Rise of My Practically Inevitable Disappointment

I was probably more excited than I should have been to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Well, “excited” probably isn’t the right word. I was, by turns, energized and terrified, and these two emotions sort of slurried together into an affective stew that produced something akin to excitement. I love the original series. They are edgy and smart and were way ahead of their time. Much like George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Planet of the Apes engaged in scathing cultural critique in a decade everybody nowadays glibly associates with disco. I’m also in the camp of people who hated Tim Burton’s 2001 remake with Helena Bonham Carter and Mark Wahlberg. Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes attempts a re-boot in a way that seems in some sense more sincere than Burton’s fiasco. Rather than just splashing around in the world of the original films and not finding anything coherent to say about it, Wyatt re-envisions the story in a way that could be bold and devastating but manages to be neither.

Stupid Man Says Stupid Thing That Smarter Man Actually Does

From the Des Moines Register :

“Discussing controversial classroom subjects such as evolution and global warming, Santorum said he has suggested that “science should get out of politics” and he is opposed to teaching that provides a “politically correct perspective.”

Regrettably, this is just a stupider way of talking about policy that the Obama administration already practices.

The Culture of White People

[This is a guest post contributed by our friend Jessica, a Brooklyn lawyer and writer who also posts at The Best Book Ever.]

At my first newspaper job, about ten years ago, we received a tip that someone who worked at a local public school had sexually abused a young boy. The details were sketchy and impossible to confirm. My first thought was, what if this is true and we ignore it? The first thought of my editor, on whole a really great boss and a really great guy, was, what if this man is accused of this horrible thing and has to try to clear his name? I learned an important lesson that day, which is that, by and large, when confronted with an accusation of rape, a woman will think, “what if that happened to me or my child?” whereas a man will think “what if someone called me a rapist?” For some men, fatherhood or the experience of knowing someone who was victimized will change that, but for the most part it is almost always true.

So what happens when people who can only identify with victimizers, and not with victims, are unilaterally in charge? Then we get the Catholic Church. Or Penn State University’s football program. By now, it should be time to acknowledge that while child sex abuse may be committed by one bad apple, there’s something systemically wrong with a culture that allows it to go on. If it were just the bad judgment of one supervisor here or there, it would not be an epidemic, which seems to be what we have on our hands. What that is, I think, is that we have not only institutions that can only understand potential victimizers, not potential victims, but that we also have a larger culture that says everything is fine, the world is a great place, and anyone who says otherwise is just a complainer, a feminazi, “playing the race card,” or some other type of hypochondriac or scorer of political points. That culture can best be called the culture of white people.

Why We Fight

60 Minutes* aired a piece by CBS News anchor Scott Pelley tonight that clearly looked like it was rushed to air as a favor to to Ray Kelly and the NYPD, almost certainly wanting to put a face of strength and righteousness on the department as a response to a damning series by the Associated Press on profiling and potentially-illegal CIA overreach.

From the AP:

New Media Translation: Part 1 of a Series

Netflix on why it removed the part of your Instant Queue that showed all the titles you had in your queue, but were no longer available:

We stopped showing titles that were at one point available for streaming. We did not delete those titles; we merely stopped showing them on the instant Queue page until we know exactly when they’ll again be there to watch instantly. When we know that a title will be available again it will reappear in the saved section, and once it is available it will move back into the instant Queue, with a Play button.

Why did we do this? We heard from our members that the list of unavailable titles complicates use of the instant Queue. And given the dynamic nature of our catalog that list can get long over time. So this change is intended to make the instant Queue easier to manage – by removing the inactive titles. Rest assured that we did not delete any of the title you have added to the instant Queue.

What this really means: