Honestly, I’m staying away from editorializing on the Israeli Gaza strikes right now. There’s always the New York Times for that. But I did find this think-piece worth pointing out, in which Glenn Greenwald calls to question the rationale — or ill-rationale, perhaps — of an editorial penned by Weekly Standard editor Michael Goldfarb. (If this name sounds familiar, it’s because his previous post was spokesperson for the McCain-Palin campaign.) Goldfarb writes:

The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it’s not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions.

In other words, he suggests, a broad action of terror that kills and maims innocent people is justified if it delivers a message of intimidation. Greenwald recognizes this familiar logic:

There are few concepts more elastic and subject to exploitation than “Terrorism,” the all-purpose justifying and fear-mongering term. But if it means anything, it means exactly the mindset which Goldfarb is expressing: slaughtering innocent civilians in order to “send a message,” to “deter” political actors by making them fear that continuing on the same course will result in the deaths of civilians and — best of all, from the Terrorist’s perspective — even their own children and other family members.

That, of course, is the very same logic that leads Hamas to send suicide bombers to slaughter Israeli teenagers in pizza parlors and on buses and to shoot rockets into their homes. It’s the logic that leads Al Qaeda to fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled office buildings. And it’s the logic that leads infinitely weak and deranged people like Goldfarb and Peretz to find value in the killing of innocent Palestinians, including — one might say, at least in Goldfarb’s case: especially — children.

The big-picture purport to this story? There is always a real human cost. And dehumanizing a people for the sake of conceptual semantics is always wrong, no matter whose “side” you’re on. It’s hard to believe we haven’t learned that yet. (via)

When it comes to the “wrestler’s sniff test,” Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler passes according to Mick Foley — better known to some as former WWF Champion “Mankind.” Of course, this world-class wrestler — who was rumored to be the archetype from which Mickey Rourke developed this role — did find one bone to pick:

I never did detect any of myself in the movie. Believe me, I tried. Hey, if you are going to be an influence on a movie, it might as well be a great one like The Wrestler. Who knows, maybe I inspired Randy’s ratty assortment of faded flannels. And a few people have suggested that I inspired that grisly wrestling scene. But I can claim with a clear conscience that I never used a staple gun on an opponent. Thumbtacks, yes; barbed wire, definitely; but never a staple gun.

I almost missed this great story in the Independent about aXXo, the Internet’s most notorious movie pirate. His formula is simple: DVD-quality versions of a film in a simple format that plays on any computer at just the right size to fit on a single writeable DVD. It’s the kind of attention to customer detail that the movie industry could probably stand paying attention to:

“He tried to go away,” says David Price, head of piracy intelligence at the internet consultancy Envisional. “But he came back. The pull of it is quite attractive to him. When you have millions of people downloading your content online and they know who you are, that’s quite an incentive. Even if he’s not getting any money, he is getting name recognition and status.” To commemorate his return, aXXo chose as his first post the symbolic — and hubristic — film title, I Am Legend.

1. Snow Patrol
   
2. µ-Ziq
   
3. Take That
   
4. Rage Against the Machine
   
5. Rhett Miller
   

Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a reporter for the New York Times, has a book coming out next week that follows the lives of eight addicts — including a blind alcoholic, a grandmother with a crack habit, a bodybuilding meth and steroid addict, and family woman who can’t stop shoplifting. The narrative becomes more complex once you consider the source: In the introduction to America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life, Denizet-Lewis himself admits to being a recovering sex addict:

Sean was the only person I followed who I knew before I started writing the book. Because we’re both sex addicts, we related strongly to each other’s struggles. Sean is straight and I’m gay, but the insanity of our addictions is the same.

I was open about my sex addiction with the people I wrote about. And because I spent so much time with them, they often asked me how I was doing with my own recovery. Bobby was the only one who couldn’t seem to wrap his head around the concept of sex addiction. He didn’t understand how anyone would choose sex over the high of drugs. I told him I didn’t know how anyone would choose drugs over sex.