Wednesday, June 29, 2011

NOT THAT I AGREE WITH ALL OF THIS: But the idea that Hope Solo's falling out with Greg Ryan back at the last World Cup was a big, watershed moment for American women's soccer a la Chastain's sports bra is an interesting one. I'm also struck by this quote from Solo herself:

"We needed some change (in 2007)," Solo said Saturday in a phone interview from Niketown in New York City. "People like to keep everything so positive -- like we're the girls next door. We like to do everything together, and all that. Why are we sugarcoating? Just because we're teammates doesn't mean we're all best friends. But that's how women's sport have been portrayed. We're not your girls next door. We have opinions, we have arguments."

Because the Hamm-dominated teams were portrayed that way, neatly packaged by Nike as safe for consumption by little girls. And post-Solo the national teams aren't that way anymore, they're edgier, meaner. Definitely more personality-laden. (Remember how great a vector Hamm was for endorsements? Solo talks too much to be much use for that--and it is of course sexist that she can't sell products but, like, Charles Barkley can, who is also a talker/sayer of incorrect things.) And I remember thinking back then, "Wow, we're having a major media dustup involving female athletes complaining about playing time! JUST LIKE THE DUDES!"

Where that post above goes wrong, I think, is when it claims Solo was vilified because she's a woman. I mean, 1. she wasn't universally vilified; I remember there being legit debate over what she said, and of course in hindsight she was right, she should have been there instead of Scurry; and 2. just look at LeBron. All he did is switch teams and have a tv special about it and he's American sports worse than Hitler. Americans are perfectly willing to vilify anyone whose lifestyles we fund via ticket prices and shoe sales, because we PAY THEIR SALARIES GOLDERNIT and we have that right. And I would say even accounting for their relative size of their fames LeBron is getting it much worse than Solo.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

LUCKILY I WAS ALREADY BOYCOTTING THE HUFFINGTON POST: Because it's unreadable and--you know--Arianna Huffington. But if you need to support the actual union-organized boycott, here's why you should. Good discussion in the comments too.

(Radley Balko never followed through on his threat/promise to take down his personal website, so there's still nothing forcing me to go there. And I get that there's no one forcing people to give their effort to Arianna for free, but no one's forcing Arianna to be all SOCIAL JUSTICE! all the time either so it's fair to call her on it. And as Erik Loomis pointed out, it is a way to at least get the bright serious youngsters of the "progressivesphere" (or as Moe Tkacik has termed it, the consensusphere) to at least talk about labor issues sometimes, even if they would never think of themselves as being laborers.)

Monday, June 13, 2011

BEHOLD! I AM BECOME GEOFF JOHNS, DESTROYER OF WORLDS: Love Sean Witzke's take on Flashpoint and Geoff Johns. A snippet:

So here we are at 2011, which is a fallow period for every edge of comics concerned...[...]...the now-even-more-corporate DC comics decided that they need to make a move, and they decided that Geoff Johns had the right idea – and streamline everything. But instead of just doing what Johns does, which is essentially write his way out of a corner, they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater and chucking the entire universe. Worse yet – they’ve hired Johns himself to perform the act of destroying the universe he loves so dearly. I believe that he took the job knowing that if he didn’t take it, someone else would. Someone who probably wasn’t going to apply the care he would (whether you or I agree with this, the simple fact is that Johns loves DC comics in a way few do). So Johns took the job, and decided that it was best to tell the story in an alternate world apart from the DCU he loves.
 Man, I actually wasn't that convinced that this would really be the last time we'll see the old DCU, but Sean's logic (that streamlining Green Lantern worked, so Warner thinks to itself, in its simplistic corporate hivemind fashion, that streamlining the whole shebang will work even better) is sound, and it's not like DC hasn't pitched previous versions of its multiverse before, never to be seen again (even post-52 we didn't really get the old Earth-2, Earth-X, Earth-S multiverse back, just something that sort of resembled it but without its vitality.)

Thursday, June 09, 2011

THIS IS NEWTINY, MR CHRISTIAN, NEWTINY: Newt's latest presidential campaign was always going to be a clown show, with not even Bachmann levels of support from the rank and file and limited media interest (he's just not offensively dumb enough to get noticed.) Still it's amusing to see the wheels leave en masse off his clowncar this early in the proceedings.