Two of my favorite books are The Devil’s Candy and Final Cut, which tell the stories of two of Hollywood’s greatest modern debacles (Bonfire of the Vanities and Heaven’s Gate). In that vein, here’s a revisitation of Super Mario Bros. and a sad little featurette on the making of Batman and Robin:

You know a movement thinks it has achieved total victory when it moves on to the recriminations phase of operations against dissenters and enemies. Here’s the American Prospect’s the Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta wondering what should be done with those once appeared on The List as a result of deviationist thinking:

And so the question arises: How does America address its homophobic past as it moves forward into a more tolerant future? If American views on gays have changed — and they have, with shocking rapidity — that means there are a lot of people in this country who used to hold more deeply anti-gay views than they do today, and who may be ashamed of what they once thought and said in what now seems a distant and unenlightened era. . . .

Most such people have had the privilege of a private life, where their participation in an ugly ideology that diminished and damaged gay people is something they speak of only in conversation with friends, or recall within the inmost sanctuary of their own thoughts.

But some people have been living public lives a long time, and have left a very public paper trail of their expressions of discomfort and distaste. What is the proper response to the discovery of such information?

My reading of Franke-Ruta’s piece–and I may be wrong here–is that she magnanimously thinks we ought to forgive the sins of those who once expressed doubt about the perfect wisdom and goodness of same-sex marriage. Which is a relief. I suspect that before the week is out, someone on the left will respond to her taking the hardline view.

In a way, this is just further confirmation of Chris Caldwell’s insightful Claremont Review piece on gay marriage–which I really cannot recommend highly enough. It’s one of the best pieces on the subject. I’ll tease just a bit:

When elites rally unanimously to a cause, it can become a kind of common sense. The upwardly mobile parts of democratic publics emulate their “betters.” They quell their natural misgivings. Those who do not quell their misgivings, therefore, look like losers. There is a first-they-came-for-the-Communists element to this shift—a lot of people worried about saying something un-chic assume that there will always be someone more conservative, more heedless of his social position, ready to come out of the “woodwork” to take the heat in front of public opinion. But Rush Limbaugh now supports civil unions and Glenn Beck opines that gay marriage “isn’t hurting anybody.”

The elite view thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The referendum victories that gay marriage won in Maine, Maryland, and Washington state in November may be its first three victories, yet they seem to count more than its three dozen defeats. The push for gay marriage in the U.S. resembles the European Union’s attempts to spread its influence through referenda. “Yes” and “No” are taken to mean “Yes Forever” and “No for Now.” The debate is sown with taboos the instant the slightest formal assent is granted. In real life, the heroic endurance of a democratic opposition does not last long. When they discover their consistently expressed votes to be unavailing, people lose interest in casting them. Sometimes they turn against democracy. More often they tune out of the political system altogether.

Where this assent to elite views on gay marriage does not arise spontaneously, it can be imposed. The state of California now bans therapies that seek to reorient homosexuals towards heterosexual behavior, on the grounds that doing so is psychologically damaging. The more likely objection is that the therapies challenge the conception that there are only two sexual orientations, “homosexual” and “heterosexual,” and that they are of absolutely unwavering constancy. This conception is false. In fact, the gay-rights movement itself used to stress the polymorphousness of human sexuality, back when the movement was focused more on liberation. But it has different rhetorical needs now, chief among them to convince parents that there is no danger of their children being proselytized about homosexuality in school.

The most troubling aspect of the gay-marriage movement is that, more than any social movement in living memory, more than feminism at its bra-burning peak in the 1970s, it aims not to engage in lively debate but to shut it down. Scurrility has become a norm. In April 2009, Miss California, Carrie Prejean, told a Miss America judge she thought marriage should be between a man and a woman and got called a “dumb bitch” for it on the judge’s website. If it is now easier to call people dumb bitches, then it makes no sense at all to extol the gay marriage movement as a moral advance.

Shutting down debate can be more effectively done now that the internet has solved the organizing problem of mobs. Anyone who expresses the slightest misgivings about gay marriage can become the object of boycotts, blacklists, and attempts to get him fired. Restaurant chain Chick fil-A was boycotted when its chief operating officer speculated that gay marriage might be “inviting God’s wrath.” A theater director in Sacramento resigned his post after having been shown to be a donor to Proposition 8. The law firm King & Spalding refused to allow Paul Clement permission to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act on behalf of the House of Representatives. Defending O.J. Simpson will not get you booted from your firm, but defending a federal law will. Most companies are probably brave enough to defend their employees’ freedom of opinion, but cowardice of King & Spalding’s sort risks becoming the norm.

There’s a lot more. Read it all.

I didn’t know anything about Steve Alford that wasn’t in Season on the Brink, but this piece on his hire by UCLA, “So You’ve Hired a Steve Alford,” is an epic sports rant. Enjoy.

This is pretty awesome, too.

Santino was just getting warmed up with this comic-book politics post yesterday. Now he’s stumbled upon an incredibly earnest attempt to change the costumes of female superheroes. So that they’re not so objectifying. And warmer.

Truth: I kind of liked the Zatana costume. It actually makes sense for her character.

Don’t tell the environmental left and Alexandra Paul, but even Democrats are making noises about how fertility rates are important for America’s economy. Here’s Bob Fertig in a call-to-action email from Democrats.com arguing for a national program of paid maternity leave:

Twenty years ago, President Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and the United States took a major step toward becoming a more family friendly nation.

But the FMLA was only meant to be a first step. The sad reality is 40% of workers aren’t covered by the FMLA, millions can’t afford to take unpaid leave and the United States is one of four countries that doesn’t provide paid maternity leave. . . .

More lawmakers are recognizing that family friendly policies are essential to families’ economic security as well as the success of businesses and our nation’s economy.

As I’ve said before, the politics of pro-natalism are really open to both parties, because it’s more populist than ideological. And judging by the chasm between ideal and achieved fertility in America, there may be a lot of votes there.

In re: Your Thesis About The Politicized Life

This AICN intra-comic book war over an issue of Uncanny Avengers might make your head explode. It’s unbelievable even by the mammoth internet standards of political life preening.

So Ezra Klein kind of hates Twitter, too.

He just doesn’t hate it enough.

Reason’s Nick Gillespie reviews What to Expect for BookForum. My favorite line:

Despite his preference for the way things used to be, Last writes not with vitriol or bitterness but with something like pleasant exasperation.