Silent Yawn: When the Outrageous meets the Boring

Over at The Curvature Cara has a story about a middle-school biology teacher who apparently got a wild hair and decided to show the old anti-abortion standard The Silent Scream to his class one day after a test. No notice to parents; students just told to look away if it bothered them. This led to a predictable outcry, and lots of bureaucratic dodging of responsibility, but the most interesting aspect of the whole post (at least to me) came from Cara when she visited You-Tube to view the film herself:

Has anyone out there ever actually seen The Silent Scream? I found it on YouTube once and tried to watch it. It’s only a half hour long, and I assumed that it would be either so ridiculous as to be amusing or so infuriating as to pop a vein in my forehead. Instead, it was just really fucking boring. I’ll admit that I have the attention span of a flea, but I couldn’t make it past more than 10 minutes of the 30 minute film. Yeah, it was outrageous. Yeah, it was ridiculous. It was also not even remotely engaging, so I’m kind of confused about why the antis would want to use the damn thing. But I didn’t get as far as to see the truly graphic stuff. I sure as hell don’t remember watching the dismembering of a fetus, or even the actual “silent scream” scene. If these did appear within the first 10 minutes of the film and I somehow don’t remember, it truly must deserve an award for Excellence in The Field of Boring.

I guess one generation's controversy might just become the next generation's ho-hum.

But please, if Reefer Madness is equally bad, don't tell me.

Comments

tom said…

> But please, if Reefer Madness is equally bad, don't tell me.

The original is pretty lame, but the 2005 musical remake is a lot of fun.

February 14, 2008 at 8:51 PM

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point: Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo: Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1. Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...

Search This Blog