Being gay is a choice, says man trying desperately not to be gay

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 3 Comments

Seriously, this is the best picture of George Rekers available. I defy you to find one on the internet that isn't just twelve big pixels and a mustache.

If you love the vague area between hypocrisy and irony the way I love the vague area between et cetera, you probably already know that George Rekers—psychologist, co-founder of the Family Research Council and general anti-gay crusader—recently took a vacation with a male prostitute he met on Rentboy.com. It should be stressed, here, that unlike most men who use male prostitution websites to purchase escorts for their Bahaman vacations, Rekers is not gay. It says so right on his website: “I am not gay and never have been,” just before the warning about “misleading media reports about Professor George Rekers” and slightly after the link to the section on “natural parenting versus gay parenting.” George Rekers is straight as a marching band major. It doesn’t matter what the media or his choice of a travel assistant with a “sweet, tight ass” or his endocrine system says. It matters what George Rekers says, because Rekers knows that sexual orientation is a choice.

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Thursday is melt your brain with theo-philosophical reasoning day

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 8 Comments

Good morning, Christopher Hitchens! I'd like to trade you my argument that a transcendent plenitude of being is the necessary predicate of universal contingency for your rat's ass. No? Not gonna do it?

It’s Thursday, and you know what that means: its time to read theist critiques of the philosophical logic behind contemporary atheism! You don’t remember us doing this every Thursday since the creation of this blog? Well, I do, and the onus is on you to prove that we haven’t. In the meantime, I’ll be running for the local school board. Nah—I’m just messing with you. You can’t prove a negative, unless you use an indirect proof to demonstrate that assuming the negative’s opposite results in a logical contradiction—like, for example, when you point out that an omniscient god could not also be omnipotent, since his certain knowledge of the future would delimit the field of his own actions. That’s one of the many appealing but ultimately bankrupt arguments* for atheism that Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart mentions in his dense, insightful and enormously infuriating indictment of “the new atheism” in May’s issue of First Things, which I assume is on your coffee table right now. Hart, who is the author of a book called Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, (beach reading!) contends that the present cottage industry in books indicting religion is a poor, pale imitation of atheism’s great past. He writes like CS Lewis listening to a tape recording of his own voice, but he makes an interesting point. From the standpoint of rigorous logic, contemporary atheism has become sufficiently popular that it needs to start watching its ass.

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It’s hypocritical to expect privacy from Facebook

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 6 Comments

This tactic also worked on Iraq.

The increasingly hungry uroboros that is the World(-)Wide Web has been aglow with anger this week over Facebook’s new policy of sharing user information with third-party websites. The social networking site has propagated its “Like” button to a number of partners, including the Washington Post, whose users immediately took exception to their friends seeing a list of articles they’ve shared with their friends. Facebook has also made all the bands, movies, hometowns and whatnot on its users “About Me” pages into active links that point to other pages—a move which, as of this writing, has led to the creation of fanpages for the movie, TV show, book and activity “fuck you.” If you clicked on that link, you probably saw not only the groups but also a list of your friends’ status updates containing that phrase—the top of my list was a picture of my friend Aaron saying, “Fuck you, Broncos,” which was enormously satisfying—followed by, disturbingly, a scrolling list of people you don’t know who’ve used “fuck you” in their various posts.* Herein lies the problem. If I can see everybody who wrote “These Banana Republic chinos totally kick/accentuate my ass!” on Facebook today, then so can Banana Republic. The idea that Facebook has compiled my likes and interests and favorite bands for ready sale to whatever weird marketing ghosts are constantly trying to drag me into their fashion spirit world seems like a betrayal. That’s my life, Facebook! Except, of course, that’s what Facebook has been doing all along. Their entire dang raison d’etre has always been to aggregate marketing data and serve online ads. The new linking and information-sharing policies are objectionable for only two reasons: first, they put it out in the open, and second, it forces us to confront the reason why we all signed up for Facebook in the first place.

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Is it just impossible to sell a cell phone or what?

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 6 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfpAkNyHAtQ&feature=player_embedded

Everyone’s favorite Meghan Gallagher sent me the foregoing ad for the new Microsoft Kin, which promises to do for cell phones what Bing did for internet search engines. If you’re wondering, the song is by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, a band I liked without reservation before they sold their best work to a phone commercial and forced me to yet again consider how much of my aesthetic taste is aesthetic taste and how much is just contrary esotericism.* Anywhom, the ad has provoked an extremely small firestorm of controversy, due to allegations by Consumer Reports that it promotes sexting. You remember sexting, right? It’s the totally real thing that teenagers do all the time nowadays, when they’re not cyberbullying or attending rainbow parties. I quote intrepid CR reporter Mike Gikas: “The video…includes a downright creepy sequence in which a young man is shown putting a Kin under his shirt and apparently snapping a picture of one of his naked breasts. The breast is then shown on the phone’s screen, just before the guy apparently sends it to someone.” Needless to say, Gikas did not get away with referring to a man’s bare chest as his “breasts,” or, worse, “the breast,” and comments-section hilarity ensued. Despite the obvious sophistication of its reporter, the CR piece prompted Microsoft to re-edit the spot so as to remove the breaxting, as well as change the Kin’s slogan from “Send a grainy picture of your breasts or breast!” to “We’re all in this together!” Except, of course, those of us who are peering at our phones. Which brings us to Combat! blog’s question of the day: Is it just impossible to sell a cell phone or what?

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The girl at the coffee shop seems lonely, you guys

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 11 Comments

First of all, let’s make it clear which girl at the coffee shop we are talking about: not the one who asked me if I have Asperger’s Syndrome. That girl is a bitch. It doesn’t matter that she’s taking abnormal psychology and she just learned what Asperger’s Syndrome is, or that her tone of voice suggested she was asking in the spirit of genuine inquiry and not mockery, although her facial expression was kind of hard to read. That’s still not the kind of thing you ask a customer, especially one whose self-deprecating wit and friendly-yet-efficient approach to purchasing coffee makes your job so much more pleasant, even if some of his remarks are met with confused stares. They can’t all be gems, Girl Who Thinks I Have Asperger’s Syndrome.

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