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Right! Like, OH NO THEY MADE FUN OF JESUS ON FAMILY GUY! Everyone hates me… Meanwhile, in Burma, the Chin state is undergoing active ethnocide with deliberate attacks on the Christian church system in the area featuring rapes, extrajudicial executions, beatings and resource exploitation by the Burmese military. HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

SeriousGum time! So I spent some time at this place called L'Abri in Southboro MA. It's a little hard to describe, it's like a place of Christian learning where you live in community and work and spend time in tutoring and studying, and it's pretty much Narnia. I was having a particularly bad year, and was probably in my lowest state, and for the first time in my faith, was genuinely angry and doubtful. What I encountered was basically the EXACT opposite of this "I'm gonna settle this score once and for all!" My tutor listened to my "story" (LOL) and just said "Yeah, your life is absurd." and I was like "THANK YOU! WHAT?!" It was hugely liberating to be told, and demonstrated Biblically, that God is very hard to understand, and that we have the room to be confused and hurt. All that to say, as a Christian, it's very hard to see the likes of Kirk Cameron, not because he's a social embarrassment (Jesus was a huge social embarrassment) but because he has missed the point of humility, quiet reconciliation, and the moral imperative of surrender and friendship with "the distinct other."

It's like there's a wall in the MTV offices with person-outline stamps on the walls for how many already-at-risk lives they can make incalculably worse by bribing them to be on camera. "We killed that southern kid, let's see what happens if this girl does some porn!"

Ehhh, "better" is very subjective here. The reason I preferred it is because it had a fast, intuitive interface that worked very well with software that I preferred. You could make an argument for preference, but you can't call it "pointless" or even really a trick. It was a product that people who don't have time to fiddle with technology could use to a relatively maximized effect. That's not easy. Also, paying for music is a good thing.

Wait, how was the iPod a pointless product? In 2001, that firewire 5GB brick was better than anything out there for listening to music on the go. Which isn't pointless.

(btw, "used that way"=used at all, like in this example of women clearly being used, among many other examples one could give in this sad fallen world.)

Yes, it drives me crazy. The whole clothed-male-with-several-naked-females creates a visual power dynamic that really does legitimately piss me off, and I'm generally pretty thick-skinned, because pop stars tend to be annoying, and you just can't get that riled up ALL THE TIME! I tried bringing up to a JT fan, and I said "You know, it's really disappointing, because while I doubt JT is a living-breathing sexist, people really need to recognize that women shouldn't be used that way. How do you have "tunnel vision" for 3 naked women?" and she said "Who cares, he's hot, he can do whatever he wants." Later that night I was taking a bus, and I hit the "Stop Requested" button and it was particularly poignant.

I don't mind the song, but the video ruined it for me. It practically puts Terry Richardson on a cultural throne and says "I really will just keep objectifying women, because so many people keep paying me to." Mrs Huxtable, on the other hand. Try telling her that she's the hottest bitch in the room, and you'll get slapped so hard, your dog will bleed.

I mean, we've been objectifying women for YEARS now, so the JT video a lot less to ease in to.

Word up. And to be clear, I thought the RT thing was awful and actually made me way more angry than the JT video because it's WAY too wink-wink about the whole thing. At the very least, Justin has some kind of infatuation thing going on, even if it's blurred horribly by the multiple women, and ironically, the laziness does work in the video's favor because really, it's just naked people kind of dancing with a tone-deaf concept, and in Kanye's lyrics, there IS a palpable sadness and frustration about "the life" which is on some level interesting and makes you wonder, is this guy losing his marbles? In the Robin Thicke video, these women are just prancing for the benefit of their male dominants, and he doles out his attention when it damn well pleases him, all with a knowing smirk. It would be just as obnoxious if they had some more clothing on.

Kanye's new work is musically exciting to me, as far as what's coming out of the "huge artist" category, and lyrically poisonous and it does make the album pretty cringeworthy. JT's new video is just kind of lame and very lazy. What disturbs me most about it is how I personally know some of his female fans who will defend it to the death by virtue of it JUST being Justin Timberlake (which is a commentary about some of my friends, not all women.) So, Kanye and Justin both score low marks.

I'd say it's pretty straight foward objectification, and I have a pretty thick skin about that kind of thing. The fact that JT is always clothed and separate (not-vulnerable) is pretty domineering. I have no problem with nudity in art or even as art in of itself, but it's all in how it relates to the context of the piece and the viewer, and the only thing I'm getting from this is "Justin will like me (and by marketing-proxy, you) if I'm (you are) naked and pliable."

(btw, I don't really like the term, "pro-life" because I'm pretty sure everyone likes life. it assumes a bizarre sense of superiority.)

I'm generally pro-life, and pro-life politicians scare me to no end.

Hingham is a nightmare of a town. Ultra-homogenous rich white elitist community. It's also where Wahlburgers is. Just throwing in some context.

At that age, any reference of "tonight we're gonna---" usually involved watching shows that ended at 8pm, unless it was a sleep-over because someone's mother was reckless enough to get a pay-per-view pro wrestling event for 9 kids going into mountain dew apoplexy.

I'm not seeing Act of Killing! "Do not see Act of Killing" is a permanent item on my daily to-do list. I'm gonna achieve my goals.

I was camping way up on the Maine/New Hampshire border last summer, and the park rangers were VERY aggressive about the 10PM quiet hour rule with us. As in, we basically had to stop all conversation at 9:30 pm as part of a "wind down" process, which is funny because we're all basically old people now. We just had the misfortune of camping right next to the ranger's resident campsite. So you can imagine my displeasure when the camp ground children could be up at quarter till 5, riding their bikes up and down the road, apparently reenacting the battle of stalingrad, with total impunity. They woke us up and kept us up. I got out of my tent at 7 am, sat on my car hood with a bottle of whiskey and chain smoked while glaring at the parents of a few of the kids for a few minutes while I got morning-drunk. I'm not proud, but I'm not ashamed.

I would be really mad if someone trashed my local art museums. I'm mad over someone trashing this fake one.

He doesn't take her back, he yells "OPPOSITE DAY!" in her face and sprints away, because his voice cracked on "DAY" and his face would be starting to contort from the sobs, and everyone will be like "I mean, 'Opposite day' kind of worked there, but not really. Opposite of what? He must be very upset."

From the HollywoodLife comments on this article: ("ARTICLE") "people grow apart. people change as they mature. what you love at 21 is not necessarily what you want at 27. good luck and a happy life to the both of them." Fantastic voice of reason in the tumult of the brunette-to-blonde type-change. I feel calmer already.

I thought everyone in the video WAS pregnant.

You're touching on the biggest mystery, as far as I know, in Christianity: The ethics of God creating while knowing there would be tragedy. This is definitely an issue that can't be resolved completely in real life, let alone on a web board. I think Christians go about dealing with this in a peculiar way, as it's scripturally illustrated as a matter of a faith decision rather than one of being logically convinced: Job wanted an explanation, all God essentially said was "I am who I am. What are you going to do about it?" This answer is either horrifying and repugnant (which I understand completely) or an extremely poignant qualitative illustration of the nature and relationship of creator and creature. The reaction depends entirely on the reactor's perception of the person and implications of God. That is not something I, or anyone else, can really convince anyone of one way or the other on any argumentative terms. I can really only offer a few points on how "I am who I am" became satisfactory, or at least close to it, to me. I have huge philosophical issues with saying "Non-existence would have been better than existence." so I can't begrudge God for the act of creation as a start. As far as a Godless universe, I have trouble reconciling the concept of "tragedy" to an arbitrarily chaotic reality. If significance of life or an individual exists in such a universe, it is entirely subjective. If our origins are "accidental" or the result of the settling of atoms in the expansion of an arbitrary universe, than so is our existence and destiny, which in the former is brief and painful, and the latter is uniform annihilation. Any feelings of significance or meaning an individual experiences is simply a matter of choice or happenstance, and correlates to nothing objective. This does not mean that such a reality doesn't exist, it simply means once we accept it on a logical basis, the HONEST course is to address the concept of tragedy as nothing more than an unpleasant evolutionary specter. Anyone can, of course, decide to react and hold to concepts about anything however they want to, but I take issue with trying to, on one hand, show the universe to be a hopeless place, and then cram sentimentality into it, and claim logic as their sole compass. This is going to get very long, so I'll cut to the chase. I accept hope in God, not in spite of suffering, but because of suffering. I believe that God suffered for the sake of man, and thus suffering can serve a real purpose, not necessarily in of itself (God does not like suffering) but suffering can participate in an objective meaning, which is His purview. The Cross is my nexus point between suffering and benevolence, and because of that instance, I can't hold suffering as an indictment against God's love. I cannot possibly know if or when there is an objective meaning to any particular case of suffering that does not relate directly to me, or what that specific meaning is. I distrust anyone who offers such an explanation, but I also distrust anyone trying to rule out the possibility of meaning as well.

I also want to note that on all of the internet, the videogum community has probably been the best place experientially for me to discuss my point of view on religion and my beliefs. I've always felt that I've received a lot of grace and understanding from the other commenters who have disagreed with me, which is unique and not lost on me. Ya'll aren't knee-jerk redditors who are out to make other people feel bad, and that's pretty great.

And the assumption problem is very real and totally worthy of a lot of discussion. I'm just seeing a lot of atheist friends on social media use this as an indictment against the entire religious community as some kind of "SEE? LOOK! THEY ARE OPPRESSING US!" and this just isn't a good example of the actual cultural oppression that takes place by localized religious communities.

I'm not saying he should have made the assumption, but I don't think it was a wild one. He's in the most religious part of the entire country. He recovered and made sure the woman was comfortable and affirmed her and they both seemed fine. Segments of the religious and irreligious claim levels of cultural persecution, and I think that's true on a relative scale for both: You and I are from the same area, which is a much more secular-dominant place than Oklahoma. I'm way more cautious discussing my faith in Boston because frankly, I don't like dealing with the possible, borderline-probable, instant barrage of judgemental hand-wringing, which is not exclusive behavior to the religious community. But if I were an atheist in Texas, I'd feel the exact same way, which bothers me just as much, if not more. The fact that Wolf and Lady could laugh it off and move on is more important than the gaffe, because it's a good example of how everyone should deal with that kind of mistake.

I mean… he WAS in the Bible Belt. It was poor execution, but I think some people want this to be a bigger blunder or hugely awkward situation than it was. I get plenty of loaded blank stares or demands for explanations from atheists as to why I go to church. Being offended over what other people think of your beliefs is not the worst thing that can happen to you, as evidenced by the pile of rubble behind them in the video.

Wow. What? I mean I don't think I'll be seeing invites to anyone mastectomy party or anything, but can't we just let people NOT GET CANCER? (Granted, I have to raise my eye-brows with Angie. Not that I take issue with the choice, one way or the other, but at least give a nod to the women who have to do this without unmitigated access to the best plastic surgeons in the entire world. I'm glad she won't be disfigured, for her and her family's sake, but the decision had to be made a LITTLE easier by the fact that she can afford to rebuild virtually any part of her body for cosmetic purposes.)

This is an honest question. Is there an actual shame-based stigma out there that exists for this kind of thing? Like is anyone out there thinking "No, nope. What an attack on femininity!" I think "Don't get cancer if you can help it" is a pretty supported choice, right?

I just want all of the raw footage of the table dance from 0:12. I hope there's hours of it.

Ke$ha joke. Something about getting it out of their system young, or whatever. It's just really lazy.

I looked up the lyrics because I couldn't handle the noise: "They called it Reconstruction, fixed the buildings, dried some tears We're still siftin' through the rubble after a hundred-fifty years" That's… uh. Wow.

For an even MORE erotic literary experience, get your phone book and read it aloud to yourself in the mirror while eating Tums like candy.

Hard frown. I'm taking tips for what I should watch as far as movies that this guy loved. Anyone?

I've decided the irony is just baggage now. I love this kid. I want to be his older brother.

I hated it because it was so obviously pre-massaged by his handlers. CB's People: "They are going to ask you some tough questions (poster's note: LOLOLOL) and just stay calm and tell your story because you're beautiful baby." CB: "I got this, you know, cuz I'm pahzitive and beautiful." ML: "Look at all the money we have!"

Basically very annoying all around.

NO! PICK A SIDE AND PREPARE TO DEFEND YOURSELF.

Respeck.

I mean fair enough, and I didn't mean to sound like I was condoning out and out harassment of the poor guy. I guess I'm thinking in terms of the mostly sane people at videogum who see the humor in saying "Ha! What a weirdo! Ain't that people tho? Say, you look like a fella that enjoys a good cigar!" I also don't think Gabe was being mean or vicious in anything he said, just as a disclaimer.