A while back I posted about a project I highly approve of, the Obameter.

Current Obameter stats:

Obameter Stats as of 2009-06-30

(Hooray for Google Charts!)

Along similar lines, but more participatory, is the Sunlight Foundation’s Transparency Corps project, which aims to enlist internet users en masse (I refuse to use the term “crowdsource”) the tedious work of scrutinizing public, but dense, records to ensure more, well, transparency.  As of this writing, they have only two projects — one to read earmarks and one to exhort Congresspeople to read bills before signing them — but I hope it takes off.  It’s a very good idea.

(Other noteworthy efforts along these lines: the indispensible OpenCongress (also a Sunlight Foundation project); for those of us in Massachusetts, the OpenCongress-inspired OpenMass, run by BMG’s own Jim Caralis; Filibusted, which as you might guess tracks who filibusters what, how often and for how long; and the unfortunately-named — hey y’all, you might want to notice that they ain’t all men no more — but very handy Know Thy Congressman.  The latter two were the first- and tied-for-third-place winners, respectively, in the Sunlight Foundation’s Apps for America contest, which is also a great idea.)

I am lucky: I was born male in a society that values male persons more than female persons, and, arbitrarily, accords the former undeserved privileges while unjustly denying the latter their full equal rights as human beings.  I am lucky: because of that undeserved privilege, and the way our misogynist culture works, and some measure of random chance, I have not been a target of sexual assault.  I am lucky: I live in a society which, though misogynist, has a relatively effective system of laws, the application of which, even over my three decades of life, has been, on the whole, more closely (if slowly) approaching justice.  The people I know, in my real-world, meat-space life, are lucky: disproportionately few of the women I know are survivors of sexual assault or rape — or at least, as far as I know; but it’s also not unlikely that I simply don’t know about many cases, because our misogynist culture teaches women to be ashamed of, and silent about, having been the victim of crime.

Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection, along with Isis the Scientist, Aetiology, Bioephemera, Neurotopia and The Questionable Authority, has launched a project, inspired by a Nick Kristof column, to bring attention and pressure to bear to try to end the epidemic of mass rape around the world.

Kirshenbaum, taking seriously the idea that silence is the enemy, opens her post by describing her experience with sexual assault.  She’s right: if survivors refuse to be silent and ashamed, it becomes harder and harder for people who’d prefer not to upset the apple cart to pretend the status quo is tenable.

It’s important, however, not to misunderstand this (which I don’t think Kirshenbaum does; she’s just picked a particular focus) as a problem of Darfur, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Liberia, or West Africa, or “elsewhere.”  There are certain places in the world — generally, places where a state of war or lawlessness has lasted a long time: mass rape has long been used as a weapon of war, even by our own soldiers — where these things happen in such numbers, and with such brutality, that it can be hard to believe.  The roots of these problems are deep, and are intertwined with histories of colonization and exploitation, and of war, and of poverty.

But we should not believe that we in the “West¹” are so much better.  We have, in the United States for example, a functioning government, and relatively fair laws, and no war is being fought on our soil.  But even so, by the most widely accepted estimate, at least one in six women will be sexually assaulted or raped at least once in her lifetime.

Let me rephrase that, actually, because it’s important that we do not linguistically hide the criminals.  Men² will sexually assault or rape at least one in six women. It’s not just something that happens, it’s something people do.  And like the women of Congo, the women of Darfur, the women of Liberia, like Sheril Kirshenbaum, silence is also the enemy of these women.  Silence is the enemy of the one in six who have been assaulted, and the enemy of the five in six who have not, but who are also in danger.  Silence is the enemy of the men who have been victims of sexual assault, because the weight of culturally-imposed shame falls heavily on them as well.  Silence is the enemy of the men, too, who have never harmed anyone, many of whom simply do not know, because our misogynist culture of shame and silence is not set up for them to know, the true extent and impact of sexual assault and rape.

Two months ago, Melissa McEwan opened a thread at Shakesville to try to help break that silence: the more we understand the extent of this horror, the less excuse we have not to fight to end it.  Silence is the enemy; these stories need to be heard.

A good man was murdered yesterday.

Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas was one of only a handful — perhaps two, or three, or four, there doesn’t appear to be a clear consensus — of doctors in the entire United States who perform late-term abortions.

Yesterday, as he was walking into church services, someone shot and killed him.

Tiller has been a major target of the anti-choice movement for a very long time.  He has lived with near-constant death threats, frequent vandalism, and other intimidation and demonization, for many years; in 1993, in an earlier attempt on his life, he was shot in both arms, but recovered and returned to practice.

Only a couple of months ago, he was acquitted of trumped-up misdemeanor charges brought in an attempt to prevent him from helping women.

He has been attacked by Bill O’Reilly, persecuted via the Kansas legal system and, now, murdered for doing his duty as a doctor as best he saw it to help women who, on top of being faced with terrible, heartbreaking decisions, were being bombarded from all sides by messages that they were bad, unworthy people who deserved no help.

They did deserve help, of course.  They do deserve help.  Dr. Tiller was one of very few people willing to help them; and now that number is smaller.

It’s important to understand this about late-term abortions: they are a procedure that is simply never performed except for reasons of medical necessity.  They are performed when the mother’s health is gravely imperiled by the pregnancy or the prospect of giving birth, or when the fetus suffers from congenital deformities or defects which will ensure its life is very brief and very painful, or when the fetus is already dead to save the mother the trauma of delivering a stillborn baby, or sometimes when the mother’s only chance to survive cancer is to enroll in an experimental treatment which doesn’t accept pregnant women.  No one ever, ever wants late-term abortions to be necessary; but sometimes they are.

Now that there is one fewer doctor who performs these procedures in the country, many women will be unable to have this necessary procedure performed.  Some will be bankrupted trying to pay for medical care for an infant which cannot survive.  Some will be plunged into depression over delivering a corpse or watching helplessly as their babies die.  Some — dozens? perhaps a hundred or more? — will die along with their fetuses, due to the birth complications that made the abortion a necessity.

The domestic terrorist who murdered Dr. Tiller has killed them too.

I was going to add links to this post, but so much has been written that I hardly know where to start.  Virtually every political blog on my blogroll has one or more posts about it, should any readers want more.

So I’ll just point to Jill Filipovic’s list of suggested organizations to donate money to in Dr. Tiller’s honor, to Sara Robinson’s explanation of how terrorism like this is a natural consequence — indeed, the goal — of decades of right-wing eliminationist rhetoric, and to Ann’s list of things we can do.

The Times is reporting that President Obama has selected Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for the Supreme Court seat Justice David Souter will be vacating when he retires at the end of this term.  From what I’ve read this seems like an excellent choice, though I was also excited about the prospect of a couple of his other short-listers, Dean Elena Kagan or Judge Diane Wood, being picked.  I hope that I’m right in believing her record shows her to be more likely to side with the powerless than the powerful; it’s also very exciting to have the first Latino on the court.

This is mainly me doing my paltry best to boost signal for Teh Portly Dyke’s post on the necessity of investigations and prosecutions for the war crimes committed by the US government over the past eight years (a subject I’ve mentioned before).

Launching a war of aggression is a war crime. Torturing prisoners is a war crime. Refusing to investigate and prosecute war crime is itself a war crime. And if the rule of law means anything, it means the mighty are bound by the same laws as the small, and president, ministers and CEOs may not be excused for their misconduct on grounds of expediency anymore than pickpockets or junkies.

PD has issued a pledge and a challenge to write letters weekly until investigations commence. I don’t know whether I will manage to do that — it often takes me months to write a single blog post — but I will try, and I encourage you to as well.

So, a little while ago there was this thread over at Shakesville, where standard mockery of a wingnut’s absurd hyperbole quickly devolved into a barrage of our own absurd hyperbole.  Note that “quickly” here means “by the second comment.”

In the course of the thread, Jen said,

No fair. Scott’s got his hyperbole shield on. It’s like he wants to destroy us all with snappy comebacks while remaining immune himself. SCOTT MADIN IS THE EBOLA VIRUS OF THE INTERNET.

To which I responded, as anyone would, “I want that on a plaque.”

Reader, I did not have to wait long!

Llencelyn obliged shortly thereafter:

Scott Madin: Ebola Virus of the Internet

And I thought that was really pretty awesome.

Last weekend, however (sorry, Llen!) it got pretty squarely beat.  The Brahmina came to my birthday party, and brought me a little something from Giant Microbes:

Plush Ebola Virus Tag

But this was no stock plush Ebola virus, oh no!  That, my friends, is not how the Brahmina rolls.

Behatted Ebola Virus

That’s right.  It’s wearing a suit, and tie, and glasses, and a gray fedora.

Thanks, Brahmina!

There has been much wailing, gnashing of teeth, tearing of hair and rending of garments in the online video game press the past few days — you’d think someone died.

And you’d be right.  It was this guy:

Duke Nukem

And, not to put too fine a point on it, I come to bury Nukem, not to praise him.

Duke Nukem is an iconic figure, for better or for worse (and it’s mostly worse), in video game culture.  He’s the hard-bitten, cigar-chomping, iron-pumping, one-liner-spouting, alien-killing badass hero of 3D Realms’ series of games named for him.  The Duke Nukem series began in 1991 with the original Duke Nukem; the sequel came two years later, and Duke Nukem 3D, the inception of what we might call the modern Duke Nukem franchise, arrived in January 1996.  Indeed, DN3D might equally be called the definition of the modern Duke Nukem franchise.  The first two games were DOS-based side-scrolling platformers, with little plot exposition and no dialogue; Duke himself was only a few pixels tall, and while his blond buzzcut was discernible, little else was.  And they were pretty fun, actually.  iD had shown a year earlier with Commander Keen that you could make a PC platformer as much fun as the console titles that dominated the market (though PC platformers would take much longer to break out of the limited shareware niche, and never became the dominant force that console platformers did), and Apogee picked up their formula and ran with it.

iD, of course, then made Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, and while they were arguably less sophisticated than their contemporary competition (and the whole iD/Bungie, PC/Mac history is very interesting, but beyond the scope of this blog post), they completely changed the market’s idea of what a video game was.

Apogee had no intention of being left behind, so their 3D Realms division (which would later become the whole company, as the Apogee name and all non-3D games were quietly dropped) looked at Wolf3D and Doom and saw, apparently, mainly that they were graphically violent in a way games had not really previously been, and that in Doom’s case, it allowed multiplayer “deathmatch” gameplay.  And, again apparently, they thought to themselves, “OK, those elements are important to a game being a huge success.  What else might we need?”  And their answer to this question was, “boobies, duh.”

And thus Duke Nukem 3D was born, and Duke Nukem was reborn, transformed from a tiny, nondescript 2D sprite with yellow hair into a self-parodying, hollow caricature of machismo; a pastiche of every musclebrained action hero ever, rattling off lines that were only kind of funny when Bruce Campbell said them in the first place.  Oh yeah, plus gems like “no one steals our chicks and lives,” on learning that the invading aliens are abducting human women, and “shake it, baby,” on encountering strippers bizarrely still dancing in the blasted-out ruin of a nightclub.

Duke Nukem Forever was announced as the sequel to Duke Nukem 3D in April 1997 — about 15 months after DN3D saw the light of day.

In 2001, 3D Realms came in for some mockery from Penny Arcade with its announcement that they were going to stop setting release dates (of which they’d already blown past several) and that the gamew ould be released “when it’s done.”  (The other game to which they refer, Prey, was another famous vaporware title, first announced in 1995, and after a similarly troubled development process to DNF, was eventually handed off to a different development studio, and released to middling reviews in 2006.)  DNF was so hotly anticipated, back when it was first announced, and so over-hyped, that it rapidly became a punchline, of course, and no one is really surprised that it is, indeed, never coming out.  The “Forever” in the title really did refer to the development time.  And hence the gnashing of teeth, &c.

And I say: good.  Duke Nukem embodied everything that was wrong with video games.

In between DN3D’s release and DNF’s final demise, there were approximately 2.4 billion other Duke Nukem games released, almost all of which were ports, expansions, or retreads.  One of the PlayStation ports was subtitled Land of the Babes; there was also a Penthouse-themed level pack.  I mention this because the usual refrain from fans of Duke Nukem 3D is that it was the gameplay they loved so much (a claim that sounds frustratingly familiar to anyone who paid attention to the Resident Evil 5 controversy), not the immature chuckles they might have derived from the third-hand jokes and thoroughgoing misogyny.  But the documented history of the game belies that notion, and besides, I was there.  I was a nerdy sixteen-year-old guy who spent way too much time playing video games, when DN3D came out — precisely its target audience — and I know what it was about the game I liked: it was that Duke cursed, and part of the game was set in a porno theater, and there were strippers.  I thought it was funny that you could shoot the strippers, and they’d explode in a shower of dollar bills.  Like an unfortunately high percentage of sixteen-year-old boys, even the nerdy ones who play too many video games, I was an asshole.  But 3D Realms knew that about sixteen-year-old boys, and they made a game that catered to assholes.  And everything we knew about Duke Nukem Forever made it quite clear that they were still going after that same misogynist, poorly socialized, teenage boy audience.

(I think it’s worth noting that the first Grand Theft Auto — back when it was a top-down, 2D game with simple, cartoony graphics, long before there was any controversy, or indeed much of any notice at all, attached to the name — was released in late 1997, over a year and a half after DN3D.)

So, yes: I’m very glad this game is never coming out.  There’s a lot of ink being spilled in regret and nostalgia for the good old days of Duke Nukem 3D, but it’s fundamentally dishonest, in that its writers claim what they miss is the fun, fast-paced multiplayer, when in fact many games — from the original Half-Life, released only a couple of years after DN3D, or even the brilliant-beyond-its-time Descent, which predated DN3D by almost a year, through to many modern games — have offered and do offer better multiplayer experiences.  What they really miss, I believe, is the cheap thrill of objectification of and violence against women, the macho posturing, the frisson of transgression from a character in a video game using swear words: the same impulses, at bottom, that lead people to valorize “political incorrectness.”

Video games need to grow out of those juvenile attitudes.  Video game culture needs to refuse to stay mired in that mid-90s-teenage-boy mindset.  I’m not an asshole poorly-socialized sixteen-year-old anymore, and I’m actually completely OK with not reliving those years.  The excessive mourning for Duke Nukem suggests that many in the video game press would like to, and I think that’s rather sad, especially when we have so many other, better examples of what video games can do.  Me, I’m glad he’s dead.

And by “that,” of course, I mean this:

I was at Saturday’s game, where we came back from 0-6 in the 4th with an RBI single and a grand slam, and ended up giving the Yankees a 16-11 drubbing, so I’m not too sad not to have seen the steal in person, but wow.  The look of “wuh?” on Pettitte’s face is priceless.

Jeff wrote about this today, at his place and at Alas!, and a bunch of other folks have picked it up too:

Shepard Smith, on a Fox program called “Freedom Watch,” discussing recent coverage of the Obama administration’s release of Bush-era DOJ memos “authorizing” torture, and Michael Hayden’s claims that torturing prisoners provided useful information, very dramatically banged his fist on the desk and yelled, “We are America!  I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps: we are America!  We do not fucking torture!  We don’t do it!” while the other panelists tried to keep giving the calm, fair and balanced view of both sides of the issue that Fox is known for.

I’ve seen a fair amount of cheering for Shep Smith on this, and as far as that goes, well, sure, I agree: outrage, indignation and profanity are the only sane reaction to a government so calculatedly setting about to torture people into giving false confessions which could then be used as justifications for launching an illegal, immoral war of conquest against an unfriendly, but hardly dangerous, tinpot dictatorship which happened to be in possession of and in proximity to an awful lot of oil.

(Which, just by the way, did Shep Smith bang his fists on any desks about the launching of that war, at the time?  It wasn’t known at the time that we’d been torturing people to obtain our pretext, but no serious consideration of the available information could possibly have led any reasonable person to conclude it was anything other than an illegal war of aggression, and thus a war crime.  I certainly don’t remember hearing about Smith, or much of anyone in the media — Krugman being an exception — doing a lot of desk-pounding.  I’m just saying, is all.)

So anyway, you know, good for Smith.  But what he’s saying isn’t actually true.  We do torture.  We’ve done it several times.  In fact, we tortured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month, if we only count one kind of torture.  That’s precisely what these memos, for example, are about.  What he means is “we are America, so torturing is incompatible with how we’re supposed to behave, with who we were before 9/11,” but what he actually said — which, except for the “fucking,” is exactly the phrase President Obama has used when promising to end torture, and exactly the phrase President Bush used when lying about the fact that we were  torturing — is “we don’t torture,” and that’s just not true.

It’s an attempt, I think, to salvage a belief in the United States’s righteousness.  We — us — the real America — America as we’re supposed to be — we don’t torture!  We never would!  The last eight years, that, um, that wasn’t really us!  We were kind of crazy because of 9/11, and these awful guys Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were in power, and, and, and, a hundred reasons why it doesn’t count.

Nonsense.

First, “that doesn’t count” is a way of saying “we shouldn’t have to do anything about it, our insistance that ‘we don’t’ should be enough.”  Second, even though we didn’t actually elect Bush in 2000, and depending on how you feel about what happened in Ohio may not have elected him in 2004 either, about half of us voted for him, each time over an obviously better, more qualified, more experienced, smarter, better person.  We voted for the Representatives and Senators who signed onto the illegal war of conquest, who steadfastly insisted even once the opposition party gained control that impeachment was  “off the table,” who failed to demand sweeping, thorough investigations from the top down as soon as the first allegations of torture surfaced, who went along with plans to illegally eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants.  And all of that does count.  We don’t get to pretend it didn’t happen.  We don’t get to pretend someone else did it.

And finally: that righteousness Smith wants to protect his belief in was a lie from the start.  “America doesn’t torture?”  Are you sure?  If you read histories that weren’t necessarily written by and for people who look like Shep Smith, you might come to a different conclusion.  If you ask communities of color who’ve been subjected to the unchecked, arbitrary power of racist police departments for years, or citizens of Latin American countries whose socialist governments the CIA tried to destabilize or that were run by School of the Americas graduates, or the Vietnamese, or Native Americans, or the descendants of slaves, or LGBTQI people whether America tortures and commits atrocities and war crimes, you might get a different answer than what Smith implies.

We can’t pretend that was all someone else.  We can’t pretend we’re special.  It was us, and denying it is just as dangerous as denying the Holocaust happened, and for pretty much the same reasons.  Langston Hughes wrote, “America never was America to me.”  By the nature of the ideal of America, of course, so long as there is anyone to whom America is not America, America — the America Shep Smith talks about, the America that America never was — still does not exist.  In fact it very probably never will.  But the point of ideals is not to achieve them, but to strive constantly to get closer to them, and if we tell ourselves that ideal America Hughes swore would be already is, and our striving can be ended, then nothing’s surer than that it will only get further away.

If you don’t read Kai Chang’s Zuky, well, let me tell you, you’re missing out.  He’s an absolutely brilliant writer, and whether talking about gardening or the toxic legacy of colonialism, what he has to say is always worth your time.  I first found Kai through Nezua, but to my great detriment I didn’t start following his blog again until I saw him in the running for the 2008 Weblog Awards, and thought “oh hey! ‘Zuky’ sounds familiar!”  And then the first post of his I saw contributed to my quotes sidebar one of the most brilliant sentences I think I’ve ever read.  His latest again displays the same kind of (I’ll have to ask you to pardon the cliché — what else but cliché can an inferior writer fall back on when describing a far superior?) gemlike clarity.  I don’t kid myself that my tiny readership will make much difference to his numbers, but even if I’m not doing Kai much of a favor by trying to point y’all his way, if you do start following his blog, I will certainly have done you one.