Insulation for the Galaxy

Twitter Sonnet #177

Sad spaghetti speaks of useless walking.
Too much cheese barrages a Taco Bell.
Curdled cherubs rocket through line kicking.
Drive-through windows have taught demons too well.
Sun's rubber wrap crushes a minivan.
Mormon tunnel punctures a burger place.
Thousand hooks stop the fall of Peter Pan.
Calico cad's caught by a spray of mace.
No enterprise eclipses egg shell blue.
Pastel metal holds a house together.
Discount a chocolate bunny's derring-do.
Risk takes row boats down in liquid weather.
Blank graffiti grabs for a good mind's throat.
Pink lemonade dyes the luminous moat.

When did Penn Jillette get to be so damn boring? I followed a link on his twitter to this video which is over ten minutes of Jillette discussing whether or not Finland is a Scandinavian country.

My comic has some Finnish readers, from the pictures I've seen it looks like a lovely country, I like Nightwish's Wishmaster album, and I can even say the question of whether or not Finland is a Scandinavian country is mildly interesting to me. But not stretched out over ten comedy-free minutes. It's true, I only watched half of the video, so maybe it does get funny at some point, but the guy lost me.

But I remember liking Penn Jillette, so I clicked on another of his videos, called "Fuck You Seth MacFarlane! - The Tea Party is Racist?". I know Jillette's a libertarian, so I was hoping the video would at least get me angry with him--you know, that it would provoke me. Something. But, first of all, his argument that in order for an organisation to be racist it must call itself racist is so off as to be bizarre. The Nazi party was racist, but they considered themselves to be about saving Germany. Personally, I don't think the Tea Party actually has much of a philosophy, just a lot of complaints, many of those having to do with a vague umbrella about how it's the government's fault for fucking things up. A lot of racists happen to be anti-government, and anti-left, people, so naturally there would be a lot of racists in the tea party, which accounts for Rand Paul.

Then I watched the Larry King segment Jillette was talking about and I saw MacFarlane never even actually called the Tea Party racist. Rachel Harris, another panellist, did, and MacFarlane did not appear to disagree, so maybe Jillette just didn't consider her name big enough to use for the title of his video. And an argument that Jillette finds particularly offensive, an argument he attributes to MacFarlane, the argument that the tea party are an illegitimate organisation because they have backing from extremely rich politically partisan individuals, isn't even an argument MacFarlane actually made. Jillette stresses that MacFarlane called the tea partiers "puppets" when in fact MacFarlane had only called the rich political backers "puppeteers". And there is an important difference between saying someone is trying to control a group of people and saying a group of people are essentially mindless zombies. MacFarlane also at no point says that the Tea Party is "not a real movement" as Jillette quotes him as saying. Jillette goes on with a completely fabricated argument which he attributes to MacFarlane, that the Tea Party is illegitimate because it argues against it's own self-interest, universal healthcare. Jillette holds forth about how a group of people can believe in a fundamental idea that might not lead to them being comfortable, how that's actually virtuous.

So, the point of Jillette's big, rambling, impassioned video is that in some circumstances an aspect of a phenomenon MacFarlane is putting down is good.

I actually watched a clip of Jillette on Glenn Beck after this. Both of them seem like guys who haven't slept in days and have been drinking a lot so that really meaningless, superficial arguments sound extremely important and profound.