This short video of a dubbing session for a German porn video really kills the romance, don’t you think? (NSFW, of course)
Tag Germany
Islamophobia Über Alles
Hey, ALL the cool kids are Islamophobes now, so you should be, too!
Not satisfied with kicking all the Roma out of the country, yesterday the French Senate overwhelmingly voted to ban the wearing of full-facial veils, as is the custom of some Muslim women. The so-called “burqa ban” has been a political hot potato since the lower house of Parliament passed the bill a couple of months ago. Proponents, including President Nicholas Sarkozy, have portrayed the ban as a “human rights” effort, but it is estimated that there are only a couple of thousand Muslim women in France to whom the ban applies and critics decry the effort as pandering to the resurgent right wing in France and singling out Muslims over other religious groups.
The Germans, in the meanwhile, have had a whole ‘nother ballgame going on as Thilo Sarrazin, a board member of Germany’s central bank and former finance senator for Berlin, resigned under pressure from the Merkel government after making a number of anti-Muslim remarks in his latest book. Unlike Sarkozy, who uses the cover of secularism to justify his policies, Sarrazin is a straight-up racist and all-around troll who sounds suspiciously like some FOX News personalities talking about little Muslim girls in headscarves having lots of Muslim babies.
And guess who else thinks there are too many Muslims in Europe…that’s right, the Roman Catholic Church. Quelle suprise! Sounding like someone who watches a little too much Glenn Beck, senior Vatican official Fr. Piero Gheddo urged Italian Catholics to start fucking like bunnies to counteract the evil upswing in Muslim births that imperil Christendom. Not to mention the need for future generations of altar boys, I presume.
Back here in the good ol’ United States of Jesus, last week New Republic editor Martin Peretz wrote the New York Times that American Muslims don’t deserve First Amendment rights. That’s caused some appropriately outraged reaction in other quarters, but didn’t stop Harvard University’s plans to name a research fund after him, complete with a big celebration for Peretz planned for next week, though they did call his remarks “distressing”. Peretz has issued an apology of sorts, but it’s one of those “I’m sorry you took offense at what I said” sort of dealies that doesn’t really apologize for anything.
Gosh that’s an awful lot of fuckwittedness.
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You Look Like A Monkey, And You Smell Like One Too
Writing at “The Smart Set”, Stefany Anne Goldberg visits the history and longevity of the most popular song in the English language: Happy Birthday To You
She mentions that the Germans (among others) also sing this song and even have their own “naughty” lyrics in the vein of “you look like a monkey” involving marmalade, apricots, and doing something rude with a bratwurst. Here are a couple of little German kinder offering their rendition:
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Time Again For “That Darn Ratzi!”
Papa Ratzi has been keeping a pretty low profile for a while, but he’s back in dutch once again over a couple of problems: first, one of his personal attendants was discovered to be buying services from a gay prostitution ring inside the Vatican being run by a Vatican choir singer. The attendant, who is also a prominent construction contractor in Rome, was being investigated for corrupt business practices, when investigators discovered him “ordering for delivery”.
And while that’s embarrassing, it’s the second item that puts those red-soled feet on the fire: the Pope’s own brother admits beating young boys in his church in Germany over a period of 30 years, and it appears that the Pope himself (during his tenure as Archbishop) played an important role in covering up the abuse along with a number of incidents of sexual assaults on boys by German priests.
You know things have gotten pretty bad, because the Vatican’s “Chief Exorcist” has publicly stated that “the Devil lives in the Vatican”. Of course, he also says that Harry Potter is the work of the devil, so he *might* be given to hyperbole, you never know.
Christopher Hitchens, always on the lookout for new ways to badmouth the Catholics, weighed in today with this fine screed at Slate. Money quote follows:
Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church’s own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated “in the most secretive way … restrained by a perpetual silence … and everyone … is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office … under the penalty of excommunication.” (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism!
ADDENDUM: Here is a less charged, more thoughtful, yet nevertheless very critical piece about this Pope from the British newspaper The Independent which I came across after writing this post. I think it puts Ratzinger into the broader context of the struggle with modernity that the RCC has faced since the mid-20th century, and even in the big picture finds him wanting.
ADDENDUM TO THE ADDENDUM: Here’s Jon Stewart’s version on “The Daily Show”
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The Seven Assholes Of The World
Finally, something we’re still Number One at! This post at 3Quarks Daily by Adam Ash dissects the characteristic of national superiority that defines a handful of nations — China, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, the U.K., and, of course, the U.S. — and wonders if the world wouldn’t be a much better place if they gave up their over-inflated self-importance. Frankly, it’s a nice breath of fresh air for a piece like this to acknowledge that we Americans are not the only ones who cannot see beyond our own noses; the Big Three European powers certainly have had their moments, and certainly the xenophobia-cum-racism of both Chinese and Japanese exceptionalism rate high on the scale of general assholery.
For me, the money quote is this section where he talks about how America reacted (and is still reacting) to 9/11:
What in fact did we do after 9/11? Instead of taking the moral high ground, a pedestal upon which we were suddenly thrust by the rest of the world — in Iran they held candle-lit vigils for us, Le Monde thundered “We are all New Yorkers now” — we sunk lower than sharkshit into the deepest assholumbra of assholectonomy. Instead of using our elevated moral position to examine ourselves, and come up with a measured look at ourselves and a suddenly changed world, and to render a semi-mature judgment about what had happened and how a civilized nation should respond, instead of thinking and weighing and reasoning the whole thing out among ourselves like the democracy we’re supposed to be, instead of stepping up like adults, we behaved like a child who stubs his toe and hits the smaller kid next to him for relief. We did not rise to the occasion. We did not even stoop to it.
It brought out the demon in us which, heart-breakingly, might be what we really are.
Definitely worth keeping in mind this week as we all sit glued to our television sets watching most of these World Assholes duke it out through the proxy of men and women in oddly-colored skintight superhero suits and goofy helmets.
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The Torch Is Past
Everybody seems to be in quite a dither about the Olympic Torch being doused twice today as it was run through the streets of Paris.
I certainly hope the irony is not lost on anyone that it was Adolf Hitler’s propaganda ministry that came up with the idea of running the Olympic Torch from Greece to the site of the Games for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was all part of the glorification of the Aryan supermen, with the direct implication that there was a link between Nazi Germany and the Olympian gods. Hitler himself was big on the idea that somehow the Germans had some sort of tie to the Spartans.
Of course, the IOC itself was run by a Francoist for twenty years, and even prior to that the long-time head of the U.S. Olympic Committee and head of the IOC, Avery Brundage, had direct business ties to Nazi Germany. So to pretend that the Olympics are somehow tainted by their association with Beijing and the Chinese government is a little disingenuous.
As a true testament to the 19th Century ideal of amateur competition, the Olympics ceased to be worthy of that consideration with the 1936 Games. When the Games resumed after World War II, the political propagandization and the proxy battles between the two sides of the Cold War carried the Games for another 30-odd years until the 1980 Games in Moscow. Since 1984, though, the Games have mutated into nothing but a commercial spectacle, deteriorating further and further along that path with each subsequent event. Protesting over China hosting the Games is too little, too late. China as the Next Big Superpower seems to me to be the perfect symbol of the triumph of unbridled capitalism and hypocritical symbolism. Dousing Hitler’s torch in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe only seems fitting to me.
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Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away
And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
And I watch my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reliving old dreams of past glory
And the old men march slowly, all bent, stiff and sore
The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask, “What are they marching for?”
And I ask myself the same question
And the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men answer to the call
But year after year their numbers get fewer
Some day no one will march there at all– “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, by Eric Bogle
Over the past weekend, the next-to-last surviving French veteran of World War One, a man named Louis de Cazenave, passed away at the very advanced age of 110.
Yesterday it was announced that the last surviving German veteran of World War One, Erich Kaestner, passed away on New Year’s Day, aged 107.
Only about 20 more, one of whom is the only surviving female veteran, remain. Within the next couple of years, the War To End All Wars will have slipped from living human memory completely. War, unfortunately, will remain all too fresh in the minds of millions for the foreseeable future.
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More Fun Than A Barrel Full Of….Oh, Riiiiight, Sorry…
This Ananova story about a German zoo hiring a local clown to come in and cheer up their monkeys is getting a lot of play. And apparently so are the monkeys, who go ape (ahem) whenever they see her coming to visit their enclosure. I guess they must not have a Chuck E. Cheese nearby.
(Everybody seems to have the same wire story, so it would be cool if somebody actually IN Germany could follow up with a few more details, like which zoo it is, and maybe score some photos of the clown entertaining the animals. Ananova has a history of simply spreading around any old story without offering much in the way of details…just like FOX News.)