• A recent must-read: Adam Serwer and Katie J.M. Baker of Buzzfeed on “How Men’s Rights Leader Paul Elam Turned Being a Deadbeat Dad Into a Moneymaking Movement.” David Futrelle has covered Elam and the “men’s rights” movement for years at We Hunted the Mammoth, where he supplements the Buzzfeed profile with “More, Much More, About the Charming Paul Elam.”
This is why, whenever I catch a whiff of anything like this MRA stuff, it sets off alarm bells.
• ISIS/Daesh aims to promote their agenda by publicizing their killing of the journalists and aid-workers they have taken hostage. This has put American conservatives in a predicament. American conservatives hate Islamist terrorists like Daesh, but they also hate journalists and aid-workers. The strain of this dissonance is starting to show.
• Christian Nightmares informs us that at some point the folks at Marilyn Hickey Ministries decided to make a “comic book” based on the book of Revelation. The project was apparently completed by people who had: A) never been to seminary; and B) never read a comic book. I would comment on the horrible theology and biblical illiteracy of the thing, but I can’t get past the execrable lettering.
• Scott Eric Kaufman meets Captain Jack. Acquits himself as well as can be expected.
• Patrick Mitchel stumbles into one of my biggest pet peeves: He writes about “the sacred/secular divide” when what he’s actually talking about is the sacred/profane divide.
I’m not making a grammatical point there. This is a dangerous confusion. Christians like Mitchel start by saying “secular” when they mean “profane” and end up thinking that therefore something is wrong with the idea of secular government. Get rid of secular government and you’ll wind up either with a pile of bodies or with a thoroughly secularized state religion. Always.
• Matthew Keville finally saw Caddyshack and observes some interesting ways the quotable 1980 comedy is an artifact of pre-Reagan America. “I wonder when Roman Catholicism stopped being the strange alien ways that had to be stopped, and just became part of the Religious Right. … Whenever it was, this movie seems to be just a little bit before.”
• “The only way to get rid of a plot bunny, even a disreputably fannish one, is to write it.”
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