apparently i didn't quite make it in before the "but gais, stereotypes really ARE true!" crowd and i salute the many others who have argued against this perspective from logical and personal angles. so i just have one thing to add:

Asian Teen Has Sweaty Middle-Aged-Man Fetish

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/asian_teen_has_sweaty_middle_aged

(fwiw, i've dated a white man who was raised in a small town with the most severe case of yellow fever and yellow-fever-denial evah. but of course because he was a leftist he was immune to any racist and sexist sentiments and i just had to deal with the fact that asian women were objectively the most beautiful women on earth. let's just say that he was the one who was heartbroken when i broke up with him after a year of "but i'll be so lonely without you! you can't leave me!")

echoing what others have said, why so down on netflix? i love the instant!

we do have an xbox, although it's not necessary as i used to watch stuff on my mac. i don't get why you're so unhappy with the selection...we have around 300 movies in our instant queue and it has seen waaaay more activity than the movies that we order (although we do have the cheapest plan - one movie delivered at a time). maybe your issue is not enough artfart stuff?

here's a smattering of stuff that i've really enjoyed off the instant in the last few months:

- lots of amazing michael palin travel docs (i wish they'd put them all on the instant because i like to just set aside a whole day for michael palin viewing)

- wendy and lucy

- inland empire

- right at your door

- all of 30 rock

- persepolis

- special

- many many hollywood movies

- lots of documentaries

sure some of those "independent" movies are "mainstream independent," but still...they were available without a wait.

my only complaint with instant is that there are just some really bizarre, very lo-fi films on there including many movies from the scifi channel (terrible) and some films that are so bad they look like student productions (eg: crash test, paranoia 1.0).

but i appreciate your research into the other websites that i hadn't heard about! i'm particularly excited about the documentary site - gonna check that out tonight.

(side note related to xbox live: before there was streaming, there was downloading. i have an external filled with around 150 downloaded movies from the days of ye olde college network. they sat there unwatched for years until my partner discovered an amazing thing. vuze (formerly azureus), a bittorrent program, lets you just drag your avi's and mpg's into it and it converts them to xbox format and transmits them to the xbox over your home network. voila: downloaded movies on your tv! in short, it's frickin awesome.)

thanks for the nice lord saletan takedown. i appreciate it when broadsheet articles are free of the "i'm a hip young lady!" language that it sometimes slips into. more credibility this way! less anne hathaway in devil wears prada ;)

interesting letter choice and nice, writerly response. that's all i got.

sorry in case any of the other commenters already linked to this, but io9, the gawker scifi fanboy site, has a much different (less alarmist, surprise!) take on the film and includes a history of violence against women zombies in film. i found it much more interesting and analytic than this blog post. here it is: http://io9.com/5053881/zombie-feminism

thanks for the great roundup. it's really good to get an overhead perspective on who's saying what.

recently reading "why americans hate welfarE" by martin gilens ( http://www.amazon.com/Why-Americans-Hate-Welfare-Communication/dp/0226293653/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251735875&sr=8-1 ) really provided a lot of insight for me into a lot of what's going on in the health care debate. the issue of the "undeserveds" is highly prominent in this book and i'm happy that salon has covered this issue.

regarding the issue of race, like many other conservative code words, it seems that "being undeserving" has been unmoored from its racist origins and is now floating freely. i encounter conservatives these days who scorn the "undeserving" in whatever form they take (although remarkably minorities seem to always fall into the category..maybe the category has just expanded beyond them).

in my opinion, this really is the crux of almost all conservative positions these days. back in the stimulus debate days a very reasonable conservative told me that he opposed extending emergency unemployment funds because "those kinds of programs tend to stick once they get started." this was his biggest fear. not that someone couldn't find a job for 18 months and would literally have no support after their unemployment insurance ran out, but that they might become "addicted to the teat of the system" to use the right's favorite image.

anyway, not to blog whore or anything, but i wrote about this issue recently on my open salon whee! : http://open.salon.com/blog/montcalm/2009/08/24/health_care_narrative_ideology_and_progressive_failure