Ok, I don't really spend my time looking for this conspiracy pornography stuff, but once I noted it, a lot of surprising word choices started leaping off the page. Or, rather, they were surprising to me - although may not be a shock to the intelligent, well-read viewer.
So, the one that struck me more recently was this bit from Beautiful Atrocities, in which reviews from the Passion O' Da Christ, and Celsius 488 are compared. (Courtesy Jimmy Taranato)
The one that struck me was this:
Geoff Pevre, Toronto Star:
F9/11: A plea for America's deliverance ... it may not be an argument one agrees with, and it may be unbalanced and propagandistic, but it is both convincingly argued and sincerely motivated.
Passion: A work of fundamentalist pornography.
Now, in and of itself, this ain't much of much, but if we indulge ourselves and pretend that the sets of quotes about F9/11 and da Passion are essentially parallel and represent similar thoughts (or at least thinking along similar lines), and that each set of quotes from each reviewer represents, on average, diametrically opposed views, then we end up with interesting back-of-the-napkin musings.
Without belaboring the point, what I found fascinating is how this tracks with my recent post mentioning Jonah Goldberg's article making the comparison between pornography and conspiracy theory.
Now, granted, if you look for a relationship between two things hard enough, you can often create it. What I think I may be running into is a problem associated with language. In this case, we are mooking around for a term to describe things that, for whatever reason seem to violate community standards for one group or another, and thus earns the ire of that community. In these cases, the offended community seems to certainly wish that the thing itself had never been produced, and wouldn't mind seeing it disappear altogether due to its self-evident trashiness and obscene nature. The folks who like this however, both tend to get defensive and try to repackage the item in question in a bit to make it noble again.
I'm sure there's an SAT adjective that I'm probing around the edges of, but I just can't recall what it is.
Launched by Bravo Romeo Delta at June 30, 2004 10:09 PM