Tofu and Jerky get a gift

Not to detract from the vitriol of my previous post, but I was recently gifted this amazingness!

Yep! That’s exactly what it looks like! Bendy bacon and tofu action figures that can battle to the death. (Our beloved Jerky is a connoisseur of bacon and an expert bacon chef, btw.)

The description on Nerd Approved is priceless:

“Mr. Bacon doesn’t like Monsieur Tofu’s uppity “healthier than thou” attitude, and Monsieur Tofu is offended by Mr. Bacon’s sloppy, greasy lifestyle. Unfortunately, their feud is about to boil over into violence thanks to this Bacon vs. Tofu action set. Each figure comes bendable arms and legs.”

Yeah, that pretty much describes the conflict between Tofu and Jerky. Love. It.

I might bring Monsignor Tofu to any future job interviews and speak in a French accent. “Dis job, it will be veeeerrrry bad, no?”

Photo credit: Nerd Approved

They lied to us in kindergarten.

While writing this blog post, I realized that for my entire fucking life I’ve been spelling kindergarten as “kindergarden” which is how we say that word in AMERICA, but is apparently, not how it is spelled. Yep, my $80,000+ of higher education debt is really paying off.

Today, I put on my nicely pressed please-hire-me slacks, a freshly ironed shirt, and even (!) put in a very, very subtle nose stud. (I have a tiny nose piercing, yeah, fuck off, Jerky, I know I’m a *SO* counterculture.) It was to be a special day. Today I was going to leave higher education and join the working world. I would be gainfully employed. I would have lunch breaks and a boss to bitch about. I would have savings and health benefits that didn’t include a student health center.

Wrong. Instead, today was yet another “I’m so sorry, BUT…”

“I’m so sorry, but I don’t think you meet our needs at this time.”

“I’m so sorry, but we’re looking for someone with more experience.”

“I’m so sorry, but I don’t have enough money to pay you what you are worth.” <–TRUE FUCKING STORY.

“I’m so sorry, but we’re not going to give you this shitty salary in a horrible office building where you’d work on things you marginally care about while your feet blister in your high heeled shoes.”

You know what, I AM fucking sorry. About a whole lot of things, but let’s just start with the fact that they LIED to us in kindergarten. Remember how the world was a special place? And you were a special little flower with unique ideas that could cure cancer and play in an orchestra and be an astronaut, and on the weekends you would write Nancy Drew novels? (For the sake of my own paltry remaining dignity, I can say I never, EVER wanted to be a stupid astronaut. But the stupidity of space travel is another blog post.)

Yeah. That was a lie. Instead, you’d be unemployed, broke, depressed, and seemingly unable to fix any of those three things. You’d also go through the constant, groveling humiliation of realizing that all the kindergarten and grade school “you can do anything you set your mind to” and “you are awesome!” is just another pile of bullshit they fed you in between DARE and the history of the American revolution.

Back, with less black

Dearly beloved reader(s),

After a month hiatus from the intarwebs, tofu and jerky is back. With a facelift and bikini ready body for the summer season! Now, as both Tofu and Jerky are only marginally employed, expect more snark, more scandal, more thrills and more chills…

Much soy-based love,

Tofu

P.S. Oh, and that blog post I promised about Spencer Pratt? Yeah, totally not going to happen. Not only is the Hills *so* last season, (God, I love a good pun) but I just couldn’t bring myself to focus on that waste of space for long enough to write a coherent post.

Photo credit: The Daily Mail

Re: Re: Illegal Pictures of Minors Engaging in Sexually Explicit Conduct are Not Protected Speech

God, nothing gets you out of the bat cave like condemning child molesters, which makes me wonder about YOU. And I don’t believe I argued the “social utility” of child pornography, only the potential clinical uses, but I’m not surprised someone of your reading level missed the distinction.

“So don’t boo hoo for offenders, they are adults who make choices.” Ah yes, the rational choice model of criminal justice. It has just gotten society so FAR.

And um, actually? Your new Supreme Court decision seems to break down the distinction between real children in pornography and “anime porn starring Japanese school girls.”

Lastly, there is actually a lot of legal ambiguity about if what To Catch a Predator does is entrapment. Plus, the fucking MAJORITY of people they catch on the show are later released and not prosecuted. The show is simple scarlet-letter shaming. Why don’t we just put pedos in the stocks and parade them around the town square while we are at it, too?

Or even better, we can have all people convicted of a sex crime have special license plates. (Actually a TRUE proposal.)

Because the more we focus on mindless shit like making sure that pedos suffer every moment of their perverse little lives the LESS we focus on real things that will help our children such as improving foster care, child welfare services, and health care. Punitive criminal justice is let’s-all-get-riled-up-and-condemn-criminals distraction from REAL social issues.

Go back to lighting the candles on your Chris Hansen shrine, weirdo.

Next up I promise you even more mindless shit…Spencer Pratt!

Re: Illegal Pictures of Minors Engaging in Sexually Explicit Conduct are Not Protected Speech

I admit to simplifying and lumping together all people who enjoy children and sex anywhere near each other.  I told you, I don’t discriminate.  Furthermore, don’t try and argue the social utility of child pornography to me – it makes me wonder about you. 

And sure, many people with sexual perversions were victims of sexual abuse, but guess what?  Many people with sexual perversions were not abused and many abuse victims are not sexual perverts.  So don’t boo hoo for offenders, they are adults who make choices.  I don’t give a shit if they choose to get off on anime porn starring Japanese school girls, but when real children are being abused to aid in sickos getting their rocks off, we have a problem.

Your use of the First Amendment to protect kiddie porn is near anarchical.  But that doesn’t really surprise me coming from you.  And back to Chris Hansen, look up the law Tofu, there is certainly no entrapment occurring.  Those dorks would have committed the crime without Dateline or Perverted Justice.

Re: Illegal Pictures of Minors Engaging in Sexually Explicit Conduct are Not Protected Speech

Jerky, I’m really waiting for you to just go ahead and get your Perverted Justice Fan Club decoder ring and deputy badge so that you can clean up the dirty, child porn infested corners of the intarwebs.

(For those of you not in the know, Perverted Justice is the private contracting group [read: vigilante group] that is used by Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator “sting” [read: entrapment] operations.)

Pithy insults aside, there’s nothing I like more on a Monday evening than to discuss the first amendment, child pornography, and the sexual abuse of children. Uplifting stuff, no?

You veer into some dangerous oversimplification here, equating internet chatrooms to “street corners” (WTF, this is EXACTLY the kind of misunderstanding of new technology that has gotten federal courts in trouble) and throwing internet predators, sexual abuse, and child pornography into one big pile. So, to aid in pointing out how very wrong your Chris Hansen lovin’ self is, let’s separate your stream of consciousness kiddie porn+ sexual abuse = pedophiles-are-evil into three easily digestible bites: 1) United States v. Williams, 2) Online Child Pornography/Online Child Solicitation/Child Sexual Abuse and 3) Pedophiles-are-evil-and-must-be-destroyed

United States v. Williams
I’m with the dissent on this one, but that’s because I really am the type of First Amendment wackjob that thinks that the slippery-slope argument does have a lot of legal merit. Also, I think the key intent of the “Protect” Act was to protect children from being exploited in the production of pornographic material, which this decision goes well beyond.

Stated better than I could have said it myself, from the Williams dissent: “Brandenburg unmistakably insists that any limit on speech be grounded in a realistic, factual assessment of harm. This is a far cry from the Act before us now, which rests criminal prosecution for proposing transactions in expressive material on nothing more than a speaker’s statement about the material itself, a statement that may disclose no more than his own belief about the subjects represented or his desire to foster belief in another. This should weigh heavily in the overbreadth balance, because “First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.” Free Speech Coalition, 535 U. S., at 253.

Amen. I think the reason that it is easy to just nod along with this decision is because we all conjure up creepy images in our head of some pervert photoshopping “artistic” poses of children to share with his equally perverted internet pals. But that’s not really the point, here. The point is that in terms of the government duty to protect children and first amendment rights, the evidence just isn’t compelling enough to tip the scales (of justice!) in favor of the government duty.

Next!

Illegal Pictures of Minors Engaging in Sexually Explicit Conduct are Not Protected Speech

I was careful to title this post as non-pervy sounding as possible, considering the Supreme Court’s latest decision regarding child pornography, in United States v. Williams. The Court upheld the “Protect” Act, which inflicts a mandatory 5 year minimum prison sentence to anyone found guilty of “pandering” child pornography. “Pandering” applies to anyone who “advertises, promotes, presents, distributes, or solicits” material that they believe contains minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct. Furthermore, even if a person advertises child pornography that does not actually depict children, but the “panderer” intends for others to belive the material does, the person is guily of violating the Protect Act. The opinion states “Rather than targeting the underlying material, this statute bans the the collateral speech that introduces such material into the child-pronography distriubution network.” This decision means that it is illegal for the creepy pervs on the internet to even enter a chat room (first hint that someone might be a perv: they are in a chat room) and solicit pics from somebody, even if the second person in fact, does not possess any child pornograpy.

Justice Scalia and I don’t agree that often, but I’m with him on this one. There is no social value in letting freaks who get off on kiddie porn create a marketplace for it on the internet. Of couse, people who posess child porn should be punished, but punishment for possesion alone is not enough. Very little has been done to destroy the black market for this material before the harm is done. By the time the creepy guy who lives next door is arrested for having an entire library of illegal pics, the children in the pics have already suffered the abuse and the perv has already “enjoyed” the photos. The Protect Act makes the best effort yet to prevent the sharing of this illegal content on the internet by criminalizing pandering.

I have a hard time thinking reasonably when it comes to the topic of sexual abuse of children. My first thoughts drift toward the maiming and pain-infliction of offenders of these kinds of crimes. I don’t discriminate between people who actually physically sexually abuse children and those who perpetuate the cycle of abuse by viewing child porn. They are all abusers in my book. I’ll admit to unclean thoughts –when I read the countless news stories about child abusers or watch an episode of To Catch a Predator, my mind races though a thousand violent, torturous acts I would like to inflict on those dopes. I think the decision in Williams is a good one and a step in the right direction. We aren’t doing enough to protect, as Justice Scalia put it, “the most defenseless of our citizens.”

Re: Voyeurism 101

First of all Tofu, everyone knows that by “sex dungeons make you introspective” what you really mean is “sex dungeons make you horny.” (Was that too soon for a sex dungeon joke?)

I would agree with you that this case grabs our attention, but I disagree with you about why. Fritzl and his family have become the car wreck that we can’t look away from, despite the fact it turns our stomachs. I can’t help but think about the people in this family and wonder, how will they ever live a normal life? How will Fritzl’s wife continue to live life knowing that she couldn’t keep herself safe, and couldn’t keep her daughter safe? And I would be hard-pressed to believe that Mrs. Fritzl wouldn’t feel some kind of conflict about the fact that her husband’s mistress was also his daughter? Will some part of her resent her daughter Elisabeth for that? Will Elisabeth resent her children, for being the fruit of painful suffering and abuse, or will she be able to put that aside? Will Elisabeth’s children ever be able to put this behind them? This isn’t the Fritzl family’s dirty little secret anymore. The whole world knows about what happened in that dungeon. I hope the best for them all, but part of my fascination with this story is that I can’t help but think how will these people survive?

And to me, the fascination is not with the monster’s “ability to live so amorally free from all our understanding of right and wrong.” It’s goes beyond that. Josef Fritzl has proven himself un-human. I realize that there are a lot of people who sexually abuse their own family members, and I in no way mean to discredit molestation, but it is one thing to have your sexuality perverted to the point where a person engages in inappropriate touching and sexual acts. This is often an indication of a person asserting power over a victim, or also of cheap and sometimes easy gratification because of the vulnerability of a child, especially a child who is a relative. But Fritzl goes beyond that. He repeatedly raped and fathered children by his own daughter. Incest is one of the few cross-cultural taboos, and there are also reasons why incest is normally a taboo in nature. Because when the gene pool gets too shallow, the species puts itself at risk of not being able to replicate. Fritzl commits an un-human and almost un-animal act in that he seeks to reproduce within his own family. Although I would like to see him rot in prison, the fact that he will be pleading some sort of insanity is not surprising or appalling to me. How could a healthy person do this? (Plus, check out those eyebrows. Dude’s totally fucked up in the head.)

Voyeurism 101

Today I was sitting around in the computer lab with my students. Now before you conjure up visions of cherubic six-year olds clustered in some happy-Kumbaya learning circle, these are college undergraduates. Most of the students I teach are either some variant of “honors” students, or some variant of “pre-law” so they are annoyingly well-prepared for class, and ask annoyingly well-thought out, occasionally even insightful questions.

More than occasionally, I feel like I’m the class slacker. Who wants to talk about institutional structures that impact constitutional review?

Not me. So today, I did anything but.

To set the scene, my students are sitting in the computer lab for a legal research free work day. Some of them have pages of careful notes on their subject; others have highlighted books in stacks by their side. Every one (with the odd non-honors student on im or reading Perez Hilton) is hard at work.

Except, of course, me. I’ve been instructed by the professor that today, instead of teaching any material, I’m to supervise and act in “advisory” capacity. Which I take to mean “sit in the back of the room and stealthily read internet trash.” After my somewhat dispirited scouring of the gossip blogs, I trotted on over to the BBC to see if anything new had developed in the Josef Fritzl case.

So if you haven’t been near a television/radio/computer for the past three days, Josef Fritzl is the 73 year old Austrian who (in what seems to be a popular new Austrian pastime), imprisoned and sexually abused a young women for 24 years. Ok, let that first part sink in. TWENTY FOUR YEARS.

Oh yeah. And she was his daughter. Clearly merits all caps again. HIS DAUGHTER. Can it get worse? Oh yes. She bore him seven. Yep, SEVEN, children.

Three of the children spent their entire lives down in these little intricately organized, soundproofed basement rooms. Four of the children, for reasons which are entirely unclear, were raised aboveground by Fritzl and his wife. And a pause for caps: HIS WIFE.

There are lots of intricate details to his plan. The door that was locked by some type of secret code, the fact that he told his underground daughter and children that they would be gassed if they tried to leave (yeah, he just makes the fucking Nazi jokes so easy, doesn’t he), the fact that he told authorities and his wife that their daughter had run away from home. Or even the simple fact that he had been sexually abusing his daughter since she was eleven years old.

What starts to become interesting, in the end, is not really all these little tiny plotting details, but the fact that these little tiny plotting details are so interesting.

Re: So you don’t know shit about politics…

Oh, point made. There’s nothing more intelligent than choosing a candidate based upon what a fun tidbit their name will be in the World’s Greatest Presidential Facts Volume 12.
Give me a fucking break.

Normally, I barter my vote for cash money outside my local church/senior center/elementary school polling place, but this year, I’ve decided to forgo the cash and participate in democracy.

Yep, I’ve decided to choose my presidential candidate based upon celebrity endorsement.

Because god-fucking-forbid that I choose who the leader of the free world based upon such trivial factors as actual policy positions. Instead, I’ll follow the recommendation of someone who is better dressed and has whiter teeth than me.

McCain, well, what else can I say other than Heidi Montag. Heidi Montag, well, what else can I say other than Spencer Pratt. Thanks but no thanks. McCain better get far, far away from that sinkhole of Western Civilization.

Hillary (I love how she has reinvented herself with the casual first name so that we don’t immediately think, Clinton, wait, wouldn’t this be his third term? ), well, the first celebrity that comes to mind is Barbra Streisand. And eh? That just reminds me that Babs, and Hills, have both had their day.

Of course, the biggest celebrity endorsement comes from Mr. Hillary Clinton himself, the larger-than-life former president. Oh Bill. I remember when I too, was swayed by your folksy down to earth intelligence and your aw-shucks man-of-the people approach. Then you reformed welfare and signed the defense of marriage act and sold us all down the road to centrism and years of entrenched Republican rule. Although, I DO imagine the scandalous fun we’d all have should you and Ron Burkle cruise around DC.