But I thought, that isn't like me. Sometimes you just have to name names, and this is one of those times. I mean, if it was good enough for Richard Nixon to have an enemies list, it's good enough for me.
Some of these are going to be so obvious if you've read this blog, and some of them might indeed be surprising. I am going to put a link to this in my sidebar and add to it as the weeks and months go by, so consider this a preliminary list.
The Church of Scientology: If anyone didn't know that this organization was going to be high on this list, then you haven't been reading my blog for very long. Where do I begin? How about the fact that they are a cult, and have practices which seem almost like they are modeled after a pyramid scheme. As someone who has always had an affinity for how fraud works, this does seem to be something born of beauty. L. Ron Hubbard concocted a scheme where to advance in the Church, you had to pay large sums of money, which entitled you to new Church documents when you reached a particular level of spiritual cleansing. Of course, cleansing yourself of the souls that had attached to your own soul after Xenu dumped them on Earth means you basically have to confess everything you've ever done wrong in your life and all your secrets, so that if you try to leave, well, they can now destroy you. And if you are someone who is outside the Church and criticizing them, well, they have been known to try to destroy you through the Fair Game doctrine. And the places people would turn to to try to get help, have either been bought out (like the Cult Awareness Network hotline who antagonized them for many years, which now tells desperate people that Scientology isn't a cult), or demonized like the entire field of psychology.
Fundamentalists: I am not casting aspersions on the entire religious community. I am talking about the kind of people who are trying to legislate their own narrow definition of morality into law, or their religious laws to be the law of the land (Sharia). I am talking about the kind of people who want Intelligent Design to be taught in science classroom and make movies like Expelled. The kind of people who books banned from their local library not just issues such as homosexuality, swearing and the like, but because they have a rainbow on the cover, or the story has a witch in it or in a particular book, a child's father drinks a beer and his son chews gum in class. I wish I was making that last one up. And of course, the kind of people who picket outside the funerals of gay people, those who have died because of AIDS and soldiers. Basically, I am talking about that minority of people who blacken the reputation of the normal, well-adjusted people who share a faith, a school district, a state or even a country with.
Jack Thompson: You know, if it was just about the video games and the general antagonism he has with his critics, I would sort of laugh him off, or at worst, consider him a nuisance. But his history as a crusader against so many forms of entertainment in the past makes him the poster child for everything that I find repellent in the psyche of those who seek to censor. I'm glad he was disbarred for practicing law in the state of Florida, as he used his power as an attorney to harass people he saw as his enemies (like radio host Neil Rogers, Janet Reno and the Florida Bar Association) before turning his attention to such media scourges as 2 Live Crew, Howard Stern and his white whale, the video game industry and Rockstar in particular. He is almost as widely known for his exchanges with video game related sites (where he is particularly insulting to those he is conversing with), as he is for his appearances as a panelist on news programs and his press releases/conferences. To me, he is just a petty, bitter man who wants some taste of fame and was trying to use his law degree to get it.
Focus on the Family/Parents' Television Council: I know that some of you out there are questioning why this is a separate from fundamentalists in general, but Focus on the Family and the Parents' Television Council hold a very particular place in this list. As you can tell from some of my earlier entries on this list, well, I really don't like censors, and these two related groups thrive on that sort of thing. These are the kind of people who wait years to get a lot of people complain about a show that aired after 10PM (that most of them didn't see) just to try to hurt a network and make a statement. These people are free not to watch programming they find objectionable. They can turn the channel or not order that particular network in their cable or satellite, they have that freedom, but instead of exercising it, they instead resort to fraud to try to get what they want. Yes, I called it fraud. Because the other option is that the membership of these organizations are stupid. I mean, which seems like the most likely option on this, that thousands of people that belong to the organization all watch shows week after week that they find objectionable just so they can complain to the FCC with form letters, or that a few people watch those same shows and tell their membership that they found it objectionable and therefore they should click on a link on their site to make their collective thoughts known to the FCC. I know which one sounds right to me.
Michael Moore: I think this is going to be one of those ones that is potentially surprising, but truthfully, it shouldn't be so. I used to like Michael Moore's work when he was doing TV Nation and The Awful Truth. And then, something happened that made me not like him too much anymore: I watched his movies with a critical eye. I saw how badly he started misrepresenting how situations unfolded in his films just to make a point. I read the opinions of his fellow documentarians who criticize him for the same things. And then there are the character issues, like the fact that he is so thin skinned, responds poorly to criticism, and is someone who hogs credit for things that he was at times only tangentially related too. His troubled past, especially at Mother Jones, is well-documented, and at this point, he has absolutely no credibility to me.
Ann Coulter: She calls her self a polemicist, others call her a satirist, but I'd just call her a cold-blooded and dangerous idiot provocateur. Antagonizing people, like the families of the 9/11 victims doesn't make one cutting edge, even if you are doing it seemingly in jest. Part of me knows that she says those things for the media attention, and because of her background in law, she is likely very aware of how she carries herself, but I have two fears: one is that she actually believes the things she says and two, that other people take what she says at face value and parrot them. I know, coming from someone who attacked Jack Thompson for his own crusade against forms of media for having that same effect, well, it seems hypocritical on my part, but it is just the way she carries herself that makes me loathe her. She takes criticism and tries to spin it as people's attempts at silencing her, when that isn't the case. Being called out on your bullshit and hateful speech is countering bad speech with good speech, not an attempt to silence someone (unless all they have is bullshit). I just wish this version of Ann Coulter was real, I really did.
Rosie O'Donnell: I didn't really have a problem with Rosie when she was acting in movies and had her talk show. I had even forgiven her for being in that dreadful Exit to Eden. She seemed like a genuinely nice, if kooky person. And then she admitted that when she was likable, it was all an act. Soon, her true personality was unleashed on the world showing her to be an opinionated, though not particularly knowledgeable, loudmouth who didn't seem to have the ability or good sense to just shut up. And because of her exploits in blogging, she has given this entire form of communication a bad name.
Bill O'Reilly/Sean Hannity/Rush Limbaugh: Now talk about two pompous blowhards. I'm a blogger... and since I have at least a little of that kind of self-aggrandizing personality, it is obvious when someone else has it too, and these two have it in spades. I will admit that Bill O'Reilly at least paid his dues... he has two Master's degrees and worked his way up the broadcasting chain and I can respect that (one of the rare times when you will actually read me saying something like that). Doesn't make him any less of an asshole or knowledgeable, but at least he seems like he actually did some hard work to become what he is today. Hannity on the otherhand was a college dropout who decided on a whim to do some college radio in his late 20's, got fired and had the Santa Barbara ACLU fight on his behalf to try to get his job back. When he attacks the ACLU now, does that make him a hypocrite? I think it does, I really do. But somehow, these two have become a major part of the conservative broadcast movement with a third member, another college dropout named Rush Limbaugh, who got his big break replacing Morton Downey Jr (and if you remember that gentleman's talk show, than you know what kind of spectacle they were looking for). I guess I expect those who talk about politics to actually have some insight into what they are talking about, but as it stands, none of them could even hope to fill the shoes of William F. Buckley. I guess it is naive to expect that they could actually be thoughtful and actually think about what they are saying instead of being the 3 stooges of the conservative movement.
PETA: I love animals, and most of those fighting to protect them are good people, and I respect them, and on the surface, their general aims are compatible with mine. But some of the things that PETA does are just so counter productive. All those silly campaigns to get fish renamed Sea Kittens and to get Hamburg, Germany to rename themselves Veggie Burger make it hard for me to take them seriously when that is what I should be doing, because their agenda also subsidizes groups like ALF and ELF (Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts respectively), two terrorist groups. For me to say that a group associates with terrorists, you know that I have to have seen some pretty decent evidence to support that. And they are anti-pet ownership as well, which to me, is a very untenable stance (because you love animals, but you aren't supposed to want to share your life with one... interesting).
Added July 27, 2009:
Collectors: Now, I am not talking about people who merely buy lots of related things because they enjoy having them. No, I am talking about the people who collect things as some warped form of investment. And because they consider their hobby one which has financial motivations, they set an artificially high price for whatever they own. I am sure a lot of you out there have been in a situation where you wanted to watch, read or play something and the only people who have that item want an unrealistic amount of money for it... a price that is so far out of whack from either its original value or the value such an item would dictate on the open market. Now there are some that would argue that the laws of supply and demand dictate those prices, but that is not true. What has happened is there are some people who have set a high price, and someone made a choice to buy it at that price, and others seeing that it can be sold for that get all nutty and set their prices that high too. And when you see prices that high, when you are trying to buy the item in auction, well, even if you pay more than it was worth otherwise, you still aren't paying that premium price that everyone seems to want. I'll give you an example from my own life. I bought a copy of Ico for the PS2 at a Blockbuster late last year for 10 dollars because I wanted to play it. But after I bought it, I tried and did not like Shadow of the Colossus, which was made by the same team, so I listed it at a game trading website. Someone offered me a sealed game and 50 dollars for said item (the sealed game, if you went by Amazon.com's marketplace was worth 77 dollars... but if you bought it at the manufacturer that same day, it was 30). I then decided to look up Ico (which sold 250K units in the United States/Canada, so it isn't even super rare) at the Amazon marketplace, and there are people who are trying to get over 100 dollars for it. And one person in particular wants 194 dollars for it. I will say that again. One hundred and ninety four dollars. It makes me question the sanity of the world really. Though I am guilty by association because someone offered me a deal which was insane, and I took it, so I am complicit with this, but honestly, I think someone would have to be pretty low to demand 194 dollars for something which at best should be 50... at best.
The Entertainment News Media: Yes I have problems with most of the news outlets, but there are things that I need to say another day about them. So, I thought it would be better to start with something which is near and dear to my heart. Do you remember when you would turn on Entertainment Tonight and they would be talking about an upcoming movie, television show or musician about to go on world tour? I do. Oh, the 1980's, how I hate your fashions and hairdos, but I did appreciate what you were bringing to the party in terms of coverage. And I realize that a lot of the things I want from the entertainment news media are now online, but there was something almost heartwarming about tuning into a show just to see some exclusive scenes from a hotly anticipated film. Now, what are we left with? A lot of celebrity gossip about breakups, drug abuse and weight gain and loss. Or we get TMZ which is basically a half-hour of people with a camera harassing celebrities on the street, at the airport and in front of clubs with various snide comments from the team in the office. These two versions of entertainment reporting almost work as a microcosm of the news media in general, but that would be letting the latter off the hook too easily. There used to be a time when there was an unwritten rule that the private lives of celebrities were pretty much off limits for the legitimate entertainment press. I sort of wish we would go back to that standard, because my needs as a pop culture junkie are really not being served by what passes as coverage these days.
Added August 12, 2009
Intelligent Design proponents: I should preface this one with the admission that when I was in university, my specialty during my history degree was the intellectual development of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, so I am very familiar with the competing arguments in this. I would also like to say that I don't care what people believe, as long as it doesn't have a wider, deleterious effect on things in general. Intelligent Design is one of those belief systems which indeed has a negative effect, because let's be frank, it isn't science. No matter how hard these people try to spin it as a scientific theory, it doesn't hold up. They know this for a fact. When held up to scrutiny in the case of Kitzmiller v Dover, even the legal system acknowledged that Intelligent Design is just creationism in new clothing. And I for one certainly don't want someone working in virology, oncology or various other disciplines where understanding the mechanisms of natural selection and the current theories in evolution to be ignorant of this necessary knowledge because someone with a religious ax to grind was so challenged by scientific fact that they denied children this education, thus radically altering my life and the lives of millions of other people. I don't want kids to learn things in science classes which won't help them be the best they can be in the subject, because that is truly dangerous. But the ID proponents try to cloud the issue and say that the scientific community is afraid to debate them, but it isn't like that. It is more like Verne Troyer drunkenly challenging Mike Tyson in his prime to a fight, and when Tyson says no, Minime calls him chicken and tries to punch him in the junk. If it held water at all, it would feature prominently in peer reviewed articles, but that isn't happening. And that isn't happening because there is a conspiracy amongst scientists to suppress it... it is happening because it isn't science. And one particular ID proponent is such a tool he earned himself a place all by himself on this list.
Ben Stein: I know what some of you are thinking... that boring economics teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off who made a career in Hollywood by playing a particular kind of low key character? How can he be your enemy? Well, it boils down to the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and the media blitz he did when it was released. I had to make this a separate entry from other ID proponents because Ben Stein went above and beyond to me in making himself an ass. With his movie, he proved himself to inflammatory and lacking even the most rudimentary sense of intellectual honesty (because he set up a lot of people in this movie by telling them they were going to be in a more balanced film... he Verne Troyer'd the entire 1986-9 Heavyweight division). I also don't believe for a second that Ben Stein doesn't fully understand the basics of evolutionary science... he would just rather sell the controversy. Do you know how I know he is full of shit? He is an economist by training, and guess what one of the major influences on Darwin was? Classical Economics... Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, the very same people who were instrumental in the development of Stein's own discipline. Basically, he knows what that particular audience wants to hear, so he tailored his film to rile up those people. It doesn't add anything to the public discourse, but rather it is a blatant attempt to advance the Teach the Controversy movement. And when he said the following on the Trinity Broadcast Network, well, it really was over for me with him: "Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people." He is also the living example of Godwin's law, as he seems to compare everything he doesn't like to Hitler or the Nazis. Let's go down the list, shall we? Obama, Moslem Extremists and Environmentalists are like Hitler, evolutionists, scientists, critics of the response to Hurricane Katrina are Nazis, and the Minneapolis police were like the Gestapo regarding the Larry Craig arrest. And according to Stein, gay males are all pedophiles. So yeah, even beyond my own misgivings about his evolutionary stance, there is a lot more vile crap in Ben Stein than meets the eye. He spins himself as this affably hip guy, but he is just a petty hatemonger.
Keith Olbermann: I admit that I used to watch Countdown a lot. I mean, almost daily for a long period of time, mainly because many of the people he would relentlessly go after were people who appear on my enemies list, in particular Bill O'Reilly. However, I started to have a falling out with him after his attacks on the show 24, which showed a remarkable lack of knowledge about the series, instead relying on a single idea that the show was propaganda for Fox and the Republican party, when the larger plotlines ended up being very critical of his administration, and was one of the few shows, news or otherwise during the run up to the Iraq War which had the United States entering a war in the Middle East because of bad intelligence and due to some ulterior motives. And as the months went by, Olbermann began acting like the very people he attacked, and he continued to do so as I continued to watch, while not having guests who had opposing viewpoints. And in that echo chamber, his dickish qualities were amplified and I lost a lot of respect for him, despite some of his good Special Comments. Basically, I grew tired of his shtick and I can't watch him anymore without feeling dirty.
Birthers: I have to say this. If you believe in your heart of hearts that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and somehow he made it through his entire public life with all the scrutiny that comes along with it while maintaining that illusion, or worse still, you use what was once a conspiracy theory from the fringes the the right wing to advance either a personal agenda or your career, then I am sorry to say but you are a complete and total amoral asshole. I mean, think about what a scoop it would have been for someone, anyone to have proven that story true during the last presidential election... and yet, no one did. In fact, evidence to the contrary was presented and accepted by everyone but you. And those of you reading know that if it was John McCain and the fringes of the left were doing something like this to him about being born in Panama, well, they would be ridiculed and mocked without mercy by these very same people.
Added September 8th, 2009
Dennis Miller: I used to be a huge fan of Dennis Miller. I even watched his talk show, and I don't mean Dennis Miller Live on HBO... no, the ABC crap fest, I liked his work so much. But then a funny thing happened. Sometime between when he started doing Monday Night Football and September 11th (because the transformation was already in process before the event, despite what he might say), he became a partisan hack of the worst caliber and ceased being a comedian. Some might argue that I disagree with his politics now, and that is the reason he is on my enemies list, and there is an element of that, but it goes further than that. In the past, there was a sort of bemusement with the things he was critiquing and making light of, but now, it seems that what he calls comedy is fueled by nothing but anger. Not faux anger like Lewis Black either... genuine bottom of a dark well anger. I wish he was just being an opportunistic prick who was playing to an audience that doesn't get a lot of love from comedians, but he seems to genuinely believe the hateful things he says these days.
Pedophiles on Flickr and other photosites: OK, pedophiles in general are horrible human beings, I think we can all agree with that (though I expect a member of NAMBLA to chime in to my comments section at some point to refute that, and we will all gang punt that individual into next week). The origin of this particular entry involves my niece and the weird and disturbing individuals who are grabbing copies of her pictures (along with the pictures posted by many other parents)) and who are trying to insinuate themselves into my sister's confidence (she isn't buying it). I'm talking about dudes who make lists of favorites which consist of nothing but pictures of toddlers but they don't have any pictures themselves. You are creepy fucks, and no amount of groups claiming you aren't monsters will ever change that. Drop dead in the most painful way possible.
Glenn Beck: I used to stop by Glenn Beck's little slice of madness when his show was on Headline News, and basically, he made Nancy Grace look good, and I hate her. I mean, it takes a lot to make Nancy Grace look good in comparison, but he did it. Whether it was asking a newly elected representative of the Muslim faith in 2006 to prove that he wasn't the enemy to suggesting to a lovely reporter from US Weekly on air that she pose for some salacious shots, Beck found so many ways of being just plain disconcerting. I think the moment that really pushed him over the edge for me was the first time I happened to catch him talking about a geopolitical issue (regarding warming Iranian-Russian relations) and he started talking about that being a sign from the Book of Revelations. That is the last thing I want to hear when someone is talking about this particular subject. Apparently, his move to Fox has ramped up these tendencies, and a recent boycott effort has resulted in him frankly going batshit insane, like he is just going to keep going further and further as sponsors supposedly leave the show. And the worst thing is, he acts like everything that is coming out of his mouth is just coming from some perfectly reasonable individual. He tries to make it seem like he is speaking for every man, when he is, as I said, batshit insane.
For all I know, basically all that is happening is he is bringing more of his radio show game onto his cable show, because there are quite a few tapes out there of him being a total screaming dick to people who call into his show.
The RIAA/MPAA: Let's see here. Litigious: Check. Petty: Check. Sanctimony: Check. No sense of decency or proportionality: Check. Basically, with the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America, you have the worst of all worlds. Two organizations which claim to be protecting artists, when in fact, they are protecting few rich conglomerates which control mainstream music, as demonstrated by grumblings from a number of artists that they themselves would take legal action against the RIAA for the monies they collected on their work. And if you look at their record for these cases, you will see a lot of bad litigation (in terms of following the spirit of the law), from suing the children of a dead man to blanket suing people and using shady practices to drag as many people into their net of lawsuits. And these two organizations also put pressure on legislators to enact laws which are detrimental to the rights of consumers, which again is a dick move all around.Someone put together a list of 7 crimes that net less fines than file sharing, and some of them are doozies, which shows you just how out of whack with the principle of the penalty fitting the crime really is in these cases. And yet, day after day, these two organizations keep suing people for what amounts to the most trivial of offenses in the grand scheme of things. There is one other element in their collective philosophy which really sticks in my craw as well: what individual copies of a piece of work represent. To me, if you buy a CD, you own that copy... it is yours to do with what you want. If I bought a book, and I decided I wanted to cut out the word "and" from every page, as a consumer, that is my right because I own that copy of that work. The RIAA and its sister organizations argue that in fact, their clients are granting you a license to their work, nothing more. You don't own anything but a hunk of plastic, and thus, they are the arbiter of whatever you do with it. But at the same time, if something happens to your licensed copy of a piece of music, then they aren't responsible for replacing it, despite that being the logical implication of that licensing system (if you are buying the right to use one copy of something, then shouldn't you always have access to that copy despite the vagaries of physical media). I think my version of things is more in keeping with how every other commodity works. If you bought a car and you wanted to modify it for your own enjoyment within the confines of the transportation law, you are allow to do it because it is your property, a principle which basically works in every arena but this small one involving small hunks of round flat plastic and files. That is why the RIAA and MPAA (amongst others) is sort of malignant.
Added November 5th, 2009
Andrew Schlafly: Whenever I do one of these lists, there is usually one wingnut. Some are easy to recognize, some are very difficult. This entry is almost wearing a t-shirt that says they are in great big letters. You see, the reason that Mr. Schlafly is on this list is because I was looking at wikis this week, and he started the Conservapedia. The reason why he did so, and some of the subsequent incidents because of it are the reason why he is made this list. Schlafly has stated that he felt that Wikipedia has a "liberal, anti-Christian, and anti-American" bias. I could bring up a Stephen Colbert's quip that "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" as well, but that would be mean on my part. Some of the reasons he has seemed to find the site anti-American is due to the fact that non-Americans can edit the site from their own point of view and with their own take on the English spelling (British spelling is evil you know), and it is anti-Christian because the accepted date format is CE rather than AD amongst other things. He has been miffed that his edits of Wikipedia seemed to get deleted at times within a minute of posting, and has taken that as a sign that the whole thing is liberal, rather than as a sign that he may be a crank, and yet on his side of the Wiki aisle, there is very little freedom to express one's self outside of an agreed upon version of Conservative Christian orthodoxy. I've even heard rumors that editing is closed on Conservapedia during what are twilight hours in North America. There is the Lenski affair, and a spurious complaint to the FBI because someone edited a number of pages on the site by changing "Christianity" to "Ethnic Identity", the upshot of which is now people are getting permabanned for even mentioning the FBI on the site. But the topper for all this, the thing that proves just how nutty Schlafly is is the fact that he is spearheading an effort to take liberal influences out of the Bible... which includes the passage about He who is Without Sin, Cast the First Stone and Jesus asking God to forgive the people who crucified him. This is of course, just the tip of the iceberg.
Canadian Cable Companies: I have to preface this by saying that I live in an area that may or may not lose its local stations. There is a battle between local television stations and their networks and the Canadian Cable Companies. The cable television companies, who as far as I know have territorial monopolies (although maybe there is competition in places like Toronto and Montreal), and are carrying local stations on their systems without compensating those stations for their content. Those stations want some compensation, especially since as I understand it, cable viewers cannot be counted when they sell advertising on the station. What's more, the cable companies pay American stations to air them on the system, and yet, somehow they've gotten around that with local broadcasters, despite the fact that they are getting paid for doing so. When local stations started to complain and they banded together to get the revenues that they are owned with a series of television ads explaining the situation, the cable companies responded with a series of commercials of their own, making it seem like the local stations were being paid and were just trying to extort 10 dollars a month from subscribers, which is sheer chutzpah on two level. One as I mention, the local stations are getting dime one from the cable companies and two, where this 10 dollar fee came from is a mystery since the parties involved haven't even started negotiating over this, which to me tells me that the cable companies plan on instituting a new charge no matter what happens, even if the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC) says they can't pass on the local TV payments to consumers. The CRTC declared that cable companies couldn't charge customers for a payment they are supposed to make to support independent productions in Canada, but somehow, cable bills went up the same amount that the cable companies are supposed to be paying into that account. But I am going to tell you a little story that might demonstrate why I have a hard time believing anything the cable companies have to say at the moment. Back in 2003, our cable system was slowly making the transition from a purely analog system to a two tier system with basic analog cable with a set of digital channels with a box for the higher channels. During this transition, the Canadian equivalent of HBO was on both the analog and digital dial, until one day, it just disappeared from analog, which was what I was watching it on. So I call the cable company and tell them my problem, that the station disappeared without warning, and the guy on the other end, without missing a beat, says that what I say isn't possible... because that channel was never on analog. Right... a channel that I had watched for 7 years was never on the system. So I am a liar then and my previous experiences were a hallucination. I mean, that is a much more likely explanation than say this one: you wanted subscribers to move up to the digital package, and you didn't want to send a letter telling analog subscribers that you were in fact discontinuing that channel for them like you had for so many other changes. Telling your customers they are liars is always a great policy, isn't it?
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