Shit that Pissed me Off – 1/8

With Christmas and January 1st falling on Fridays, I’ve been a bit backlogged on this column.  That means this week might feature more anger than usual.  If you are a regular reader, I’m sorry for the time off.

A Couple of Prosperity Preachers Spend Some Time Justifying Their Private Jets

The sheer amount of privilege these guys exhibit when they talk about how difficult it is for them to fly coach is remarkable.  What is frightening, though, is some of the points they make are completely fair.  I hate that.

Imagine you are a super popular preacher who has to travel all over the country.  Imagine you are flying somewhere new almost every day.  If you had to fly commercial air the whole time, it would be a lot less convenient.

What if god loses your luggage?

I mean, you’d get all the first class upgrades and I’m pretty sure whoever is bringing you in to speak would be paying for your ticket but it would still be less convenient.  If you schedule yourself that tightly, it would likely be very difficult to get everywhere you needed to go with commercial airlines.  You might have to cut back on your appearances or something.  Which would be a damn shame.

Thing is, they are getting luxury jets paid for by convincing poor people to give them money.  Lots and lots of money.  And they have conversations with god on their planes (not kidding – watch the video) in which god apparently tells them that they should want a better plane.

Which means it is time to fleece the poor people again!

Men’s Right’s Group Claims They Cost Disney Almost 4.2 Million Dollars

So the privileged douchebags over at Return of Kings were upset that The Force Awakens features a woman as the main protagonist.  In their opinion, having a woman in a lead role is stealing work from all those underrepresented male action stars. In retaliation, they encouraged their readers to boycott the film and apparently, it worked!

According to a Twitter poll, 55% of the respondents to the survey indicated the opinions of the Return of Kings assholes would have an influence on their decision to see the film.  Extrapolated out to the 900,000 people who visit their site every month and multiplied by the price of a ticket, they estimated their internet crusade cost Disney over four million dollars!

BAM! Suck their oppressed male dicks, Disney!

And you know – I’m not even pissed about their misogyny.  It’s their math.

Problem the first: they are assuming the numbers in their twitter poll can be directly extrapolated to the number of visitors their site has each month.  That is ridiculous because the poll itself is meaningless. They asked if their opinion had an impact on a decision to see the film.  So what was the impact?  Made me want to see it more. But that’s an impact.  Since you don’t know what impact your respondents were talking about, you can’t even begin to assume that all 55% of them were going to boycott the film.

The 900,000 visitors is a pretty soft number too, don’t you think?  How many of those were repeat visits?  How many were bots?  How many were people who think they are fucking assholes but followed a link to the original article so they could bitch about it?

Finally, they go with the average ticket price of $8.38 without taking into account that not all of the ticket price goes to Disney.

So their number is soft to begin with.  Given the film has grossed over 1.5 billion, it is also too small for Disney to even notice.  Imagine someone running into Bob Iger’s office and frantically saying “Bob – because we featured a woman in a lead role, one less family of four went to Disney World today!”

I don’t think he’d be concerned someone was going to convene a shareholder meeting.

And face it, every Star Wars nerd that reads their site went to see the movie anyway.  No matter what they said on a Twitter poll.

A Bunch of Insensitive Assholes Think Carrie Fisher is Too Old to Play and Old Princess Leia

To her credit, Fisher can handle herself just fine.  She’s witty and brilliant and makes all of these idiots look like – well – idiots.

But why does she need to deal with them at all?  Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford got old too.  They are guys, though, and we don’t have a problem with old men. We have a problem with old women.  I mean, unless they don’t look old.

Anna Kendrick is, like, 30 or something and she doesn’t look old. What the fuck, Carrie?

Unless they look younger because of a lot of plastic surgery.  Because then they look like freaks, right?

Fisher got older.  It happens to everyone.  But women in Hollywood are faced with the fact that their window is a lot narrower than their male counterparts.  They already know that.

So when a bunch of fanboy assholes are upset because they can’t fantasize about 60-year-old slave Leia, it makes their reality just a little bit worse than it already was.

Hey – Speaking of Star Wars, Did I Miss the Part Where Rey Wasn’t the Lead?

So Disney is making piles of money off of The Force Awakens. I loved the movie so I’m not complaining.

They have established Rey as the main protagonist for the trilogy.  Which is also awesome.  And the other main protagonist is a person of color.  Diversity for the WIN!

And you know what? It is great that there are so many toys featuring Finn because he is a person of color.

When you replace Rey with Finn in Star Wars Monopoly, however, you are contributing to what has become a long record of ignoring female leads.  Especially by Disney.

We all remember how Disney seemed to think nobody wanted toys or merchandise featuring Gamora or Black Widow, right?  They weren’t the main characters of their films, though (except for Black Widow because she’s a fucking Avenger and the movies are fucking Avengers movies). Because Rey is the unquestioned main character in The Force Awakens, she is, at least, more prevalent in the toy lines from the film.

But she sure is underrepresented.  She sure is hard to find (at least in part because her toys keep selling out).

Listen Bob Iger – you are in charge of the whole company and I know Disney likes to make money off of merchandising because of how many gift shops you guys have at Walt Disney World.  If you walked into your merchandise department and said “hey guys – how about you produce more Black Widow, Gamora, and Rey toys,” they would do it because you are the boss.

I’m betting if you had them do that, you’d make a hell of a lot more than the four million those whiners over at Return of Kings say they cost you.

Note: Hasbro has explained they didn’t include Rey in the game because of “spoilers.”

FDA Finds That Majority of Unregulated Supplements Don’t Actually Contain What they Claim to Contain

When you walk into Target to buy some echinacea to treat whatever it is echinacea is supposed to treat, you expect that the pill you take will contain at least a little echinacea.  You’d think that would be a requirement.

It isn’t, though, because the supplement industry is unregulated.  They can literally put whatever the hell they want into their echinacea pills.  Including echinacea.  If they really want.  But they don’t actually have to.

Wait…echinacea costs how much? Forget it. Just throw in some wheat gluten.

The next time someone tells you that the free market works and eventually bad products will disappear, take them to GNC and point to the entire fucking store.  People are making millions off of sugar pills.

Actually, billions.

And there is a gigantic pile of evidence that they are sugar pills.

But nobody cares.  Because the nice people at GNC aren’t going to tell them there is as much ginseng on the label as there is in the pill.

Pro-Family State Rep Says He Should Be Able to Grab the Nipples of Breastfeeding Women in Public

I know that none of us should give a shit about what some New Hampshire idiot named Josh Moore thinks about public breastfeeding.  He most likely represents the fringe of his party when he comes out on Facebook and says:

So, if we’re not going to put moms in jail for breastfeeding their babies in public, the least we can do in the best interest of equality is allow the men to come up to them and play around with their exposed nipples and areolas, BUT ONLY once the babies are finished feeding

Um…equality?

If a woman’s nipples are exposed while she is feeding her baby, guys should have the equal right to play with those nipples? But only once the baby is done.  Because seriously – the guy isn’t a monster.

So feeding a baby in public because the baby is hungry is an invitation for every man in the area to sexually assault you.  Does that mean if we see a guy pissing on a tree, we can kick him in the balls?  For equality?

Apparently, Chick-Fil-A Should be Exempt From Health Regulations

It would appear that religious freedom should now be extended to include the freedom to serve fly infested food to the public.  As long as you are a good Christian.

New York City recently shut down a Chick-Fil-A because of health code violations.  Health inspectors do this a lot and these shut downs are usually temporary until the restaurant fixes the problems that have been identified. Like flies in the food.  Most people don’t like flies in their food.

Unless one of those flies is Jeff Goldblum

However, New York is filled with liberals who don’t have a problem with gay people and since Chick-Fil-A was in the news (two years ago) for having a problem with gay people, the only reasonable conclusion is they are being persecuted by liberal health inspectors.  Who are also probably gay.

Chick-Fil-A hasn’t said anything.  I presume it is because they are too busy cleaning up their skanky restaurant so it can re-open.

Christian conservatives are up in arms, though.  And I can understand why.

I mean, no matter what your religion, we can all agree that you shouldn’t be stuck with KFC.

Maine Governor Blames Drugs on Black People but Don’t Worry Because That Wasn’t What he Meant

They have someone of a drug problem up in Maine and Governor Paul LePage thinks he knows why:

These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty. These type of guys. They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we’ve go to deal with down the road

After a bunch of people got the mistaken impression that when he referred to these guys impregnating young white girls, he probably meant they were black men. Not so, his spokesperson assures us!  He wasn’t talking about a race problem.  He was talking about a drug problem!

Which is true.  He was talking about a drug problem.

He was just blaming the drug problem on black people.  I’m glad we got that cleared up.

A Bunch of Yahoos Occupy a Federal Building in Oregon

No.  I didn’t forget about this one.

A bunch of ranchers are upset because a couple of ranchers who are also arsonists and poachers are going to jail for a while.  Perhaps longer than they should.

They are also upset because the Federal Government controls a lot of land in the west and if you want to use that land, you have to pay them and follow rules.  I mean sure, you don’t pay as much as if you wanted to use other private land and the rules are there so people can continue to use that land in a hundred years because you didn’t over graze it but you still have to deal with rules.

Like rules about how you are supposed to treat the American Flag. Which don’t matter, I guess, as long as you aren’t burning it in protest.

So they took over a Federal building and are prepared to stay there as long as it takes.  Unfortunately, they didn’t bring enough snacks so they’ve been asking for supporters to bring them food.

I’m not sure if “prepared” is the proper term for their movement.

At this point, local authorities are adopting a “whatever” strategy.  By that I mean, they are thinking “whatever – this is more people than we’ve had in these parts for a while.  It’s good for the economy and as long as we don’t provoke them, they probably won’t start shooting anybody.”

So there are a bunch of flag waving anti-Government dudes holed up in a federal building in a National Wildlife refuge and the official response is pretty much nothing.  Which is awesome.

All I hope is that we stop writing about them or talking about them and a year from now someone says “oh – are they still there?”

And they’ll be like “we have some demands.  Doesn’t anyone want to hear our demands?”

And everyone else will say “no.  Not really. Do you need more snacks?”