Gender, Media, My favorites

Glee and My Manhood

I live with two men who have not had the issues with self-gender that I have had. When they were 10 they were not referred to as a girl by new camp counselors who were confused by the long hair and foreign name. When they won best Halloween costume in the local newspaper they were not referred to as the “kid who dressed as Frankenstina.” They did not have every telemarketer assume they were the woman of the house.

I came home the other day with the knowledge that I was going to put my roommate in an awkward inbetween of desires. I told him that I had just discovered an all you can drink brunch place that offered a $10 all you can drink, from 11-4 …. mimosa. After his initial excitement was only mildly dampened by the inclusion of fruit and bubbles into what he thought would be manly and testicle-full, I then explained it was at a Vegan restaurant. “DAMMIT!” He screamed as though he had just spilled a hot blueberry cobbler on his shirt just before his job interview.

My wake up time was spent watching Glee, a show I desperately hate that I hate that I love. Glee is just a copy cat show that I think I enjoy because of how infuriatingly cookie cutter it is. And yet it rings of originality. It is a show that dares to copy so many terrible cliches that it becomes daring. Glee steals more than the hamburgler in a grade F slaughterhouse. From the whiny-teenage -confused-puppy-indignantly-lost-in-a-McDonalds-ballpit-looks stolen from HSM. To the forced transitions to song stolen from that outdated 1776 musical we watched in 5th grade public schools that tried to make history fun. To the constantly rotating love geometric shapes stolen from every teen movie that stole from Shakespeare. Everytime I watch it, I turn down the volume when the songs come on. I’m not sure if it has to do with that I don’t want to explain my non-ironic/ironic love of teenage lovescapades in song form, or if it has to do with that I don’t want them to think I am singing along to the cheesier version of songs we already hate, or if I just don’t want them to know I exist, but I don’t like it. I don’t like being embarrassed about my desires simply because they don’t conform to the gender norm, so I am going to blast Glee! Actually I’m not because hearing Finn’s annoying voice whining that loudly makes my testicles pop.

Lonely, Media, My favorites

Diaries of a Douche (Pt. 1)

It’s interesting that “Douche” now has a pretty specific definition whereas the definition of “Hipster” is as broad as people’s hatred. I can no longer agree to hate hipsters because I have no idea what that person is talking about. When they say hipster they could mean someone with ironic facial hair and women’s pants, or they could mean someone in sarcastically corporate shirt and a sense of entitlement. Or they could simply mean that person that looked at them funny on the subway and made them feel self-conscious. “Douche” or “Douchebag” on the other hand has transformed from being a blanket term for people found dislikable to being a very specific group of human scum. I like to look at scum. Here is part one of things that were written on receipts in my wallet while I was waiting for my plane watching these “Douchebags.”

He spent 25 minutes picking out the perfect shudder shades from the corner kiosk. This trip had been a week in the making and he finally had gained the courage to buy them by himself. He tried each pair on by placing the dark glass and plastic in front of his eyes eve though he knew that once they were his they would habitate the back of his head. Even though he was comfortable wearing them backwards in public, he was scared the kiosk attendant who wasn’t paying attention to him would judge him unfairly.

He picked cream green. A color he would tell his friends he picked because it reminded him of radioactivity. This would supplement the identity he had created within that group as the guy who still liked ninja turtles and always played as the alien in Halo 3. Really he picked cream green because it reminded him of the lime creamsicles his mother used to give him when he came in upset because all the other kids had picked on him during the squirt gun fight.

His mom knew that he liked lime best so she used to make him eat orange or cherry after dinner so that there was an excess of lime for when he most needed comfort.

When asked why he wore his glasses on the opposite side of his cranium than was the norm as opposed to simply perching them on top of his head when not in use he told people that it was because he didn’t wan the plastic frames to fuck up his perfectly gelled hair that nearly acted as plastic itself. This wasn’t true. When his closest friends asked him the same question, knowing that he never wore the frames correctly, he said it was because he liked the idea of having eyes in the back of his head. This wasn’t true. He didn’t know why he did it.

He wore them backwards because he saw someone do it once and thought they looked happy – in a way that he wanted to be happy. So he copied all the traits he saw in an attempt to be that happy. This resulted in him thinking he was happy because he had done all he could do to be so. He was happy.

Media, race

Stop Speaking for me Republicans!

Jon Stewart has done to death the “I’m a real american too goddamnit” speech so I’m not gonna bore you with my version, but my anger has been reignited at republicans speaking on my behalf without my consent – speaking of an imaginary populous that I don’t belong to.

A couple of things:

1. How are we determining what defines a terrorist? Is it a murderer who’s Muslim? That’s what this seems to imply. Charles Manson believed in an ideology that was counter to what the United States stood for. Charles Manson convinced a bunch of people to kill a bunch of other people. Ted Kaczynski was the same way. They were both tried in court and both were brought to justice. Nobody complained. Now, I understand that there is no legal way to demand that these people get tried in some foreign court because they aren’t foreigners, but why is what they did different than what KSM or Osama have done? Sure, Osama and KSM have killed and convinced more people than T-Kaz and Helter Skelter, but the definition of terrorist does not lie in the magnitude of effect. The shoe bomber and the panties bomber were both terrorists who had very little effect but should definitely be defined as terrorists. If Culberson (R-Texas) wants to argue that KSM is so much of a bigger deal and should therefore not be tried like an american civilian then he has a point I just happen to disagree with, but if he wants to defend as position that terrorists are different than murderers, he needs to define terrorist differently. Right now, it just comes across as terrorists are murders who read the Koran.

2. At 1:28 Culberson states without evidence that Holder has a disconnect with “where the vast majority of the American people are.” While this is a very hard question to pose to the American people because a “vast majority” of them (myself included) don’t understand the intricate differences between a civilian criminal court and a military trial, the polls still do not show a vast majority of people disagreeing with the Obama administration. I will look at three polls that were done around the time of the announcement of KSM’s trial in NYC. There are large discrepancies between the polls. Part of that is that they used sample sizes of 1,000 so their claims of 95% confidence in a +/- 3 margin of error is while mathematically right if the data is truly completely unbiased in its sampling, is far off considering the ways phone interviews automatically bias your sample by only polling people who are home with house phones. (20% of Americans now use their cell phone as their main phone and those people had a 6.5% higher leaning toward Democrats in the ’06 congressional election and an 11.5% swing toward legalizing gay marriage)1 2. Let’s also look at the wording of the questions. In one poll the group was asked to identify themselves by party affiliation then asked if they think “it would be better to hold KSM’s trial in a civilian criminal court or a military court.” 59% preferred a military court. I can also guarantee that 95% of those people had no idea what the difference was but heard the word civilian and knew that that referred to themselves and didn’t want to be that closely related to KSM. Th next poll has a long unnecessary diatribe about how KSM was probably responsible for the 9/11 attacks before asking a similar question. 64% preferred a military trial and very few people had no opinion. This angry rhetoric about KSM will definitely change the thought process when most people are unsure about their true feelings about this issue. The third poll stated: “Do you favor or oppose the decision to try the terrorist detainees linked to 9/11 in a civilian court rather than before a military tribunal?” and only 51% said they wanted a military tribunal. This question is both a very truthful phrasing and absurdly vague. Barely anyone in the American public will understand this question and so I think this poll should also be dismissed. My point is that if taking out the person’s name and instead describing his crimes can change 13% of the people’s minds, we should not be making statements about what the American people think on this issue. We don’t know what the American people think on this issue because the American people don’t really think or understand this issue – that’s what we elect you to do.

3. I am a fucking American! This is my Jon Stewartesque rant about how you can’t keep claiming that the Obama is not paying attention to Americans because he isn’t listening to Joe the Plumber and Betsy the abused housewife and Roger the kid who shoots his dog with a bee-bee gun and Anthony the guy with a confederate flag in his truck. Those are all Americans too, and by no means am I diminishing their citizenship, but I am too. Me, with my vegan food and women’s clothes and barista/art job. And I know plenty of other Americans in the same boat. Stop saying that you identify with real people because you shoot baby deer. 51% of households in America don’t have a gun and 69% of adults don’t own a gun. 3 Both numbers are, according to Representative Texas-Real-America-Hates-Muslims, a vast majority.

When you pretend your views are populist views, you are using very basic propaganda. This becomes a major problem when you begin subversively adding in your other more radical, racist views into your rhetoric – when you equate desiring a civilian criminal trial for murders whether or not they are Muslim with being terrorist sympathizers.

This picture below only vaguely relates to what I have just ranted about, but I think it is emblematic of the republican propoganda machine. It is a screen shot from a warning that only plays for 2 seconds at the beginning of a video that has over 1,000,000.

Gender, Indignant, Media, Selfish

Your Safe Space is Stupid

Okay, I get it. Despite all of my attempts and my desires, I don’t have a vagina. I get that you need a safe space to discuss issues that I’m not allowed to be a part of.

Fuck safe spaces.

I really agree with the concept of safe spaces. I create safe spaces all the time in my groups of friends where I can discuss a certain neurosis of mine with others that have that same upbringing that caused that neurosis, and I think that that has been very helpful in allowing me to understand myself.

Your fear of others is not a safe space.

I went to a college obsessed with the concept of safe spaces. Safe spaces are inherently segregatory – that’s an important part of a safe space, but segregation is dangerous when you start valuing it over integration. You lose your perspective on the world. You lose your ability to communicate with people outside of that safe space. You lose your mind.

I am far from insisting that people need to conform to society, but they need to understand the society that they are refusing to conform to. If you refuse to interact with society, you don’t know what the argument against it is.

Big conclusion: I hate society so much that I submerge myself into it. Do like me, c’mon, I’m happy.

Gender, Indignant, Media

Defending Ashley Madison

How am I supposed to feel about this?

I don’t really believe in monogamy so I already have confused feelings about adultery. Sure, lying is bad and I have never and would never cheat on a person because guilt already consumes me on a daily basis, I don’t need something else to fuel that emotion of mine. So, I’m excited about the prospect of breaking down the institution of marriage in any way possible. Especially in such a mainstream way.

This commercial in particular is creepy because of their Avatar spoof which is racist? Maybe not. Maybe it’s commenting on the fact that Avatar itself was racist (which it was). Maybe they are pointing out that our otherization of these “tribal” aliens was very based on our desire to otherize black people. That’s productive.

But I can’t support lying. I just disagree with it so vehemently that it’s hard for me to support infidelity.

That being said, the arguments for why these ads must be taken down are that these ads are ripping apart the institution of marriage. Great! The institution of marriage is fucked. We won’t let gays marry, and divorce rates are over 50%. Marriage is stupid anyway.

So, the CEO of this site agrees with me (aka: has a very healthy outlook on marriage, life, and love).

What I see as scary is the irrational hatred that we see from the audience members and some members of The View. Before they’ve listened to his point of view they have become emotionally entangled and are unwilling to listen to the very decent points he’s presenting. People need to listen. Tyra Banks has the same reaction on her show.

Scariest though is Tyra’s reaction when she condescends to saying that she “feels a heart inside of [him] that [he’s] trying to cover up right now.” He was in no way trying to cover up his heart – this statement came directly after he very honestly discussed the fact that he believes in counselling to save marriages. Tyra is creating her own dialogue which is dangerous because dialogue is a multiple person action. Dialogue cannot be internal because then you are not hearing the rest of the world and their views and then you get stuck in the racist, sexist, homophobic community we are in now.

I have often brought up that I don’t disagree with the concept of infanticide – that people should get a one year warranty on their babies. This has almost lost me a sexual relationship and made my mother say she wishes that I weren’t her son. This type of irrational emotional reaction is dangerous. Not because they are wrong – maybe life is more sacred than I think it is – but because if people don’t listen to new ideas we can’t evolve. And shouldn’t we always attempt to evolve.

I think I just created Ashley Madison’s new tagline: “Ashley Madison: Evolve into Infidelity.”

Media, race

Tyler Perry’s Hating on Tyler Perry

You are a racist. You are a racist if you hate Tyler Perry. I’m not saying this because I like Tyler Perry, in fact I haven’t watched a thing of his that I’ve enjoyed (To be fair, I haven’t seen Precious, which is a problem and I should see it and people who dislike that movie are racist too). His sitcoms are trite, obnoxious, and dull. His movies serve to ingrain gender norms in a way that is destructive to society. Medea is a stupid character. These are all valid criticisms that I agree with. That doesn’t make me hate Tyler Perry or his work. These criticisms are valid against most anybody making movies nowadays, the only reason people bring them up against Tyler Perry is because he’s Black and he puts his name on shit.

Nobody actually cares that he puts his name on shit, that’s just a made up reason so that people can feel indignant in their frustrations of not understanding African-American culture. Do we all know when a movie is produced by Judd Apatow? Sure, because it says from Apatow Productions. Or when some shitty comedy about smoking weed and doing dumb things comes out and says it’s a Happy Madison production, we know it’s made by Adam Sandler’s production team.

People like to hate on Tyler Perry’s movies because he’s Black. It’s the only reason left. You can come up with every reason you hate his crude drag, boringly simple morals, and unfunny jokes, but remember how long you ranted about Tyler Perry. Now remember how long you ranted about every other shitty sitcom that existed. Remember how long you ranted about every other Jennifer Aniston movie. You can pretend that it’s because you think Tyler Perry has a larger fanbase, but that’s incorrect. House of Payne had 1/3 the viewership of either Big Bang Theory or Two and a Half Men. Marley and Me made nearly 3 times the domestic gross as I Can Do Bad All By Myself. These are all movies and TV shows that I don’t like, and I don’t mind if you don’t like them either, but stop ranting against Tyler Perry until you start ranting against Gerard Butler and Charlie Sheen. They just seem harmless, right? But the Black man seems harmful? You look like a racist now, don’t you?

Cus you are.

Media, Socialism

Statistics, Lies, and Videotape

I wanted to major in statistics since I was in 4th grade. There’s something that’s always been fascinating to me about breaking down supposedly complicated questions and topics into neat little numbers. It’s made me hate when people say that statistics lie. No. Statistics don’t lie. People lie. This is basically the same argument as guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Of course I believe in gun control. That’s why I believe in statistics control. There is obviously one big difference – nobody’s kids accidentally get a hold of their parents’ statistics and blow their neighbor’s head off.

Statistics should be used freely by our world, but I think that any time someone wants to post a statistic, they should have to go through a rigorous moral background check that checks if they are a liar. Just like if you want to buy a gun you have to go through a check to make sure you aren’t a murderer. I think you should have the opportunity to lose your ability to provide statistics by lying too much.

One of those people that shouldn’t be allowed to use statistics to “prove” their point is my most youtubed man: Glenn Beck.

At 5:07 Beck shows a chart supposedly proving that Obama has increased spending far more than FDR did – you know the guy that went crazy with spending. Obama plans on spending between 22.8% and 25.4% of our gdp, which is actually the least since the late 60s. And is consistently less than during the Reagan years.

The gradually increasing rate of spending as proportional to our GDP isn’t far too complicated a concept for G.beck, he’s just a liar. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s creating fear by misusing our greatest resource: Statistics. He’s not misusing it. He’s lying.

Here’s statistics used well.

Gender, Indignant, Media, My favorites, Socialism

Super Bowl of Shit

Capitalism breeds sexism. Capitalism is the art of finding a way to tell somebody that they need something and then selling that thing for a price. What is an easy way to tell somebody that they need something? By telling them that people like them need it therefore they need it. Humans will inevitably relate to humans that look like them because sight is the strongest of our 5 senses so Capitalism tries to sell to you by putting people that look like you on screen and having them like the thing they are pitching. Therefore: Men like men things, women like women things. Really capitalism breeds binaries. And not the fun ones in the computer. Racial, gender, sexuality, etc. These binaries tell you that if you are one thing you also relate to a whole host of other things, and you can’t blame the companies for buying into these binaries because it’s good for business – if you can convince every man that he needs to drink Bud light to be a man then you sell a lot of beer.

Here we bunch together the idea that if you are a man, you must like bud light, and then for good measure we also tell you that you can’t like books and you really like boobs. There are about 16 commercials for every half hour of television so no matter how problematic a tv show might be, you aren’t forcefed it as often as commercials.

And here we get a laundry list of roles that we are supposed to abide by as men in a relationship so that we may in turn get the thing that we are supposed to want most as a man – their product. These are all super bowl ads. This is the day where capitalism reigns supreme and capitalism knows the demographic that is watching most heavily.

So then you say; “but if the demographic is already watching, aren’t they just continuing these binaries you hate so much as opposed to creating the.” You say that because you are stupid and no nothing of how humans work. Here we are even told what TV to watch as men so that next time you tune to that channel it’ll be easier for the advertisers to target their audience. It’s cyclical. Capitalism tells us what shows to watch and then advertises our products on those shows and then tells us to keep watching those shows within those advertisements.

So, how dangerous is this system? It’s just what we buy, right? If you were asking those questions, you are still stupid and you still smell like farting pubic hair. What happens next is that the people that own these tv channels get to become propaganda machines spewing out their opinions to specific demographics of people.

Capitalism is freedom? No. Capitalism is the act of creating dictators out of wealthy people.

Attention Whoring, Death, Gender, Indignant, Lazy, Media

Cleaning My Room Will be the Death of Me

Here’s what I have to do today:

1. Get my laundry out of the dryer.

2. Clean my room. And I mean clean it. I’m gonna scrub the fucker down and get whatever that smell is out of here since I can’t just air it out because of my lack of window.

3. Eat, shower, brush teeth, be human.

4. Call a prospective client.

5. Go watch Up in the Air and have sex.

Here’s what I have done today:

1. Watched Lost.

2. Watched Movie Previews on apple trailers.

(Note: The links are important to the narrative of this entry)

I just can’t get myself out of bed because all these things that I supposedly need to do are strenuous and I don’t know which one to do first. I just want to call my parents and tell them to clean my room to make up for the fact that I wouldn’t let them clean it when I was a teenager. If they clean than I can eat and do the other chores I don’t mind doing. But if I do those than I’ll only have cleaning left and nothing to look forward to. I can’t wait until I’m a famous person and I don’t have to deal with turning to my family in times of need. Maybe I can make this blog into a movie – except no one would watch a simple one trick pony turned into a feature length film.

I fear the fact that I probably won’t leave behind a legacy that affects millions. So no matter what happens I will write a memoir that I will publish near the end of my life. Maybe after death I can become famous. At least I can comfort myself with that thought on my deathbed. It’ll be a story of how our world is full of pretentious fucks who claim a deeper understanding of things instead of the truth, which is that they hate poor people. It’ll be about how people judge each other based on the easiest qualifiers instead of taking the time to understand how to judge people quickly based on deeper qualifiers. My search for fame is simply a desire to be seen by all, a desire to be the ultimate socialist commodity – something that everyone gets an opportunity to view and explore, and yet I am judged to be simply another whiny, effeminate, skinny Jew who is following the path of every other person that looks like him and trying to turn his ability to point out his own flaws into a humorous rise to fame.

There have been so many people in existence that for your path to not follow someone else’s to some extent is impossible. The key is not to try. The key is not to fall into every single cliche of your time period. That is the key to timelessness. If one does the things they love, then one is bound to followed by people that love that same thing because, as I said before, statistically someone else loves that too.

Which, again, is why I don’t believe in one true love. You probably love someone else more, and someone else probably loves that person more than you. So we should give up the competition for love that is jealousy and all be scared of commitment. Commitment is only good in that it leads to little kids that can carry on your legacy. But what if you fuck up and your kid is weird and won’t be an exact clone of you?

My point is that we all want to be remembered forever, and that to be cliche and to follow others is to doom yourself to an existence that goes forgotten (and is extremely boringly sexist). Striving for the undying attention of others isn’t selfish, but rather human nature, and once we embrace that desire for fame after death we can live contentedly as opposed to chasing an unknown entity.

Let’s just stop fighting. It’s too cliched and it brings on death before we are able to me immortal.

Now I have to go watch a movie so that I get ideas of what to do with my life that doesn’t involve cleaning my room.

Attention Whoring, Gender, Hungry, Indignant, Lazy, Media, My favorites, Selfish

Type Ayudame into FreeTranslation.com

Our world is transforming through technology. Okay, I’ll wait a second while that uber profound statement sets in. I know it’s taking a while because no one has ever said anything like it before. I’m still waiting because I think you are still flabbergasted by my extreme assertion. I now am going to continue to wait to see how much I can make you read while I think of how I am going to relate this to feminism and possibly socialism.

Got it!

Sure. I also hate douchebags who beat women, but creating a facebook group about it puts that opinion on the same level as this one. Both could even be true. You might have been scared by “Are You Afraid of the Dark” and dislike domestic abuse, but I would never talk about both of those opinions in the same sentence.

I understand that it makes me sound like an old person clinging to my fear of change if I say that facebook groups, or MySpace petitions, or Twit-complaints trivialize issues that need to be dealt with in a more traditional way so instead I will say that the gentrification of these casual internet sites into supposedly meaningful expressions of belief just offers its users the ability to feel self-righteous without accomplishing anything worthwhile.

I’m sure there are people who join the facebook group to save Darfur who are also holding fundraisers, but there are plenty who are not. That’s not necessarily harmful – in fact it’s completely neutral and I’m fine with that. If facebook didn’t exist those people would be just as harmless and harmful. They would simply discuss it in person and do nothing about it. No big deal. Not the worst thing in the world. The problem comes in that facebook offers these people with a tangible piece of evidence to call on when their morality is questioned. I don’t mean that there is a group of morality police running around questioning the validity of each person’s indignant opinions in terms of how much they actually try to help the problem they discuss, but rather that when that person’s conscience acts as the morality police they need to know exactly how much good they are doing for the world.

You don’t become a feminist because you joined a facebook group declaring that you “Hate douchebags who beat women” especially when the group description uses the problematic word “pussy” to describe the offenders, and you aren’t helping the situation in Haiti by joining a group that states that “Haiti makes me : (.”

Last night I got the maddest I’ve gotten in years when I brought back my steaming hot bowl of Annie’s Mac’n’Cheese from the kitchen and immediately tripped and dumped the entire bowl onto my laptop. I swore like a pirate who found out his half finished bottle of rum had actually been AIDS-juice. This was because my two biggest loves of my life: Food and My Computer had attacked each other and made each other less useful. The white gloss of cheese across my keyboard and the dirty macaroni that is settling my stomach serve to remind me of the most traumatic experience of my past year. I say this because I am well aware that this is not the biggest deal in the world, but to me it was.

I don’t have the money or time to help out the horrible situation in Haiti, or Darfur, or Afghanistan, or any number of other disturbing things that happen in our world. I only have the money to go back to Minnesota come early March to visit my friends and see my old sketch group’s comedy show. Fuck, I’m selfish, but at least I don’t fake selflessness. Technology has allowed us to do this and I hate indignant rants on the internet that don’t do anything or effect anybody except allowing the ranter to feel better about themselves.

Wow. I feel much better now.

Nisse Greenberg

Category Archives: Media