Foreign Dispatches

Why Everybody Hates Gwyneth

I have no intention of turning this blog into a celebrity gossip site, but there's one very noticeable phenomenon I can't help commenting on, to wit, the breadth and ferocity of the hatred expressed online for the actress Gwyneth Paltrow: it seems no matter what the woman does or says, hordes of voices come out of the woodwork to ridicule her for her supposed pretentiousness, arrogance or stupidity, and the strangest thing of all is that the issue being seized upon is usually nothing of any real consequence - for instance, a comment on a gift on her GOOP website, or some such, hardly on par with, say, explaining your lackluster acting career by saying you're just too beautiful, or childishly ridiculing another actress for daring to possess and utilize a less than impoverished vocabulary.

Why Twitter?

Farhad Manjoo asks a question I've long been meaning to myself: what exactly is the reward in using Twitter? I've never been able to come up with a good answer to this question, which is why I've never ever bothered to use my Twitter account even once after creating it. 140 characters doesn't suffice to share all but the most banal thoughts, and when I look at what active users of the Twitter service actually put out, I find myself scratching my head as to why anyone would care to follow such material. Is it really news to anyone that politicians and celebrities engage in all the same mundane daily activities that the rest of us do? I could care less that Ashton Kutcher is mowing his lawn or that Lindsay Lohan just bought an iced frappucino, and if the minutiae of the lives of these famous individuals are of so little interest, I fail to see why anyone - other than  perhaps a stalker - would care about the many non-events that make up my typical day, which might look like this in all its gripping detail:

You Know Obama Worship Has Gone Way Overboard When ...

His name is even being used to flog heroin. What happened to good old brand names like "Blue Magic"?

Seriously, though, the level of adulation being accorded to Barack Obama and his wife is seriously starting to creep me out, and I suspect that to some extent it must creep the Obamas out as well. It's all very well for Obama backers to be euphoric about their man getting into the White House, but to hear many in the media (both in America and abroad) talk, you'd think America had just elected the Messiah, and that a new golden age was just about to begin, with swords turned into plowshares, lions lying with lambs, etc. Why not at least wait until the man's half way through his term before treating him as if he could walk on water?

It's That Time of the Year Again

I promised your respite from my cynicism would be a short one, and as such here I am doing my best not to disappoint. I went into my local gym this morning, and what did I see? Lots and lots of new faces, some being shown the facilities and others simply wandering around aimlessly from machine to machine. At the sight of these newcomers the first thought that occurred to me - apart from some annoyance at their generally getting in the way - was that hardly any of them were likely to be around by the end of the month in any case, so all of their pre-paid gym memberships were in effect subsidizing those of us who don't wait until January to decide we're going to get in shape.

While I'm grateful for the unthinking generosity of all these fair-weather fitness buffs, it is precisely behavior such as theirs which makes me so cynical about festivities like Christmas and New Year's Day in the first place: there is nothing especially significant about these particular points in spacetime, and as such one should not have to wait for some date on the calendar to be nice to others or begin to act on resolutions to improve one's life in some way. To me, the fact that people wait for such days to act in ways they ought to throughout the rest of the year spells out very clearly that they aren't serious about the efforts they do make on these supposedly "special" days either, which means that all they are really doing, in sending presents and well-wishes or making resolutions, is engaging in self-deluding, feel-good theatrics. That is why all those Christmas well-wishers turn back into monsters of egocentricity once the festivities are over, and why all those new-year gym joiners will only have paunches and cellulite to flaunt by the time summer rolls around.

As for myself, I take my own medicine. I have no new year resolutions to make, and everything I intend to do in the course of the year is precisely what I'd been planning to do from the year before; to the extent that I fail to meet any of said goals, it will not be because I've been pursuing them half-heartedly or waiting for some supposedly more auspicious time to begin to act on them.

Death of an AIDS Denier

It's been a little over 3 years since I touched upon the words and deeds of Christine Maggiore, and the only reason I'm bothering to do so again today is because the inevitable has happened: the notorious AIDS-denying crank has finally died - of AIDS. Shocking, isn't it?

I know it's supposedly in bad taste to adopt a mocking tone towards the recently deceased, but I refuse to abide by such rules when it comes to people who were murderers, and that is what Ms. Maggiore most certainly was. Not only did her advocacy against the use of AZT by pregnant HIV-positive women encourage others to insanely irresponsible behavior, but by taking her own utterly stupid advice, she needlessly condemned her own daughter to a brutally short life ending in what must have been a painful, lingering death - and now, the son who survives her passing has been condemned to growing up without a mother who would almost certainly still be alive for at least two more decades if only her ignorant pride and delusional confidence in new-age nonsense like "holistic cleansing" hadn't gotten in the way of getting on a cocktail programme.

Ultimately, in a certain twisted way Christine Maggiore was right: there are things in this world even more lethal than HIV, not least of which is pig-headed irrationalism and a preference for escapist fantasies over science. One cannot wish facts away simply by vehemently denying them (what becomes of Maggiore's "Alive and Well" website now that she no longer is either?).

PS: If only there really were a "God" I could invoke to strike down every cowardly chickenshit journalist who insists on bestowing a spurious air of legitimacy upon Maggiore by calling her a "skeptic" rather than what she actually was - a dangerous crackpot.

Britannia Rules - in Casual Sex

Another blow to the myth of sex-crazed Scandinavians: if tawdry sexual encounters with complete strangers is what you want, then Great Britain is the best place in the world to be. Of course, you'll have to keep in mind that said British sex will necessarily take place under the influence of insane amounts of alcohol, and with some scruffy chav or cellulite-encrusted beluga, but hey, sex is sex, right? Life in Britain is one long tutorial in the importance of placing quality over quantity: never in history has the prospect of so much sex with so many offered so little temptation ...

PS: This is the Daily Mail we're talking about, so I thought I should follow up on the source from which these insights were drawn. As best I can tell, the numbers come from one of David Schmitt's papers from 2008 on this page, though as yet I've been unable to determine which one it is exactly.

Klaus Emmerich, Österreichs Schande

If even outbursts like this one do not constitute a firing offense, what exactly does it take to get fired from Austrian television?

Austria's official state broadcaster is refusing to sack a senior political commentator who said blacks were not civilised enough to rule.

So Much for "Swedish Sin"

The Local, an English-language newspaper covering Sweden, is currently carrying an article on a supposed uptick in the popularity of swinging in Swedish society, but what is striking to me isn't so much the total absence of any concrete data to suggest that any such boom is taking place - lazy, sensationalist journalism knows no borders, and the original Dagens Nyheter article was no better - but all the quotes illustrating a reality of Swedish culture that will come as a huge shock to foreigners who've grown up imbibing images like the "Swedish Bikini Team"; Swedes actually aren't very "free" and "open" about sex at all.

Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful

Something odd I discovered while randomly surfing teh internetz.

TORONTO (Reuters Life!) - Average-looking men with good manners are among the most trusted, while good-looking men are trusted the least, a new survey suggests.

Why I Hate Shaking Hands

I've long considered handshaking a barbaric Germanic relic which ought to have been done away with alongside trial by ordeal, and once you read this BBC article you'll see why I feel the way I do. From reading research surveys and watching how others behave in public facilities, I've come to understand that most people either have no idea what proper handwashing technique entails*, or else they're simply too lazy and slovenly to act on this knowledge; as such, whenever possible I'd rather just give a friendly wave and say "Hi" rather than grab anyone else's grubby mitts. As far as I'm concerned the Japanese have the right idea - a simple bow ought to suffice to acknowledge someone else without having to share the person's faecal, respiratory and skin pathogens - and that is precisely what the disgusting habit of handshaking entails. To think that the vast majority of people compound such filthy habits with a reluctance to wash their hands before eating turns my stomach.

*Hint: If you take less than 10 seconds to "wash" [sic] your hands, you're not doing much more than engaging in meaningless ritualistic activity, as it is the mechanical action of actually using soap to scrub the germs away which counts, and that takes time to do properly: soap does not actually kill many bacteria and viruses, and what it does is simply detach the germs from one's skin so that the water can wash them away. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I see someone wash his or her hands properly, and I say "surprised" because it happens so rarely!