Culture of Sleaze

[rick]

Liberals have been at the forefront of creating a culture of sleaze. They have dumbed down society where what is vulgar, detestable, and an abomination has become the norm. All of this in the name of art, progress, and being "open-minded."

This culture is rotting and destroying itself and no one knows anymore the difference between what is worthwhile and what is profane and despicable. Anything goes. There is no right and wrong, good or bad; there are no boundaries of good taste. Freedom of speech no longer means responsible discourse but license to say and do anything you want regardless of the consequences. In the name of art, we are served up with a constant deluge of what is base, contemptible, degrading, and vile. And the liberal promoters and supporters of this pitiful "work" try to convince everyone that it is honorable and praiseworthy.

"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!"

Isaiah 5:20

[valpo89]

What brought this out of you Rick, too much time to think?

Where does the internet and message boards fit in the scale of good to evil?

[rick]

valpo89 said:

What brought this out of you Rick, too much time to think?

Where does the internet and message boards fit in the scale of good to evil?

Documentary on beastiality premieres at Sundance Film Festival

By Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times
Posted January 21 2007, 6:39 PM EST



PARK CITY, Utah -- "Zoo" is a documentary about what director Robinson Devor accurately characterizes as "the last taboo, on the boundary of something comprehensible." But remarkably, an elegant, eerily lyrical film has resulted.
"Zoo," premiering before a rapt audience Saturday night at Sundance, manages to be a poetic film about a forbidden subject, a perfect marriage between a cool and contemplative director (the little-seen "Police Beat") and potentially incendiary subject matter: sex between men and animals. Not graphic in the least, this strange and strangely beautiful film combines audio interviews (two of the three men involved did not want to appear on camera) with elegiac visual re-creations intended to conjure up the mood and spirit of situations. The director himself puts it best: "I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it."

Devor and his writing partner, Charles Mudede, live in Seattle and were stunned, as were many in the state, by a story that broke in 2005 about a local man who died after having sex with an Arabian stallion. Though bestiality is not illegal in Washington, the subsequent revelation of the existence of an Internet-based zoophile community (the men refer to themselves as "zoos," hence the title) was a shock.

Though there was the inevitable tabloid fuss, what Devor called "the prurient spectacle," the filmmaker was also "shocked that nobody did an in-depth look at this, that there was no investigative reporting rounding the story out with the psychology involved. I thought, 'This is an opportunity.' "

Though "Zoo" is intent on allowing these men to be heard, Devor's intention was not polemical. "I'm not in there wrestling with the legal or animal cruelty issues," he said. Rather, he envisioned a film like his others: "I count on the natural world pulling my films through. I thought the marriage of this completely strange mind-set and the beauty of the natural world could be something interesting."

In introducing "Zoo" at Sundance, Devor called it "a difficult film and a difficult film to make."

He added: "A lot of people looked at me as if I was an exploitative person, dredging up something for profit, and that bothered me. I was certainly asked many times, often with a wrinkled brow, 'Why are you making this film?' It was something I did resent; I thought artists had the opportunity to explore anything."

In the end, Devor ended up agreeing with the Roman writer Terence, who said "I consider nothing human alien to me."

"It happens," the filmmaker said, "so it's part of who we are."

Liberals have been at the forefront of creating a culture of sleaze. They have dumbed down society where what is vulgar, detestable, and an abomination has become the norm. All of this in the name of art, progress, and being "open-minded."

This culture is rotting and destroying itself and no one knows anymore the difference between what is worthwhile and what is profane and despicable. Anything goes. There is no right and wrong, good or bad; there are no boundaries of good taste. Freedom of speech no longer means responsible discourse but license to say and do anything you want regardless of the consequences. In the name of art, we are served up with a constant deluge of what is base, contemptible, degrading, and vile. And the liberal promoters and supporters of this pitiful "work" try to convince everyone that it is honorable and praiseworthy.

Rick

[rick]

Candice Law, a barista at Cowgirls Espresso in Tukwila, chats with customer Gary Lundstrom. She and other baristas vary their outfits, depending on the day's theme. "Everybody's excited to see you," Law says.

Some coffee stands get steamier

By Amy Roe
Seattle Times Eastside bureau

In a short, sheer, baby-doll negligee and coordinated pink panties, Candice Law is dressed to work at a drive-through espresso stand in Tukwila, and she is working it.

Customers pull their trucks up to the window, where Law greets each with an affectionate nickname, blows kisses, and vamps about as she steams milk for a mocha. "You want whipped cream?" she asks, a sly smile playing on her pierced lip.

The next customer rolls up, and Law throws a long leg onto the window sill, like an indie-rock ballerina at the barre.

"Do you like my leg warmers?" she asks. "Aren't they hot?"

Hot is not the half of it. To stand apart from the hordes of drive-through espresso stands that clutter the Northwest's roadsides, commuter coffee stops such as Tukwila's Cowgirls Espresso are adding bodacious baristas, flirty service and ever more-revealing outfits to the menu.

At Port Orchard's Natté Latté, baristas sport hot-pink hot pants and tight white tank tops. Day-of-the-week theme outfits ranging from racy lingerie to "fetish" ensembles are the dress code at Moka Girls Espresso in Auburn and at several Cowgirls Espresso stands in the area. Bikini tops are the special at Café Lorraine on Highway 9 in Woodinville, and the women of The Sweet Spot in Shoreline pose provocatively in Playmate-style profiles on the stand's Web site.

"In this area, we all know how to make good coffee," said Barbara Record, who opened Bikini Espresso in Renton last month. The trick is to set your business apart, she said, and sex is one sure-fire way to do that.

"It's just, how far do you want to go?" she said.

At Best Friend Espresso in Kenmore, baristas go thigh-high. An elevated service window offers customers a nearly full-length view of pretty, young baristas — some of them high-school students — in short skirts, tank tops and high heels.

Best Friend owner Wayne Hembree said he requires employees to dress "classy;" in dresses, skirts and a nice top.

"What I think most of them have found is that their tips are better if they wear short skirts," he said.

Occasionally, Best Friend does theme days, such as "schoolgirl" or adding glasses for a sexy "secretary" look, manager Heather Bacon said.

Longer commutes, a change in laws regulating the stands, and the saturation of the carryout coffee market have given drive-through stands a jolt in the past few years.

When the state's smoking ban went into effect last year, many bar, casino and convenience-store owners sought to make up for expected losses by renting part of their parking lots to espresso stands, said Lori Bowden, owner of the Cowgirls Espresso stands.

The advent of "sexpresso" is harder to track. Business and baristas debate over who pioneered the edgy outfits, but they agree that by sweetening the product, with a smile and maybe a shot of hazelnut syrup, they've reached out to customers who've never set foot in a Starbucks.

Drive-throughs are a growing part of Starbucks' business, too, with more than 1,500 drive-through locations throughout the United States. But a representative of the company said it has no plans to sex up the dress code, as it wouldn't fit the company's brand.

At places such as Cowgirls, the barista is the brand.

"If I'm going to pay $4 for a cup of coffee" said one male customer, "I'm not going to get served by a guy."

That attitude has been a boon to Cowgirls. Bowden, a former vending-machine-company owner, has acquired seven drive-through stands, with a total of 26 employees, all of them women.

Though most of the stands in the area pay minimum wage, Law said she makes more in tips than she ever did as a waitress at Hooters. One recent morning, she served 400 customers between about 6 a.m. and noon.

"Your customers freakin' adore you. Everybody's excited to see you,"[aka lust] Law said. "You spend a few minutes with them and they leave."

They come back, too.

When Ryan Reed pulled up to Best Friend Espresso for his usual, a 24-ounce iced vanilla latte, on a recent weekday afternoon, he knew what to expect.

"The owner [Wayne Hembree] always hires super-hot girls," [no ugly feminists]Reed said. "That's basically his philosophy."

Hembree said actually, he looks for customer-service skills. The dress code, which he started four years ago, was inspired by an employee whose polished look boosted business, he said. Hembree also requires staff members to wear makeup and do their hair, "and these guys, I won't lie to you, they like that," he said.

But Best Friend has made some enemies. Jeff Marshall, whose wife, Wendy, owns the gift shop Chalet Cadeau, said the couple moved their business from Kenmore to Kirkland last month in frustration over neighboring Best Friend Espresso. Marshall said the business caused traffic problems and drove customers away from the gift shop.

"It's disgusting," he said of the stand. "It's an undesirable business from a community that's trying to sell itself as a family-oriented community."

Kenmore City Manager Steve Anderson said city officials looked into Marshall's complaints.

"We've heard of issues and we've had undercover investigations, police surveillance, and it resulted in nothing," he said. Likewise, King County sheriff's spokesman John Urquhart said the business isn't breaking any laws.

Bowden said law requires that employees cover their breasts and buttocks, so there will be no "thong Thursday," as some customers have requested. [darn, can't ya pleeese?]

Back in that cow-spotted stand in front of Silver Dollar Casino in Tukwila, Law steams milk and dreams up new themes.

"I like the idea of Saran Wrap Saturday," she mused. "Now they've got those colored Saran Wraps. Dude, they could totally make a cute outfit." [far out man - Don't bogart that joint my friend, pass it over to me]


Amy Roe: 206-464-3347 or [e-mail]

Liberals have been at the forefront of creating a culture of sleaze. They have dumbed down society where what is vulgar, detestable, and an abomination has become the norm. All of this in the name of art, progress, and being "open-minded."

This culture is rotting and destroying itself and no one knows anymore the difference between what is worthwhile and what is profane and despicable. Anything goes. There is no right and wrong, good or bad; there are no boundaries of good taste. Freedom of speech no longer means responsible discourse but license to say and do anything you want regardless of the consequences. In the name of art, we are served up with a constant deluge of what is base, contemptible, degrading, and vile. And the liberal promoters and supporters of this pitiful "work" try to convince everyone that it is honorable and praiseworthy.

Rick

[rick]

Sex sells on Broadway
22/01/2007 09:45 - (SA)

New York - Teenage sex scenes showing a naked breast, masturbation and sadomasochism aren't the usual Broadway fare, but Spring Awakening has become the surprise hit musical of the season while being hailed as tastefully erotic.

Adapted from German playwright Frank Wedekind's then-scandalous 1891 play, Spring Awakening looks at the angst of high school students and their sexual awakening in repressed 19th-century Germany.

With song titles such as The Bitch of Living and Touch Me, the show opened on Broadway last month to glowing reviews that compared its contemporary rock song score to that of the prize-winning Rent. Its run was recently extended.

When considering a Broadway musical, "probably nobody thinks: pure sex. That might just change," said New York Times critic Charles Isherwood, calling the show "a straight shot of eroticism" as it tastefully deals with provocative topics such as abortion, homosexuality and abuse.

"Spring Awakening' makes sex strange again, no mean feat, in our mechanically prurient age," Isherwood said.

Scenes between the lead male and female characters include an erotically charged one in which she encourages a spanking with a wooden plank, leading to the exposure of a bare breast.
Similarly, one of the secondary characters displays homosexual longings and comically sings and masturbates centre stage, surrounded by dancing females. [Sounds like a spot might be open at Vagina Monologues for this]

Trials of puberty

Critics and the show's creators, playwright Steven Sater and composer Duncan Sheik, said the show is less about sex than about staying true to teen spirit. The cast members are 17 to 22 years old.

"It touches something deep that is resonant in all of us, which is our own adolescent experience," said Sater, who persuaded Sheik to write the music after meeting him chanting at a Buddhist gathering and writing the lyrics to Sheik's third album.

Neither feared the sexuality would leave audiences aghast.

"There is nothing exploitative about it. It simply shows what it is like for these young people to go through the trials of puberty," Sater said.

Sheik, 37, gained fame for his 1996 hit pop music single Barely Breathing. He said he composed the musical after becoming disillusioned with his early success.

"Our culture in general has a real acceptance and even love of violence and a real fear of sexuality that is troubling, and that is one of the things Spring Awakening addresses," he said. Teenage angst

While the show's longer-term success may lie in whether it can seduce traditional theater-goers and a younger audience, both men say they already have an avid fan base.

"I just got an e-mail from a 15-year-old boy who was going through a lot of teenage angst," Sheik said. "Every day he puts on The Bitch of Living and jumps around his room screaming at the top of his lungs."

Liberals have been at the forefront of creating a culture of sleaze. They have dumbed down society where what is vulgar, detestable, and an abomination has become the norm. All of this in the name of art, progress, and being "open-minded."

This culture is rotting and destroying itself and no one knows anymore the difference between what is worthwhile and what is profane and despicable. Anything goes. There is no right and wrong, good or bad; there are no boundaries of good taste. Freedom of speech no longer means responsible discourse but license to say and do anything you want regardless of the consequences. In the name of art, we are served up with a constant deluge of what is base, contemptible, degrading, and vile. And the liberal promoters and supporters of this pitiful "work" try to convince everyone that it is honorable and praiseworthy.

Rick

[rick]

FP: You cite Abu Ghraib as an example of the depravity of “liberal family values.” Why exactly do you say this?



D’Souza: For Muslims, torture was not the big story at Abu Ghraib. Historian Bernard Lewis has said that compared to prisons anywhere in the Muslim world, Abu Ghraib was like Disneyland. Many of the infamous pictures depicting captives blindfolded, or with wires all around them—that was simulated torture, not real torture. What really scandalized the Muslim world was the pictures of sexual depravity. Now even some conservatives minimized this at the time, I guess in the hope that it would make the scandal go away. “It was just a fraternity prank,” and so on. But for traditional societies where honor is the highest social value, there is nothing amusing about taking a religious man and putting a woman’s underwear on his head. There is no humor in stripping him naked and forcing him to masturbate while you take photos. For many Muslims Abu Ghraib was an illustration of what perverts Americans have become, and how lightly we tread on other people’s sacred beliefs. We think that a little sexual tomfoolery is nothing compared to cutting of a man’s head and broadcasting the assassination on the Internet. But for many Muslims, it’s bad to kill a man but it’s worse to strip away his honor. This is why some traditional Muslims are reluctant to condemn their radical counterparts. They don’t want to be seen as taking the side of Western depravity, a depravity that my book shows to be the product of contemporary liberalism.

frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26556

[valpo89]

Suddenly, I'm having a craving to purchase a $4 coffee in the great Northwest.

[rick]

valpo89 said:

Suddenly, I'm having a craving to purchase a $4 coffee in the great Northwest.

Yeah, me too. Anything that can get my blood boiling, I'm all for. Too bad it's one of my baser instincts and that it doesn't take much to get us men excited. Heck, anybody could do that. Just have any babe (feminists excluded) on the street take off her clothes and even the most pious among us will have a hard time not looking. The porn industry knows this and they play off of that base instinct which appeals to the lowest common denominator of human beings. Can we rise above that? Hell no! We always look at a healthy buxom popping out of a blouse. That's what the babes want us to do. That's why they are hanging out for everyone to see. It gives some women their only sense of self-esteem to know people stare at them. That's the pop culture, how you look, am I sexy? It's still just raw lust though. Nothing wrong with that if you are into lust all of the time. Even the pristine but senile Jimmy Carter confessed to lusting after women. Even an amatuer can get a rise out most men. Doesn't take much raw talent. And we, like lapdogs, eat it up.

[rick]

From First Things:

January 23rd, 2007
Zoos: Not for Children Anymore
By Wesley J. Smith

Perhaps it is wrong for me to comment about a movie I have no intention of seeing: But if this review of the new semi-documentary Zoo is accurate, it apparently has a sympathetic take on “the last taboo,” meaning bestiality. (”Zoos” in this context don’t refer to animal viewing facilities but are apparently the chosen moniker of people who like to have sex with animals. It is a take off on zoophilia. Who knew?)

This film, at least as reviewed and described by the director Robinson Devor, seems steeped in what I call “terminal nonjudgmentalism,” by which I mean that we are losing sight of the important moral truth that some acts are intrinsically wrong–and it is killing our culture. Bestiality is one of these. It is wrong for many reasons, the most important of which goes beyond sex as animal abuse or, as some have put it, the lack of animal consent. Bestiality is an assault on human dignity itself. As I wrote in this piece about the controversy surrounding legislation in Washington State (since passed) to make bestiality illegal–which occurred after a man was killed from being sexually penetrated by a horse–the impetus for Zoo:

The great philosophical question of the 21st Century is going to be whether we will knock humans off the pedestal of moral exceptionalism and instead define ourselves as just another animal in the forest. The stakes of the coming debate couldn’t be more important: It is our exalted moral status that both bestows special rights upon us and imposes unique and solemn moral responsibilities–including the human duty not to abuse animals. Nothing would more graphically demonstrate our unexceptionalism than countenancing human/animal sex.

(Yes, I know that Peter Singer disagrees, claiming in a book review on Nerve.com that “we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes. This does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”)

I am not saying that we shouldn’t strive to understand what drives people into such a depraved state that they couple with animals. But this should not be to wink at the practice or normalize it as just another choice. Rather, it should be for the purpose of helping mental-health professionals treat and restore “Zoos” to a proper sense of self-dignity and mental health. But this seems beyond Devor, a self-described artist who said, “I consider nothing human alien to me.”

Devor also said that he had “aestheticized the sleaze right out of it.” Sorry. Can’t be done. What Devor really tried to do was cover up the moral stink, adding his energies and talent to the ongoing project to bring about the descent of man.

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. He is currently researching a book on the animal-liberation movement.