We Are The Word (of Porn!)

The source of all my news has a new post on one of my all-time favorite topics: pornography!. He quoted some numbers on the amount of revenue generated by porn that I thought were too good to be true, so I looked them up. It turns out that sometimes, it sounds too good to be true, but is true nonetheles. This is one of those times.

I found this anti-porn site that confirms the whopping $13 billion dollar figure for US porn revenue. But it does more than that! It shows different countries porn revenues and the news gets even better. The countries with higher porn revenue values than us are, in descending order, China, South Korea, and Japan! I remember reading in American Caesar how General Arthur Macarthur took his recently commissioned, West Point graduate son Douglas on a tour of Asia in the years before the first World War and told him that Asia would be the future focus of our country's international relations. Time after time we see just how right he was.

I've spent a year in South Korea, and I can sort-of almost have a conversation in Korean. I've spent six months in Japan and I can just about read a novel in Japanese. One thing I've been saying since I started reading Japanese is that I don't feel like their culture is even as foreign to me as that of continental Europe. French was my first foreign language and I feel way more like I'm looking at a completely alien mindset watching French movies and reading French novels than I have in any of my contact with the Japanese culture. I think the idea that we are "western" and the Japanese aren't is dated at best. Read Naomi by Tanizaki Junichiro and see if the way people think, feel, and write about it is more foreign to you than something by Camus or Sartre.

That might be an apples-to-oranges comparison because High-brow culture is foreign to anybody not trained in subjecting your self to senseless bullshit, while pop culture, coming from anywhere on earth, is more international and a lot less boring.

Anyway, back to Porn. Japan's per-capita porn revenue more than triples ours while South Korean pornographers rake in fully ten times the revenue of their American counterparts. Oddly enough, I did a google search on "Banned in South Korea" expecting to find stories about pin-up girls books being banned there. Those stories were common a couple of years ago. I found not a single one. An interesting thing about Korea is that things change must faster over there. A Korean friend explained this to me recently. What happens is you go to school expected to refer to people one grade ahead of you using respectful terms and you wind up seeing the people a year older as a different generation. Nobody anywhere on earth wants to be seen using the slang of the previous generation or wearing their styles. In Korea the previous generation is only 1 or two years older than you. Back when I was still practicing Korean, some friends taught me some swear words. They were all amused by the way I said them with my funny foreign accent. The next day I was saying my new swear words with the same group plus one other woman who was 5 years older than the rest of us. She wasn't amused at all. She was seriously offended and pissed off at the rest of them for teaching me that. It was years later when I told someone of this incident that the Korean speedy generation gap was explained to me.

So the current generation of Koreans is consuming more porn-- ten times more!-- in terms of revenue than the US. Maybe there's some hope for South Korea. When you look at a culture where large numbers of people turn out to protest against U.S. beef, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the entire country is retarded. But they do some things right there. They make good cheap cars. They have a great protestant / Confucian work ethic. I've known about these things for a while. But watching ten times the porn that Americans watch is a sign that they may be headed for a better place culturally.

Korea is more European than the U.S. and Japan when it comes to protesting in general. There is a subculture in the U.S. that think's it's reasonable to go out in the streets and hold up signs and shout their opinions at the passers by. Americans generally view protesting as something like dressing up in Star Wars costumes in public only less amusing. It's not something normal Americans would ever want to be seen doing. The Japanese seem to have a similar attitude toward marching in the streets. South Korea and Europe, on the other hand, respect protestors. A protest in France or in South Korea is a social even to see and be seen at like a Baseball game or a golf course in the US or in Japan. The idea that it's okay for grown-ups to throw tantrums in public and that it will accomplish something is a serious social ill that afflicts most of the world, but not the US or Japan.

But I've digressed all over the fucking place and the point is that the world is rapidly becoming a better place and these porn statistics prove it beyond a doubt.

The Chinese numbers are particularly encouraging.

It's also funny just how much reading pleasure a porn fan can get from a site with the words "family safe media" in it's url.

I should also mention that I have found no evidence yet that there's anyone on earth who agrees with my views on the idea of Western vs. Eastern cultures.

Let me recap what those views are in case all this rambling has buried that point. Most people (actually everyone I've met or read) think that the U.S. and Europe are "western" while Japan, China and some other countries are "eastern". But on the porn consumption charts, China, Japan, South Korea and the U.S. form one block while the rest of the world forms another. I think that other charts could be made measuring other cultural tendencies that would show Japan and the Anglosphere having more in common than Japan and the rest of Asia. I believe that there are many other ways in which the US is closer culturally to Japan than to continental Europe, but proving it is a long way off.

Calling all Advice Gurus

The cause of making fun of bigger cities has never needed your services more urgently than now. Charles Muedede is asking for your help in thinking for a name for a fucker of starfuckers? If not you, who? If not now, when?

More Persecution

There have been more and more stories like this one of alcohol regulators running right over the first ammendment. What would the ACLU say if the local police department called me and asked me to take down my big "Worship Satan!" billboard from my front lawn. I think they would call that intimidation and persecution. But when alcohol regulators "ask" someone to change their packaging because it offends their sensibilities, that only comes up on the radar of a few alt-weeklys. It's only a brewery being "asked" to comply with the anti-drug agenda by a regulator who has the power to destroy his business.

I have the word "ask" in quotes throughout this, because I got it from the SFIST post, but the actual article says that federal regulators have ordered the Shasta Brewing company to stop selling beer with those caps.

Here's the Seattle version. I would be much more interested in voting if getting rid of the Washington State Liquor Control Board was on the ballot.

In Good News

Dominic Holden's the week on drugs column is a must read. What's unusual this time is that so much of the news is good. 3,000 crack offenders got reduced sentences, and people in california made fun of the prohibition regime openly. I wish the Stranger had a link to that column.

Oh, and check out the job that he and Dan Savage are doing on the local paper's coverage of the recent drug raids.

More Religious Persecution in the Military

When I first heard the story of the Air Force Academy cadets being harrassed for their non-religious views, it sounded like less of a big deal than the way it was being spun. The bullet points, as I understood them, were that senior cadets had told atheist cadets that they were going to hell. On the one hand, the religious cadets are entitled to believe that we infidels are damned, on the other hand, if you use your seniority to force a junior to listen to your opinion on matters that don't concern the job, you're undermining discipline. So it is a kind of harrassment that should concern the chain of command. But it's a pretty mild offense. The difference in rank is not a big deal. A bigger deal would be a platoon sergeant ordering his soldiers to attend an Amway meeting (or a religious one). That would be a substantial level of rank being abused. From 93 to 97, when I was in the Army, nothing like this ever happened and my first contact with a military chaplain, in the welcome briefing at reception prior to basic training, began with his assurance to all of the recruits that one of his responsibilities was to see that it didn't and that he took this seriously. There was never any doubt in my mind during those four years that this kind of abuse of authority, if it occurred, would be quickly and severely punished.

It looks like that may have changed

Going back to the way it was in 93-97 when I was in. There was one prayer breakfast that we were given the option of attending in stead of doing our morning physical training. I decided to go because, as is often the case in the Infantry, my muscles were all kinds of sore from previous days training. It didn't strike me as a horribly unfair priviledging of religion by the commander because soldiers are let out of garrison duties every now and then for family reasons or other reasons. So, when I heard about the harrassment of AF academy cadets, I didn't take the story too seriously. Being told you're going to hell is not harrassment. Being told you'll suffer professional repercussions if you don't bathe in the blood of the lamb and/or drink it, on the other hand, is a very serious crime against the discipline of the unit. When the Army gives you authority over someone else, it's with the understanding that it's to be used for the Army's purposes, and the Army really only has only one-- that is to defend the US constitution. To use that authority toward some other end, whether it be promoting Amway, Jesus, or Aleister Crowley is.

We had one democrat in my platoon. I don't know of him suffering any repercussions for holding those views and Bill Clinton was hated quite passionately in the Army in those days. Charly company upstairs from us had a Satan Worshipper whose room was decorated with Anton Lavey posters. He went to Ranger school-- a very prestigious thing in the infantry-- and showed no sign of suffering any professional setbacks for his wierdness. I remember hosting a binge-drinking evening in my room one night which consisted of a debate between him and my pagan next door neighbor with Metallica blasting as high as my speakers would go to try and drown them out so the rest of us could concentrate on drinking. We all binge-drank together and understood that our differing views on whether to sacrifice rodents to the earth-mother or to Satan, or whether to instead drink the blood of Jesus were separate from our jobs and that debating these things on duty would be as wrong as drinking on duty.

Oh and we also had a platoon sergeant who was into Amway and who tried to recruit for it, with a little success. He never suggested that people didn't have a right to not take Amway seriously.

Our First Sergeant at one morning formation said "I would like to have one of those 'Impeach Clinton, and her husband too.' bumper stickers, but I don't because that would ...." I can't remember the rest, but the point was we were free to engage in political and religious activity, but not in uniform and we were always required to do so as private citizens. Claiming to speak for the Army on political or religious matters was recognized as a crime.

Stories like this could be a serious problem.

Spc. Hall's approach to it, forming a group for atheists and free-thinkers, has some merit. It's an open sort of "we're here! we're queer!" kind of statement. And the blood-drinkers are constitutionally required to accept atheists and Satan worshippers in the ranks. They are constitutionally required not to persecute pagan goddess worshippers even though their beliefs are by far the dumbest. They should have an in-their-face reminder of that. But is shouldn't come from the troops. It needs to come from the chain of command.

Propaganda

Here's an interesting review of the dishonesty of The Ben Stein film Expelled. What's interesting about it is the amount of energy religious groups are spending trying to attack science. One might think that religion is so well established in American society as to not feel threatened by science. One would be wrong.

In other propaganda news, Blackfive, a site run mostly by current and former US Soldiers, reports that Al Jazeera actually does a better job of reporting on the war in Iraq than any American media outlets. I was a bit surprised at first, but not so much now.

The Classics

I can't remember exactly how I first stumbled across Skippy, but I think it may have been via Anna. You'll notice that that's a cached page. I was reading Skippy's late 2003 posts, and there were a couple of mentions of her. I clearly remember first coming across Primal Purge via Kim DuToit, who I discovered via a bunch of relatively forgettable blogs. Purge is no longer with us, but the Google cache is still holding onto her archives. If you run out of current shit to read, it's always a good idea to know where the good archives are. They are here, here, and here in that order. Those last two are really goddamn close, so the order kind of breaks down on those.