Backup Brain

After her bigoted anti-gay diatribe produced a backlash she didn’t expect, Michelle Shocked thinks she’s the victim. It’s a typical cycle for right-wingers and reactionaries: they spew hate speech, they receive pushback, then they whine about how they are being so terribly repressed. Color me unimpressed.

Michelle Shocked staged a sit in outside a Santa Cruz nightclub that canceled her show because she made an anti-gay slur at a San Francisco club earlier this month.

The tape across her mouth said “Silenced By Fear.”

What a crock. The message on that piece of tape indicates she believes that people are afraid of her message, and so she’s been censored. But club owners didn’t cancel her shows because they were scared of what she believes; the show were cancelled because people are disgusted by her fundamentalist religious beliefs. I listened to the tape of her SF show that started this; she was clear she believes that homosexuality will bring on the end of the world. That’s nutty and bigoted.

She hasn’t been silenced at all. She can still speak. This is what freedom of speech is all about; you have the right and ability to speak, and other people have the right and ability to be repulsed by what you say and not give you their money anymore. Actions have consequences. Artists have the opportunity to find an audience, and have an equal opportunity to drive that audience away. Nobody has a right to keep being paid when they alienate their audience.

Singer Michelle Shocked sits in at canceled Moe’s Alley show

Welcome to the twelfth annual Oscar™ blogging!

Multiple Oscar winners:

• Life of Pi: 4
• Argo: 3
• Les Misérables: 3
• Django Unchained: 2
• Lincoln: 2

For those who are unfamiliar with me doing this, you can find previous year’s Oscarblogging at:

• 2002
• 2003
• 2004
• 2005
• 2006
• 2007
• 2008
• 2009
• 2010
• 2011
• 2012

Updates will be (mostly) placed at the end, so scroll down.

I think that Seth MacFarlane is wicked talented, so I’ve been looking forward to him as host. His opening bits range from the ridiculous (anything with Captain Kirk) to the sublime (soft shoe with Daniel Radcliffe and Joseph Gordon-Leavitt).

The awards start off with Best Supporting Actor, with the Oscar going to Christoph Waltz for Django Unchained. Not quite who I would have picked, but he’s an intense actor.

Paul Rudd and Melissa McCarthy come out to give the award for Best Animated Short Film. Their bits together fall flat, and it’s a relief when they get to the nominees. The award goes to John Kahrs for Paperman. Tom exclaims about how they appear to have the nominees for the lesser awards in a box near the stage so that they don’t have to run up from the nosebleed seats. Next up is the Best Animated Film, and I’m expecting it to go to Pixar as usual—Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman for Brave. Huzzah for kilts!

Reese Witherspoon (in a so-so dress) introduces a few of the best picture nominees: Les Misérables, Life of Pi, and Beasts of the Southern Wild.

The guys from The Avengers come out to give the award for Best Cinematography. It goes to Claudio Miranda for Life of Pi, and Tom complains about the choice—given that most of the movie was CGI, why is he getting an award for lighting done by the computer artists? Next up is Best Visual Effects, again to Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer and Donald R. Elliott for Life of Pi.

Wow, they’re vicious this year about cutting people off when their time is up. Playing the theme from Jaws is a little over the top.

Channing Tatum and Jennifer Aniston give the award for Best Costumn Design to Jacqueline Durran for Anna Karenina. I’m surprised; I thought this might go to Les Misérables. The award for Best Makeup and Hair goes to Lisa Westcott and Julie Dartnell for Les Misérables; no surprise there, as it has to be hard work to make Anne Hathaway look that bad.

Halle Berry comes out to celebrate fifty years of James Bond. A montage of film clips are shown, which (to my surprise) got all the Bonds, including Lazenby and Dalton. Shirley Bassey comes out to sing “Goldfinger” and gets a standing ovation.

Kerrie Washington and Jamie Foxx come out to give the award for Best Live Action Short Film, which goes to Shawn Christensen for Curfew. The Best Documentary Short Subject award goes to Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine for Inocente.

Liam Neeson introduces further Best Picture nominees. Sadly, he’s wearing a tie, not a bow tie. Is it too much to ask that gentlemen wear a proper tuxedo? He presents Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty.

“The actor who really got inside Lincoln’s head was John Wiles Booth”. Groan.

Ben Affleck gives the Best Documentary, which goes to Malik Bendjelloul and Simon Chinn for Searching for Sugar Man.

Jennifer Garner and Jessica Chastain come out to present the Best Foreign Language award. Tom objects to the former’s butt bow, but I disagree. The award goes to Austria for Amour.

John Travolta comes out to present a celebration of movie musicals. Catherine Zeta Jones sings “All That Jazz” from Chicago, Jennifer Hudson does “I Am Telling You I Am Not Going” from Dreamgirls, and the entire cast of Les Misérables sings a medley of songs from the show.

Chris Pine and Zoe Saldana cover the Sci Tech awards.

Mark Whalberg and Ted give the Best Sound Mixing award, which goes to Andy Nelson, Mark Paterson and Simon Hayes for Les Misérables. Best Sound Editing is a rarity: a tie! One goes to Paul N.J. Ottosson for Zero Dark Thirty and one goes to Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers for Skyfall.

Christopher Plummer gives the Best Supporting Actress award to, as widely-expected, Anne Hathaway for Les Misérables.

Sandra Bullock gives the award for Best Editing to William Goldenberg for Argo.

Jennifer Lawrence, wearing an amazing dress, introduces Adele, singing “Skyfall”.

Nicole Kidman introduces the next batch of Best Picture nominees, including Silver Linings Playbook, Django Unchained, and Amour. Tom notes that her forehead never quite seems to move.

Daniel Radcliffe and Kristen Stewart (limping) give the award for Best Production Design, which goes to Rick Carter and Jim Erickson for Lincoln.

Selma Hayek gives the Governor’s awards (i.e., honorary Oscars).

George Clooney gives the In Memoriam tribute, which ends with Barbra Streisand singing “The Way We Were”.

The main cast of Chicago gives the music awards. The Oscar for Best Original Score goes to Mychael Danna for Life of Pi, and for Best Original Song goes to “Skyfall,” Music and lyric by Adele Adkins and Paul Epworth for Skyfall. Huh, never knew her last name before.

The writing awards are given out by Dustin Hoffman and Charlize Theron. The Best Adapted Screenplay award goes to Chris Terrio for Argo, and the Best Original Screenplay award goes to Quentin Tarantino for Django Unchained.

Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas present the Best Director award to Ang Lee for Life of Pi.

Jean Dujardin awards the Best Actress Oscar to Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook. That amazing dress got away from her and she tripped on the way up and that just makes her more lovable to the Academy. Tom notes that she appeared to have forgotten to thank the director—whoops!

Seth MacFarlane announces that the next presenter needs to introduction and leaves the stage. Meryl Streep comes out to give the Best Actor award. It goes to Daniel Day-Lewis for Lincoln, to no one’s surprise.

Jack Nicholson introduces Michelle Obama live from the White House, who gives a short speech and then turns it back to Nicholson to announce the nominees. He passes it back to Michelle, who annouces that the winner is Argo.

All in all, I think that MacFarlane did a great job. I’ll be interested to see what the general buzz is tomorrow about how well he hosted. Although Life of Pi won more Oscars, I think that the big winner tonight was Argo, which I did not expect to win Best Picture.

I’m fed up with the Aaron Swartz hagiography and subsequent bullshit garment-rending from people who didn’t know him well, or at all. I’m still reading fresh examples of anguished wailing and blogging and Twittering about the guy. But to me, he seems unworthy of the sainthood that’s being thrust onto his corpse.

I don’t think I ever met him (I might have, at an O’Reilly conference in San Jose years ago); I may or may not have ever corresponded with him many years ago, and I can’t be bothered to look through my email archives to check. I know I read a bunch of his words at one point, possibly on a mailing list or on his blog. But I had no personal connection with him, as far as I can remember.

I knew of him, but mainly because of his well-known, well-honed talent for being an arrogant jerk to many people, often to people who had extended a helping hand to him at one time or another. I’ve been hanging around the geekosphere long enough to have heard of one or another of the many spats Swartz triggered when he viciously turned on somebody.

I knew he was a smart kid. So did he. Boy, did he know it. And he loved to share that knowledge, via his palpable contempt for, well, just about everyone who didn’t agree with him (read this account by his partner, who denies Swartz killed himself due to depression, to get a feel for just how arrogant and contemptuous he was about most people).

Because I’d read his words, and seen how he lashed out at people, I had him pegged in my mind as “Really smart but asshole kid who might grow up someday and learn to be a smart adult, but for now, ignorable.” But even years ago, I thought he was special, and didn’t really expect that to happen. I expected him to turn out like Eric Raymond or Richard Stallman, get a sinecure from some open-source group, and live out his days haranguing the rest of us about how disappointed he was that we didn’t live up to his lofty standards.

I wasn’t the only one who felt that way; after learning of his death, I said to Dori, “Hey, remember that Aaron Swartz kid?” She replied, “Yeah, what stupid thing has he done now?” I said, “Well, it looks like he killed himself.” Dori doesn’t lack compassion, and of course she had no idea that something bad had occurred. The point I’m making is that Dori, who pays way more attention to geek society than I do, was also primed to think that he was likely to do something foolhardy or attention-seeking. Because to the casual observer, that was the way he lived his life.

I’d heard of his caper with PACER, when he released a significant portion of US case law to the public, because he was morally offended that it was behind a paywall. It’s speculation, but that was most likely the same stunt he was trying to pull again when he got busted after downloading a large amount of academic journal articles from JSTOR, another paywall. (Aside: I agree with Swartz that this data should be publicly available; I disagree with his methods).

He knew that what he was doing with the JSTOR data was criminal, or at best unauthorized; he tried to hide his identity while doing it.  But Swartz was offended, so even though he had previously been around the block with the law after the PACER caper (he was investigated then, but no charges filed), he decided his moral outrage trumped the petty laws of the stupid. So he took what he wanted, because he wanted to, and because he could. This is the moral calculus of a child or a criminal, not an adult.

Then he got caught. And this time he drew a prosecutor who clearly decided to make an example of this arrogant kid. I completely agree with those who think Swartz got a raw, unfair deal. The prosecutors abused their discretion. Prosecutors who want to impose harsher penalties for Swartz’s alleged crimes than for murderers or rapists have lost their own moral bearings.

From reports, Swartz didn’t think he had done anything wrong or criminal, and more or less expected to be let off the hook for his actions. In his experience, people had always recognized his brilliance and let him off the hook before. When that didn’t happen, he was bewildered and defiant. It’s possible this was the first time he was faced with the real possibility of serious consequences for his choices. According to Wikipedia, the prosecutors were seeking a plea bargain that would result in a six month jail sentence.

Swartz’s many apologists are, if effect, arguing that his actions should be completely excused because he was morally in the right. I’ve seen the more fevered comparing his actions to Martin Luther King. This is a nearly obscene comparison. King repeatedly risked his life for the civil rights of his people, proudly stood as the leader of his movement, and took responsibility for his actions. Swartz surreptitiously downloaded a bunch of data from a closet, tried to hide his face when he slipped away with the loot, and wasn’t willing to pay any penalty.

I remember many of the civil rights activists in the Sixties breaking unjust laws for their moral convictions. The ones we revere today didn’t say, “I’ll do the right thing as long as I get no punishment.” They knew the risks, took them, and stood tall when they faced the consequences. Those were acts of true courage.

Swartz’s defenders say the prosecutors killed him, but that’s not what happened. He was not killed by the state. Swartz hanged himself before his consequences had even been decided. The woman who lived with him, who knew his mental state better than any of the rest of us, says he was not chronically depressed, and she does not believe he suffered from mental illness. We’ll never know the exact reason for his suicide, but it seems more likely than anything else that he killed himself to avoid going to jail for six months, and therefore he was too cowardly to face the harsh results of his actions.

My personal view is that killing yourself and leaving your body to be found by your lover is a profoundly horrible, selfish, and unforgivable action, and one that deserves our disgust, not our compassion. I’ll reserve my compassion for the woman whom he presumably loved, but he knew would find his corpse.

The Saint Aaron bandwagon so many people have piled onto nauseates me.

He wasn’t a saint.

His moral judgments were not superior to everyone else’s.

He did not die for anyone’s sins.

He wasn’t depressed and mentally ill. His death has no lessons for us in that area.

He was a very smart kid who got himself in over his head, was overcome by fear, and killed himself. That’s a shitty thing. But his death, though regrettable, is meaningless for the rest of us. When you hear differently, you are being sold somebody’s agenda. Beware.

When Andrew Sullivan announced he was going indie, I saw many approving comments and excited commentary that he was “the future of journalism” and “pointing the way”.

Has everyone forgotten? Why are so many dazzled by his current libertarian/pro-Obama stance, one that is so at odds with his many previous stances?

I don’t get it. He’s a skilled writer, sure (though it’s unclear, and you can’t trust his word, as to how much of his current blog he writes himself). But he has a very long, very well documented record of being dead fucking wrong about many, many, many things, and he damn near single-handedly strangled The New Republic while he was running that joint. Let’s take a little peek down into the Sullivan memory hole:

• He published “No Exit,” the 1994 article packed with the outright lies and fraudulent reporting of the repulsive Betsy McCaughey, which was widely credited as being the beginning of the end for Hillary Clinton’s healhcare reform, in large part because it was published in the hitherto-liberal New Republic. We eventually (not via Sullivan) later discovered that McCaughey was shilling for a tobacco company while writing the article. McCaughey later returned, the undead pundit, in 2009; she invented the equally bullshit term “death panels” when she failed to help kill the Affordable Care Act. So I ask: how many uninsured Americans died between 1994 when healthcare reform was killed, thanks largely to Andrew Sullivan, and 2012? From my brief calculation, it’s on the order of 380,000 dead people. Arguably, many of those people would not have died had the US moved to a sane healthcare system in 1994. In my view, Sullivan’s hands are stained with the blood of those people. He bears some of the responsibility for and shame of their death. And by the way, one of Sullivan’s long-standing causes has been, laudably, advocacy for AIDS/HIV patients. How many of those uninsured people were gay men who died of AIDS and were denied insurance and care from a healthcare system that Sullivan helped stay broken for an extra 15 years?
• 1994 was a banner year for Sullivan; he also published a cover story lauding The Bell Curve, a since throughly discredited book written by racial eugenicist Charles Murray. In it, Murray argues that blacks are inherently dumber than whites. Sullivan apparently still agrees with this view.
• Sullivan, like many right-wingers, went full batshit hide-under-the-bed crazy after 9/11. However, his favorite tactic was to smear anyone who didn’t want to attack Saddam NOW NOW NOW as unpatriotic and un-American. One of his most famous quotes during this time: ”The middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.” So if you didn’t want to rush to war — a path we now know to be absolutely correct — you were a traitor. Contemptible.

A little research shows how Sullivan hasn’t been especially interested or concerned with journalistic integrity; at The New Republic he published many false articles and assisted the careers of at least two plagiarists. Here is the piece that led me to write this post today; it details Sullivan’s sins in much more detail than I care to today.

I simply can’t get on the Sully bandwagon. I read his stuff sometimes, and sometimes I enjoy it. But I think there are many more deserving bloggers who should be rewarded by putting their stuff behind a paywall and getting a ton of subscribers.