in just about every article I've read on the subject. And though no one will mention it, the game's popularity also has a lot to do with the fact that it will feature two of the least thuggish championship teams in recent memory. Both squads are majority white, both schools are academically rigorous, and Duke and Bulter are each known for playing tough defense and having sound fundamentals. Throughout the contest, fans might suspect that the cable just skipped over to ESPN Classic!

Fake Steve Jobs says it will:

The "Duke Hate" meme is making its way around the Interwebs. Salon and Newsweek have articles on the subject, both of which nip around the edges of the obvious. As I wrote just before the regional finals, Duke is hated because they're white, they play white, and they win.  

I also noted in passing that simply mentioning the Blue Devils in the wrong bar can evoke "crude accusations of homosexuality"... Well, a Duke grad and staff writer at The New Republic, Seyward Darby, has picked up on this phenomenon and run with it. Indeed, he casts poor little Duke as the victim of -- you guessed it -- homophobia!

Being a good liberal, Darby can't bring himself to disagree with the "Duke = elite" argument, but, alas,

there's one major problem with the neat morality play that left-leaning Duke haters have constructed for themselves: the jarring and disproportionate level of homophobia that routinely gets directed at the basketball players.

He continues,

These crowds below make the Tea Party look diverse.

It's something we must ask ourselves: are these people worth preserving?