Vis-a-vis Whoopi Goldberg saying that Polanski didn't commit "rape-rape," and that Europeans look at 13-year-old girls differently than US citizens, here's director Luc Besson, as quoted in the Telegraph: "I have a lot of affection for him, he is a man that I like very much but nobody should be above the law. I don't know the details of this case, but I think that when you don't show up for trial, you are taking a risk."
Just so. The kicker is, Besson is French. More proof that Goldberg's theory is insane. The fact that no one is calling for her to be canned is telling.
Besson's comments came after he refused to sign a petition calling for Polanski's release. The Telegraph reports that 100 movie bigwigs have signed it so far.
Could Hollywood be any more removed from the people that they're trying to sell tickets to? This is rape, not shoplifting.
Here's a post I wrote a while back. I think it holds water:
Musing on Fans, April 6, 2009
I was doing some work last night and had the TV on in the background. The Academy of Country Music Awards was on. As company, it was good enough for me. During the broadcast, I heard the presenters and award recipients say the word "fans" dozens of times. Fans-this, fans-that. "I'd like to thank the fans." And, "If it wasn't for the fans, I wouldn't be here." And, "The fans made this song a hit." The speeches were maybe ten or fifteen seconds long, and all of them revolved around record labels, family, and fans.
Country music is good at marketing itself to the people that matter: the fans that buy albums and listen to the radio.
Contrast that with the Oscars, where the show is designed to prove how far the movie business has gone in alienating its audience. Every speech is about "me," followed by an endless string of names that the home audience has never heard of. Agents, script consultants, producers, on and on.
A few years back, Hilary Swank made the faux pas of forgetting to mention her husband during her Academy Award speech. She was knocked around for it by the rags. I asked: why? It was perfectly understandable. These people dispose of marriages like coffee cups. (Swank is since divorced).
After thanking their sycophants, movie stars then get on a soap box. You have the writer of Milk preaching for gay rights, Sean Penn thanking "Commies" and "homo lovers" for granting him the Best Actor award, and any number of stars bashing the former US President. When they're finished, they go to a ritzy after-party, get drunk, and sometimes drink and drive. Want to meet a movie star? Depends how much they've had to drink and how fast they're driving. Movie stars can afford to buy ten thousand BMWs, but not one chauffeur.
During this year's Oscars, I heard the word "fans" exactly twice, one time as a joke from Will Smith (he correctly observed that action movies are great because they have one thing that most Oscar contenders don't: fans). Someone else mentioned the fans almost by accident. And that was that. All of the other speeches were about people we've never seen and never will.
Think about that. A room full of people, rich because people buy tickets to watch what they do, and it never crosses their mind to thank the people buying the tickets.
It really is amazing that people still line up to meet movie stars, or ask for their autograph, or even go to the movies. We know these people don't give a damn about us. To paraphrase Warhol, they tell us how to think, how to vote, how to behave and, more importantly, how to look while we're behaving. We pay their salaries and treat them like royalty while they treat us with indifference. They'd just as soon never meet us, let alone shake our hands. But we love them.
Amazing. Amusing.
Showing posts with label Whoopi Goldberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Whoopi Goldberg. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Whoopi Goldberg
This gave me a sick, creepy feeling. Watching someone split hairs about rape vs. rape-rape, whatever the hell that means. My comments follow.
Polanski's a good film director, and I like most of his movies. But he's a confessed rapist of a 13-year-old girl, and he skipped out before being sentenced. You can give his movies all the five stars you want, but facts are facts: he never paid for the crime of drugging and raping a girl.
Whoopi Goldberg goes for the gusto in defence of a Hollywood family member. First she gives us a strange definition of rape and rape-rape, then tells us that in some parts of the world, 13-year-olds are looked upon as fair game. Goldberg: "Well, you know, I have to tell you, again, we're, we're a different kind of society. We see things differently. The world sees 13-year-olds and 14-year-olds, in the rest of Europe, they are seen often times--"
She was interrupted before finishing what would have been an abysmal statement. But you get her drift. She finally closes the point thus: "I do know that not everybody sees things the way that we see things."
Ah. Polanski got the shaft because US rape laws are too narrow for a hip Euro guy like Polanski.
This is disgusting.
They save the best for last, though, as all of The View ladies break every rule in the feminist handbook and blame the victim's mother and the victim herself for being with Polanski in the first place.
Two thoughts: If the exact same language had been used on Jay Leno or Glenn Beck's shows, the screams for a boycott would be deafening. Considering The View's target audience is primarily homemaking women who probably have kids, Goldberg should be canned.
Polanski's a good film director, and I like most of his movies. But he's a confessed rapist of a 13-year-old girl, and he skipped out before being sentenced. You can give his movies all the five stars you want, but facts are facts: he never paid for the crime of drugging and raping a girl.
Whoopi Goldberg goes for the gusto in defence of a Hollywood family member. First she gives us a strange definition of rape and rape-rape, then tells us that in some parts of the world, 13-year-olds are looked upon as fair game. Goldberg: "Well, you know, I have to tell you, again, we're, we're a different kind of society. We see things differently. The world sees 13-year-olds and 14-year-olds, in the rest of Europe, they are seen often times--"
She was interrupted before finishing what would have been an abysmal statement. But you get her drift. She finally closes the point thus: "I do know that not everybody sees things the way that we see things."
Ah. Polanski got the shaft because US rape laws are too narrow for a hip Euro guy like Polanski.
This is disgusting.
They save the best for last, though, as all of The View ladies break every rule in the feminist handbook and blame the victim's mother and the victim herself for being with Polanski in the first place.
Two thoughts: If the exact same language had been used on Jay Leno or Glenn Beck's shows, the screams for a boycott would be deafening. Considering The View's target audience is primarily homemaking women who probably have kids, Goldberg should be canned.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Separation of Me From Daytime TV
I watched a video clip of The View, that strange show where 5 rich women tell the housewives of America how to live their lives.
Last week, John McCain paid the gals a visit. The group asked him about the Supreme Court (surprise, surprise, Roe v. Wade came up within 10 seconds), and Whoopi Goldberg also asked McCain if she should be worried about becoming a slave.
Whoopi asked that question because McCain says he wants Supreme Court justices that interpret the constitution the way the Framers intended. That is, not to write legislation, but to weigh the legislation against the words written in the constitution.
This is where Whoopi pounced, asking if she should be worried about "becoming a slave again." Poor McCain had to murmur that no, that wouldn't happen, but that he understood her concern. The crowd applauded. Whoopi comically fanned herself with a slip of paper and admired her own intelligence. McCain had to give her a hat tip because, though talking to an idiot, he was in the idiot's house.
The irony of Goldberg's stupidity is rich. Just as McCain finished saying that he doesn't want justices writing law, Whoopi asked if the justices will bring back slavery. It was too far above her head to grasp that 1) the Supreme Court cannot write slavery into law, and 2) even if the legislature wanted to write slavery into law, it would be against the 13th Amendment of the constitution, making the law moot. Therefore, Goldberg is in total agreement with McCain: the Supreme Court shouldn't be writing laws, and they should be interpreting it the way the Framers intended.
The 13th Amendment reads like this:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
And that's that. No slavery. If Goldberg wants to worry about new laws, she should be looking to Congress, not the Supreme Court.
The hosts of The View need a refresher course in the different branches of government. I'd be happy if they even bothered to Google it.
Whoopi also took a run at McCain for the separation of church and state mumbo jumbo, which isn't in the constitution. The Framers batted the concept around in correspondence, but they never made any specific rules about it (though most people use the First Amendment to cover the subject).
Atheists have been using the church/state argument to paint ever widening circles intended to shut Christians up, thinking that church/state is written in stone. The logical conclusion of their argument seems to be that leaders should never be religious. Untrue. What the Framers seemed to intend was that no president should also be the leader of a religious group. That is, a religion's beliefs don't write the rules. But there's a flipside: the Framers didn't want the state to tell a religion what to do either. That's the whole point of the First Amendment's freedom of religion clause. It isn't there to protect the government, it's there to protect the religious worshipper.
In any case, contrary to what the View gals want, nowhere in any US rule book is there a passage that says a president cannot say the word "God." Unfortunately, there's no rule against being forced to hobnob with daytime talkshow hosts, either.
The church/state deal is a problem for Whoopi and the gang because Palin prays. Whoopi says that it worries her. She agrees that the US may have a Judeo-Christian tradition (McCain brought up the term, which is why Goldberg used it later to sound smart), but she says that there's Muslims and Zoroastrians in America, too. When she said that, five people applauded and McCain, to his credit, said, "There's a few Zoroastrians at the back."
Church/state. Palin prays. There goes the neighbourhood.
Everybody's been lionizing Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln these days. I'm sure Whoopi thinks that Lincoln was a great man for freeing the slaves and fighting the Civil War. I believe that, too. Still, this statement from Lincoln regarding the Bible would scare the hell out of Goldberg:
"In regard to this Great book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good Savior gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it."
Yikes. If Honest Abe were running for president today, Whoopi would rake him over the coals for that. Civil war? Suspending habeus corpus? Bible thumping? The man's a murderous Jesus-freak and a tyrant.
As for Roosevelt, here's his take. Whoopi should listen carefully: "If there is one thing for which we stand in this country, it is for complete religious freedom, and it is an emphatic negation of this right to cross-examine a man on his religion before being willing to support him for office."
Last week, John McCain paid the gals a visit. The group asked him about the Supreme Court (surprise, surprise, Roe v. Wade came up within 10 seconds), and Whoopi Goldberg also asked McCain if she should be worried about becoming a slave.
Whoopi asked that question because McCain says he wants Supreme Court justices that interpret the constitution the way the Framers intended. That is, not to write legislation, but to weigh the legislation against the words written in the constitution.
This is where Whoopi pounced, asking if she should be worried about "becoming a slave again." Poor McCain had to murmur that no, that wouldn't happen, but that he understood her concern. The crowd applauded. Whoopi comically fanned herself with a slip of paper and admired her own intelligence. McCain had to give her a hat tip because, though talking to an idiot, he was in the idiot's house.
The irony of Goldberg's stupidity is rich. Just as McCain finished saying that he doesn't want justices writing law, Whoopi asked if the justices will bring back slavery. It was too far above her head to grasp that 1) the Supreme Court cannot write slavery into law, and 2) even if the legislature wanted to write slavery into law, it would be against the 13th Amendment of the constitution, making the law moot. Therefore, Goldberg is in total agreement with McCain: the Supreme Court shouldn't be writing laws, and they should be interpreting it the way the Framers intended.
The 13th Amendment reads like this:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
And that's that. No slavery. If Goldberg wants to worry about new laws, she should be looking to Congress, not the Supreme Court.
The hosts of The View need a refresher course in the different branches of government. I'd be happy if they even bothered to Google it.
Whoopi also took a run at McCain for the separation of church and state mumbo jumbo, which isn't in the constitution. The Framers batted the concept around in correspondence, but they never made any specific rules about it (though most people use the First Amendment to cover the subject).
Atheists have been using the church/state argument to paint ever widening circles intended to shut Christians up, thinking that church/state is written in stone. The logical conclusion of their argument seems to be that leaders should never be religious. Untrue. What the Framers seemed to intend was that no president should also be the leader of a religious group. That is, a religion's beliefs don't write the rules. But there's a flipside: the Framers didn't want the state to tell a religion what to do either. That's the whole point of the First Amendment's freedom of religion clause. It isn't there to protect the government, it's there to protect the religious worshipper.
In any case, contrary to what the View gals want, nowhere in any US rule book is there a passage that says a president cannot say the word "God." Unfortunately, there's no rule against being forced to hobnob with daytime talkshow hosts, either.
The church/state deal is a problem for Whoopi and the gang because Palin prays. Whoopi says that it worries her. She agrees that the US may have a Judeo-Christian tradition (McCain brought up the term, which is why Goldberg used it later to sound smart), but she says that there's Muslims and Zoroastrians in America, too. When she said that, five people applauded and McCain, to his credit, said, "There's a few Zoroastrians at the back."
Church/state. Palin prays. There goes the neighbourhood.
Everybody's been lionizing Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln these days. I'm sure Whoopi thinks that Lincoln was a great man for freeing the slaves and fighting the Civil War. I believe that, too. Still, this statement from Lincoln regarding the Bible would scare the hell out of Goldberg:
"In regard to this Great book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good Savior gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it."
Yikes. If Honest Abe were running for president today, Whoopi would rake him over the coals for that. Civil war? Suspending habeus corpus? Bible thumping? The man's a murderous Jesus-freak and a tyrant.
As for Roosevelt, here's his take. Whoopi should listen carefully: "If there is one thing for which we stand in this country, it is for complete religious freedom, and it is an emphatic negation of this right to cross-examine a man on his religion before being willing to support him for office."
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