Some random Real World Crap (TM)

Yeah, it's one of those days. I'm cranky about some Real World Crap. But I will try to lighten the mood of this rant by including a science fictional tie-in with each segment of it:

1. The far right and the far left are wrong in their assessment of Obama's handling of the Iran election situation. What Americans need to understand is that most Iranians, regardless of their position on their own internal politics, distrust the United States government. The last thing the opposition to the regime needs is the perception that the American President is weighing in on it in a meddlesome fashion. When Senator McCain insists that Obama ought to rant and rave like a nutcase about how the Iranian election was a corrupt, fraud, sham etc.  he just makes me even more glad than I already was that he is not currently our President. The right needs to understand that the opposition to Ahmadinejad does not necessarily consist of people who would be pro-American if they were to prevail. The left needs to realize that these courageous young protestors that we see in pics via Twitter probably all believe that the US provided Saddam Hussein with the chemical weapons that Iraq used against them during the war in 1980s, and they all know for sure about how we and the British overthrew their elected government in the 1950s and re-installed the despotic Shah. Sure, the US has some legitimate gripes with Iran, and we should all deplore their regime's thuggish behavior and theocratic ideology, but the Iranians have plenty of very good reasons to not like our government either, and those reasons are shared by people across their political spectrum. It will take a lot of time and work to undo the distrust in both directions. [SF tie-in: In Frank Herbert's Dune, the Emperor Shaddam IV miscalculated the seriousness of the unrest in Arrakis' native population. Had he not cast his lot with the Harkonnens and turned a blind eye to their excesses, he may have avoided the sequence of events that led to the collapse of his government and his own exile to the prison planet Salusa Secundus.]

2. This one will piss off some people. I recently unfollowed all of my Twitter gays who seemed to be doing nothing with their Twitter time other than complaining about how Obama has "betrayed" them because he hasn't already managed to end "don't ask/don't tell," repeal the stupid Defense of Marriage Act (signed into law by our last Dem Prez, by the way), and other things. I want all this stuff to happen, too, but I am bright enough (and have a long enough memory) to understand that he is not going to frak away the whole first term of his Presidency by engaging with these things immediately before he has done the big-ticket stuff like health care reform. As one who worked on the Clinton campaign in '92, I remember with great pain and bitterness how the first thing President Clinton did upon taking office was to embroil himself in the gays/military issue and ended up creating the moronic DADT policy.  I want it gone, and I believe Obama will do it, but we need to wait a little bit longer. He's got a lot of stuff to do thanks to the Long W Dark Age that preceded his still-brand-new administration. [SF tie-in: In the newer Battlestar Galactica TV series, Laura Roslin becomes President immediately after the near-total annihilation of the human race. Though she is a liberal on social issues, she is forced to make a deal with anti-choice religious fanatics so that she can proceed with her overall agenda of saving humanity.]

3) Sorry for the triviality of this next item. It's way too low-brow for this fancy and high-minded blog, but anyway...I saw people on Twitter retweeting about a dumb petition to get shlock internet/TV celeb-gossip slug Perez Hilton removed the list of nominees for an award of some sort at an event called the "Fox Teen Choice Awards."  I am quite completely out of touch with what's popular on TV with the kids nowadays, but this is evidently some kind of big-ass hoo-ha with the adolescents, and apparently Mr. Hilton's nomination for one of these awards is drawing ire and fire from parental units and other people who have assigned themselves the fraudulent task of guarding the purity of American youths. Look, I can't stand that dude either, but after examining the petition to block his nomination, it appeared that the only problem the originator of the petition specifies with Hilton is that he supposedly places "uncensored gay porn" on his website. Which makes me wonder if there's not a tinge of homophobia behind this. Maybe not, but it feels a bit like that (since a gay-related offense is the one and only thing mentioned in the single short paragraph that explains the petition). Of course, the official story on this would be that his online behavior is not a "good role model for teens." Well, duh. Why the hell would anyone think that a pop culture douche-bag would be a good role model in the first place? Why would you look for role models in the kinds of venues that people like Hilton and others like him inhabit anyway? Someone is going to win that dumb award, and if it's not Hilton, then it will probably be some other vapid creep. Maybe they can give it to the former Miss California. [SF tie-in: In the film Soylent Green it is eventually revealed that the titular food product is made out of human corpses.]

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