This, of course, follows on Catalonia’s execrable decision to outright ban bullfighting.

A commenter on the Yahoo story summed up my thoughts pretty well:

What a shame it is that bullfights will no longer be aired so that children will learn the valuable moral lessons these noble events instill. An important tool for teaching virtues is being tossed aside, and I fear the virtues themselves will be lost because of it.

Those who decry bullfighting for being cruel, violent, barbaric – those people miss the point. Barbarism is good. Cruelty is good. Violence is good. To be weak or peaceful is to be an abomination. It is to be prey, meant for killing and exploiting. Bullfighting teaches the value of killing the weak, which is mankind’s highest calling.

Bullfighting should be flourishing in Spain and spreading to other countries. Instead, it is dying, and mankind’s goodness is dying with it, replaced by the lies and sins of “compassion” and “mercy”. Bullfighting is good. Bloodsports are good.

I don’t know that I’d say killing the weak is mankind’s highest calling, but the rest of it is pretty much spot-on, I think, especially the knocks against compassion and pacifism. That said, I’d add that there’s also a problem with criticism of bullfighting based on “animal rights” reasoning, since “animal rights” is a contradiction in terms. No such things exist. Rights stem from consciousness and sentience, which animals (like fetuses, coma patients, plants, rocks, and everything else that doesn’t possess or deserve rights) are incapable of having.

And as for bullfighting? A world with bullfighting is a better world than a world without bullfighting, and humanity with bullfighting is better than humanity without bullfighting.

Oh well.

Of course, this spam’s better than the other spam I get.

I just wonder how these organizations got my email address, is all.

Just thought I’d share, since I like sharing interesting websites.

Seriously, I saw it come on TV the other night, and I was just baffled by why the Bouchard campaign thought it would sway people against Chris Stolle. See, it doesn’t attack Stolle’s proposals, or his judgment, or his values, or his ideas, or his record from another position… ok, it does that last, but it’s a ridiculous stretch. See, Chris Stolle works at a hospital. So, of course, Bouchard’s put on tv an ad that attacks… the hospital.

WTF?

Tellingly, the ad has not been put on YouTube. As it stands, it’s just one more example of the reason I don’t like election season – which seems to be neverending here in Virginia: the damned campaigning.

This mystifies me. Setting aside the root question of “Does there exist – and if so, what is it – a valid reason for allowing a non-expert celebrity’s opinion to sway your judgment on anything?”**, I have to wonder: what reason is there to give more credence to Jenny McCarthy’s belief that vaccination is good than to give credence to Salma Hayek‘s belief that vaccination is good, or Amanda Peet‘s belief not merely that vaccination is good, but that the refusal to vaccinate your kid is destructive anti-social behavior worthy of public censure. Sure, if you look into the available research (which Peet clearly did), you’ll find out that Peet and Hayek are right and McCarthy’s wrong, but before then… what is it that makes people say “My kid’s doctor, Salma Hayek, and Amanda Peet all say I should have my kid vaccinated, but Jenny McCarthy says I shouldn’t, so I just don’t know what to do.”

Really, in a field where neither has any expertise by dint of professional experience, rigorous education, or performing original research… what is it that gives one person more credibility than another?

*I’m really not sure whether I think the fad is having autistic children or blaming your kid’s autism on vaccination. You know the theme in Rain Man where nobody, not even the nurse at the doctor’s office, knows what “autism” is? That’s because until Rain Man, nobody who wasn’t directly connected to autism or an autistic person had ever heard of it – which was because it was rare. Kinda makes me wonder if it’s been overdiagnosed of late.

**As the memorable scene goes:
Kid #3: My Mommy says smoking kills.
Nick Naylor: Oh, is your Mommy a doctor?
Kid #3: No.
Nick Naylor: A scientific researcher of some kind?
Kid #3: No.
Nick Naylor: Well, then she’s hardly a credible expert, is she?

Anyway, seems the 5-second-rule isn’t unhygienic unhygenic, it’s prophylactic!

So be it. All I can say before we go to happy-cut-tag-land to prevent spoilers, is: Go see this movie. It is amazing. And remember, “A smile is cheaper than a bullet!”.

Actually, before the cut, I’ll add something else. The woman “E” who wrote this review displays a lamentable ignorance of human history. I agree that the movie contains a level of gore that will disgust many people (though going to a movie with Peter Jackson’s name so prominently associated with it, you should expect gore. Being surprised by gore in a movie associated with Peter Jackson is like being surprised by fart and Jew jokes in a movie associated with Mel Brooks), and there is horrific barbarism (though in my opinion, there is justice meted out and redemption had), which was unsettling even to me the first time. But to watch the movie and say “[I] was insulted that they tried to make that comparison” is equivalent to watching Children of Men and saying “I was insulted that the movie suggested prison guards would put a prisoner in a black hood and garbage-bag cloak, stick him on a box, and string him up with wires“. Considering that the movie pulled the details straight out of real events – as I will explain in spoilering form below the cut – you should not be insulted. If anything, you should be ashamed of your limited knowledge of actual human history.

Now, Miss “E” states, “I just can’t believe they thought they could compaire the holocaust or apartheid to what the aliens were going through.”. Well, let’s see… the movie begins with forced relocation of the aliens living in District 9, Johannesburg, South Africa. I’m going to assume that E is, like me, a white middle-class American, and so I’m not going to blame her for not knowing that during apartheid, there was forced relocation of the black people living in District 6, Cape Town, South Africa. I am going to blame her, though, for not knowing about Negro RemovalUrban Renewal and Indian Removal. So… forced relocation… check.

Ok, so what about being used as test subjects for destructive medical experimentation and as targets for weapons tests? Well, testing weapons on live people is more commonly associated with the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731 than Nazi experimentation. That is, more commonly associated by people who know about more human experimentation than just what the Nazis did. But as long as we’re talking about the Nazis – and fuck it, I thought EVERYBODY knew about that! – what Nazis like Megele did was more of the vivisection and deliberate-infliction-of-wounds to see their effects sort. And you know, when Wikus gets wheeled through the lab and when he and Christopher Johnson break in, there’s a lot of… vivisected Prawns… and Prawns that have been burned… and… hmm… looks to me like Mr. Blomkamp may have, oh, I don’t know, read the evidence that was presented at the Nuremberg Trials and stuck that in his movie with the only changes being the substitution of MNU for the Nazis and the aliens for the Jews, Roma, POWs, etc.

Come to think of it… Wikus gets infected, and rather than treat him, doctors leave the infection untreated to study its effects. There’s no way that could possibly be similar to a real event like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Of course, E did specify “apartheid”, which generally refers to South Africa, and Tuskegee, Alabama, is the the United States… And to be honest, while I made that association, I really don’t think there was the same sort of deliberate basing-on-actual-events that there was with the other stuff.

Regardless… the filmmakers “thought they could compaire the holocaust or apartheid to what the aliens were going through” because they were the exact same thing.

On a comparably trivial note, I found the subtitles kind of annoying. Not the subtitles for the alien language – I appreciated those – but the subtitles when assorted humans were speaking. Just because a guy’s speaking with an accent doesn’t mean he isn’t speaking English! Hell, every African shown in the movie was either Nigerian (and I love that when Obasandjo – the name’s similarity to Obasanjo may or may not be deliberate, but I noticed it Friday night – has his gang rip off the prawns for the power armor, there’s several iterations of translation, which not speaking any African language I can only assume is some sequence involving Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba. When was the last time you saw a movie that would bother with a detail like Nigeria having multiple official native languages?) or South African… and Nigeria and South Africa were both part of the British (as in English) Empire! Until South Africa got kicked out for being a racist shithole, they were both part of the Commonwealth. People speak English in both Nigeria and South Africa! Sure, the accent’s not American, but when the subtitle is word-for-word what the guy is plainly saying, I think you can dispense with the subtitles. By no means did that ruin the movie, but I did think it was pretty pointless to have English subtitles for people speaking English.

Anyway… I love the movie. And this guy gives a way better review than I just did. For that matter, Roger Ebert gave a surprisingly decent review – surprisingly decent in that I’m surprised he did a decent job of getting the major characters’ names and the major plot events right. Typically, his reviews of science fiction are so bungled on the facts I have to wonder if he actually watched the movie, or just shuffled a deck of flashcards with screenshots on them and looked at those.