Water break

Getting hot in here. Man listen, I just wanna see Mike hit that lean shit. I have no idea how cats were comparing his skills to Usher. Or even Hammer. Mike is king.


UPDATE: Better still...

UPDATE #2: This vid was sent to me by reader Dominic Bearfield. Thanks for looking out.

Spoiler Test

Just noticed someone was pissed about me revealing a plot point in The Wire. When is it safe to talk about a show in its entirety?

Understanding the black anti-gay marriage sentiment

UPDATE: I didn't think I had to do this, given how much I've been writing about this issue, but judging from comments I do. I obviously totally disagree with the comment itself. I've said as much many, many times. But just so no one is confused, I'm not defending the comment and the point isn't to justify homophobia. I'm digging for the root of the weed, so it can be yanked out. That doesn't mean I like weeds. Heh or even black people for that matter. Yes I know. That was just wrong.

UPDATE #2: Bolded for emphasis. Hopefully it clarifies things some.

UPDATE #3: Closing comments. This isn't going anywhere. Part of that is probably the tenor of my post. I don't know. I think, on this blog, the whole subject could use a lengthy time-out.

I wanted to pull the following comment out because I think it says a lot. It comes from the Hank Johnson/John Lewis thread below:

I do not approach this topic from a religious standpoint but as one of the Black Yes on 8 voters from LA County I simply disagree with everyone here....

People make the argument that a stable gay relationship is just as good as a stable heterosexual one. I can see that argument. However...

I think children growing up in a gay household is as harmful to their sensibilities (i.e. - thinking that it is acceptable and normal) as children growing up in a household where the parents are swingers or the hetero parent has a different man or woman in their bed every week.

Courts take away parental rights for that kind of behavior... But we are supposed to think that children growing up in a gay household is ok?

Black people know first hand how dysfunctional family units can destroy a community. If we redefine marriage as being between essentially between anyone and anyone, what further damage do we want to do to an institution already on the decline in this country?

I have repeatedly argued against the whole "the blacks stabbed us in the back" narrative. Like buying a present because you want one in return, I find it narcissistic and dishonorable. But more than that I find that it is logic hinged on a kind of quasi-racism, which does not so much see black people as human, which does not see them as one my see the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the white Southerners, the evangelicals, but as one sees an android programmed by simply by two buttons labeled "Oppression" and "Righteousness."

I shouldn't make this about race, because truly the same shit is at work with people who lampoon poor whites for voting "against their interest." Nevertheless, here is the thing. People who tend not to have actual conversations with black people, think that most black folks thing having kids out of wedlock is cool. Like we have rallies and shit celebrating the latest mother on welfare who's had her tenth kid. What they don't understand is the intense, intense shame and insecurity black people feel, a sense that history has robbed us--and that we now rob ourselves--of some essential part of the American Dream. That being the ability to marry someone and raise some kids, and then be around other people doing the same.

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The politics of The Wire (again)

Here's Ross and Jonah Goldberg talking sensibly about The Wire. Goldberg makes a solid argument for a conservative reading of the show, though sentences like this strike me as sloppy:

To the extent many liberals try to explain all of the problems of poor blacks on racism, the show was a powerful rebuttal.

I just get nervous when I read absolutes like "all of the problems." Bloggers would make for poor screenwriters. Ross rightly notes that Simon is, essentially, a liberal. But the point I like, made by both of them, is The Wire generally avoided propaganda. It was so focused on story-telling, and digging deep into character. From Ross:

t's a testament to the genius of the show that its depiction of Baltimore (and by extension, America) offers fodder for liberal, conservative, leftist and libertarian readings - much like reality itself! In this sense, The Wire is the rarest and most precious of beasts: A work of art that's intensely political but rarely devolves into agitprop.

I thought this was less true in Season Five, when a clear ideology did emerge, but it wasn't left or right. The ideology was nihilism. Now, nihilism was always at work in The Wire, but at the end, I felt like it just became too much. It felt like a desire to show futility of systems became the author of plot, not character. I thought that the press angle was poorly done--and saying "Yeah well it's reporters who are objecting" is a weak, ad-hominem defense.

I thought the serial killer turn--particularly the way Freeman embraced it--was hastily executed. I most disliked the ease with which Marlo took over the city's drug trade. I even hated the manner of Omar's death--not that he was killed by Kinard, but that he was basically brought back into the plot, simply to be killed. He really served no major plot point. It all felt deeply cynical.

Anyway, before I throw this to comments, a bit of essential concern-trolling Let me apologize to the vast majority of my commenters, but experience has taught me to handle this in advance. I know there are certain readers here who nurse a visceral dislike for Goldberg and Douthat. That's fine. But I will delete any personal flames, which have nothing to do with The Wire, directed at either of them. "Suchandsuch is right-wing prick who has blood on his hands because of blahblahblah," may be entirely true. I guess it's not that I disagree. It's that, for purposes of this thread, I just don't care. There may be people who find such trenchant insight interesting to read. But I'm not one of them. Plus it's off topic.

Carry on.

The bogus "Clinton people" narrative

I wrote some pretty harsh things about the Clintons during the primary, most of which I stand by. But, I always thought it was true that there is a particular sort of political animal, whose habitat spans the political range, that is just utterly infuriated by the Clintons, and wants them to fall of the face of the earth. One way people vent their prejudice is they find the most polarizing member of a group, and they hurl all the worse sort of venom at them. So things a white guy might never say about blacks, in the form of Barack Obama, they say about Pacman Jones. And things a man would never say about, say...damn my analogy broke down--men will say fucked-up shit about any woman, in my experience.

Anyway my point is that a particular brand of white male was utterly repelled by Hillary, and to an extenet Bill, in a manner which I never understood. I thought Ricky Ray Rector was slimy. I thought Sista Souljah was cowardly. I thought Hillary's inability to say "I was wrong" was an act of extraordinary political and moral weakness--the kind we'd just been treated to for eight years. That is possibly indefinsibly harsh. Maybe that would have been suicide for a woman. Maybe John Edwards had wiggle-room that she just didn't.

Meh I'm rambling again. My real point is that I don't get people who are utterly incensed by the fact that many of Obama's appointments have ties to the Clintons. By that line of thinking, we should have been pissed that Susan Rice was always on television during the campaign. Hendrik Hertzberg brings us some historical perspective:

What is a "Clinton person"? Apparently, it's any Democrat under about fifty or fifty-five years of age who has had work experience in the executive branch of the federal government.

The theory seems to be that a "Clinton person" would be inclined, at best, to reproduce the policies and actions of the Clinton Administration, including the accompanying mistakes, or, at worst, to serve the interests of "the Clintons" should they prove divergent from those of the Obama Administration and the nation.

This is the sort of reasoning that led to needless unhappiness the last two times Democrats were in power. Jimmy Carter's circle regarded Johnson, who mired the nation in Vietnam and then handed the White House to Nixon, as a failure. They weren't about to have any "Johnson people" in their White House. Clinton's circle regarded Carter, who allowed himself to be paralyzed by a few hundred Iranian "students" and then handed the White House to Reagan, as a failure. They weren't about to have any "Carter people" in their White House.

It didn't seem to occur to either crowd, Carter's or Clinton's, that old hands, far from being eager to repeat the errors of the Administrations of which they had been a part, would be especially keen to avoid them. Also, they would know in detail what those errors were.

MORE

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A good way to fight black homophobia...

...is to refer to black people as "the most homophobic racial group in America." Expect this to be about as effective as Barack Obama campaigning in the South and calling it "the most racist region of the country." It'd be true in the most reductive sense. Meanwhile the actual story on this isn't so reductive.

Among the conclusions--58 percent of all Dems think it's acceptable to have a baby outside of marriage, but only 39 percent of black Dems think so. 51 percent of all Dems think abortion is morally acceptable, only 37 percent of black Dems think so. 64 percent of Dems think sex between unmarried is acceptable, but only 40 percent of blacks do. 57 percent of all Dems think the death penalty is morally acceptable. Only 47 percent of blacks agree. What are you seeing here? Here's a hint--76 percent of all black dems attend church weekly, as compared with only 50 percent of nonblack Dems. Black Dems are actually more church-going than Republicans.

A zealous religiosity doesn't explain it all, but it explains a lot. More on that explanation later today.

Now here's something interesting...

By now, most of you have seen this story on Barack Obama's grandfather, which notes he was savagely tortured by British thugs during the fight for Kenyan independence:

Hussein Onyango Obama, Mr Obama's paternal grandfather, became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after the war. He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.

"The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed," said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango's third wife, the woman Mr Obama refers to as "Granny Sarah".

Mrs Onyango, 87, described how "white soldiers" visited the prison every two or three days to carry out "disciplinary action" on the inmates suspected of subversive activities.

"He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down," she said The alleged torture was said to have left Mr Onyango permanently scarred, and bitterly antiBritish. "That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies," Mrs Onyango said. "My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained."

Brutal stuff. And yet the subhed for the story reads:

The President-elect's relatives have told how the family was a victim of the Mau Mau revolt.

Yes, yes. If those Kenyans hadn't decided to fight for self-rule, we wouldn't have had to torture them. Seriously, I'm sure it was a mistake. If a weird one.

Obama's drug czar

Don't even know why we have a effin drug czar, but this bears watching. A recovering addict weights in.

Brooklyn we go hard...

I'm happier for Santogold than Jay--dunno if I'm feeling the flow. What do we think?

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And while we're talking football...

Skins fans need to chill. Seriously. The impulse to dump your QB because a few games went bad is one of the silliest in modern sports. The only thing that comes closer is the impulse to fire a coach for not winning the Super Bowl. People always complained about Marty Schottenheimer. But I don't know a single team--excepting the Skins--that was better off after he left.