Before I begin this post, I want to be clear that I have the utmost respect for the individuals who put their lives on the line to protect their fellow Canadians. As we know from the recent Moncton shootings, working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) can be dangerous and, sometimes, devastating work.
Unfortunately, the RCMP is also a fallible organization. No matter how great intentions may be, things are bound to go wrong when there isn’t enough accountability. Lately the media and the RCMP itself have been looking into just what can and has been going wrong. It’s pretty disconcerting, and I’ve outlined three of the major issues for you below. Continue reading →
Last night Adventure Time storyboard revisionist Emily Partridge went to twitter to identify Skyler Page, creator of the Cartoon Network series Clarence, as the person who had sexually assaulted her, an incident she revealed earlier via the same method.
Cartoon Brew covered all of this about as thoroughly as it could be, so I’m not going to hash out for all of you exactly what went down. They compile tweets from not only Partridge, but also others in the industry such as Regular Show storyboard artist Ryan Pequin and Steven Universe writer and board artist Lamar Abrams. Again, it would be great if you could read it.
This isn’t going to be a post on mental health, which is a factor that can’t be ignored in this incident, and which reading through the article above would help explain. The reason I’m coming to the internet and adding my drop to what’s already becoming an overflowing bucket is because of how I initially heard about it, as well as follow-up commentary along the exact same lines. Continue reading →
Now you might be thinking “Gordon, you clarion bugle of the downtrodden, isn’t that ****ed up beyond all reason? That sounds like a math problem from a demonic algebra class.”
Yes, readers- yes it is. Nearly 350 people have been arrested on “suspicion” of involvement in the disappearance of these three boys.
In the final hours of September 21, 2011, the State of Georgia executed an innocent man. Troy Davis, born 1968, had been wrongfully convicted and subsequently murdered after spending nearly two decades in prison. In spite of cries of protest from former presidents, the director of the FBI, the pope and countless activists, Davis was killed for a crime he did not commit.
Such is our thirst for blood- and it is blood that we’re after.
Mel Gibson’s a racist lunatic, but this was a pretty dang cool movie…
We might dress it up as “justice” or a “deterrent” or any number of grotesque charades, but make no mistake, it is an emotional drive for vengeance that is overwhelmingly behind this. Christopher Hitchens, complicated man that he was, got it right when he called the death penalty “Human Sacrifice” in his 1997 debate on the subject.
We seem to have, as a society, a twisted sense of justice. We’re happy to serve up a person- any person- for slaughter to convince ourselves that justice as been done. Someone‘s got to pay when a crime is committed, whether or not that person actually did it seems of little consequence to us, as evidenced by the long and still-growing list of innocent men, women, and yes, even children who we’ve sacrificed for our appetites.
For this reason, today we’re going to be addressing the foundations of the arguments in favor of the death penalty. Continue reading →
GORDON: Up there! In the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…! It’s…!
It’s a cheesy rehash of the same joke we closed out on last time!
EVAN: How dare you, sir.
GORDON: Citizens, today our topic of discussion is Superman, and to a lesser extent, superheroes in general- though you could hardly go wrong to kick off a discussion on the subject by starting with the Big Blue Boy Scout.
I mean, I might have to in the near future, but as of yet, I haven’t.
Today I’m going to be making some pretty bold statements, and I want to be up front about my reasons for doing so. While I don’t work in the big house (I have had to deal with min-sec “transitional housing”- if that counts for anything), I do work exclusively with an ex-felon population. As with a bad car wreck, you don’t have to be an expert to a look at the current situation and work backwards to figure out just where things started going wrong. Now I’m not saying that prisons help cause crime, just that as they stand today, they aren’t doing a whole lot of helping.
I don’t work in prisons.
Culture War Reporters 