Yesterday my eight-year-old daughter schooled my sorry ass at Mario Kart Wii. She did so even though her strategy mostly involved deliberately crashing into hazards. The word "pwnage" was invoked. By her. Against me.

That's what my life is like now.

Evan's already a dedicated gamer. Abby's less hardcore, but with a family with so many gamers, she's bound to become one. But her experience will be different than Evan's, or mine. That's because she's a girl.

To illustrate what difference that makes, I offer you two sites: Fat, Ugly, Or Slutty, a blog that collects the sort of messages that women get online (as well as the sort of hate mail sent by people upset that women are collecting and posting such things), and Go Make Me A Sandwich, a blog that explores how women are depicted in gaming art, particularly fantasy gaming art (and, again, exploring how certain men react to anyone talking about such things).

So that's what Abby is looking at. Fortunately she's strong enough to handle it.

A couple of nights ago, after a disappointment in a hockey game, a number of folks in Vancouver rioted. They smashed windows, looted stores, and overturned and torched cars. This was not a crowd of the dispossessed. This was a crowd of hockey fans.

I confess that I'm quite surprised that Canadians riot. I was under the impression that they were too polite. Riots involve rudeness. There's an unacceptable risk that someone might say something cutting that could hurt someone's feelings based on social condition or ethnic group membership or something.

Anyway, regrettably for them, these were not practiced rioters, and few came equipped with masks. In the age of the cell-phone camera, misbehaving in public carries with it a grave risk of worldwide exposure (as Hermon Raju, our friend from yesterday's post, might tell you). The rioters did not heed those risks; they capered for the cameras.

Now come the modern consequences.

Within hours, people on the internet began collecting the pictures and identifying the rioters, particularly those who were doing notably obnoxious things like setting police cars afire. With the aid of such identification, police have already arrested some. As I said, these were not the dispossessed — they were people like Air Cadets on their way to college and water polo stars with scholarships. Many of these were Canada's privileged. They had Facebook pages.

Now, thanks to the magic of Google, any inquiry into their names yields evidence of their bad public behavior.

How should we feel about that?

The comments in the posts linked above are a microcosm of the public debate over this phenomenon. Some advocate deliberate public shaming of people who engage in bad public behavior. Others accuse shamers of vigilantism, judgmentalism, and failure to respect the presumption of innocence, and assert that modern Google-fame is a disproportionate punishment that will follow bad actors for too long, because such people "just made a mistake."

Here's my take, which is not terribly different than what I've been writing about this phenomenon for three years:

Vigilantism: Exposing people to the social consequences of their misbehavior is not vigilantism. Subjecting them to physical danger is. That's why decent people involved in this process don't post home addresses or phone numbers, and delete them when they are posted.

Proportionality: The proportionality argument is at least somewhat misguided. First of all, bad behavior doesn't go viral on the internet unless it's really notable. Garden-variety assholes don't get top Google ranking. You've got to be somewhat epic to draw this modern infamy — by, say, being a water polo star on a scholarship trying to torch a cop car because your hockey team lost. Second, lack of proportionality is self-correcting. If conduct is actually just not that bad, then future readers who Google a bad actor's name will review the evidence and say "meh, that's not so bad. Everyone acts up now and then." Saying that bad behavior should not be easily accessible on the internet is an appeal for enforced ignorance, a request for a news blackout. It's saying, in effect, I'm more wise and measured than all the future people who might read about this; they can't be trusted to evaluate this person's actions in the right light, like I can.

"They Just Made A Mistake": The argument that bad actors shouldn't become infamous because they "just made a mistake" is a riff on proportionality. The same criticisms apply: it takes a hell of a mistake to go viral, and future viewers can make up their own minds. Plus, this argument is often sheer bullshit. Trying to torch a cop car because your hockey team lost is not a mere faux pas; normal and decent people don't do it.

Can internet shaming be disturbing? Of course. Threads about Hermon Raju are filled with racist and misogynist drivel. Threads about the hockey rioters are filled with calls for murder. But that's not too different from the way any thread on the internet goes — the trolls are always with us. Moreover, bigotry-driven shaming is self-defeating. Shaming depends on shared values; if communities don't share the values, the shaming doesn't work.

One of the criticisms of modern society is that we're indifferent and best and rude at worst too each other because we're anonymous. We get away with things in big-city life that we couldn't in small-town life because the consequences of our behavior don't follow our name. Can the internet be the antidote for that phenomenon, at least for epic bad behavior? Can it be an effective deterrent to bad behavior in public? Can cell phone cameras be the arms in the catchphrase "an armed society is a polite society?"

What do you think?

Yes, this has been done to death. And it would be easy enough just to say that I agree with quite a bit of what Megan McArdle has to say.

But I can't resist a few points:

1. A scandal, however petty and stupid, is a crisis. If a politician demonstrates utter incompetence in handling even a petty and stupid crisis, it's reasonable to question whether he'd be able to handle a more important one competently.

2. With political power comes vast temptation. Politicians have opportunities to do bad things for bad reasons in their official capacity, and their bad choices can have an impact on millions rather than just their family. If a politician demonstrates an inability to resist personal temptation — even when yielding to that temptation poses obvious and disproportionate dangers to his reputation and family — then I question whether he can resist temptations brought to bear in his official capacity.

3. If Anthony Weiner and his wife had an open relationship, I wouldn't criticize it. If Anthony Weiner and his wife had an understanding that he could send pics of his dick to coeds, I wouldn't care. However, if Anthony Weiner betrays his wife, then I don't trust him. I don't buy the notion that private and public fidelity are separate; I think it's reasonable to question whether someone who breaks his word to his wife may also break his oath of office. Does that make me judgmental? Maybe. I'm not saying I would shun anyone who committed adultery (of whatever sort). I'm not saying I'd stop being their friend. I'm not saying that I'd judge them evil. I'm certainly not saying I'd assert that because they committed adultery and I didn't that I'm a better human being than they are. I'm just saying that not everybody has to be given the launch codes or the Treasury's purse strings. Significant political power carries with it significant temptation and significant occasion for dishonesty, and that dishonesty can impact the many rather than the few. I'd rather people without a proven record of oath-breaking exercise it.

As a rule, I don't sing where people can hear me. It's a vestige of humanity that I cling to, along with liking dogs and despising the Yankees.

If I'm in my car, however, all bets are off. Can you hear me from the next car over? That's your problem. I know it's bad, but try not to drive into a bridge abutment, please.

My habit of singing in the car — together with my awful singing voice and my eclectic taste in music — has led to awkward moments. Take for instance the time one December when a neighbor pulled up next to me at a stoplight and caught me singing along with Handel's Messiah, specifically the part that quotes Isaiah 53:6. Since Messiah is an oratorio, bits and pieces repeat quite a bit. So the neighbor pulled up to witness me singing this at the top of my lungs:

All we like sheep
All we like sheep
All we like sheep

Which comes out sounding like "Oh, we like sheep!" The light turned green before she could hear the next verse, "have gone astray," which takes the quote firmly out of the bestiality-celebrating context. Her expression suggested that her children would not be trick-or-treating at our house any time soon.

Anyway, I'm not new to humiliating myself by singing in the car. But I got a new car last week, and with it a new way to humiliate myself.

The car has a high-tech stereo system that offers, among other things, a way to connect and control one's iPod or iPhone or other overpriced Apple device, a hard disk drive on which one can store music, and most dangerously, a voice-recognition system to instruct the car which music to pay.

Here we encounter my problem. My wife enjoys country music, which tends towards songs with simple words in the title like lost and truck and dog and beer and tractor, arranged in simple declarative statements and the occasional plaintive question. My tastes include some modern stuff, but runs mostly to classical music, particularly opera.

The designers of the voice-recognition system on this car apparently did not foresee that someone would be trying to tell it the names of operas, or bits therein, in their original language. The car responds by suggesting other songs, apparently at random, or possibly in an ironic way to mock me.

I have tried better enunciation. I have tried varying among Italian and German and French operas. As in all difficult foreign language situations, I have tried raising my voice and, eventually, losing my composure.

As a result, these are some of the things I have spoken in an unkind tone of voice to my car this weekend:

"No, NOT JOHNNY CASH. What about LE NOZZE DE MOTHERFUCKING FIGARO sounds like Johnny Cash to you, bitch?"

"JESUS CHRIST, you piece of shit, how do you get from TANNHAUSER to the Beach Boys? They don't sound alike at all. PET SOUNDS DOES NOT HAVE FALLEN KNIGHTS HELD AS SEX SLAVES TO GODDESSES."

"dongiovannidongiovanniDonGiovanniDonGiovanniDONGIOVANNIDONGIOVANNIDONGIOVANNIDONGIOVANNIDONGIOVANNIDONGIOVANNI I'M GOING TO KEEP SAYING IT UNTIL YOU GET IT DAMN YOU TO HELL!"

And so on.

I try not to do this at stoplights, but I've seen people on the freeway staring at me, so I may be getting kind of loud.

When I use the dial on the stereo to select particular music manually, the car reads it in a monotone bereft of all pronunciation beyond a faint dull twang, sounding like a cross between a circa-1980 voice synthesizer and a teen who has just been asked how school was that day. When I revert to trying to select music by voice, the infernal thing stubbornly reverts to suggesting completely inappropriate alternatives, using a tone of voice that conveys why don't you pick something a little less pretentious, asshole?

It's possible I'm not ready for the digital revolution.

I could go into iTunes and rename all the operas by their English translated names, and even rename all the tracks. BUT THAT WOULD BE SURRENDERING.

. . . ask yourself — could it all be utter bullshit?

Sheena now says British tabloid The Sun—which published the first Botox Mom story—orchestrated the whole thing. "I was provided with the story, instructions, and a script to follow for a recorded interview." She made $200. "The truth is I have never given my daughter Botox, nor allowed her to get any type of waxing, nor is she a beauty pageant contestant."

There are plenty of genuinely outrageous things going on in America, and in the world, that we ought to be outraged about and that the media ought to focus on. But those things tend to be uncomfortable, controversial, complicated, and difficult and/or expensive to cover. Why spend $50,000 on a long-term investigation of government corruption when you can spend $10,000 to get some jackass to tell the world she Botoxed her eight-year-old, and get ten times the eyeballs that the corruption story would have gotten?

How can you tell the bullshit from the genuinely outrageous? Well, when the media makes shit up, blows it out of proportion, or plucks it from deserved obscurity to crowd out serious stories, it tends to follow certain familiar themes:

1. That pretty white girl is missing!
2. Holy shit! This product will incinerate/decapitate your kid!
3. He is not married to her, and yet they had intercourse!
4. How could that celebrity have said that?
5. This small-chinned child is in peril!
6. HOW CAN YOU DO THAT TO A LITTLE BABY DUCK, YOU HEARTLESS BASTARD!
7. Eeeeeew, gross.
8. Ha ha! He totally had his schlong out!

By contrast, if the media reports on one of the following stories, it is generally not made up, because the media doesn't particularly give a shit, and thinks you don't either:

1. Lies by politicians that require more than two sentences to explain;
2. Corruption of a sort that cannot be understood by a five-year-old;
3. Culturally deified groups (cops, firefighters, etc.) misbehaving;
4. People accused of crimes being mistreated;
5. Political leaders making stupid decisions that cannot be described at a sitcom level (e.g. "Ha! He totally choked on a pretzel!")
6. Generally, reality failing to function as TV suggests it should.

THE TERM "FEMINAZI" WOULDN'T PROVOKE SUCH OUTRAGE if it didn't hide more than a grain of truth. If the shoe fits, wear it proudly!

CANADA'S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS. Canadian State Department cables, courtesy of Wikileaks, show diplomats opining to one another that Canada's notorious hate speech laws provoke "little public debate or public interest," and that Canada is crawling with white supremacists. It's as though our elites live in a bubble.

HECKUVA JOB, BROWNIE: "One Huntsville woman is using her professional skills to help volunteers assist those affected by the April 27 tornadoes.  Alice Brown has set up a website, www.keepvolunteering.org, to provide information about volunteer efforts in areas hit by the tornadoes. People can also ask for help on the site."

Web intervention while FEMA dawdles?  Somebody should write a book about this kind of thing!

"I decided to compete in a contest premised on shallow, vapid, sexist douchebaggery, but after I won it, it turned out to involve different types of shallow, vapid, sexist douchebaggery than I had anticipated. It's not fair, and I want to sue. Please give me an injunction. And money."

Via i09, check out this 1940s propaganda comic that imagined a Soviet takeover of America. It's a great window on the styles and anxieties of the times, and on the propagandist's craft. Less has changed in 65 years than one might expect.

Here's a devastating cutdown for Andrew Sullivan's poll on the "the smuggest, most pretentious pop song in history."  Smugness and pretension being traits Sullivan embodies all too well.

Sullivan is simply pandering to his new audience of leftists who claim Sullivan as "my favorite conservative blogger," precisely because he hasn't written a conservative word since 2004.  He understands quite well that Merle Haggard was having fun when he sang "Okie from Muskogee," and on his more lucid days (Sullivan, who divides his time between the District of Columbia and the gay beach resort of Provincetown Massachusetts, has never understood middle America too well) might even perceive that Haggard's audience in the 1960s was in on the joke.

Of course, he didn't take on Haggard's far better, funnier (and smugger, more pretentious) song, "The Fightin' Side of Me," because Sullivan, who advocated the most bloodthirsty tortures, praised Guantanamo, and boosted the Iraq war up until the very day George W. Bush came out in favor of a constitutional amendment to prohibit same sex marriage, would have difficulty dealing with complaints about "switchin' sides" and "some squirrelly guy who claims that he just don't believe in fightin'".

The Fightin' Side of Me:

sleighin' it old school….

Like I keep saying, the writers over at cracked continue to offer insightful political and social satire and commentary disguised by numbered fart-and-boob jokes.

But some things are so freakishly wrong in the first place that they can't really be satirized; even the best writers are left sitting back and gaping in horror, making a few half-hearted jabs.

Take, for instance, Cracked's take on the E! Channel reality show Bridalplasty, in which brides-to-be compete for free plastic surgery.

I thought, at first, that Cracked was having us on — that it was describing a fictional, over-the-top show in order to satirize reality TV.

Oh Lord, how I wish that were true. Because the show is real — and, if anything, worse than Cracked's heroic but futile attempts to ridicule it would suggest. E! thinks people want to watch this sort of shit. And they're right.

What the hell is wrong with us?

Craig Ferguson explains Dr. Who to Unitedstatesian viewers:

It's starting to feel a lot like Christmas, as the first salvos of the seasonal culture war are fired.

Look, I know that I've ranted about this before. But bear with me. It keeps happening, and earlier every year, so I keep ranting.

It's hard for people who want to be good Christians to raise their kids in a spiritual Christian spirit during the holidays. The overwhelming message kids receive in our society is not about the Christian Christmas, but about the enjoyable (mostly) trappings of the secular Christmas that coincides with the Christian holiday. Christians are supposed to be focused on the advent of Christ and what He means to humanity. The culture is largely concerned — and always will be — with ugly sweaters, eating until we heave, going into debt to buy stuff that may or may not amuse us for more than a week, and indulging in fun traditional winter rituals. It's brutally difficult to keep kids even a little focused on the advent/goodwill-towards-men/peace-on-earth thing and not on the deafening omnipresent roar of the cash registers. My son Evan has been writing and rewriting his Christmas list so obsessively that he's about half an hour away from making it a multimedia presentation. And I can't blame him. That's what the culture teaches him.

If people aren't Christian or religious, and want to enjoy the secular Christmas, or non-Christian religious practices, best wishes to them; may they enjoy their family's seasonal traditions. Those of us who would like our Christmas to be more about Christ have options. We can deliberately re-focus the season: fewer parties in the whirlwind, more modest decorations, less of a cornucopia of presents, more of an emphasis on family activities together and reading stories about Christmas. We've had some success with that: we're part of a happy group of adult relatives who've agreed that to only buy presents for each others' kids and not for adults. We can also work to teach our kids about why the religious meaning of Christmas is important to us, and (as part of a life-long lesson in being skeptical about advertising) help them spot how the culture wants them to buy, buy, buy without regard to whether it really makes them happy or satisfied.

Unfortunately, of the voices calling for a focus on Christ, the noisiest ones are not the ones trying to focus seasonal attention on talking about Jesus' advent in the home and the church. No, the noisiest voices are trying to make the secular, material, consumption-focused side more Jesus-focused.

I submit this is ridiculous.

Typical example: the American Family Association is calling for a boycott of Dick's Sporting Goods because Dick's doesn't feature the word "Christmas" prominently enough in its holiday advertising. The AFA's position is that by failing to say "Christmas" as often as possible in its advertisements, Dick's is being deliberately offensive:

We looked high and low for "Christmas" at Dick's, only to find they couldn't care less if they offend you and other Christians.

But look: Dick's is not in the business of spirituality. Dick's is in the business of selling sporting goods. Dick's will either sell enough sporting goods at a sufficient margin to stay afloat, or they won't — that's true whether they keep Christmas in their hearts or not. Dick's decision to say "Christmas" however many times it has to in order to keep the AFA off of its ass, or not, will depend not on the spirituality of some Dick's executive committee (or the poor cash-register jockey harassed by the angry AFAite), but on Dick's assessment of what advertising sells sporting goods best. And you know what? Christians are missing the point if they care. Because whether Dick's celebrates Christmas with cold, monochrome atheist banners or with Jesuses on pogo sticks handing out bible verses at the register, buying sporting goods is not about the religions, spiritual Christmas. It's about the secular Christmas. Far from putting the Christ back in Christmas, the AFA's queer obsession with merchants' advertising nomenclature is distancing Christians from the spiritual Christmas and promoting confusion between the spiritual and the secular.

The AFA's naughty or nice list of retailers is a further illustration of how the AFA, like other Culture Warriors for Christmas, utterly confuse the secular trappings of Christmas with the spiritual meaning of Christmas to Christians:

Criteria – AFA reviewed up to four areas to determine if a company was "Christmas-friendly" in their advertising: print media (newspaper inserts), broadcast media (radio/television), website and/or personal visits to the store. If a company's ad has references to items associated with Christmas (trees, wreaths, lights, etc.), it was considered as an attempt to reach "Christmas" shoppers.

If a company has items associated with Christmas, but did not use the word "Christmas," then the company is considered as censoring "Christmas."

Companies are not "censoring Christmas" because "censoring" does not mean "failing to utter the message I wanted you to utter." Moreover, the obsession with what our merchants say about Christmas — rather than focusing on what we say to our kids at home and at church about Christmas — misses the point of Christmas entirely. It's like saying that we don't focus enough on Easter representing the death and resurrection of Christ and His transcendent sacrifice, and we ought to remedy that by making more chocolate Jesuses and fewer chocolate rabbits. It's like saying that, instead of throwing the moneylenders and dove-sellers out of the temple, Jesus ought to have told them to hand out free copies of His Sermon on the Mount with each purchase. We're told repeatedly — and correctly, I think — that Christian education begins in the home and continues at church. It's counterproductive to dilute that message by telling kids, in effect, that they also ought to look for spirituality in the food court. The mall is always going to be about commerce, and commerce is not about Christ, and it's sheer lunacy to think otherwise.

Telling a retailer to say "Jesus" a lot or we won't shop there doesn't promote spirituality. It cheapens it. Teaching children that they ought to look for stores that say "Christmas" in their advertisements does not teach kids to be better Christians. It teaches them to be more gullible consumers of advertising. It teaches them to be more secular and less Christian.

I try not to think the worst of people. Okay, you've read me, you're not going to buy that. Let's say: I make an occasional gesture towards thinking about possibly not assuming the worst of people without evidence. But the efforts of the AFA, and of similar Culture Warriors, seem so foolishly, so forcefully, so self-evidently counter-productive to actual promotion of Christian values that I've become convinced that they are actually all about promoting cultural and social orthodoxy in the secular sphere. And I see nothing to respect about that. They, and their allies, trade in bogus urban legends: about hordes of ACLU lawyers going about suing stores that say "Merry Christmas", about stores bullied into taking down Christmas references because they are quaking in fear over offending those nasty Jews or atheists or Muslims, about stores secularizing their advertisements out of conscious secular hostility to religion. Bunk. Stores choose advertising based on what they think will separate customers from their money. They are doing so in a nation that remains overwhelmingly majority Christian (at least, in a cultural sense). The AFA is trading in unbecoming conspiracy theories and persecution complexes that I find, frankly, un-Christian. They are about political and cultural dominance, not about Christ.

Meanwhile, this year I'm going to try to spend less money on geegaws and more on charity, spend less time at parties and more with family, and find new age-appropriate ways to tell each of my three kids why Jesus being born is important to me.