FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

The Ahmed Muhamed case got me thinking of Stiff Little Fingers, which got me thinking of The Undertones, which got me playing The Undertones all afternoon. Loov-ley. 
• Did you know Breitbart.com has a Doritos tag? And no, it's not there to get Jonah Goldberg to come over more often -- it's to denounce the homosexual menace of Rainbow Doritos packaging, which was created to celebrate Frito-Lay's partnership with the It Gets Better project. (Frito-Gay, amirite #c'monbrodon'tleavemehanging.)  It Gets Better was created to keep young gays from killing themselves, which is of course unconscionable in Breitbart world, so John Nolte demands Frito-Lay explain how they can support a project founded by Dan Savage, who has not shown proper deference to bigots, and another operative warns readers of other gay snack foods  so they don't accidentally turn Game Day into Gay Day and convert their beer buddies. (Breitbart.com also reports that the gay Doritos are "a variation of the standard Cool Ranch-flavored chips," which makes sense because they taste like cum.) But American Thinker does B-bart one better by giving an asylum window to one Ed Straker (h/t Will Menaker), who may be a Poe but so what this is awesome:

Furthermore, I think we should push other companies to launch pro-heterosexual campaigns. Perhaps we could persuade a hot dog maker and a hot dog bun company to do a joint effort promoting man-woman relationships. 

Until we try sexualizing food like the left does, we'll never know. And if we think like the left, we desperately need to find out.

Maybe he should marry a chalupa in protest of Obergefell -- or infiltrate gayism, then take it down from the inside. Politics is down-low of culture, comrade!

• It may seem weird to you that, while you look at the Texas clockmaking student's case (made a digital clock, brought it to school, got arrested) and see sad bigotry thwarting the admirable intellectual ambitions of a second-generation immigrant kid, some other people see unearned Muslim-American privilege (or, in the case of some prominent nuts, a conspiracy to let jihadis take over America). But remember, these guys are convinced that America has already been taken over by the Kenyan pretender Barack Obama, and that his seven-year reign of terror has so changed America that it no longer behaves in ways they're accustomed to seeing: Instead of siding with the authorities, people are siding with the powerless, dark-skinned kid. And not just people: MIT, Facebook, and other companies have all told him that, in effect, it gets better. It's interesting that conservatives have been crying because the kid who got suspended for a Pop-Tart gun and others similarly hassled  didn't get all this attention. But those cases actually did get attention -- not only from conservatives, but from the so-called liberal MSM, because everyone loves a bureaucrats-gone-wild story. And from all I can see, conservatives merely turned these teachable moments into more sour grievance to steep in; while supporters of Ahmed Mohamed have reached out to him, encouraged his scholarship, and made something positive out of the experience. Maybe that's why they're so pissed.

FRIDAY 'ROUND THE HORN.

Friday I got Monday on my mind.
•   Last summer Michael Webster took some photos at Coney Island and, as is usual with him, saw the scene differently than your average joy-popper would. The package is at Burn magazine and is called "Too Many Black People in One Place." I wrote the accompanying essay. All the work predates Ferguson and Baltimore but still holds up pretty well. Give a look when you get a chance and tell me what you think.

•   As we all know, my credentials as an equal-opportunity blasphemer are impeccable. Jonah Goldberg's position is similarly consistent -- that is, he was a moron before the Pamela Geller uproar and remains one today. His latest, "Progressives Love Anti-Religious Art — as Long as It’s Anti-Christian" is just another fatty serving of the same congealed ressentiment he's been dishing for years -- it even contains references to Piss Christ and "Mapplethorpe’s hide-the-bullwhip oeuvre." (It's like his mother was scared by a Duchamp readymade while she was pregnant.) Goldberg knocks people who don't think Geller has a Constitutional right to her bullshit, but who's that?  Just a tiny sliver of idiots. Most normal people don't much care how the avatars of the world's major superstitions are portrayed (at least not the ones they don't believe in!) and, I would imagine, consider Geller an nuisance on the level of Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, looking for chances to stir the shit. (You think reactionaries like Peter King are turning on Geller because they love Mohammed?) But Goldberg portrays the real problem as snotty bohos with their so-called "art" who get fans and grants while he has to float in the oceans with nutcakes and humiliate himself with his shit writing on a regular basis.

FUCK YOUR BLOODTHIRSTY GODS, CONT.

I hear Pam Geller held a Draw Mohammed event in Texas which drew some unwanted attention (well, unwanted by normal people, anyway -- I'm sure Geller is delighted). I wonder why she didn't invite me -- I have after all been the internet's boldest, baddest blasphemy-be-unto-him artist since 2006:

I'm joking, of course -- the noted rageclown Geller doesn't do free-speech events, she does skree-kill-Mooslims events, in which I have no interest. Nonetheless, I defend to the death their right to harrumph harrumph harrumph. Now where's my medal?

UPDATE. Nobody likes Pammy.

FURTHER COMMENT SUPERFLUOUS.

When you see Obama holding up one finger in a photograph, F.W. Burleigh of the distinguished conservative journal American Thinker will have you know, he isn't telling someone to wait a minute, nor calling for attention, nor witnessing for Christ like Archie and the Gang, nor doing the Lindy Hop --

Obama and the Muslim Gang Sign 

Is President Obama a Muslim? A lot has been written about this, but if photographs speak louder than words, then a photo taken at last August’s U.S.-African Leaders’ Summit in Washington D.C. might shed considerable light. 

It shows Barack Hussein Obama flashing the one-finger affirmation of Islamic faith to dozens of African delegates...

The one-finger display is the distinctive Muslim gang sign: The index finger points straight up while the thumb wraps underneath and presses against the digital phalange of the middle finger. The remaining fingers are squeezed against the palm in order to highlight the extended forefinger...

There's even semiotic analysis of a grainy photo detail:

The reaction of Togo president Faure Gnassingbe, at the top row second to the left, is less approving. Through his face you can read the mind of this Sorbonne- and George Washington University educated leader. His mind is screaming, “You gotta be kidding!”

I could go on, but why spoil it? If you're a fan of Crazy, this is a treasure trove.

UPDATE. John Bridges, among others, sees the problem.

AND THEY'LL KNOW WE ARE CHRISTIANS BY OUR WHINING.

I think most of my readers will agree that the murder by ISIS of Christians in Egypt is bad, right? Well, that's not enough for conservatives -- you have to agree with them that Christians here in the States are persecuted, too, or you suffer from "anti-Christian bias." Here's Rod Dreher's brain-teaser on the subject, from his evocatively-titled post "Lions & Christians in America":

The mass martyrdom last week of the 21 Egyptian Copts at the hands of ISIS is a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like. Yet it is also the kind of thing that people in this country who fear and loathe Christians point to as an argument-ender when Christians complain about social injustice against themselves, e.g., “Get back to me when they’re chopping Christian heads off, then we’ll talk.” I would point out that ISIS is throwing gay men out of high windows to their deaths, and the crowds below are finishing off the job with stones. No secular liberal would — nor should — accept the argument that gays in the US have no right to complain against discrimination because they don’t have it as bad as gays in ISIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed.

Based on this, if some nut on the other side of the world is persecuting your affinity group, you're being persecuted here as well, or should at least be treated as if you were. I wonder if Dreher knows that ISIS is a champion killer of Muslims, and would agree that we should for that reason hold our domestic Muslims as a persecuted group as well, and tell their stateside critics like Pam Geller and Daniel Pipes to fuck off.

No chance of that -- you can read farther down Dreher's post about the media's "normalization of homosexuality," just a small number of paragraphs after Dreher was using gays as a point of comparison with Christians. At National Review, Jim Geraghty also thinks the newsies are unfair to American Christians; he heads toward the same affirmative-action argument we often get about conservatives in the press, but is smart enough to realize that most reporters are probably at least nominally Christian -- or else Jewish, and he can't complain about that; think what Bibi Netanyahu would say! -- so he takes an interesting tack:

Last night I argued that in most media newsrooms, the notion of Christians as victims doesn’t fit their usual narratives. Fournier argued that there are a lot of Christians in the Times newsroom, and that the Times has a lot of reporters in the Middle East, covering ISIS, at considerable risk to themselves. Both points are true but neither really refutes my argument. 

For starters, sure there are Christians in the Times newsroom, but not particularly representative ones. Here’s Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, back in 2003: “Nearly all of us in the news business are completely out of touch with a group that includes 46 percent of Americans. That’s the proportion who described themselves in a Gallup poll in December as evangelical or born-again Christians.”

So it's not enough for reporters to go to some modern Church where anything goes -- one has to roll hard and roll holy! Picture the new breed of newsroom quota-Christians: Fear-God Gump and Barebone McGillicuddy, working on a Style section piece about a hip new way to handle snakes.

My own solution would be regular cats-for-Christ slideshows, which should give everybody what they want, or at least deserve.

UPDATE. Mmm, them's some good comments, e.g., Megalon:

[Dreher says,] "The mass martyrdom last week of the 21 Egyptian Copts at the hands of ISIS is a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like." 

Yes it is. That's why you and your cohorts in this country trying to claim that having to accept a paying job to bake a gay wedding cake means you're being persecuted the same way is so offensive. Especially when it's coming from a man who often talks like he's about ten minutes away from converting and joining IS himself.

Also, Hob runs down Kristof's shady "a group that includes 46 percent of Americans" = fundies claim and finds it possibly lacking. I wouldn't be surprised, but then, the claim is 15 years old -- maybe since then millions of Americans have got born-again, moved to the haunts 'n' hollers, and stopped voting, which explains how Obama won twice.

UPDATE 2. If we ever get Cats for Christ (no not this one) off the ground, I think we have to use ADHDJ's topline: "I'm not purrfect, just furgiven."

FUCK YOUR BLOODTHIRSTY GODS.

Today's events call to mind my foray into cartooning. 2006, bitches. I don't want to hear any shit from sub-literate wingnuts about dhimmitude today.

It's out of context but, as this whole blog continually shows, context means nothing to psychos anyway.