I can already hear my mother asking me why I don't like nice things. Take a look at this current ad for the mall jeweler Zales, and maybe you'll see what makes me squirm?

Those of you who (like me!) have been engaged and who are straight women have no doubt been asked "how he proposed" by inquiring acquaintances, and those of you who (also like me!) just decided to get married and told inquisitive types that have no doubt been met with a bit of disappointment. Which is why in this montage, the men are all smiling smugly while the women freak out at the sight of the gems proffered them, or even just their boxes. The man acts; the woman reacts. It sets a pattern — and maybe provides some foreshadowing for the wild-eyed craziness that occurs in Bridezilla mode. (Perhaps the element of surprise occasioned by the proposal causes that strand of behavior to hit the ground running?)

Sure, a lot of how one views the decision to get married depends on how one views that old, weather-beaten institution. I have not been married but in my perhaps overly romanticized worldview I see an ideal marriage as a partnership, as a combining of two people who enjoy each other and respect each other and see each other as equals and who want to legally solidify that mutual love and admiration, and perhaps throw a party for a bunch of people they like as a celebration of that fact. But the whole notion of the "proposal" set forth by these ads, and other cultural artifacts celebrating it, is a more civilized/sparkly way of Tarzan forcibly throwing Jane over his shoulder. (Not to mention that in the current moment, the whole idea of the man in the heterosexual relationship being the only one who can afford a gemlike token of the sort offered by these shops is a luxury left to either the financially suicidal or the extremely rich. Although I should probably note that I'm also opposed to gross artifacts like that ring women are supposed to wear on their right hands to indicate that they are "available and happy," because, yuck.)

This is not to say that I'm begrudging the happiness of people who proposed and were proposed to and were happy. Hey, knock yourselves out! But I think that the three months' salary that would go toward a bauble would be put to better use when combined with the partner's income over that same timespan, and put toward something that both people could enjoy — a house, a trip to the south of France, or maybe even the marriage celebration itself. (Oh, how much extra money catering halls charge when you utter the word "wedding" ...) And the idea that said treat would be something mutually agreed-upon? Would make it only sweeter.

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Here's the big secret about dating hipster girls: we're just the same as everyone else, only cuter, better dressed, and know way more about music and pop culture than you do. But in the end we're still looking for the same thing everybody else is: someone who's cute, smart, funny, won't be too much of a jerk and is at least familiar with the discography of Matt and Kim.

So lose the keffiyeh (you look like an idiot and no one's worn those for three or twenty-three years), put down the Monster energy drink, stop asking people if they like Arcade Fire, and listen to me.

Step one: Come to us.
I don't know where you live and, frankly, I don't care. Unless it would make a good crash pad because it's around the corner from our favorite dive bar that serves those frito pies we always end up craving at 4 a.m., nobody's going to care. Come to us. We're very busy! There's band practice on Tuesdays and Sundays; graphic novel book club every other Friday; kickball league on Wednesday nights; rehearsal for our new performance art/dance troupe that still doesn't have a name on Thursdays; our volunteer shift at the rooftop farm is every third Monday; and sure, our bike gang may not go on rides again until next summer but that doesn't mean we're not going to get drinks together every Saturday afternoon and plan for it. We just don't have time to venture outside of the the 3.5 neighborhoods where all this stuff is happening, let alone to come and meet you in a bar in midtown. Instead, make the trek to our neighborhoods. Join the clubs we're in. It might even give you something to talk to us about.

Step Two: Yes, just talk to us.
We may look judgmental, but mostly that's just our eye makeup running a little and making us squint. Really, we're quite nice. It's okay if you don't have as many tattoos as we do, or can't quite muster up enough testosterone to grow a full beard. There's an 80 percent chance our last boyfriend was a starving artist who moved into our place after two weeks of dating because the art studio where he'd been crashing didn't actually have a bathroom aside from the shared one down the hall, and we just had to kick him out after discovering that not only did things like "paying rent" stiffle his creative spirit but so did that hassle called "fidelity," as we found out thanks to that blond skank he went home with from Union Pool. Who gave him bed bugs.

We're might not break our facade of cool to come over and talk to you, but chances are if you offer to buy us a drink we'll take you up on it (let's be real: we're living off our credit cards, don't have health insurance and are drinking here because they sell PBR & a whiskey shot for $3. Of course we will take you up on it). We probably have a lot to talk about-we too may harbor an unhealthy obsession with "Jersey Shore," like the latest Ke$ha song, or be equally fascinated by Insane Clown Posse. My friend Jesse says, "the biggest difference between trying to pick up a 'hipster girl' and J-Woww is most hipster girls will value commonality much more than your average girl. They have had a life of feeling disillusioned and outcast from others and want to feel like they have a friend in this dark, cold universe. If you feel there is a strong chance her favorite movie is Harold and Maude, just like yours, bring it up ASAP."

So: you like bikes? Mention that the fixed gear bike we parked outside is kinda sexy. Happen to think our faded Slayer t-shirt is awesome? Well then, say so. Tell us you like our tattoos, although be careful with that one. As my friend Jackie warns (whose tattoos are admittedly pretty awesome): "Do not under any circumstances refer to my tattoos as 'tats' or 'ink.' That just sounds douchey. A line like
'I really like your work, who did it?' can work quite nicely, and is most effective if you actually know some artists and/or shops. But!" she added, "no touching the tattoos, they are not 3-D and you are not invited to put your hands on me... no matter how cute you are.... That will have to wait."

Step Three: Don't be creepy.
This one especially goes out to that dude last Friday night who thought it was hilarious to keep asking if we had nipple piercings, that guy who "jokingly" said it looked like we were wearing our dead grandmother's jacket and then tried to get our number, and especially the dude who hands out those "Karaoke Wizard" business cards around the Lorimer stop and then systematically hits on every single Asian girl in the bar regardless of whether or not she is there with her boyfriend.

Stop it. You're creeps. This is creepy. And negging doesn't work. There is a reason none of these techniques are working, and it's because you're transparently a douchebag. Also, we have self-esteem! We have enough to worry about at the moment-we have about $20 in our bank account, didn't sleep well last night because our downstairs neighbor was holding a pop-punk showcase that went until 4 a.m. and we're rushing to finish making enough necklaces to sell at the flea market this weekend. The last thing we want to worry about is whether or not some random creep (you) is going to try to roofie our drinks. Talk to us like a normal person, make us laugh, that's all great. But it's not endearing to make fun of our shoes. It took us an hour to get our hair to look this good-we don't want to have to run home and shower just to wash your sliminess off us.

Step Four: Bone up on pop culture.
You don't need to don skin-tight acid-washed jeans or try to pull off that southwestern poncho. You don't have to love Best Coast or Dan Deacon. But please. Loose the baggy blue jeans with the tattered bottoms. Toss the trucker hat. Expand your itunes beyond U2 and Coldplay. That's the great thing about the Internet-you can listen to music, read about fashion, find out what you like and update your life a little. Because after a certain point, sporting something like a goatee isn't just you being adorably nerdy. It's you being so out of touch with current culture people will start to worry a sociopath.

Step Five: It's not called flakiness, it's called letting your plans evolve.
The last time anybody I know made and stuck to solid plans was somewhere around the spring of 1989, when no one but yuppies in the movies carried cell phones, because they were still the size of bricks. We're not flaky, it's just that often times something better comes up. Sure, on a Monday afternoon it sounds like a great idea to go see the new 3D Wes Craven movie with you this weekend. But on Saturday afternoon we all of a sudden remember our friend's art opening is that night and then Sarah texts about this loft party where the guy from our favorite band Slaughtered Twin's new side project Half Absorbed Twin Fetus is playing their first ever show, and, well, we're not going to miss that.

But you know what will impress us? If you can keep up as we hop from that matinee Todd P show to our friend's zine launch party to fried chicken dinner to a couple of bars and then dancing until 4 a.m. at our friend's DJ night. Or better yet-come up with something more fun to do and we might just follow you anywhere. Pop-up art party in the back of rented U-Haul trucks in Bushwick? Birthday party with a boxing ring and a slip 'n' slide? We're up for it. Sure, the traditional dinner and a movie date might be dead, but it's been replaced by something better-making each night into an epic quest to have the time of your life.

On a related note, sorry about not returning your phone call. Next time text, email, IM, Facebook or direct-message at us. We'll probably respond in a few minutes, instead of the week it took us to realize you'd left us a voicemail.

Sponsored posts are purely editorial content that we are pleased to have presented by a participating sponsor, in this case Gillette; advertisers do not produce the content.

Erica Sackin is our Spandex Report columnist, which focuses on the lives of the young, so she would know. She is also the proprietor of Erica Saves the Day.

Photo by Jon Gos from Flickr.

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As Ariana Eunjung Cha and Zachary A. Goldfarb explain in the Washington Post, the nation's financial institutions are processing the greatest volume of home foreclosures in our history-now numbering more than 2 million properties, with another 2.3 million seriously delinquent–"through a mass production system of foreclosures that was set up to prioritize one thing over everything else: speed."

[T]he problems plaguing the foreclosure process extend well beyond a few, low-ranking document processors who forged documents or failed to review foreclosure files even as they signed off on them. In fact, virtually everyone involved – loan servicers, law firms, document processing companies and others – made more money as they evicted more borrowers from their homes, creating a system that was vulnerable to error and difficult for homeowners to challenge.

The unrivaled king of the great foreclosure speed-up is Florida attorney David J. Stern, whose law firm processed 70,000 Broward Country foreclosures in 2009 alone. Mostly, he moves through repo proceedings for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac-together with bailed-out mortgage giants like Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup. According to a report from Mother Jones writer Andy Kroll, foreclosure mills like the Stern shop command flat fees, of around $1,300 per foreclosed property, rather than the hourly fees law firms normally charge. The result is a premium on rapidfire processing-usually by a reserve army of temp workers who sign off on forbidding stacks of legal and real estate documents that few have been trained to interpret-and none, effectively, have the time to review in any meaningful fashion.

Indeed, long before the mortgage fiasco had fully metastasized in 2008, foreclosure mills were drawing legal reproofs, Kroll notes, with a New Jersey firm processing a battery of foreclosures over the signature of an employee who had left the outfit a year earlier, a Texas concern submitting computer-generated documents that a federal judge called "gibberish" and "erroneous," and a Florida default operation raking in fees by, in the words of another federal judge, "filing any old pleading without undertaking any investigation into its accuracy is perfectly acceptable practice."

But there were plenty of similar warning signs preliminary to the 2008 meltdown as well, with shady national mortgage operations constructing subprime loans that actually had mortgage-holders kiting balloon payments on their interest, all but guaranteeing the eventual doom of their loan contract. But in both that crisis and today's foreclosure fiasco, the lure of quick-turnaround fees simply proved too powerful to draw much sustained critical scrutiny. During a deposition in a suit against the Stern firm, Cha and Goldfarb report, senior paralegal Tammie Lou Kapusta described the work routine thusly: "The girls would come out on the floor not knowing what they were doing. Mortgages would get placed in different files. They would get thrown out. There was just no real organization when it came to the original documents."

As it happens, the latest wave of disclosures about the foreclosure mess coincided with former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo's $67.5 million settlement of a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing the bottom-feeding mortgage firm of fraud. The agreement stipulates that Mozilo can never again serve as a corporate officer-something of an academic stricture, since the original S.E.C. complaint furnishes plenty of detail showing his unfitness to manage much of anything beyond a sock drawer. In one internal email from April 2006, he offered this frank assessment of the company's equity-destroying adjustable-rate mortgage deals: "In all my years in the business, I have never seen a more toxic product," he wrote to a Countrywide financial officer. "With real estate values coming down... the product will become increasingly worse." And in a September 2006 email, he fleshed out that dour estimation further: "The bottom line is that we are flying blind on how these loans will perform in a stressed environment of higher unemployment, reduced values and slowing home sales." The day afterward, the S.E.C. complaint notes, Mozilo approved a massive sale of his own Countrywide shares-part of an ongoing sell-off that netted him $260 million between 2005 and 2007.

So to recap: Even after his SEC penalty, Mozilo walks away with something just shy of $200 million in well timed stock proceeds alone. The note-holders seduced by the stirring vision of risk-free universal homeownership and now getting the free market's bum's rush, meanwhile, can't count on even any meaningful semblance of due process. And that being the case, most of them dare not dream of a rationally restructured loan arrangement that might start to undo some of the fathomlessly cynical ruin that a corps of Mozilo-esque financial cretins have left at their doorstep. This de facto social compact was neatly summed up in the Legal Aid case against GMAC-yet another federal bailout recipient farming out its repo workload to unscrupulous foreclosure mills-that brought the whole sordid business to light in the first place. As New York Times reporter David Streitfeld writes, that challenge involved a fight to keep the holder of a $75,000 mortgage-a laid-off employment counselor, fittingly enough-who consulted with a Maine legal aid firm. There, as luck would have it, her case caught the attention of a onetime bank attorney named Brian Cox-who suffered a debilitating depression and divorce from his own tour in the foreclosure trade, and had recuperated by building houses and switching sides as a pro bono volunteer in the housing wars. With a little digging, Cox established that the signatory on all the documents, a "limited signing officer" named Jeffrey Stephan, moved through foreclosures for GMAC at the forbidding clip of 400 a day. As Cox summed things up in a court filing:

When Stephan says in an affidavit that he has personal knowledge of the facts stated in his affidavits, he doesn't. When he says that he has custody and control of the loan documents, he doesn't. When he says that he is attaching ‘a true and accurate' copy of a note or a mortgage, he has no idea if that is so, because he does not look at the exhibits. When he makes any other statement of fact, he has no idea if it is true. When the notary says that Stephan appeared before him or her, he didn't.

Such is the face of the quest for economic justice in our age. In the face of such outrages, we could do a lot worse than remember Samuel Johnson's crisp assessment of the inequities of the British debtor prison: "Those who made the laws have apparently supposed, that every deficiency of payment is a crime of the debtor. But the truth is, that the creditor always shares the act, and often more than shares the guilt, of improper trust... and there is no reason, why one should punish the other for a contract in which both concurred."

By the way, I almost forgot: Angelo Mozilo's legal fees were paid by Bank of America, which bought out the toxic Countryside operation-with some conspicuous assists from well-padded lawmakers-in 2008.

Chris Lehmann's book, Rich People Things, is available now! He even made you a slideshow about things rich people like.

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It was never really good to be a bully, but they used to be seen more as a fact of life, like getting shit on by a bird. Bullies were the thing that necessitated stalwart heroes to protect the weak. (See also: the Team America theory of geopolitics.) Then came the school shootings of the 90s, which were interpreted as, among other things, the result of bullying. This changed bullies from harmless thugs to the precipitants of picked-upon teens going on homicidal rampages. And in the past few years, stories of "cyber-bullying" (cyber!) cases changed the equation by making the targets of bullying victims instead of merely threats. The most visible recent examples, of course, involve gay teens killing themselves after being bullied. That increases the perception that bullying is not just something vaguely unpleasant that you have to deal with, but a threat to the survival of our loved ones.

The equation, then, is this: bullying is bad not because it's unpleasant to endure or because it can screw you up psychologically, but because it can result in teenagers killing themselves. But there's a sense that something's changed, that there's something new here-even though of course teenagers have always killed themselves, and probably sometimes because of bullies. We have statistics! One particularly well-established statistic is that the suicide rate for gay teenagers is several times the rate of that for straight teens. We know this because some people have been talking about gay teen suicide for a long time. What's interesting, though, is that the statistics have come to mean different things at different points in that debate. Today, the higher suicide rate among gay teens is being used by gay-rights advocates to show the increased risk of teens to bullying, and is effective enough that anti-gay groups feel the need to question it.

But a few short decades ago-and even sometimes now, this same statistic was used to support arguments that homosexuality was a kind of mental illness (as it was officially classified by the American Psychological Association until 1973). Suicide was seen as a sort of co-morbid symptom of homosexuality, another sign-like gays' well-known proclivities for cultural deviancy, tragic personal lives and difficulty maintaining romantic relationships-that homosexuality was a sort of disease that some were just deciding not to treat. The higher suicide rate played into this: if homosexuals keep committing suicide, it must be because they are all crazy. (Rather than, say, because people were awful to them.) It's an effective enough argument that, yes, some people are still making it, but that seems far more fringe now.

So the statistic didn't change-the facts didn't change-but the power those facts hold now runs to the other side of the equation, in favor of gay rights, instead of against them.

How did this come about? Well, a few things shifted. First, many people stopped seeing homosexuality as a choice, and so the bullying wasn't the victims' "fault" anymore. At the same time, many of us became far more understanding of mental illness as a medical condition (so that suicidal depression, for instance, was seen as something to be treated), and also many became far less tolerant of overtly threatening or predatory behavior as the rights of women and minorities became more culturally cemented. Being an asshole is now a lot less acceptable in American culture, unless you are British and on a reality show. And now, it's all filtering down to schools and children. Which is good! But what do we do with the assholes?

Let me tell you a story. In fifth grade, I was being bullied by this boy named Jason. As a weird little kid, I was not new to this sort of thing, but this experience was particularly shitty. It was one of those situations that you particularly must endure as a child, where you can't choose to avoid the person who's tormenting you. Jason was awful to me and yet I had to see him on a regular basis both at school and at Cub Scouts, where his mom was our den leader. It made me miserable. But after a lot of thought (of course!), I decided I was going to stand up for myself the next time the opportunity presented itself. That opportunity happened to be when we were taking our class photo. While getting lined up in the back row, Jason jostled me, and I responded by giving him a bloody nose.

I faced no disciplinary action for this. As I recall, I got a subtle nod of approval from my teacher. I did, however, get a reaction from one of the other kids. During a lull in class, a guy named Dave showed me a piece of loose leaf paper, on which was written a list of all the people in our class. "This is the list of who's most popular," Dave explained, and pointed to my name: "See? You moved up." And indeed, there I was, now four spaces from the bottom of the list rather than two. And at the very bottom was Jason.

I'm pretty sure that was the exact moment I decided that popularity was stupid, an attitude that would cause me no small amount of trouble later in life.

But it also drove home that, as scary as bullies are, they're not exactly society's winners. Unless we're prepared to say that a ten-year-old kid deserves to be a loser and has permanently entered a class of loser-hood by his own fully-informed choice-entering a class that may run him up one side of the criminal justice system and down the other-then we have to be willing to entertain the prospect that people like Jason ended up on the bottom rung perhaps through some situations that were not entirely of their own making.

Of course, this thought was of little comfort when I spent most of middle school hiding from a whole different group of dudes that were awful to me.

And where is Jason today? Well, the one web hit I turned up is... a picture of my former tormentor in SWAT gear, participating in a simulated takedown of a school shooter. I kid you not: this is true. If I were making it up, I would be the first to condemn it as psychologically simple-minded, but reality has given the lie to complex art yet again. Of course the bully ended up as a cop! Of course he is training to deal with the consequences of his own bullying! Oh, how neat and tidy.

So, okay. Maybe we shouldn't have too much sympathy for bullies. But at the same time, there are some problems with the current rhetorical climate. For one thing, ," and the widespread use of that phrase-even by people with the best of intentions!-says depressing things about our inability to deal with a social problem without perceiving ourselves as floating in some ahistorical moment. And we've been through this sort of hysteria before. Think of Heathers, the comic masterpiece about adolescence and suicide that makes a good case for the dangers of a John Hughes morality. Adults like to think that teenagers are innocent creatures, free of sin, and that if we could just remove all pressures on our precious youth, they could frolic in peace. That's one theory! But there are others, too.

As much as we feel like we're doing good by painting a Hitler mustache on bullies, it's not like it's a problem that no one was aware of before. And one that wasn't, at least mildly, improving. There's no evidence that going to these rhetorical extremes will force improvements any more quickly than what people are already doing to fight the problem-whereas there's ample evidence that allowing ourselves to think about social ills with a crisis mentality degrades our ability to embrace the difficult, gradual solutions that most long-standing problems actually require. We paint social conflicts in these terms only because we can't stand the thought that we might not be doing everything we can to make things better for everyone.

Meanwhile, we're telling kids that it gets better. Which means we're pretending that adults are far less terrifying creatures. I've known enough friends who've gotten gay-bashed as adults that I know bullying doesn't stop at graduation, and that seems like a far bigger issue. (Technically speaking, I once got my nose broken for being gay, but that's a story for another time.) It's hard to escape the feeling that things like Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project, National Coming Out Day, and this nightmare have only been successful because they make straight people such as myself feel better about ourselves, like we are doing something to help the cause of equality, even though we're not really doing anything substantial.

They may make us tear up, but it also makes gay people into Sanrio dolls for the enjoyment of the straights-cuddly creatures who, like John Hughes characters, are pure of heart. That's better than being seen as child molesters, but it still seems unproductive. And on one level, anti-bullying campaigns are just one more way to delude ourselves that human cruelty is something we can overcome.

In a few months, when the media (whether "mainstream" or LiveJournal) have all forgotten about Bully Crisis 2010, the people who were working before to improve things one interpersonal interaction at a time will still be at it, and will still be making a difference. Making the world a better place is mostly a small, boring affair. Those tiny but persistent efforts, that slow stacking of brick upon brick, is the only way we might approach an attainable semi-utopia: one in which teenagers might still sometimes kill themselves, but at least gay teens don't do it any more than straight teens do.

Mike Barthel has written about pop music for a bunch of places, mostly Idolator and Flagpole, and is currently doing so for the Portland Mercury and Color magazine. He continues to have a Tumblr and be a grad student in Seattle.

Photograph from Flickr by Thomas Ricker.

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Reagan's dad was a drunk and Clinton's dad died before he was born (and his stepfather was abusive), while Jimmy Carter's father was a successful businessman and member of the state House, George H.W. Bush's dad was a senator, and George W. Bush (who did at least serve two terms, although I can't think of anyone who is calling that a successful presidency-yet) was, you know, George H.W. Bush. Obviously this model works in Barack Obama's favor, but with all the bad breaks the guy has caught, who the hell knows?

As I say, it's just a theory. I have a feeling that if it holds up at all it has something to do with resilience and the ability to create your own narrative. Anyway, in researching this hypotheses to make it more plausible, I came across this, which seems to indicate that Jimmy Carter's father was actually Joe Kennedy. Which totally screws over my postulation. Back to the drawing board, I guess.

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Ernesto Miranda, on the other hand, was broke most of his life and could in just about every way have emerged, Freddy Krueger-style, from the bigoted, blaze-orange unconscious of leatherette Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. An Arizona-born – okay, that part fucks up Brewer's narrative – career criminal, Miranda received a dishonorable discharge from the Army, drifted through Texas and later did federal time in the implausibly literary-sounding locales of Chillicothe, Ohio and Lompoc, California. The two things that Miranda and Roethlisberger have in common are a general ambient infamy and a place in the history books.

Roethlisberger is there because, in 2004, he became the youngest quarterback ever to win a Super Bowl. Miranda, for his part, is the reason why – had the Milledgeville, Georgia police arrested Roethlisberger on suspicion of sexual assault charges back in March of 2010, instead of posing for photos with him – the two-time Super Bowl champion would've been read his rights. It's tempting to say that Roethlisberger and Miranda also have in common a predilection for coerced sex. But we can't say that, really. Miranda's 1963 conviction on rape charges in Phoenix was eventually set aside because... well, you know. And while Roethlisberger has been accused of sexual assault by two different women in the past 15 months, no criminal charges have ever been filed against him. So you could say that both Miranda and Roethlisberger should be presumed innocent, as they have never been proven guilty.

You don't get to pick your martyrs on things like this. Miranda, who was stabbed to death in a dispute over a card game in Phoenix back in 1976, was a thoroughgoing butthead for seemingly his entire life, but the Miranda Warning is a popular and iconic component of America's criminal justice system. (Well, popular among most actual citizens – the Roberts Court, as Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has written, has hand-picked cases involving sub-Miranda human nightmares in an attempt to chip away at the law.) Roethlisberger... well, I should probably stop comparing Ben Roethlisberger to Ernesto Miranda. But here's why I did it in the first place: despite never being charged, let alone convicted, of any crime, Roethlisberger spent the first four weeks of this NFL season serving what was originally a six-game league suspension handed down by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

"My decision today is not based on a finding that you violated Georgia law, or on a conclusion that differs from that of the local prosecutor," the commissioner wrote when he suspended Roethlisberger. "That said, you are held to a higher standard as an NFL player, and there is nothing about your conduct in Milledgeville that can remotely be described as admirable, responsible, or consistent with either the values of the league or the expectations of our fans." So there's that, and then there's the not-picking-your-martyrs thing again.

There's a reason why Goodell can do things like issue seemingly arbitrary suspensions and then, if he deems fit, reduce them. (There's a hilarious bit of Wiki-trolling on Goodell's page that I don't want to spoil, but you should really find the hyperlinked words "personal conduct guidelines" and click them.) The NFL Player's Association collectively bargained away its right to protest such decisions and allowed the league to rewrite the personal conduct policy to make it both more onerous and more amorphous, effectively giving Goodell the right to issue punishments of his choosing to players who violate an exceptionally opaque personal conduct policy. In exchange for that gesture of good faith (um?), NFL owners have proposed that the league set aside 18% less revenue for player salaries in the next collective bargaining agreement, despite record profits. They made that demand because they're NFL owners and know no other way to be, but they did so secure in the same knowledge that insulates Goodell – no one in the NFL media is inclined to call bullshit on any of this.

That the authority-worshipping NFL media has treated Goodell to a vigorous and long-running rubdown isn't surprising, necessarily – these are the same guys who insist on hymning loathsome rage-manatee Bill Parcells as a leader of men and subject home viewers to Jerry Jones's alarmingly taut visage several dozen times per broadcast. Admittedly, it's easy to think of greater human rights disgraces in the world than a lack of due process for the Jager-bombed clot of rapey deli meat that is Ben Roethlisberger. When enough witnesses describe a large, hugely wasted professional athlete following a 20-year-old woman into a bathroom with peen akimbo, I'm inclined to leave the principled indignance to professional civil libertarians and drill down on coming up with new ways to deride said wasted athlete. From each according to his ability and all that. But one doesn't need to defend Roethlisberger – or like him, at all – to realize that there's something sort of rotten happening here.

Roethlisberger represents a lot of things, some more flattering than others. Aesthetically, he's something like the present-day apex of a certain model of quarterback – of the same demographic as the blue-collar Mitteleuropean-Midwestern gunslinger archetype, but a bit more fun to watch out of the pocket and, thus far in his career at least, impressively impervious to big-game pressure. Personally, though, Roethlisberger shows all indications of being an entitled, stone-stupid, epic scale booze-boner. By all accounts a pretty bad guy, in short, but – like Miranda – a disconcertingly good test case for the limits of authority.

The other players to have received long personal-conduct suspensions from Roger Goodell aren't much more likable – Tank Johnson, DWI hobbyist and owner of a Branch Davidian-esque cache of unlicensed automatic weapons; Pacman Jones and his Zelig-like knack for being near heartbreakingly arbitrary incidences of strip club-based violence; Michael Vick, who is Michael Vick. All of them charged with crimes, all of them suspended by Goodell, all later reinstated amid the desultory trolling of daily newspaper columnists eager to see the tough-on-crime commissioner they've nicknamed Big Red (seriously) get still tougher. It has played, at times, like a suit-clad take on ESPN's late, unlamented Sunday Night "Jacked Up" highlight segment – in which Stuart Scott clumsily slanged his way through the lighter side of helmet-to-helmet hits – only rewritten for the people who leave comments at the Wall Street Journal's opinion page.

There are exceptions to this, of course – Ray Ratto, the great San Francisco Chronicle columnist who also writes for CBS Sports, neatly unpacked the interlocking uglinesses of the whole affair back in April. But in a football discourse that deals almost exclusively in violent certainties and crude power, the commissioner's mandate to protect the NFL's brand from the players who comprise the actual NFL doesn't get the criticism it deserves. In part, this is because no one wants to defend Ben Roethlisberger, staggering disgracefully, ween out, in the direction of something very terrible. I certainly don't want to defend him – if you're just joining us, I want to compare him to a goateed olive loaf – but I also take no joy in seeing the imperatives of brand management supersede even the appearance of due process in his case. It may make sportswriters feel sophisticated to talk about brands and messaging – in the same way that it presumably makes optic-obsessed political writer-types like Matt Bai feel like something other than cheapjack soothsayers – but it's a terribly insufficient way to describe goings-on involving actual human beings. And, of course, it's a pretty weak way to avoid talking about things – from the crudest behavior to the crudest applications of power – that make us uncomfortable.

Yeah, I just wrote all that on the week of the "Pics of Brett Favre's Penis" story. I don't know, either. But as you're about to be reminded, my decisions generally deserve a pretty vigorous questioning. The good news would be that I finally defeated the coin last week, five weeks into the NFL season. The bad news would be that both I and the coin picked poorly even by the standards of inanimate objects. Again, I don't know what to tell you. Sorry? Bet the coin? The limping, Zombie Saints look weirdly terrible? Anyway, as per usual: coin flips by Garey G. Ris, lines by Sportsbook.com, incorrect picks courtesy of my own over-thinking brain-piece.

Week 4 (and overall): David Roth: 5-9 (28-45-3); Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin: 4-10 (39-34-3)

Sunday, October 17
• San Diego Chargers (-8.5) at St. Louis Rams, 1pm – DR: San Diego; ATTLCTDC: St. Louis
• Kansas City Chiefs at Houston Texans (-4.5), 1pm – DR: Kansas City; ATTLCTDC: Houston
• Baltimore Ravens at New England Patriots (-3), 1pm – DR: Baltimore; ATTLCTDC: New England
• Miami Dolphins at Green Bay Packers (Off), 1pm – DR: Miami; ATTLCTDC: Miami
• New Orleans Saints (-4.5) at Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 1pm – DR: New Orleans; ATTLCTDC: Tampa Bay
• Atlanta Falcons at Philadelphia Eagles (-3), 1pm – DR: Atlanta; ATTLCTDC: Atlanta
• Detroit Lions at New York Giants (-10), 1pm – DR: New Jersey G; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey G
• Cleveland Browns at Pittsburgh Steelers (-13.5), 1pm – DR: Pittsburgh; ATTLCTDC: Cleveland
• Seattle Seahawks at Chicago Bears (-6.5), 1pm – DR: Chicago; ATTLCTDC: Chicago
• New York Jets (-3) at Denver Broncos, 4:05pm – DR: New Jersey J; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey J
• Dallas Cowboys at Minnesota Vikings (-1.5), 4:15pm – DR: Minnesota; ATTLCTDC: Minnesota
• Oakland Raiders at San Francisco 49ers (-6.5), 4:15pm – DR: San Francisco; ATTLCTDC: Oakland
• Indianapolis Colts (-3) at Washington Redskins, 8:20pm – DR: Indianapolis; ATTLCTDC: Washington

Monday, October 18
• Tennessee Titans (-3) at Jacksonville Jaguars, 8:30pm – DR: Tennessee; ATTLCTDC: Tennessee

David Roth is a writer from New Jersey who lives in New York. He co-writes the Wall Street Journal's Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can't Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. His favorite Van Halen song is "Hot For Teacher."

Photo by Ken Lund, from Flickr.

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• Minnesota Twins

• Los Angeles Dodgers

• St. Louis Cardinals

• Houston Astros

• Seattle Mariners

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• Baltimore Orioles

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• Cincinnati Reds

• Milwaukee Brewers

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• Toronto Blue Jays

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• Pittsburgh Pirates

Abe Sauer hates success.

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The film and accompanying book, titled "My War," is original; but for many, it may feel like a reboot of a well-known classic.

"My War" is the story of You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International, a "rock and roll" ministry with the mission statement of "Re-shaping America by re-directing our future generations morally and spiritually through education and music."

In the group's own words, the "My War" audience will see "first-hand the message that has been brought to more than 330 high schools across the United States. Watch and see as our ministry is kicked out of schools and followed by police officers, merely for educating rather than indoctrinating." Additionally, "you will see Bradlee's own life story of a fatherless kid as he reaches out to this fatherless generation of youth and tells them of the saving power of Christ."

Bradlee is Bradlee Dean, the star of "My War" and public face of the You Can Run But You Cannot Hide and also the drummer for "Junkyard Prophet," one of the growing number of popular Christian rock bands that adopt the postures of their less-pious peers. Dean is also a host on The Sons of Liberty radio network. Dean most recently made news when he remarked that those who executed homosexuals as policy in foreign countries were "more moral than even the American Christians." That statement earned the ministry the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center in part of its annual Intelligence Report, titled "Pols, Nativists Make Common Cause With Gay-Bashers." Dean defended the comments in a piece titled "Affirming Our Stance on Homosexuality."

The critical focus on Dean is as an unhinged gay-basher. It's not a challenging charge. In additional to the "more moral" comments, Dean recently said of gay-bullying-suicide news, "The state-run media is going after the schools for resisting the homosexual indoctrination. The homosexuals are now blaming – they are playing the victims – the homosexuals are now blaming their stance as the reason that young homosexuals are committing suicide because of the schools' intolerance to the lifestyle of homosexuality."

But Dean is much more than a random homophobe.

If it was ever somehow not déclassé to compare some modern terrible thing to Hitler, it certainly has become so in the last decade. From Bush 2 to Obama, the opposition's speed to declare any sitting power Hitler-like has made actually being Hitler-like much easier.

Dean's characterization of homosexuals as a scapegoat for America's perceived decline is a mirror image of Hitler's use of the Jews for Germany. Just as Hitler railed about Jewish conspiracies, so does Dean point to gays. Dean has said, "On average, they molest 117 people before they're found out. How many kids have been destroyed, how many adults have been destroyed because of crimes against nature?"

Try this: "And I say to the homosexual communities, I love you enough to tell you the truth, but you better get off the kids because, America, they are after your kids." Unlike many other homophobes, Dean has gone beyond classifying gays as sinners; he repeatedly notes that gays are "criminals." Likewise, Hitler classified Jews as lawbreakers, in the beginning referring to them as the "November criminals" and later just "criminals." This manipulation of distinction made anti-semitism digestible by an otherwise reasonable, if religiously predisposed, populace. Taking action against a group based on religious theory is intellectually unjustifiable. But doing so on the basis of jurisprudence? Why, that's just a law-abiding society.

Take Hitler's comment on Jews as criminals and his reasoning that "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord" and compare it to the following You Can Run But You Can't Hide Ministry video reasoning on homosexuals.

Like Hitler, Dean's message is multi-channel, designed to whip the populist froth from whatever angle best fits his audience. Dean's focused propaganda has many mediums: pop culture (his rock band), child indoctrination (the ministry's school event assemblies), church ("Hard Knocks" street ministries), nationalism (pro-military messages) and mass media (Sons of Liberty talk radio).

Of course, Dean wouldn't get anywhere without sympathetic aid from within the mainstream. Dean gladly agrees to be used by media who themselves have an agenda. For example, two years ago The Weekly Standard's senior writer Matt Labash toured school assemblies with Dean. Labash's wet kiss to Dean and his message called criticisms of the band "pejorative" and painted Dean as a righteous Christian rocker, reformed from the bad life. Not once does Labash mention Dean's views on homosexuality.

The Muller Family Theaters corporation, owner of eight movieplexes in Minnesota, rented the space, ten miles from downtown Minneapolis, to Dean, enabling him to put together a professional-appearing movie "premiere" and additional showings (engagements begin October 28th). This appearance of a mainstream product substantiates Dean's message all while filling his 501(c)(3) coffers to the tune of $20 to $40 a seat. We reached out to the theatre chain to ask if it has any policy on the films it shows. A representative told us that Muller Family is "not in a position to tell the public what to watch." Yet, the chain does not show X-rated films and told us it would "maybe" allow an NC-17 picture. The theatre rep said that Muller Family had never heard of Dean and had not been able to preview the film.

It's understandable that the Bradlee-Adolf comparison might be dismissed as a lark, a Godwin's Nazi Law meta-enablement.

So take the below selection of Bradlee Dean and Adolf Hitler quotes and try to correctly attribute them:

1) It's time for everyone in this country to return to God and engage in His battles to take back the land that was entrusted to us.
2) We want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess.
3) It's time to turn back to the One who gave us this blessed nation.
4) We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit.
5) It is plain to see that the judgments of God are upon our country.
6) How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think.
7) Government is to be the force of law, ruling in the positive, by bringing a negative to crime. The whole purpose of government is to maintain peace in the land with righteous judgment.
8) My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers,
9) As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.
10) Christian men and women, in this fight for right you are fighting for your nation, for your liberties, your happiness, and your peace; for unless Christ and His commandments are maintained, these will most certainly be destroyed
11) I felt condemned at every step that I took, and at times, I would even try to ignore my own conscience because it was so overwhelming.
12) In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders.
13) The Jews, who heard and rejected Christ, were destroyed by Titus, and Vespasian his father.
14) They play the victim when they are, in fact, the predator.
15) All at once the Jew also becomes liberal and begins to rave about the necessary progress of mankind.
16) In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections.
17) They know homosexuality is an abomination.

1 Dean; 2 Hitler; 3 Dean; 4 Hitler; 5 Dean; 6 Hitler; 7 Dean; 8 Hitler; 9 Hitler; 10 Dean; 11 Dean; 12 Hitler; 13 Dean; 14 Dean; 15 Hitler; 16 Hitler; 17 Dean

This doesn't mean Bradlee Dean is just like Hitler. That impossible. Hitler didn't have children. Dean has three.

Hitler did not rise to prominence in a vacuum. Along the way he received help from existing politicians such as Eckart, Held and Drexler. As the SPLC noted, Dean's proselytizing has attracted political allies, especially those in his home state of Minnesota. And here is where the You Can Run But You Can't Hide ministry, and Bradlee Dean, go from a merely ambitious social reactionaries to a legitimized movement.

Bradlee Dean and his ministry were invited to the Minnesota state GOP convention. Dean stood with Mike Huckabee at The Minnesota Family Council. Minnesota GOP candidate for governor Tom Emmer donated to the ministry (exceeding legal limits) and has happily accepted the group's not-so-subtle, yet directly unspoken, endorsement, calling the ministry "nice people." Emmer, a state legislator, has penned a bill banning gay marriage. Meanwhile, incumbent Congresswomen Michele Bachmann, herself a believer in the ministry's message of criminalized homosexuality, has openly prayed for Dean's ministry.

And yes, in the photo below, that is Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty's arm around the ministry's Sons of Liberty Propaganda Minister radio host Jake McMillen.

Of these rather powerful pols, at least Emmer and Bachmann will appear in the film of Dean's struggle to "fight the good fight" and "bring us back to our foundation." "I'm not trying to draw you in by the fact that there might some celebs...," joked Dean about the film during a recent radio program, before confirming that both Tom Emmer and Michele Bachmann would appear in "My War."

Emmer, Bachmann and Pawlenty all ignored repeated requests for comment.

Regarding the Hitler coincidences, a spokesperson for You Can Run But You Can't Hide told The Awl: "Are you trying parallel something that makes no parallel? My War is this generation who needs to be taught the Constitution." [sic throughout.]

Dean himself told us he was not sure about his plans after the film's release, but he said he won't rule out a run for office of some kind in the future.

Asked if he's taking "My War" to other cities, Dean told us, "That's up to the people, and the response that we get."

Add Dump Bachmann and the Minnesota Independent to your RSS and regular reading list for excellent reporting on Bradlee Dean and his ministry.

Abe Sauer is still working on that book.

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