How Many Children Did Jesus Beat?

This story is all over the intertubes. Amanda has the best takedown.

The only Biblical justification for such child abuse is in Proverbs. Even if you take these versus as literally as possible - i.e., that it's okay to use a "rod" to "chastize" your child, as opposed to "rod" being a metaphor for less cruel disciplines - none of them endorse the level of violence and cruelty depicted in this video or in some of the publications Amanda references. It takes a sick interpretation by a sick mind to conclude that the Bible supports severe beatings.

Stuck Up in the South

As someone who has lived in just about all the major cultural regions of the US, including the South, I can assure you that people in the South are no more or less civil on the whole than anywhere else. Most of what passes for old-fashioned Southern "civility" has nothing to do with manners. It's about reinforcing caste, race and gender roles. It's also about allowing racists, sexists, anti-Semites, homophobes, Islamophobes, immigrant bashers, etc. to pretend that they're not such bad people after all because they know how to say please, thank you, sir and ma'am. And it's also a deliberately exaggerated and phony civility that allows the sort of southerner who engages in it  to continue to buy into the Myth of Southern Superiority - i.e., "We have better manners than you, so we're better than you."

In my experience, most southerners (just as most people everywhere) are nice people with normally polite manners. And I'm talking about born-and-bred southerners, not the snowbirds. The ones who bitch about the decline in "civility" and the influx of "outsiders" are a minority and, not surprisingly, mostly a bunch of snobby, racist, Yankee-hating assholes.

Jesus Wept

His Chosen Quarterback is, as of the half, 4/13 for 37.

I'd Rather Be Stupid Than Right

I really do not get global warming deniers. What do they gain by sounding like complete fucking idiots?

American Exceptionalism: Our Internet Sucks

I'm paying $60/mo for broadband internet. I'd say about 10% of the sites I visit fail to load properly on the first try.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

It has occurred to me, as I find myself tuning into the only 1pm NFL game available in western Florida - Miami vs NYG, two teams I could not possibly care less about unless they were the Texas Rangers and St Louis Cardinals - that one reason we watch so many boring, mediocre professional sporting competitions on TV in this country is because everything else that's on the gazillion or so endless-rerun cable channels we get is even more boring.

Distinguishing Shit from Shinola

This is great.

St Ronnie of Apartheid

But Lincoln freed some of the slaves, so that proves Republicans aren't really racists.

My Daily Why-I-Hate-Cops Rant

It's hard to say which is more appalling - the widespread corruption, or the behavior of the off-duty officers who showed up for the arraignments.

Update: See also.

The G is for Grifters

The GOP goes all Bank-of-America on Tampa area hoteliers and tells them they have to pay for the previous RNC chairman's fuckups by reducing their rates and handing over a much bigger chunk of the haul.

Actually, Most of Them ARE Stupid

And corrupt, and afraid Fox News and the Beltway press corps will say mean things about them.

Regardless of what our elected (big-D) Democratic officials believe to be best for the rest of us, it's (little-d) undemocratic to impose policies that are contrary to what the public wants.

But in any case, the vast majority of Washington politicians are lawyers, and almost all the rest are businessmen or doctors. They're not economists or experts on investing and finance. They don't think these policies through. They've adopted a fundamentally conservative economic ideology that sounds logical to them ("deficits bad! taxes bad! regulation bad!" etc) but which both historical fact and economic models tell us is bullshit.

They may not be stupid in the IQ sense, but on these matters, they are gullible, ignorant, and too easily bought.

Update: See also.

A Small Victory for Kenyan Islamosocialism

Yes, government can do many things right, and it can do those things for a much lower cost, and with greater consistency, fairness and accountability, than the private sector.

The problem is not government. It's not even "big" government. The problem is bad government, which is fixable as long as you don't keep electing government-hating jackasses determined to prove themselves "right".

The Pride of Texas

Shorter Prick Erry:

Swearing at your wife is sufficient grounds for judicial murder.

Why I Hate Cops 2

Yeah, it's a great fucking country we live in.

At Least He Can't Accuse Us of Anti-Semitism

No way Brian Moynihan is Jewish.

But he's definitely a kucker.

h/t

Why I Hate Cops

This pretty much sums it up.

Cheating is Winning Except When You're Losing, in Which Case It's Bad Luck

As I believe I've said before on this blog (too lazy to look up my own links), cheaters almost always regard themselves as smarter than their victims, and see successful cheating as prima facie evidence of how smart they are and how stupid their marks are for letting themselves get cheated. In other words, they see it as "winning", even if Matt Taibbi and the rest of us don't.

Of course, it doesn't occur to them that if they were really all that smart, they should be able to win without cheating.

Netflix Again

Also, too: Red Box and Blockbuster Express kiosks are now everywhere - in my neighborhood, you can't spit without hitting one. At $1 a night, if you rent only 2-3 movies a month and are only interested in relatively recent releases - which is basically what Atrios means by Netflix's "best", i.e. most profitable, customers - then you're probably gong to see the rental kiosks as a viable alternative. They aren't quite as convenient, because you have to go pick and return the DVD instead of fishing it out of your mailbox and putting the return envelope back in it when you're done. But since these kiosks are located in places you probably go to or drive by frequently anyway (grocery and convenience stores), it's not that big an inconvenience.

Companies That Don't Understand Their Own Markets

DVDs will eventually be an obsolete technology, and Netflix's DVD-by-mail business will die. But the key word here is eventually. We're a long, long way from a workable internet streaming model that can compete with the DVD rental business.

The obstacles to streaming aren't technological, but political - if they were technological, we could fix them. Political obstacles are much harder to get rid of. By "political", I don't just mean policies enacted or supported by politicians, such as the morons who want to eliminate net neutrality. I almost also mean the politics of the film and TV industry, which has various real and imagined incentives to keep streaming from becoming the predominant delivery technology.

On-demand streaming will eventually become how pretty much all content except live events will be delivered, but because of the politics, we're at least a couple of decades from that. Part of Netflix's mistake was seeing streaming as a more immediate threat to its DVD business than is actually the case.

Insde the Wingnut Mind

This isn't really aimed at anyone. It's just a standard form of wingnut whining. The logic, if it can be called that, goes like this:

X a member of group G [e.g., women]
X is being criticized for her position on Subject S [e.g., I'm a raving homophobe]
Ergo, any criticism of X's position on S is ___ist [e.g., sexist]

Or, in the case of Kristol:

The financial industry elite are disproportionately Jewish.
OWS want some accountability for the people who lined their pockets while wrecking the world economy, and they want regulations to prevent it from happening again.
Ergo, OWS is anti-Semitic.