Entertainment & Sports: January 2006 Archives

I enjoy the first phase of the American Idol season as much as the next guy, and anyone who's seen it knows that the main attractions are the freakish, untalented losers who parade themselves in front of the judges and the cameras because they either think they can actually sing or because they just want the publicity. Either way, it's funny because we're laughing at them, not with them, because they're freaks. So it's pretty disingenuous for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to get their panties in a wad when sexually ambiguous freaks are made fun of along with everyone else.

Bosses at America's leading gay rights group are demanding a summit meeting with the producers of TV talent show AMERICAN IDOL after claiming the programme is "increasingly homophobic".

Officials at the Gay And Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) were appalled by homophobic remarks made by judges SIMON COWELL and RANDY JACKSON on the first show of the new season, which aired in America on Tuesday (17JAN06).

On the programme, Brit Cowell told one effeminate wannabe to "shave off your beard and wear a dress," while Jackson asked another audition hopeful, "Are you a girl?" Both contestants were rejected.

I saw the show, and they were rejected because they were terrible singers. The whole point of the show is to mock untalented people, and these wannabes knew that and went on anyway. So it goes. In addition to mocking for lack of talent, the judges also routinely mock people for being fat, ugly, having no style, or whatever the case may be. As for the "Are you a girl?" person, the question was entirely justified because he/she was wearing female clothes, was built like a breastless girl, but kept referring to himself/herself as a male. He/she wasn't mocked for being gay (if he/she even was gay), he/she was mocked because of his/her appearance and mannerisms. There are plenty of gay people (even most gay people, for all I know) who are not freaks.

Anyway, the point is simple: if you want to be "edgy" and "nonconformist" then go ahead, but don't expect us not to make fun of you for it. The whole point of "civilization" is to enable people to work together towards a common goal, and when you purposefully choose not to conform then civilization will rightly ostracize you for that choice. Not because we hate you or want to hurt you, but because you're disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. Most freaks are disruptive on purpose, so they shouldn't be surprised when they're socially punished for it. (Socially, not violently or with malice, except perhaps in extreme circumstances like the KKK or something.)

Unwilling freaks are an entirely different matter and shouldn't properly be classified as "freaks" in the same group with those mentioned above. Those who want to get along but can't because of physical or mental differences obviously need to be treated totally differently from those who are freaks by choice.

Mark Steyn, columnist to the Anglosphere, sums up my thoughts about recent Hollywood movies quite well:

If you’re making ten straight cowboy movies, a gay one’s neither here nor there. Similarly, if you’ve made ten movies in which Jake Gyllenhaal or Heath Ledger kick terrorist butt from here to Peshawar, there’s plenty of room for a contrarian take in which it turns out to be the stewardesses who pulled off 9/11. But, in a conflict that’s already lasted longer than America’s participation in World War Two, Hollywood still can’t bring itself to make a film in which America’s heroes whump America’s enemies. That’s just lousy business sense.

And so, after spending my college years in a theater several times a month, I now rarely go to see a movie because there are rarely movies I'm interested in seeing.

Oh, what the heck... Mr. Steyn also has a great few paragraphs farther down the page about what strange bedfellows the enemies of America make:

Ever since September 11th, there’s been a grand harmonic convergence of all the world’s loser ideologies, from Islamic fundamentalism to Gallic condescension. By rights, a coalition that embraces hardline British socialists, American white supremacists, sophisticated European secularists, neanderthal European fascists, misogynist Muslim theocrats, militant gay Canadians (really – he’s a guy called Svend Robinson, who for years has been the gay mascot of the Palestinian Authority), by rights this crowd should be as fractious as a Thanksgiving reunion at the Assad home, with Bashar, the uncle who tried to topple his dad, the uncle who had his brother murdered, etc. But apparently they all get along swimmingly.

As you know, because the media parrot it incessantly, there were no links between al-Qa’eda and Saddam, because he’s a scrupulously secular Baathist and they’re fundamentalist Islamists. Good thing those pro-gay pro-feminist Eurolefties making common cause with honor-killing sodomite-beheaders don’t demand the same level of intellectual coherence from their own coalition as they do from the terrorists. Does George Galloway feel even a wee bit squeamish that his speeches are indistinguishable from David Duke?

Such lliances betray the real values of these various groups of losers. Despite how some may pose for freedom, they're all quick to stand against the world's brightest beacon of liberty in modern times: America.

The season premier episode, "Infected", of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit was possibly the most moronic and insulting piece of television that I've ever seen. In brief: a young boy (Walt from Lost) witnesses his prostitute mother get killed by one of her johns. The detectives find him hiding in the closet and take him to the police station, where he later incorrectly identifies the killer in a voice line-up. However, he later sees the defense lawyer walking out of the station with a guy he recognizes from a charity who used to help his mom, and he concludes (rightly) that this man was the killer. So the boy feels responsible for letting his mom's killer go free, leaves the police station, gets a gun, and goes and kills the guy. So far: no problem. It's simple revenge, right? It's regrettable that a young teenager has to go to jail for a while, but we all expect the DA will cut him a deal and he'll be out in 10 - 15 years for murder-one. Reasonable.

But no. The defense lawyer presents some ridiculous argument that the boy isn't at fault, the gun itself is at fault. The boy has witnessed so much gun violence that he can't help but use a gun to kill his mom's murderer. I'm not sure how this is different from "revenge", but apparently it is because the argument convinces the ADA that the boy isn't at fault and offers him a sweet plea bargain. Then a lawyer from the "American Gun Association" shows up to try to stop the plea deal because he doesn't want anything on record showing that, in the words of the defense attorney, "the actual gun itself is to blame for the death, not the person who held it".

At this point everything in the episode it completely ridiculous, but it gets worse. The AGA lawyer gets an injunction preventing the criminal court judge from accepting the plea deal. Is this possible? Who knows. But the AGA lawyer wants to establish in civil court that the boy killed out of revenge, not "gun disease" (hence the title of the episode, "Infected"). So a civil judge hauls the defense lawyer, the ADA, and the criminal court judge into his courtroom and the AGA lawyer questions the boy until he admits that he killed his mom's killer because he hated her. At which point the criminal judge, the ADA and the defense lawyer conspire together to turn this confession into a mistrial so that the boy won't be convicted of murder.

Anyway, that was probably confusing and hard to follow, but so was the episode. The central principle, that the defense attorney had a "scientific study" proving that gun violence is a "disease" and that killers are no more to blame than people who catch colds, is uttery insulting to any viewer's intelligence and betrays a complete lack of sophistication on the part of the show's creators and writers. Even the most cursory review of human history will make it clear that people have been killing each other for thousands of years, and the level of violence in America where we have the Second Amendment is abnormally, incomprehensibly low compared to historical norms... not least because our own government kills very few of us compared to governments throughout history. People killed each other with stones, spears, swords, and now guns. But the inanimate objects aren't to blame; there's nothing magical about guns. It's just unbelievably retarded.

What's more, every bad guy in the show was a white male. The charity worker was a white male, and he turned out to be a "sex addict", child molester, and muderer. The AGA lawyer was a white male, and he made the poor boy cry on the witness stand and was portrayed as speechless in the face of facile, shallow arguments about "gun disease". The civil judge who disrupted the criminal trial with the injunction was a white male. All the good people were minorities or women, like the ADA, the defense attorney, and the criminal court judge who conspired to bring about the mistrial on spurious grounds so that the boy who murdered his mother's murderer could go free. The "scientist" who testified about the "gun disease" study was black.

To top it off, I tried to email the show to express my disappointment and the email address provided isn't even any good! So I decided to write it all out here in the hope that someone from the show will find it. If anyone can determine who wrote this episode please post their name in the comments.