why isnt dan savage judged harshly as rall or coulter?

When it comes to the environment, our new policy is this: Let the heartland live with the consequences of handing the national government to the rape-and-pillage party. The only time urbanists should concern themselves with the environment is when we are impacted--directly, not spiritually (the depressing awareness that there is no unspoiled wilderness out there doesn't count). Air pollution, for instance: We should be aggressive. If coal is to be burned, it has to be burned as cleanly as possible so as not to foul the air we all have to breathe. But if West Virginia wants to elect politicians who allow mining companies to lop off the tops off mountains and dump the waste into valleys and streams, thus causing floods that destroy the homes of the yokels who vote for those politicians, it no longer matters to us. Fuck the mountains in West Virginia--send us the power generated by cleanly burned coal, you rubes, and be sure to wear lifejackets to bed.

Wal-Mart is a rapacious corporation that pays sub-poverty-level wages, offers health benefits to its employees that are so expensive few can afford them, and destroys small towns and rural jobs. Liberals in big cities who have never seen the inside of a Wal-Mart spend a lot of time worrying about the impact Wal-Mart is having on the heartland. No more. We will do what we can to keep Wal-Mart out of our cities and, if at all possible, out of our states. We will pass laws mandating a living wage for full-time work, upping the minimum wage for part-time work, and requiring large corporations to either offer health benefits or pay into state- or city-run funds to provide health care for uninsured workers. That will reform Wal-Mart in our blue cities and states or, better yet, keep Wal-Mart out entirely. And when we see something on the front page of the national section of the New York Times about the damage Wal-Mart is doing to the heartland, we will turn the page. Wal-Mart is not an urban issue.

Neither is gun control. Our new position: We'll fight to keep guns off the streets of our cities, but the more guns lying around out there in the heartland, the better. Most cities have strong gun-control laws--laws that are, of course, undermined by the fact that our cities aren't walled. Yet. But why should liberals in cities fund organizations that attempt, to take one example, to get trigger locks onto the handguns of NRA members out there in red states? If red-state dads aren't concerned enough about their own children to put trigger locks on their own guns, it's not our problem. If a kid in a red state finds his daddy's handgun and blows his head off, we'll feel terrible (we're like that), but we'll try to look on the bright side: At least he won't grow up to vote like his dad.

We won't demand that the federal government impose reasonable fuel-efficiency standards on all cars sold in the United States. We will, however, strive to pass state laws, as California has done, imposing fuel-efficiency standards on cars sold in our states.

We won't concern ourselves if red states restrict choice. We'll just make sure that abortion remains safe and legal in the cities where we live, and the states we control, and when your daughter or sister or mother dies in a botched abortion, we'll try not to feel too awful about it.

http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=32491&category=34029

Over the past few years, his column has definitely become more of a soapbox than an advice column, and he has taken to some pretty angry advocacy. That being said, the people who he is railing against have not traditionally been all that kind to him and other homosexuals, so some of what he says should definitely be read with that understanding.

I think that he is judged as harshly as rall or coulter - but he is also automatically marginalized by his profession and his sexuality. He's not a straight, Protestant white man coming out and saying all of these things and I think that the right therefore realizes that it doesn't need to fight him all that much because he's already coming in a few pegs low.

Also, why does the media put up with the same BS Jesse Jackson continues to spew? Because they don't want to be seen as actively marginalizing a black leader.

Some people still revere Marion Barry...he was an early leader of SNCC, he graduated from Fisk University with a masters in chemistry (ah, the irony), and he became the mayor of DC.

These are things that matter, despite a decade of irrelevance or tax evasion/prostitution and crack use.

Hasn't Santorum done a good job of that on his own?

I didn't realize Hazard County had tranny escorts.

xpost i live in atlanta jackass

Savage is as funny/funnier than Coulter (though, really, everyone who has ever said he should stick to sex chat is OTM) and is a member of a marginalized profession and sexual preference=no need to raise a fuss if you is right winging it. The whole "why don't LIBERALS squirm at this" thing is bullshit considering you think Ann Coulter is a dreamboat.

I mean, every single person here has said the same thing, and ain't a one of us is gonna defend Rall. It's about his outsider status. He's a complete "shouldn't exist"/abomination to the majority of people who are all big on the Coulter/Limbaugh/O'Reilly tip so they aren't going to give a shit about what he says.

lately it looks like lotsa his letters come from trolls

not as good as ILX's trolls though ;-)

doubt ann coulters audience has a clue who dan savage is

I mean, I understand your point about how they are equally vitriolic, soap boxing "haha see how extreme and sarcastic and witty I am" ultra-(insert wing here)er cartoons, why does Coulter get "shit" (and by "shit" you mean a lot more money than Savage I guess) while Savage doesn't. I mean, I understand your point on a theoretical basis. But the reason is simple: people like Savage are NON ENTITIES to the type of people who would normally raise a huge fucking fuss about left-wing "celebrities" like Moore and Rall.

dan savage is pretty much a complete asshole, though, yeah.

That being said, I think that pundits serve a vital purpose - that of getting opinons out there. The main problem with them nowadays is that they seem to, by way of their rhetoric, exclude from validity any person seeing things another way than theirs, thus making themselves the be all and end all of commentary on whatever it is they are commenting on.

And, unfortunately, they are all talking about the same thing: sex and sexually related topics. Big taboos, lots of discomfort, under-developed vocabulary for a dialogue, and a whole lot of people with preset agendas on both sides.

I tend to agree most with Savage when he says (paraphrased) "So long as you're consenting, no one gets hurt and there are no animals or children involved, its all good." Kind of a nice live and let live in the bedroom motto.

But isn't that people who are mainly reading his sex column?

I think he's kind of a dick and I'm not really trying to defend him, but I don't think there are many people who pay much attention to what he says about politics.

YOU'RE RIGHT! HE TOTALLY THINKS ITS A GOOD IDEA FOR KIDS TO SHOOT THEMSELVES!

POINT: TRIFE.

Note: I am not defending Savage as I don't read either him or Coulter, but I do think Coulter should consider just becoming a sex columnist.

Raise your hand who remembers COLLEGE. Thank you.

Never mind that the actual movie is a not-hardly-subtle attack on the current mass media.

Savage is an entertaining writer but I get the impression he's kind of an asshole & extremely judgemental and opinionated.

Isn't the fact that he's an entertaining writer probably a DIRECT RESULT of the fact that he's judgemental and opinionated (and maybe also because he's kind of an asshole)?

I can see where Coulter's humor comes from, but most of it is the "man it's tough being the one in charge" humor where you act like you have such responsibility and joke about how your job would be easier if you were just an asshole. Like, "Man, keeping the world in line is hard, wouldn't be easier if we just nuked Iraq and turned it into a parking lot?" She's a little wordier than that, but that's what a lot of the soundbites boil down to.

I'm excepting his column, since he himself will admit that it's way too easy to be an asshole behind a keyboard.

The Lie
The Hiphop Tipped Over
Editor's Note: The Stranger is currently without a hiphop columnist. Until we find a new one, Stranger editor--and cocksucking musical theater fan--Dan Savage will be filling in.

"I'm fascinated by rap and by hiphop," Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry recently told an MTV reporter. "I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important."

I have to admit that Kerry's comments cut me to the quick. Was I less hip than a U.S. senator who appears to have been born with a silver stick in his ass? The only hiphop performance I'd ever seen was that rapping granny in The Wedding Singer. Worried that I was missing out on an important art forum infused with poetry, anger, and energy, I asked Charles Mudede, Stranger staffer and self-confessed "scholar nigger," to make a CD for me featuring a selection of hiphop tunes.

The first song was DJ Spinna's "Hold." It opens with what sounded like a fart--not one of those moist buttock-flappers that you might hear on The Howard Stern Show, but a tight, dry toot, the kind of fart your mother might cut in church. I asked Charles about what this fart sound was and he said it's the "beat," created by a "human beatboxer," and not flatulence. Who knew? Then came Lifesavas' "Me," which was almost... music. The song opens with an actual, identifiable musical instrument: Someone is playing the piano! Then, unfortunately, the song proper started, a different human beatbox started farting away, and the piano was almost drowned out.

Oh, hey, we're running out of space. My final duty as your hiphop columnist is to mention some "fat" shows coming up this week. Lifesavas will be performing with their pianist--I hope--at Chop Suey on Thursday, May 13. In fact, let's hope only the pianist shows up. Friday, Cool Nutz performs at Premier. I didn't listen to his CD, but I read through Cool Nutz's press materials and all I have to say is that this man has a very high opinion of his own talent. He is, he tells us, "the epitome of creativity." (It rhymes but is it true?) And Tuesday, May 18, John Kerry and other hiphop fans will pour into Chop Suey to see DJ Spinna play a free show, complete with pre-recorded fart effects.

Editor's note again: You see what we're left with here? Our old hiphop columnist ran off to be in an Eminem cover band, and Dan "I can write about anything in a half hour or less" Savage forces us to let him fill in. Do you have a strong voice in your writing and think you know more about local/national hiphop and can write better than both our editor and Charles "scholar nigger" Mudede?

xpost

There is nothing notable about this.

(But not surprised, oh no.)

Damning with faint praise there? Do you actually spend time charting this bullshit, Ethan?

And he is probably quoting Mudede. Whatever. This column is boring:

uncool white dude doesn't 'get' rap and uses words like 'fat' hahahah it's actually 'phat' omg he's so WHITE

Unfunny. Also: Mudede referring to himself (we assume) as "scholar nigger" (perhaps even for the purposes of the article!) != oreilly condemning luda for being a "thug nigger" because one of his interns heard it in a songe once.

Oh I missed where he was condeming Charles Mudede. Sorry.

No. If this were true there would be a lot more entertaining writers.

I'd agree, fwiw. He's psyched that he's gotten "permission" from a real-live black person to use the word 'nigger.' Still not rhetorically equivalent to O'Reilly using it.

I was shocked when I read that column, too, but it was in the context of email forwards showing a map of the US divided into "Jesus-land" and "the rest of us" or whatever. It was a frustrating, helpless-feeling time for progressives and I think a LOT of people said things around then that they may now regret. Not that I think Savage does, necessarily, I don't know.

The idea that states and local politics will achieve victories on national minority issues betrays an enormous (and willfully contrary? DING DING) ignorance, and the idea that gay people should just up and move to blue states is a familiar blend of elitism and utter provincialism that I've gotten very used to living in New York.

The hip hop column isn't venal, just embarrassing.

Yeah, I don't see it myself.

Anyway, I wish this were a thread full of Charles Mudede quotes, because he's entertaining in a geirish sort of way.

Yeah you are right, context means nothing. Never has.

Oh I missed where he was condeming Charles Mudede. Sorry.

-- Alex in SF (clobberthesauru...), December 13th, 2005.

The big difference between Savage and Coulter is that Coulter is a political humorist masquerading as a political pundit, whereas Savage seems to have become a (quasi) political humorist masquerading as a sex columnist. In fact, he seems to think this is precisely what gives him license to be flip about politics: he's attempting to be the drunken who-cares sex blowhard (a shtick he works even in strictly sex-column terms), and even the fuck-the-red-states deal seem calculated to impress his liberal readers in exactly those "like I give a shit" terms. Translation to ILX: he's attempting to be NOIZE, do you see?

His problem is that the more he does it -- the more he manages to actually talk into the political discourse from his who-cares sex-column perch -- the less license he has to be flip about it. (The problem with people like this is when the line between political-comedy and responsibility starts to blur, and they -- and parts of the public -- actually think their flip blowhardism constitutes serious political opinion.) And maybe he's aimed at some point where that'll become a real problem, but dude, Ethan, thus far he's basically a deliberate blow-hard making mean-spirited jokes in alt-weeky, both about furries and about Republicans. It's kinda dumb, at this point, and mostly mean and only sometimes even partly clever, but I think so far he's still half-right about its not necessarily having the same social weight/responsibility of someone like Coulter -- who does a similar shtick on proper news outlets, in a form that's not nearly as firmly tagged as comedy-before-responsibility.

(I don't think we can even start to judge the "scholar nigger" bit insofar as we have no idea whether or not the person in question might actually be the type who'd go around saying "that's right, I'm a scholar nigger, put that in there.")

That Savage column is awful. He's pissed off at John Kerry because someone asked Kerry a question about hip hop and he decided not to be a jerk and say it was all garbage like most every mainstream politician would.

Rall and Savage are pretty similar in temperament aren't they.

Coulter = Writer you find entertaining whose politcs I find offensive.

Even if I found her "entertaining", she'd still be worthless.

ALLY I SAY IT LONGER DON'T YOU SEE

bah.

seriously, people, I just quit smoking a day and a half ago and it ain't going so well.

i don't get this at all, from savage. he's no libertarian.

no. the so-called NOIZE stance would be disavowing politics altogether, probably.

It's noize if you work with the Tuomas definition of noize as all anonymous trolls ever, I guess?

yeah, see, even then, it's not what savage is doing.

it had a fairly well-defined linguistic/apolitical stance in the beginning

xpost

And I can recall seeing him take both of those stances in his column -- it's the whole "Savage" shtick. Someone will write in with some sex problem that others might view as a touchy deep-thinking "issue"; he'll respond "I dunno, whatever, I'm drunk, jizz on the cake if you want to"; and then when the obvious group gets offended, he'll retort with "whatever, I don't care." It's deeply boring and egomaniacal, but it is definitely sometimes his shtick.

And I can recall seeing him take both of those stances in his column -- it's the whole "Savage" shtick. Someone will write in with some sex problem that others might view as a touchy deep-thinking "issue"; he'll respond "I dunno, whatever, I'm drunk, jizz on the cake if you want to"; and then when the obvious group gets offended, he'll retort with "whatever, I don't care." It's deeply boring and egomaniacal, but it is definitely sometimes his shtick.

see, that is something he doesn't do very often. most often (argh i can't believe i'm defending him but i do read him sometimes - beats most of what else is in the voice!) he is very much about this approach that just doing whatever sexually is NOT okay, that consent and emotional connection and other such things are very important. so i think there's been a huge misreading of him all throughout this thread (tho yeah, i don't doubt that those "fuck the red states" columns were just that - and nothing more).

x-post to nabisco

Neither he nor Coulter actually have anything specific and responsible to say about politics -- they just joke at it from two different directions / ideologies.

my point is simply that the guys writing a sex column, AND when he writes about politics, I mostly agree with him. Even he's irresponsible or satirical or hyperbolic, and the ideologies behind his schtick are more progressive, whereas Coulter's are idiotic.

welcome to america.

Where is the non-cheap political discourse?

Don't most of the populace on the right get their facts from Bill O'Reilly and those on the left from John Stewart?

Salon Premium.

I hope to god not.

So to say it cheapens our discourse, well, blah blah posting long quotes of congressional rants from over a century go where representatives' ancestry was regularly accused of either sleeping with or being livestock, etc.

I think often it's the case that ILX is LESS forgiving of asinine statements by liberals than conservatives! Look at what happens every time one of us does it! also FUCK YOU YOU FUCK FUCK.

yeah, insulting political grafitti existed in ancient rome.

guess that explains why you don't find savage funny

anyway...

It really depends which posters you define as 'ILX.'

http://photos1.blogger.com/img/101/2476/640/FNC%20Ann%20Coulter%2001.jpg

It's nothing new.. cf Lynn Hunt "The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution" for some choice examples.. Carnival, people!

It's not just a joke or an exagerration but a performative contradictiion, because liberal politics (in its officially avowed content anyway) cannot support the sort of self-centered, who-cares-about-the-other-guy proclamations Savage is making here... to consciously adopt these positions would mean that Savage was actually giving up on being a liberal (quite clearly the last thing he wants to do), which is all about a let's-save-everybody sense of self-aggrandizement. So the conclusion of the article isn't so much "let's do this" but more "it sucks being a liberal".

I don't think the piece works very well in the end but i think it would be mistaken to think that Savage actually wants any of these things even in a wistful, joking "wouldn't it be nice/easier" sense. After all aside from marriage the gay rights movement in the US cares about nothing so much as rescuing young gay people from the evil clutches of the red states - that is one of the core fantasies on which the movement is currently built. At best this is a wild bluff which would fool no-one at the table.

my defense of him is that, in rosy memory at least, he seemed very serious about figuring out what the proper ways are of navigating some very way out there sex behavior. like, what are the ethics of asking for a vomit enema? or whatever. his whole point was that sodomy or whatever wildass kink is no sin, but it's at heart ppl getting together, and ppl can get hurt, so there has to be a right way of doing it. in a way he was old fashioned cos he stepped past sexual politics and (back) into politesse.

he's famous now ('i'm drunk, who cares' etc), and i feel like i haven't read him in a years. remember when he insisted that all his letters begin "hey faggot"?

his rhetorical kiss-off to conservative america strikes me as the same tough-guy move that yr ongoing luv for coulter is, ethan. i mean, i read a ton of right-wing shit and coulter is pretty light, yknow? i'll give plenty of time to Ledeen or Kristol or the atimes' Spengler, all yards more vicious and hilarious than AC and and whose writing always carries actual information that liberals need to think about, instead of chappaquiddickisms over and over and over again.

Not to say these are bad positions to take, but anyone who makes a liberal vs. conservative analogy between savage and coulter, respectively, is plain wrong.

just finished the article goole linked to on the cheating thread

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2011/1103.dueholm.html

a little tl;dr (but well written!) and it states my main problem w/ savage which is

...we live in a culture that is almost uniformly and explicitly devoted to sexual satisfaction as a very high, if not necessarily the highest, good.

...

And this is where Savage’s ethics make their most problematic claims—by separating and elevating sexual satisfaction above other things people value.

In the meantime, invading and rebuilding Iraq will not only free the Iraqi people, it will also make the Saudis aware of the consequences they face if they continue to oppress their own people while exporting terrorism and terrorists. The War on Iraq will make it clear to our friends and enemies in the Middle East (and elsewhere) that we mean business: Free your people, reform your societies, liberalize, and democratize... or we're going to come over there, remove you from power, free your people, and reform your societies for ourselves.

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=12237

so grim and so smug

cannot stand this guy

so grim and so smug

cannot stand this guy

100% with you on this. I don't understand why people like this guy. He's a smug, condescending jerk and he's not even funny.

After a few years of listening to his podcast, I'm getting kind of tired of him, but I do think his advice is usually right-on.

i think it's safe to say most ppl read the column for the letters more than his answers, tho he's not usually wrong.

believe it or not I'm good friends with a cousin of danny savage - even he struggles to say good things about him

'danny'