Not so angry at Lowes

Lowes recently pulled its advertising from a Learning Channel docu-series called "All-American Muslim," which sounds a bit like real housewives only with brown people, 94.5% fewer fake boobies and in the middle of nowhere. Also the show is actually about something.

The decision comes after a massive backlash from what I can only assume is the typical Lowes customer: a racist paranoid closeted mass-murderer. Red-blooded Americans across the country began boycotting Lowes stores, and the homegoods giant had to do something to appease the teeming masses, lest is not be able to plant its blue and white flag and break ground next to every motherfucking Home Depot in the motherfucking country. The humanity! Absolom! Motherfucker!

But this decision doesn't bother me so much, and it speaks to a somewhat larger issue in business, politics, and how us common mortals should form our opinions about our betters. Lowes is just doing good business to keep the profits high, and you can't really blame an overpriced retail store for doing everything in its power to retain customers. It just so happens that those customers are a bunch of racist, paranoid closeted mass-murderers.

But it isn't the principal that is disturbing here: it's the sheer lack of principal. Gone are the days when the insert of a Nirvana album would read, "If you're a racist, sexist or bigot, don't buy this album because we don't want your money." Now anything goes, and the people most likely to rob your store and shoot you because you're a different color than them are just more potential customers. It's this complete lack of principal that has defined career dick-suckers like Rick Perry or, most disappointingly, the president - standing up for nothing on their own, but standing for anything you want if the price tag is right. This is pretty much the modern American business model, with the noted exception of Chick-Fil-A.

Point is, if you really want this to stop, don't boycott the bastards in support of racism; boycott them because of racism. Don't shop at Lowes and make sure they know it's because they will help validate a mass of people who want to murder half of the entire fucking planet, and who think that learning is the deadly eighth goddamn sin. Eventually the racist, paranoid closeted mass murderers will come around, 'cause let's face it, where the else are you going to get drywall nails at a 400% markup at 7AM on a Christmas fucking day?

How to get people to rally against SOPA quick.

Better known as the "Internet Censorship Bill," SOPA is part of a two-pronged attack on free speech in the US (the other side being the National Defense Authorization Act, which effecively allows the police to to patrol the streets para-military martial law style. Good article (from a conservative source) here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/12/05/the-national-defense-authorization-act-is-the-greatest-threat-to-civil-liberties-americans-face/).

Since the bill is a little dense, here's what SOPA really does. First, it makes websites that post content from users (Youtube, our beloved and strikingly handsome Facebook, right down to stuff like Deviant Art, Livejournal and whatever other assorted slime molds one can scrape from the bottom of a barrel) and makes the hosting website directly responsible for it. Now, Youtube, for example, doesn't allow posting copyrighted material, but they also don't claim to be responsible for what people do with it. The website, like Facebook et al, presents itself more as a tool with which the user can do what he or she wants. There's some basic guidelines (nudity, violence, etc.), but those are the same as a hammer coming with the suggestion that you don't stick it in a wall socket. This freedom of use is what makes these websites so popular, dynamic, wealthy (Google, which owns Youtube, has one of the most valuable stocks in the country), and in a way, important. There is the basic guiding principal that one can say what one wants on teh Interwebz.

SOPA changes this by establishing a set of purposely vague content guidelines, but that is not the most insidious part. What really makes this law dangerous is how these guidelines are enforced. In summary, it allows the justice department to press charges against a hosting service for certain content, whether it is deemed in violation of copyright law, illegal or offensive. So a basic example would be that if you upload a video backed with Born This Way, Youtube must remove the copyrighted content or be faced with legal action. Now thing of how many videos backed with Born This Way are on Youtube right now. Like, woah.

Now as crappy as that it is, it does sort of make sense. It's a copyrighted song after all, and thirteen year olds everywhere who think they're being clever with Windows Movie Maker need to be taught that the law is the law. Here's where it gets interesting. Let's look at the video of the police officer pepper spraying sitting students at UC Davis. Don't you think that's offensive to the university? Aren't shots of the Davis campus copyrighted material? Doesn't the same apply to the video of the officer pepper spraying four unarmed women in New York? Or videos of [insert headline politican here] blatantly contradicting themselves on national television just a few years ago?

SOPA puts a stop to all of that too.

It is an attack of free speech and the freedom of the internet, which allows the average person to present these important and, frankly, world-changing events. SOPA will make it far more difficult. If not impssible.

But that isn't the purpose of this essay. All of these things aside, how do you get the John and Jane Everyman's of the world to rally against it? I'm sure lots of people say, "But I don't care about OWS or Laday Gaga or politics. I'm an upstanding citizen and don't download things illegaly, so how does this affect me?"

Answer: Porn.

Specifically, SOPA would also mean the end of free pornography on the internet. Just take a minute and absorb that. It's ok - I'll wait.

...

Like anything else, porn does not come from the goodness of one's heart as a salve for the lonely and maladjusted. People get rich off of it. To paraphase Spaceballs, "They're not just doing it for money; they're doing it for a shitload of money!" Porn is a multi-billion dollar business, if not more, and don't doubt for a second that they are frontline warriors on the battefield of copyright law.

Think about it. If SOPA passes, every producer from the Larry Flints and Hugh Hephners of the world, right down to every sweaty crack-addled scumbag posting "Make $2,500 a month from home!" signs around Paterson, New Jersey, will jump on the chance to take the legal gatling gun to the no doubt thousands, tens of thousands or more likely hundreds of thousands of websites that traffick porn at not cost to you. You know those tales of yore we all heard in grade school about how, once, in some mythic past before industry, fishermen wouldn't even need to cast lines or nets because the rivers and streams were so packed with fish, they'd just set to sail and let them jump on the boat? Just imagine the boat is your computer and the fish are naked ladies. This is where we are, and the evil, post-apocolypic and smog-choked future where the only fish left alive are swimming in fishtanks controlled by wealthy industry tycoons is the terrifyingly close future. Except now the fish tanks are computers and the fish are still naked ladies.

I don't want to say the following but I feel need to (this is the Intenet after all). I'm not trying to be cute, and I'm not trying to an advocate for porn in some way. But again, think about it. Porn is one of the top three uses of the internet, right up there with Facebook, checking your bank account and Googling yourself. And like it or not, it's a massive and powerful indsutry, and massive and powerful industries really only seek to become more massive and more powerful. And like it or not, people love their porn. Shows like True Blood or The Tudors are basically costume porn with writers (you didn't think a show about vampires doin' it got popular because of the plots, did you?) I didn't have a computer with internet capabilities until I was 16 and already had firsthand experience playing the what-goes-where game, but now that every budding pre-teen is online, porn takes a bigger role in sex education than sex education. Sure, we don't talkabout it in polite soceity; saying it isn't going to win you any friends, but really. Come on.

Anyway, that's my political stratgey for getting the public behind voting down SOPA. Change "The attack on free speech" to "The attack on free porn," and I promise you, late at night, when nobody's looking, people will sign that shit right quick.

Tragedy in The Last Exorcism

Hahaha, you thought I meant it was a tragic movie because a bunch of innocent people die and a demon is summoned from the belly of the underworld to walk amongst men? Screw that noise.

Here's the Thing.

And here's the thing. I have a huge soft spot for Biblical end of the world shit. Be it Diablo 2, The Exorcist, End of Days, whatever, there's something about a bloody pentagram on a wall that really sucks me in. Man, taken out of context that sentence doesn't sound too good, does it?

I went into The Last Exorcist not knowing anything about the movie, other than it was yet another handi-cam docu-horror in the style of The Blair Witch. So it's necessarily short and there are a good deal of shots that really don't contribute anything to the movie itself. Anyway, here's the spoilers, er, summary:

Ex-preacher wants to expose exorcism for the fraud that it is, so he goes to a backwoods farm where a dude has a "possessed" daughter. He shows the cameraman all of his neat tricks and gizmos that make the "exorcism" look "real." Afterward, daughter is still all messed up, the father goes berserk, and in the end, low and behold, she actually was possessed and gives birth to a demon.

Fact is that I was actually way into this movie until the last five minutes, where the entire thing didn't just jump the shark. This movie got on a white motorcycle with an American flag on the back and did some serious Evel Kenevel shit over a whole row of sharks. Twenty sharks! Maybe more! So let's look at the terrible last five minutes versus the actually good rest of the movie.

The hero is an ex-child preacher with a disabled son. When the child almost dies at birth, he realizes that doctors and modern medicine allowed him to live, and that doctors and modern medicine allow him to have a basically normal life. He has a crisis of faith and comes to realize he doesn't really believe in anything he's been preaching for essentially his entire life. So he decides to hire a film crew and make a movie about how to fake an exorcism.

Contrast a film that is full of honestly interesting characters with the dumb ass twist ending of the girl actually being possessed by a 100% real demon. If this movie were a date, I feel like I just got a bottle of wine broken over my head and now I'm soaking wet and stuck with the check.

The possessed girl herself is pregnant, and there is some dispute of who the father might be. It might be the obviously abusive father, the troubled brother, or a previously unknown boyfriend from town. This plot point, if played with any sense of realism, covers so much ground, hitting abusive parents with religious values, incest, rape, and teen pregnancy as it relates to religion all in one go. Hats off to the magnificent bastard who nailed that plot point.

But once again, real demon. So none of that bullshit about sexual abuse or backwards sexual teachings has any bearing anyway.

My point in saying all this is that, as a whole, The Last Exorcism is a pretty goddamn awful movie. But the real sadness in it is that, at every turn, there is true greatness poking its meager head through all of the cheap shocks. If the movie had played realistically, think Kramer Vs. Kramer with religion instead of child custody, this would be a serious nominee for top ten favorite movies. Not many popular films tackle the dark underbelly of religion in the backwoods, where most of the time, it resembles nothing more than fear mongering and child abuse. The Last Exorcism spends a ton of time building on these very points, then shits itself in half with a cheap gore scare at the end that, honestly, isn't that scary at all.

It was also not very shocking that I saw the name Eli Roth crop up during the credits. Now there's a horror story.