Shock and aww.

[elfs]

I am shocked, shocked! to discover that a Republican Congresscritter, North Carolina 11th District Rep. Charles Taylor, has been implicated in fraudulent loan deals. Apparently, a big question is whether or not the Republican administration tried to kibosh a federal investigation of the matter.

MSNBC, in turn, was shocked, shocked! to discover that they'd hired a homophobic bigot who told a gay caller "I hope you get AIDS and die." Apparently they had no idea that Michael Savage routinely used racist language and anti-gay epithets to generate an audience.

Racist and ridiculous: The Media Action Network for Asian Americans has decried the casting of John Cleese as Lucy Liu's father in the latest Charlie's Angels flick, describing Miss Liu as "so obviously... a full-blood Asian" that portraying her as half-white was, in their words, "hurtful... to Asians."

A Russian officer has been stripped of command and rank for beating his soldiers with a dildo. Apparently the charge of abuse came to light when a soldier deserted after one of the beatings. The, um, unit was described as a "black latex baton." Hey, I own one of those!

Sean Thomas writes in The American Spectator about his addiction to internet porn. While it contains the usual mealy-mouthed "we're liberals so of course we would never call for censorship, but by Gods lock up your sons and daughters!" attitude, I have to confess to amusement. I don't know what's more amusing: his £150 a quarter bill ballooning to £600 (according to this, I spend £60 or so per quarter for all of my Internet access), or that he misspelled Bunko Kanazawa's name, or that I know who Bunko Kanazawa is (warning: link is probably not work safe and may contain zillions of popups) [edit: the link contains swimsuit-type photos, none of which show the slight overbite and bee-sting lips that made her popular, and one annoying popup].

Comments

[wendor.livejournal.com]

It doesn't surprise me at all that you know who Bunko Kanazawa is. (I'd have been surprised if you didn't)

Though, for some reason, I would have guessed you to be more of a Mai Hagiwara fan instead.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I'll have to head home and check my, um, "database", yeah, that's what it's called, but if memory serves me right (tm Kaga Takeshi) and she is who comes to mind, I think she's a bit scrawny for my taste. But I'll check that "database."

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

And Bunko isn't scrawny?

("Or so I've heard!")

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Not that I've noticed! :-) I looked up Miss Hagiwara and she's pretty enough-- shockingly clear eyes. But I think I'll appreciate my original Japanese attractions-- Kanazawa and Ai Iijima (now there's a name out of Jporn history).

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Whoa, Ai Iijima. God, the hours I wasted in college trying to download her stuff over a 56k internet link from some FSP server in god-knows-where.

I see a great need for the term 'pornostalgia' to be coined.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Okay, confession time. I got my first Internet job in late 1993 working phone support for Spry. Three weeks into the job, someone from the hosting service upstairs came down and said, "Does anyone here know perl?"

I raised my hand and got the job. Now, the interesting detail is that I had taught myself perl because my GAWK script for ripping uuencoded usenet, um, binaries was too slow and hard to maintain. So Usenet porn started my career.

An inversion of values

[(Anonymous)]

It's all relative. Clinton faced impeachment for having extramarital sex and lying about it. Bush jr. faces re-election for starting a war and lying about the chemical and nuclear weapons development that would have justified it if it had been there at all. (Oh, I'm sorry - "Technically I did not have a war" because there was no formal declaration of war.)
So now there's a lot of noise about some politician making racist, homophobic or other remarks to display his/her extreme shortsightedness.

I see a pattern here. Maybe even a new Law Of Politics: the amount of moral outrage is inversely proportional to the actual gravity of the transgressions (for lack of a better word) under scrutiny.

// Frank van Wensveen
// Rotterdam, Netherlands

Re: An inversion of values

[wendor.livejournal.com]

I think you may be a bit confused.....Elf's post referred to a politician implicated in fraudulent loan deals.....and a radio talk show host who makes racist and homophobic remarks.

Nothing about a politician making racist or homophobic remarks.