France has been steadily moving to implement a promise made by its president Francois Hollande to legalize same-sex marriage, despite the Catholic Church and right wing groups mobilizing large protests against it, similar to what they have done in the US. [Read more…]
Neetzan Zimmerman recounts the story of Alois Bell, pastor of a St. Louis church, who took a group of her flock to her neighborhood Applebee’s for dinner. The bill included an 18% gratuity built in, which is the restaurant’s policy for groups of 8 or more people, something that is fairly common. Serving large groups is tricky (especially if they order separately and want separate bills) and unfortunately some customers try to stiff the wait staff by under-tipping. (This whole business of tipping is a complex one and I expressed my own views on it back in 2005.) [Read more…]
In a lighter vein, That Mitchell and Webb Look struggles with some of the same issues of racism that this blog has been grappling with in the last few days. [Read more…]
Politics often features heated rhetoric. Hyperbolic language is often deliberately used by politicians in order to achieve more modest goals like electoral gains but, like a controlled burn in a forest that suddenly breaks its boundaries and wreaks havoc, it can take on a life of its own that its originators can no longer control. [Read more…]
Religious people are always fighting the inroads made by secular modern culture. One example is the Super Bowl that is coming up this Sunday and which is expected to drawn an audience of around 100 million. Some religious groups are worried that the halftime shows are not appropriate for their flock because the performances can be somewhat raunchy. Ever since the entire nation was traumatized in 2004 by briefly seeing one of Janet Jackson’s nipples, religious groups have felt the need to protect believers from such dangerous threats to their holiness. [Read more…]
At the risk of beating a dead horse, I want to come back one more time to the question of when the use of the n-word might be appropriate.
I am a huge fan of English humorist P. G. Wodehouse, especially enjoying his Jeeves and Wooster series. If you have read Wodehouse, you know that his stories largely deal with the life of the British upper classes and aristocracy and are set in the time between World War I and World War II. His funniest writing also occurred in this period, though he was a prolific writer, churning out stuff right up to his death in 1975. [Read more…]
The discussions between Jon Stewart and Larry Wilmore about race issues are almost always both amusing and thoughtful. This one from 2011 concerns the controversy I wrote about earlier today about the removal of the n-word from a recent edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. [Read more…]
Photo from New York Post
In my recent post on why I will not see the film Django Unchained, I gave as one reason my distaste with the fact that Quentin Tarantino seems obsessed with using the n-word as much as possible. This prompted many comments on the use of such words and one commenter noted that I should not use the euphemism. [Read more…]
You now that we have reached a bizarre stage in the so-called war on terror when a court rules that the government is doing something that is likely unconstitutional but legal.
One of the most shameful and appalling actions of the Obama administration is its claim that it has the right to target and kill anyone in the world using whatever means at its disposal, but in practice using mostly drones. Of course the US government, through the CIA, has routinely murdered people for decades but it was done covertly and not acknowledged, which implied that the government knew it was wrong but did it anyway. [Read more…]