#MEDIA DOES NOT HAVE TO BE INHERENTLY POLITICAL IN ORDER TO BE VALUABLE

[voidartisan]

you know what screw it i'm gonna say it:

every time i come across a post claiming that andor is the only good live action star wars content we've gotten since 2005 it makes me want to fight someone. i'm ready to start throwing box sets of the hobbit lotr and the silm at people. i am going to Scream

[samwisethewitch]

Cults? In my life? It’s more likely than you think.

In my last post, I talked about how the Law of Attraction and Christian prosperity gospel both use the same thought control techniques as cults. I’ve received several public and private replies to that post: some expressing contempt for “sheeple” who can be lead astray by cults, and others who say my post made them scared that they might be part of a cult without knowing it.

I want to address both of those types of replies in this post. I want to talk about what a cult really looks like, and how you can know if you’re dealing with one.

If you type the word “cult” into Google Images, it will bring up lots of photos of people with long hair, wearing all white, with their hands raised in an expression of ecstasy.

Most modern cults do not look anything like this.

Modern cultists look a lot like everyone else. One of the primary goals of most cults is recruitment, and it’s hard to get people to join your cause if they think you and your group are all Kool-Aid-drinking weirdos. The cults that last are the ones that manage to convince people that they’re just like everyone else — a little weird maybe, but certainly not dangerous.

In the book The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, author Jeff Guinn says, “In years to come, Jim Jones would frequently be compared to murderous demagogues such as Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. These comparisons completely misinterpret, and historically misrepresent, the initial appeal of Jim Jones to members of Peoples Temple. Jones attracted followers by appealing to their better instincts.”

You might not know Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple by name, but you’ve probably heard their story. They’re the Kool-Aid drinkers I mentioned earlier. Jones and over 900 of his followers, including children, committed mass suicide by drinking Flavor Aid mixed with cyanide.

In a way, the cartoonish image of cults in popular media has helped real-life cults to stay under the radar and slip through people’s defenses.

In her book Recovering Agency: Lifting the Veil of Mormon Mind Control, Luna Lindsey says: “These groups use a legion of persuasive techniques in unison, techniques that strip away the personality to build up a new group pseudopersonality. New members know very little about the group’s purpose, and most expectations remain unrevealed. People become deeply involved, sacrificing vast amounts of time and money, and investing emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, and socially.”

Let’s address some more common myths about cults:

Myth #1: All cults are Satanic or occult in nature. This mostly comes from conservative Christians, who may believe that all non-Christian religions are inherently cultish in nature and are in league with the Devil. This is not the case — most non-Christians don’t even believe in the Devil, much less want to sign away their souls to him. Many cults use Christian theology to recruit members, and some of these groups (Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) have become popular enough to be recognized as legitimate religions. Most cults have nothing to do with magic or the occult.

Myth #2: All cults are religious. This is also false. While some cults do use religion to recruit members or push an agenda, many cults have no religious or spiritual element. Political cults are those founded around a specific political ideology. Author and cult researcher Janja Lalich is a former member of an American political cult founded on the principles of Marxism. There are also “cults of personality” built around political figures and celebrities, such as Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Donald Trump. In these cases, the cult is built around hero worship of the leader — it doesn’t really matter what the leader believes or does.

Myth #3: All cults are small fringe groups. Cults can be any size. Some cults have only a handful of members — it’s even possible for parents to use thought control techniques on their children, essentially creating a cult that consists of a single family.  There are some cults that have millions of members (see previous note about Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses).

Myth #4: All cults live on isolated compounds away from mainstream society. While it is true that all cults isolate their members from the outside world, very few modern cults use physical isolation. Many cults employ social isolation, which makes members feel separate from mainstream society. Some cults do this by encouraging their followers to be “In the world but not of the world,” or encouraging them to keep themselves “pure.”

Myth #5: Only stupid, gullible, and/or mentally ill people join cults. Actually, according to Luna Lindsey, the average cult member is of above-average intelligence. As cult expert Steven Hassan points out, “Cults intentionally recruit ‘valuable’ people—they go after those who are intelligent, caring, and motivated. Most cults do not want to be burdened by unintelligent people with serious emotional or physical problems.” The idea that only stupid or gullible people fall for thought control is very dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that “it could never happen to me.” This actually prevents intelligent people from thinking critically about the information they’re consuming and the groups they’re associating with, which makes them easier targets for cult recruitment.

So, now that we have a better idea of what a cult actually looks like, how do you know if you or someone you know is in one?

A good rule of thumb is to compare the group’s actions and teachings to Steven Hassan’s BITE Model. Steven Hassan is an expert on cult psychology, and most cult researchers stand by this model. From Hassan’s website, freedomofmind.com: “Based on research and theory by Robert Jay Lifton, Margaret Singer, Edgar Schein, Louis Jolyon West, and others who studied brainwashing in Maoist China as well as cognitive dissonance theory by Leon Festinger, Steven Hassan developed the BITE Model to describe the specific methods that cults use to recruit and maintain control over people. ‘BITE’ stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control.”

Behavior Control may include…

Telling you how to behave, and enforcing behavior with rewards and punishments. (Rewards may be nonphysical concepts like “salvation” or “enlightenment,” or social rewards like group acceptance or an elevated status within the group. Punishments may also be nonphysical, like “damnation,” or may be social punishments like judgement from peers or removal from the group.)

Dictating where and with whom you live. (This includes pressure to move closer to other group members, even if you will be living separately.)

Controlling or restricting your sexuality. (Includes enforcing chastity or abstinence and/or coercion into non-consensual sex acts.)

Controlling your clothing or hairstyle. (Even if no one explicitly tells you, you may feel subtle pressure to look like the rest of the group.)

Restricting leisure time and activities. (This includes both demanding participation in frequent group activities and telling you how you should spend your free time.)

Requiring you to seek permission for major decisions. (Again, even if you don’t “need” permission, you may feel pressure to make decisions that will be accepted by the group.)

And more.

Information Control may include…

Withholding or distorting information. (This may manifest as levels of initiation, with only the “inner circle” or upper initiates being taught certain information.)

Forbidding members from speaking with ex-members or other critics.

Discouraging members from trusting any source of information that isn’t approved by the group’s leadership.

Forbidding members from sharing certain details of the group’s beliefs or practice with outsiders.

Using propaganda. (This includes “feel good” media that exists only to enforce the group’s message.)

Using information gained in confession or private conversation against you.

Gaslighting to make members doubt their own memory. (“I never said that,” “You’re remembering that wrong,” “You’re confused,” etc.)

Requiring you to report your thoughts, feelings, and activities to group leaders or superiors.

Encouraging you to spy on other group members and report their “misconduct.”

And more.

Thought Control may include…

Black and White, Us vs. Them, or Good vs. Evil thinking.

Requiring you to change part of your identity or take on a new name. (This includes only using last names, as well as titles like “Brother,” “Sister,” and “Elder.”)

Using loaded languages and cliches to stop complex thought. (This is the difference between calling someone a “former member” and calling the same person an “apostate” or “covenant breaker.”)

Inducing hypnotic or trance states including prayer, meditation, singing hymns, etc.

Using thought-stopping techniques to prevent critical thinking. (“If you ever find yourself doubting, say a prayer to distract yourself!”)

Allowing only positive thoughts or speech.

Rejecting rational analysis and criticism both from members and from those outside the group.

And more.

Emotional Control may include…

Inducing irrational fears and phobias, especially in connection with leaving the group. (This includes fear of damnation, fear of losing personal value, fear of persecution, etc.)

Labeling some emotions as evil, worldly, sinful, low-vibrational, or wrong.

Teaching techniques to keep yourself from feeling certain emotions like anger or sadness.

Promoting feelings of guilt, shame, and unworthiness. (This is often done by holding group members to impossible standards, such as being spiritually “pure” or being 100% happy all the time.)

Showering members and new recruits with positive attention — this is called “love bombing.” (This can be anything from expensive gifts to sexual favors to simply being really nice to newcomers.)

Shunning members who disobey orders or disbelieve the group’s teachings.

Teaching members that there is no happiness, peace, comfort, etc. outside of the group.

And more.

If a group ticks most or all of the boxes in any one of these categories, you need to do some serious thinking about whether or not that group is good for your mental health. If a group is doing all four of these, you’re definitely dealing with a cult and need to get out as soon as possible.

These techniques can also be used by individual people in one-on-one relationships. A relationship or friendship where someone tries to control your behavior, thoughts, or emotions is not healthy and, again, you need to get out as soon as possible.

Obviously, not all of these things are inherently bad. Meditation and prayer can be helpful on their own, and being nice to new people is common courtesy. The problem is when these acts become part of a bigger pattern, which enforces someone else’s control over your life.

A group that tries to tell you how to think or who to be is bad for your mental health, your personal relationships, and your sense of self. When in doubt, do what you think is best for you — and always be suspicious of people or groups who refuse to be criticized.

[hairtusk]

Hi! Sorry if this is a weird question, feel free to ignore it. I thought to find to you because you are always level-headed and insightful in your literary analysis and I could use some help. I recently found out about Anne Sexton and the abuse she perpetrated against her daughter. I deeply love her as an author but now I don’t know how to reconcile this fact with how meaningful her work is to me. How do you do it? Do you have any suggestion? Thank you so much in advance. I love your blog.

Hello! Firstly, I'd like to thank you for how polite this ask is. Generally, people come into my inbox with all guns blazing at the mention of a controversial writer - this was genuinely a breath of fresh air.

Secondly, your question isn't a weird one at all, I promise - this was something I used to struggle with very deeply a few years ago.

I found out about the actions of Anne Sexton the very same day that I bought her collected works of poetry. Due to this, my perception of her work has always been coloured through this lense. At this time, I was quite mournful about this. Now, I think it was a blessing, because it taught me something very important.

In the western, Christian-influenced artistic tradition, we have an association between beauty and morality. A beautiful person is inherently a good person. A creator of beautiful art, therefore, must also be a morally good person, to have the capability to produce such work. Additionally, in the past decade or so, there has been a huge fixation on identity and biography when it comes to artists. Who a writer is as a person must heavily influence their work - it must be drawn from their life, from their morals, from their emotions. Poetry especially is relegated to a non-art; it becomes a memoir, true to life.

One of the most important things I've done as a reader in the last few years is to unlearn these internalised biases I held when it came to literature. The subjects and themes a writer tackles in their work are not reflective of the writer as a person. They are an artist, working on a craft, not a person in a confession booth. They are a flawed human being, not an untouchable angel being sang to by the muses. Keeping this in mind is imperative when I read literature these days.

Additionally, I've tried to be very careful about attaching affection to artists and celebrities because I am fond of their work. It's an old cliché, but an artist is not their work. They are separate entities. In the age of social media, when we have the-artist-as-consumable-product, the fictional protagonist as a mirror for the reader to project themselves onto, this line becomes blurred. It can still be blurry for me, even now. However, literary critical thinking asks us only to recognise that while a writer may inflict their flaws onto their work (i.e., a writer's prejudices making themselves known in their texts), they are, ultimately, entirely distinct from one another. We can love the work that an artist has created while recognising its flaws, and recognising that its creator was not someone we admire.

When everything is said and done, Anne Sexton is dead. She has been dead for nearly fifty years. Buying her books does not fund to her life, allowing her to continue the abuse she perpetuated. She does not continue to win awards. We can acknowledge that she created valuable, and beautiful, works of literature, while at the same time respecting her victim and listening to her story. We have to hold both of these things to be true at the same time, in order to have a clear picture of her. Moral purity is not something we can expect from any living human being. Writers are human: they can be admired for the work they create, but it isn't helpful to us or to them to place them on a pedestal.

[justforbooks]

Perhaps the single most lucid, succinct, and profoundly terrifying analysis of social media ever created for mass consumption, Jeff Orlowski’s “The Social Dilemma” does for Facebook what his previous documentaries “Chasing Ice” and “Chasing Coral” did for climate change (read: bring compelling new insight to a familiar topic while also scaring the absolute shit out of you). And while the film covers — and somehow manages to contain — a staggering breadth of topics and ramifications, one little sentence is all it takes to lay out the means and ends of the crisis at hand: Russia didn’t hack Facebook, Russia used Facebook.

That may not be a mind-blowing idea for anyone who’s been raised on the internet, but it would be wrong to think that Orlowski’s film is only speaking to the back of the class. While “The Social Dilemma” is relevant to every person on the planet, and should be legible enough to even the most technologically oblivious types (the Amish, the U.S. Senate, and so forth), its target demographic is very online types who think they understand the information age too well to be taken advantage of. That’s zoomers, millennials, and screen junkies of any stripe who wouldn’t have the faintest interest in a finger-wagging documentary about how they should spend more time outside.

Taking a top-down, inside out approach to the basic nature of the social media experiment, Orlowski’s film doesn’t waste any time in proving its bonafides (and using them to strike fear into your heart). It begins with an ominous nugget of wisdom from Sophocles, who would have crushed it on Twitter: “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” From there, Orlowski introduces viewers to some of the most worried-looking white people you’re likely to find these days: The designers, engineers, and executives who invented social media, and then quit when they began to understand the existential threat it posed to all civilization. The guy who invented the “like” button. An ex-department head at Instagram. Even one of the techies responsible for Gmail and Google Drive. As annoying as it can be when someone tells you to quit Facebook, it’s hard to ignore someone who’s actually quit Facebook.

Orlowski’s star interviewee, however, is a guy who’s often referred to as “Silicon Valley’s conscience.” His name is Tristan Harris, he’s the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, and his measured alarmism serves as a worried voice of reason throughout the film as “The Social Dilemma” strives to bridge the gap between abstract threats and direct consequences. The most overarching of those macro concerns is a free-to-use business model that coerces people into betraying their own value. As the saying goes (and is quoted here): “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.”

With the help of articulate testimony, illuminating visual aids, and a well-crafted thesis that elegantly articulates the relationship between persuasive technology and human behavior, Orlowski fortifies the familiar argument that addiction isn’t a side effect of social media, but rather the industry’s business model. Our data is used as a currency for these companies, but our time is a far more precious commodity — how much of our lives can they get us to forfeit over to them?

The more time we spend on social media, the more valuable our human futures become; the more valuable our human futures become, the more that advertisers are willing to pay for them. And how does a company like Facebook or YouTube (which is technically Google) convince us to spend more time on their platforms? They change our fundamental perception of reality, as The Algorithm is designed to populate things into our feeds and queues that will excite/agitate us towards engagement, pull us deeper into our respective rabbit holes, and silo us all into our separate realities. It’s surveillance capitalism run amok, as well as a peerlessly effective recipe for extremism.

Orlowski, recognizing that diagnosing the problem on such a profound scale is enough to make even the most rational of people sound like they’re suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, devises a bold and semi-successful way of making these enormous concepts feel more life-sized. Every so often, Orlowski cuts away to the scripted tale of an average, middle-class American family in order to more practically illustrate the effect that social media has on our lives. And by “our lives,” this critic means to stress that “The Social Dilemma” is more interested in Facebook’s impact on the average teenager than it is in — say — Facebook’s impact on the genocidal violence against Muslim Rohyingas in Myanmar. But Orlowski knows his audience.

“Booksmart” actor Skyler Gisondo plays a high school kid named Ben who’s addicted to his phone, “Moonrise Kingdom” breakout Kara Hayward is his concerned older sister, and — in a touch of absolute genius — “Mad Men” star Vincent Kartheiser plays several human manifestations of The Algorithm itself, selling Ben reasons to stay on his phone like some kind of dystopian Pete Campbell. These sequences first arrive with the queasy awkwardness of an after school special, and seem determined to make teenagers roll their eyeballs right out of their heads. But if these dramatizations can be more than a bit too on the nose, they’re redeemed by an emergent — and very amusing — self-awareness that reflects our own; a certain level of irony is required to get through to people who regularly tweet about how much they hate Twitter (aka “this website” aka “this hellsite”).

The least effective of these moments can make it feel as though “The Social Dilemma” underestimates the persuasiveness of its own arguments, but the most valuable passages help to illustrate one particularly alarming sound byte from elsewhere in the film: “We’re so worried about tech overpowering human strength that we don’t pay attention to tech overpowering human weakness.” It’s helpful to see how social media can inflame our inherent need for approval, and discourage people from taking risks that might alienate the online community. It’s convincing to see The Algorithm alert Ben to his ex-girlfriend’s new relationship so that he’ll spend more time sifting through her photos, and — in a frustratingly reductive way — watch The Algorithm populate Ben’s feed with videos that radicalize him into the fold of a political movement called “The Extreme Center,” a cute touch that nevertheless draws a false equivalency between left and right.

Is “The Social Dilemma” persuasive enough to convince a MAGA zealot to stop binge-watching Ben Shapiro nonsense and buy a subscription to a newspaper? It’s hard to say. But the film will definitely make you more cognizant of your own behavior — not just of how you use the internet, but how the internet uses you. And it will do so in a way that feels less like an intervention than it does a wake-up call; Orlowski and his subjects recognize how the internet has created a simultaneous utopia and dystopia, and they aren’t under any delusions that we’re able to wish it away. Their documentary isn’t instructive so much as directional, and thereby most fascinating for the implications it leaves you to consider on your own time.

How has social media shaped the way we think about (overlapping) things like politics, race, and entertainment? What impact does siloing people into their own realities have on our faith in empathy, objective truth, and some kind of shared understanding? And does the isolated and algorithmically-programmed nature of streaming video make it less of an alternative to the theatrical experience than its antithesis? As human futures become human presents, these questions will only grow more urgent. In the meantime: Quit Facebook, don’t click on Instagram ads, and — for the love of God — make sure that your Twitter feed is set to chronological order instead of “showing you the best tweets first,” because the only hope we have left lies in the difference between what you and The Algorithm consider to be good content.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[radiqueer]

Rai@Tired | raikamudapon

[link] Tbh the discourse around the term "fujoshi" is just motivated by shaming women for their interests and sexuality, and specifically trying to seem woke by taking Japanese fan girls down a peg.

Yalls need to stop with that orientalism and colonizer attitudes. 

[link] Ok so, One of the biggest differences of how I see Japanese people digesting media and how Americans digest media is the ability to separate oneself from the topic. 

Japanese people are used to living with duality. The culture of Japan is all about honne and tatemae, and while a lot of Americans think of tatemae as situational lying, it's a specific form of communication that adds a buffer of space between people. Sometimes that buffer is helpful and sometimes it isn't but that's not what we're discussing today. 

In the same vein, Japanese fans consume media with that buffer space, and you see the difference in fandom spaces very keenly. For example, Japanese cosplayers don't tend to roleplay. I feel like the community discourages it, especially in public spaces because the idea is that you are not acting as a character or placing yourself in the character, you are borrowing a character to temporarily express yourself. In america you see encouragement of becoming the character and more closely associating with them in a way you don't really see in Japan. With cosplay, a lot of original outfits with characters isn't as widely accepted, and people are encouraged to add warning tags to heavily modified designs or non-cannon outfits. There's often a buffer between self expression and character expression, and Japanese people in general tend to have a clearer cut between fiction and reality. Americans go the opposite direction, and put themselves personally in to their fandoms. Any criticism or portrayal of a character isn't about the character, it's about *them*. 

Bl for many fujyoshi is a way to explore various topics about sex and gender, and have that safety barrier of "this is fiction that has nothing to do with reality". Theres even a famous phrase in bl circles of Japan, which is "BL is fantasy." People arent consuming bl content because they want to it be realistic. With this genre, a lot of American's first exposure to this culture is through groups that carry these Japanese ideas, especially that fiction is not about reality. There's a strong culture in fujyo circles in Japan to keep fujyo media hidden from from minors and uninterested people. 

This isn't because gay adjacent media is shameful and should be hidden, but because aside from keeping 18+ content away from minors, the content is inherently not for the benefit of non-fujyoshi, or people looking for canon content. Bl is a fantasy exploration of pre-established media, an additional step away from reality. And you see this influence in american bl fans as well. Most responsible adults discourage 18 under people from interacting with 18+ content. It is going to be much rarer for 18+ bl content to be presented to minors with no prior warning then for het media or media that explicitly sexually objectifies women. 

 And I think in conversations about this topic is where you see not just misogyny and sexual policing of woman come in, but a lot of conversations and ideas revolve around how "gross" and "strange" and "foreign compared to woke Americans" the entire culture of fujyoshi is. 

Trying to insist that Americans determine what definitions of language around a culture not originating or centered in America and sentiments about bl are "appropriate" is colonizing attitudes. It stems from the belief that the cultural values of the colonizer are inherently superior to another country. And treating the norms of a foreign sub-culture that was not only established in Japan but continues to flourish and be the center of media produced by that subculture as gross or strange is honestly tinged with Orientalism of the "sexual far east". It's hard to say that the image that all fujyoshi are women does not influence these ideas as well. 

So let's delve in to relations between Japan and America for a hot second. Japan and America have a very unique relationship, especially for countries that are separated by the biggest ocean in the world. Without examining the entire history of the two countries, I want to focus on two points that I think shape the way Americans interact with Japanese media. First, America with it's "black ships" was the one to end Japan's Sakoku policy. They forcefully demanded Japan end it's strict regulations concerning interaction with other countries, start trading with various countries, and to open up to western influences. 

This *greatly* changed the structure of Japan, and honestly the unequal treaties and inability of the Tokugawa shogunate to manage their relations with the west lead to the end of 264 years of governance. (The Meiji restoration is exciting, please read about it.) 

The second topic you don't see many people discuss is the occupation of Japan by American(and English) forces from 1945–1952. While a lot of modernization and things that benefited common people occurred during this time, there was also wide spread instances of violence and rape. You still see generational hurt and mistrust in places like Okinawa, Sasebo, and Yokosuka where American navy bases were placed(and still exist today). If you can stomach it, I would recommend looking up statistics and reports, but I warn you the occupation was nasty business for women. 

So what does this all have to do with modern fujyoshi? So in both of these time periods, prostitutes and courtesans were an essential part of political interactions. Many Americans gained their stereotypes about Japanese women through these encounters. Specifically these interactions were sexual or tinged with the sexual availability of these women, and looking at the increased rapes during the occupation once American GI focused brothels were abolished, you can see how this lens shaped Americans opinions of Japanese women. The story of madame butterfly is only unusual in that it gives the woman in it any agency in their interaction with american men. 

So with this in mind, I think it's easy to see where a lot of stereotypes, specifically sexual stereotypes about Japan and Japanese women come from. America is used to looking at Japan as "the weird strange place of loose morals and loose women of strange sexual proclivities." This is shown how strong the influence of Japanese women as "geisha girls" is to this day, and it tints any conversation of about women and sexuality in Japan. 

In modern day, you can see this carry over in to how people look at Japanese idols and women in anime. I would even say that it's evolved to infantilize Japanese women and the view of how Japanese women are expected to behave. A lot of other people have written literature and reading about fujyoshi and how it relates to the sexual liberation of women(without necessarily involving men or gay men) so I won't go in to that here, but there will be links at the end of the thread. 

What I want to talk about is how historically America is used to putting itself front and center about any topic about the culture of Japan, and how the views Americans have about morality is considered to be "better" and more "woke"... even without context or how those sentiments shape the ideas of foreign people and foreign based media. But we also have to address how Americans have a huge problem with not being the expert voice in any conversation. 

Over the last week, a significant number of Americans have been extremely comfortable in putting the power to decide what Japanese words mean and what Japanese sub-cultures are in their own hands, sometimes even attempting to remove my Japanese voice and background from me in an effort to center their own opinions. And honestly this isn't anything new. Americans are so comfortable with thinking of Asian voices as less influential then their own, that it doesn't stop people from thinking they are the experts about a topic that *does not come from their culture*. You see it with food, you see it with fashion, you see it with everything from equating Asians to *white lite* to assuming that Asians don't exist as mixed people but simply as a monolith. 

There are so many people who were comfortable with placing themselves as experts in a sub-culture of Japanese origin that they knew nothing about, simply because they assumed it corresponded with one aspect of themselves. And it is hard to say that the confidence that these people placed themselves and their ignorance in the middle of the topic did not stem from Americans feeling of ownership over everything they enjoy. 

The people supporting these people may have thought they were being good allies by blindly supporting them, but I saw very few people bothering to further their knowledge past the loose collection of stereotypes and horror stories I saw from the internet. Some of these feelings of superiority probably stem from the fact that these people assumed that all fujyoshi or bl content consumers are women. Misogyny isn't just the expression of hate towards women, but also the idea that non-women inherently have a more valuable opinion then woman, or that women's ideas are inherently less valuable then anyone elses. 

I saw a lot of misogyny this week, both internal and external. There was hate from many people, for the idea that people they assumed women were thriving in a sub-culture that does not involve real gay men. I saw people who could not imagine that men were not at the center of a subculture created and supported by both women and queer people. I even saw examples of women bringing up their experiences as a gender they do not identify with in order to raise their voice against other assumed women. But the voices that attempted to de-legitimize assumed women grew even louder once they were speaking against Asian people, because there is an inherent assumption that their views are qualified, their opinions more valid, their morals better. 

And honestly, this isn't just an issue with white and eurocentrific supremacy, this is an issue of American supremacy. 

 And that is certainly something we need to talk about.

link: thread by @futekiya

link: thread by @dionysiaca

link: thread by @raikamudapon

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[reformatting mine]

[adeliriouswanderer]

American Fascism, Racism, and the Trump Cult

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything on policy or politics. Quarantine has left me with what seems like an infinite amount of time to reflect on our countries current state of affairs—and as cliché as this sounds, it feels as if we are living in dark times indeed.

Since our current regime began in 2016, all of the progressive policies of the Obama era have been eradicated by an egotistical fascist. Far-right and white supremacist ideologies are being pushed as the new normal by those who fear that their position of power is being threatened by minorities and anyone left of center. A center that is very quickly skewing farther and farther right on the political spectrum. Folks who hold these far-right ideologies have historically been threatened by people of color, folks who identify as LGBTQIA, feminists, women’s rights champions, and others who voice opinions that are different than the rights self-absorbed narrative. Especially when these folks attempt to find seats at the decision-making table.

Our current regime fears these opinions so much that they attempt to silence anyone who speaks out against their clearly fascist policies and statements by convincing their base that our voices and opinions are being incited by “fake news” or as Trump loves to call it, the “lamestream media”. This regime has convinced it’s cult-like followers that any media coverage that does not stroke the ego of the POTUS or any coverage that speaks out against his archaic, and often false views/statements, are untrue accusations and that he is being unfairly targeted. Trump continuously lies to his base and the American people, and when he is called out on his lies, both he and his base scream fake news. The POTUS has convinced his base that democrats are sheep to the media who are trying their best to undermine all of the “great” work he is doing for Americans. Despite Trump not keeping his promises to his base, they still follow him with what feels like a Jim Jones cult mindset.  Take this video where trump easily brainwashes his followers into ignoring how his he is lining his and other billionaires pockets by attempting to convince his base, who largely consist of poor/working-class white folks, that they are the “elite”:  

They see no wrong in Trump's behavior. How is that Trump has convinced millions of people to blindly follow his every whim? You see, as badly as it pains me to state this, Trump is not the cause of these deeply rooted, bigoted, ideologies. They have been around since the founding of America. Like a festering cancer that sometimes quietly goes into remission, but is still there, waiting for the body to become weakened so that it can make a reappearance. Folks have long held onto their bigoted ways, Trump simply gave a platform where these ideologies could be voiced and he emboldened those who held them to speak out louder than ever. After having a president in office that championed for the rights of minorities, the right was fearful of being forgotten and worried that their ideologies would be silenced. This fear ultimately led right-wing voters to vote for and blindly follow anyone spoke out in favor of their bigoted beliefs. And trump happened to be the loudest and most aggressive at the time. The right touted his down to earthiness and non-political way of speaking. Trump is praised for “telling it like it is” because for a while, at the turn of the century, white folks seemed partly scared to fully voice what they really thought about anyone who wasn’t white and straight. That’s not the case anymore.

I find it appalling that in 2020, I can scroll through the comment section on any article related to race and find a plethora of comments written by white right-wings and conservatives insinuating that there is no race problem in America. They state racism does not exist; they unquestionably believe that there is a level playing field between white folks and people of color, and that white privilege does not exist.  Much like Social Darwinist, these folks believe that people of color and folks experiencing poverty are inherently responsible for their less than status in society. That they’re lazy and unwilling to pull themselves up by the bootstraps because it’s more convenient for them to live off of the government-- like the infamously stereotypical welfare queen, a term coined in 1974, by George Bliss of the Chicago Tribune in his articles about Linda Taylor.

These folks fail to realize that people of color and people experiencing poverty are a result of systematic and institutional racism designed to enslave people of color and keep them from sitting at the decision-making table. Further, they don’t understand how poverty rolls off the back of parents and onto children—how hard it is for children to break intergenerational cycles. Take Kaitlin Bennet, the infamous gun girl of Kent State. She hosts a youtube channel where her main “goal” is to “expose the corruption and demoralization” of the “liberal left.” In this following clip, Kaitlin states that there is no racism in America because she is surrounded by people of color on a daily basis, as if their very existence is somehow justification as to why racism doesn’t exist. She states that some lives are inherently more valuable than others and that those who are experiencing homelessness should get a job. When Kaitlin realized she had couldn’t win a baseless argument against two obviously educated college students, she had to resort to personal attacks against James's sexuality. She’s edited out the word racist or racism from her videos because apparently those words demonetize her youtube videos and she loses money for including those words. 

Let’s break down one of the systems that these folks so eagerly deny and blindly ignore-- the prison industrial complex. In the 80s, Reagan turned the metaphorical “war on drugs” into an actual initiative that was put forth by a seemingly racist governmental body whose aim was to create a caste system to ensure people of color would never rise out of poverty. While Raegan solidified these new forms of discrimination against people of color, it was Nixon who set the stage for the systematic incarceration of black and brown people through his Southern Strategy. As civil rights activists worked to dismantle the Jim Crow laws of the south, Nixon and other politicians began to create a strategy that would ensure votes from whites who aligned with both the conservative republican party and the left-leaning democratic party.

The “Southern Strategy” was ultimately a political movement that aimed to garner votes from white Americans from both sides of the political spectrum by antagonizing racialized fears in the white populace. The campaign painted an image that portrayed people of color as deserving of being poor and uneducated-- it pathologized them as criminals and deserving of their second-class place in society because they simply could not rise above their uncivilized ways. Michelle Alexander states:

The racialized nature of this imagery became a crucial resource for conservatives, who succeeded in using law and order rhetoric in their effort to mobilize the resentment of white working-class voters, many of whom felt threatened by the sudden progress of African Americans.

This campaign ultimately led to Reagan’s 1982 War on Drugs, and his later establishment of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which were enacted through his Anti-Drug Abuse Act of1986. After Raegan’s enactment of AABA, the numbers of incarcerated black and Hispanic men skyrocketed creating an overpopulated prison system that led the way for privatization. Republicans laid the foundation for mass incarceration of people of color, and democrats solidified the systemic discrimination and oppression that would soon follow a person who was formerly incarcerated throughout their life.

The Clinton (D) administration enacted laws banning drug offenders and felons from receiving public assistance in the form of financial aid or food stamps, denying them the ability to public housing, and stripping them of their right to vote. These combined laws on part of both democrats and republicans led to the creation of a caste system that created a populace of second-class citizens, who were stripped of their most basic rights—this group was disproportionately made up of people of color. Less than 5% of the world's population, has nearly 25% of the world's incarcerated population. Black people make up about 13 percent of the U.S population and 31 percent of those incarcerated for drug use—Latinos make up an additional 18 percent of the total U.S population and account for 20 percent of those incarcerated for drug use. It is important to note that crime is equally distributed between all races, but the impact of policies of the 1980s and 1990s has been anything but evenly distributed-- black men are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than white men and nearly a third of young black men are under criminal justice system control.

These laws have persisted throughout the last three decades and allow for a system that systematically discriminates against an entire sub-group of individuals. When formerly incarcerated people are released from prison they have very little support from institutions designed to provide help to the most vulnerable populations in the U.S. They typically can not get into public housing and private landlords can legally turn them away citing their criminal history as a reason. Formerly incarcerated persons cannot receive federal financial aid to further their education-- and if they do manage to pay for school, most jobs will not even look at their resume, much less hire them because of their felon status. Further, formerly incarcerated persons cannot receive public assistance benefits such as food stamps. A lack of social support leaves these individuals at a high risk of reoffending just so they can survive in the outside world, which ultimately locks them into a brutal cycle of flowing in and out of the prison industrial complex.

It seemed like during the Obama era, there was hope; a hope that our country could heal from our divisive history of viewing anyone other than white straight cis men who are most valued, followed by white straight cis women, as something other than less than. Because, let’s be honest, many folks along all lines of the political spectrum have never fully respected the opinions and lives of people of color, LGBTQIA folks, immigrants, etc. We have been and still are, just tolerated. That’s why Obama was a breath of fresh air. He attempted, and sometimes succeeded, in eradicating archaic policies like the militaries don’t ask don’t tell policy, championed for the rights of minorities and immigrants through bills like DACA, attempted to ensure those who were poor had access to health care. President Obama launched the My Brother’s Keeper initiative on February 27, 2014, to address persistent opportunity gaps faced by boys and young men of color and ensure that all young people could reach their full potential. These were just a few of the many ways Obama worked to level the playing field for those who were not born into the western version of the genetic lottery. 

What is it going to take to heal our country and end these systems of violence against black and brown people? When are we going to step up and not give media attention and not vote in folks who are so clearly bigoted to positions where they can continue to marginalize already vulnerable populations? When will this hate for those viewed as other, less than, die out? Is this our new reality for the unforeseeable future? The biggest question of all is: when will the right figure out that Trump doesn’t have any of their best interest in mind? When will they realize that he’s sitting on one of his many gold toilets and shitting on America?

I want to live in a country where equity is at the forefront of our minds; where people strive to ensure all of their neighbors have equal opportunity regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or class. We must continue to use our voices to speak up for the oppressed and vulnerable, and VOTE for folks who believe in an equal and just society. Will 2020 usher in voices into the political sphere that are representative of folks from all walks of life, or will it be the same bullshit we’ve had for nearly 244 years since America was founded? 

[berniesrevolution]

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Once upon a time, we almost solved climate change, but then human nature got in the way. This is the thesis of novelist Nathaniel Rich’s new article on climate change, comprising an entire issue of the New York Times Magazine, entitled “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.”

The decade in question is the 1980s, when, in Rich’s telling, a “handful of people” — a small group of scientists and policymakers, based entirely in the United States — nobly tried to save the rest of us from the doom now approaching. The story follows the environmental lobbyist Rafe Pomerance and the climate scientist James Hansen as they try to raise the alarm about the greenhouse effect, with help from some surprising allies — the occasional Republican senator and concerned representatives of oil companies. The climax comes in 1989 when the United States, under the “environmental president” George H. W. Bush, torpedoes a promising effort to reach an international agreement to reduce carbon emissions.

From this narrow look at a brief period of American history, Rich draws the conclusion that we are all — “we” as in humanity, “we” as in the human species — to blame for the catastrophe that we failed to prevent. Interspersed with pictures of our beautiful, wounded planet, the thesis is laid out in stark pull quotes — “All the facts were known, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.”

It is not the right conclusion. The 1980s were an important decade, but not for the reasons Rich thinks. He’s rightly gotten flak for letting the fossil-fuel industry and Republicans off the hook. But even beyond that, his narrative misses what actually happened in the decade in question: the eighties were when the new right consolidated power and limited democratic control over economic processes in order to reorganize capitalism in service of renewed growth. To turn around and lay the blame on democracy is perverse.

Rich strains mightily throughout the piece to tell a story about climate that will seem revelatory, but mostly he just comes across as naïve. In Rich’s telling, Margaret Thatcher cares about climate change because she studied chemistry as an undergraduate; a handful of Republicans’ occasional support for some kind of action on climate change renders the entire party blameless; and the occasional smooth-talking oil industry executive means that fossil-fuel companies once acted in good faith.

It’s not that the oil industry is inherently evil in the way some other industry isn’t. Like all corporations, oil, gas, and coal companies are driven by the need to make a profit, and they act accordingly. It just so happens that the fossil-fuel industry traffics in a very valuable commodity with very high social and environmental costs — costs that it does not want to pay, and that it cannot afford to. Climate change is the most costly of all.

Capitalism, meanwhile, is mentioned only once — by, of all people, an Exxon representative who acknowledges that the free market may be flawed and pledges support for clean energy, two years before he announces that Exxon will in fact be doubling down on its traditional oil and gas investments.

It’s clear from Rich’s own reporting that the industry has only ever been proactive when state regulation seemed imminent. Oil executives are explicit about this: Rich cites a memo from a researcher at Exxon stating that “[i]t behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive program because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed.’’

The same thing happened a few years later in the late 1980s, when some momentum built around a climate bill; it happened again in the mid 2000s, when another bipartisan climate bill was on the horizon. Whenever it looks like climate change will start costing them money, that is, companies either try to get ahead of regulations or block them, depending on what they think they can get away with. So far they have gotten away with even more than they themselves anticipated.

Rich recognizes that the problem is political, but again, he draws the wrong conclusions. At one point, he wonders, “if science, industry and the press could not move the government to act, then who could?” I don’t know — how about the people? They certainly seem more likely to act as a countervailing force to corporate power than corporations themselves. But “the public” enters this story only peripherally; they are either going obliviously about their mundane lives or being manipulated into a frenzy by a sensationalist media. This, it would appear, is the basis for the claim that “we” failed to do anything; that “we” are to blame. In the epilogue, Rich uses the political scientist Michael Glantz to ventriloquize what seems to be his own position: that “democratic societies are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the climate problem.”

But the period Rich examines, when democracy is ostensibly getting in the way, is one in which the Right systematically decimated the only force historically capable of holding capital in check — that is, the labor movement — and overrode democratic constraints on capital in favor of free-market fundamentalism.

So there’s a story to tell about the 1980s and climate change all right, but it’s not this one. The story that matters is one about an ascendant neoliberalism being put into practice: about the crushing of trade unions and the loss of counters to corporate power; the insistence on market solutions to replace regulation by governments being actively starved of resources. It’s about inequality and ever more conspicuous consumption; about the replacement of public with private goods, propped up by private debt instead of wage growth. It’s about moving more goods made with cheaper labor further and further around the globe, all while trumpeting the end of material limits. It’s about efforts to restart stagnant growth by removing all politically imposed constraints on capital, and moving the costs of doing business back onto people and the planet.

(Continue Reading)

[officialleehadan]

Opportunity for Advancement

“Members of the Board, we have a rather unique opportunity before us.”

I watch, my hands curled around my cane, as Summoner takes the floor with practiced ease. He holds the attention of his board as he walks them through my proposal, and it is interesting to read the crowd.

My presence has been noted, but my habit of keeping my face out of the media means that very few recognize me on sight.

After all, I do not do this for the attention.

Summoner has been good enough to keep my name out of it for the moment, but I believe it is more to his finely-tuned sense of drama and tactics than it is for any other reason. The revelation of precisely who his gentleman guest truly is will stifle most of their more offensive protests.

Who would protest a business contract with the fabled Doctor Rimehart, after all?

I laugh to myself at the absurdity of it all, and draw a few interested, concerned glances.

One woman sees my cane and blanches white.

Ah, I have been spotted, and by one of the people who has my interest.

“Doctor? I have your coffee.”

Summoner’s personal assistant is a beautiful young lady with a sweet smile and perfectly coiffed blonde hair. Where most men would have hired her for her beauty and her measurements, I feel certain that Summoner hired her for her truly ruthless efficiency.

Sadly, I do not believe I can poach her into my own service. Summoner pays her a small fortune for her loyalty.

I suppose I ought to approve. It speaks well of his business practices.

Ah, the presentation is winding down. They would be wise to accept, and not simply because of my name on the contract. The business opportunity will be very profitable for all, if it goes well, and not unreasonable if it fails.

“Thank you, Karen,” I murmur and take the tea. I am presently surprised when I discover that, rather than using the quintessential office coffee pot, she ran down to Sara’s café a block down. The now-familiar scent of fine coffee and vanilla wraps around me and I take an appreciative sip. “Oh, do close the door behind you. This meeting may be loud in a moment.”

I am delighted that my favorite barista is not Powered, although I do wonder where her remarkable ability with coffee comes from. There is nothing unusual in her blood. I had it tested after the Bloodmaster incident.

”Doctor, the floor is yours. Members of the board, Doctor Jonathan Rimehart. Our new business partner.”

Ah, the young drama queen. My supposition was correct, and there is dead silence as I rise. My face may not bring much recognition, but my name certainly does. Also, they know who their CEO is, and anyone who knows Summoner will also know of me.

Fortunately, I am used to such a response, and take advantage.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” I say politely, my eyes already finding the three who Summoner and I have agreed to eliminate. They are difficult, albeit for three different reasons. Before my interest in the company, they were manageable, but they cannot be allowed to continue as they are. There is too much at stake. “I look forward to this partnership. This business and my own are highly profitable. With our innovations in the realms of biological science and microelectronics, we offer impressive new opportunities for success far beyond our previous expectations.

Money. It may not buy happiness, but success often feels like the same thing, and money has quite the influence on that. Of course, it will be interesting to see if these successful people are capable of looking past their own apprehension and seeing the greater rewards beyond.

Not that their votes truly matter. Both Summoner and I know well that they will not challenge him. I am aware of how he took over his company in the first place.

Summoner politely waits for me to finish, before producing a folder for each of his traitorous board members, and then pulls their crimes, captured by camera and video, and carefully-collected documentation.

“Frank,” he says darkly, taking my silence for the permission it is. “It’s a shame you decided to give our financial information to OpenSky Incorporated. Really, selling us out to the heroes? I might be able to understand if it was moral, but you got nearly ten million for it. Shame.”

Summoner’s preferred method of killing is classy. Even I can admit that, although I am not fond of death. A wash of inky black rips open behind the unfortunate man, and a wall of tiny scavengers pour out onto him.

His screams are contained by the soundproofing that lines the walls. The rest of the board stares around at each other.

Summoner turns to his next traitor. “Garth. You think I didn’t know what you are?”

A low-grade Power. One I was unaware of, in fact. Aiden discovered him during the inquiry into his board members. He might have been allowed to live, if not for his… questionable leisure activities.

“She was twelve, Garth,” Aiden continues, and gets a smile that could cut a lesser man to the bone. “I promised her footage of this.”

The scavengers have eaten the first man completely without so much as a belt-buckle left to tell the tale.

The second man tries to run. I casually trip him with my cane and step out of the way. The scavengers swarm him as he tries to crawl away.

“Shameful,” I comment when he finally stops screaming. “Abusers, particularly child abusers, deserve death. Summoner?”

“I agree,” he replies, and I am again pleased that he decided to work for me, rather than die. He will be a very valuable aid to my Work. “And Grace. Grace, Grace, Grace.”

I watch the woman in question straighten proudly. In general, I like women more than men. They so rarely have the same sort of inherent authority issues, and are more inclined to work well in a team. Also, many are so hungry for opportunity that they work harder than their male counterparts.

“You know who I am,” she says, steady, although she must be afraid. “The Hero Consortium needed someone on the inside of your business. I’ve reported to them, sure, but if it wasn’t Hero business, I didn’t say a damn word. And that includes large orders from private citizens, even when I knew who they really were.”

I step in, because her integrity is intriguing. Aiden would kill her, and not without reason, but I have a hunch, that niggling feeling at the back of my mind, that suggests she may be useful.

“Your name is Mirage,” I say as I take Summoner’s chair. My hips ache in the cool autumn weather, and even on the best days, I cannot stand well. “Your abilities include invisibility and minor hard-substance phasing. On occasion, that ability goes from minor to major, but generally only when lives besides your own are in danger. Why is that?”

“I became a hero to help people,” Mirage says defiantly, and looks between me and Summoner. She still might die, but she made her peace with it already. “Good people. Powered humans usually display greater abilities in times of stress and I’m stressed when good people are in danger.”

Very interesting. This one may yet be redeemable, after a fashion. Summoner  reads her, and me, and I see the moment when he comes to the same conclusion.

“Everyone out,” he commands abruptly. “Grace, you stay.”

“Thought you were going to make me an example?” she says, and it’s not really a question. Still, we have her attention, and that might well be valuable. ”I’m a hero, after all.”

“So is Tradewind,” Summer points out, and takes a seat beside me. He nods to the chair across the table from us, and Mirage takes it. “And she and I have a longstanding agreement. What if we were to offer you an opportunity?”

“I don’t want to be a villain,” she tells us flatly. “That’s not what I’m about.”

“No,” I correct her before either of them can argue over trivial details. “You do not wish to hurt people. Tell me, what if you had the option to protect yourself, and do greater good at the same time?”

“I’m not about killing Powered people either,” she says and ah, there’s the hatred I expected. She hides it well. “Or killing anyone.”

Summoner snaps his fingers and his wave of little scavengers vanishes back into a rift.

 “How about working with Tradewind,” he suggests slyly when they’re gone. “She teaches at the university. I sponsor her more gifted students, particularly the ones from… difficult backgrounds, and ensure that they are well-equipped to move on in their chosen fields.”

“Where do I come in?” Mirage asks, but I can see the longing to help people boiling under her skin, more powerful than the hate. Not a surprise. Like Tradewind, Mirage is a child of the slums, and her dark skin does her no favors in the white-dominated Hero Consortium. The systematic bias there is rarely addressed, but deeply prevalent. “I’m not training future villains.”

“The other part of the agreement,” Summoner continues, still with that sly smile, “Is that I explicitly keep them out of the Powered community. Hero, Villain, any of it. If they happen to be Powered, I find an industry-appropriate use for their Power and encourage them to it.”

“And me?”

“You, my dear,” I cut in, because this is where my name and reputation will be valuable, “Would be a mentor. A counterpoint. Someone who is Powered, knowledgeable, and wants the best for them.”

She is tempted. I see it shifting her mind down the scale. Right and Wrong are not so simple as most Heroes like to believe, and I do take personal pleasure in proving that over and over.

Besides, my goals ad hers are not so differed, and I enjoy young people. Some of the greatest minds come from backgrounds that have not handed them everything.

“No villainy?”

“If you have moral qualms with anything you are asked to do, I encourage you to bring it to me personally,” I tell her, and know that she has taken the bait. Good I am always pleased when death can be avoided in favor of progress. “For your cooperation, your compensation will go up…”

I trail off. This is a two-person play, and she does technically work for Summoner, not me.

“Oh, I think double is fair,” he follows me effortlessly. His sly smile finally goes away, and it’s for the best. No need to scare her now that she is cooperating. “And a generous budget for any cause you feel is contributing meaningfully to society. We are always interested in new charities and causes that would benefit from a little more attention.”

“There’s gotta be a catch,” Mirage says. I nod pleasantly and she seems relieved that I am prepared to simply admit it. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

“You leave the Hero Consortium,” I lay out the requirements with unvarnished truth. “Step off the Powered stage completely, save only for when UnPowered lives are at stake, or there is a threat to global safety, and allow any offspring you might produce to have their potential Powers neutralized while they are young enough to undergo the process safely.”

A high price, but with high payout. Her Power is not suited to most Hero work, and neither is her personality.

Generally, the sticking point is the removal of Powers from their offspring, but I doubt it will be a problem with this one. She is a lesbian, and has long stated that she does not want children. I approve, and if she choses to adopt or foster those in need, I will ensure her access to the best resources possible.

But that is a carrot for later. A reward for loyalty to be discovered when she is dedicated to the cause.

“The Consortium will have questions,” she says, and leans forward. “They may cause me problems.”

“Problems that will be handled with appropriate severity,” I tell her with a shrug. “Threatening, or attacking, a private citizen Is not very heroic, is it?”

She wavers, and thinks on it, and finally makes the decision I expected in the beginning.

“Get me the paperwork,” she agrees at last. “I want to read the contract, and you better believe I’m having a lawyer look it over too. A third-party lawyer who doesn’t like you.”

“Of course,” Summoner agrees, and rises to shake her hand. “Take the rest of the week off. Paid, of course, to consider it. Talk with Tradewind if you can. She will tell you more about our work.”

Mirage shakes both our hands, and I think she realizes when the shadow of death finally leaves her shoulders.

“Thanks for not killing me,” she tells us both, and leaves with her head held high.

 We watch her go, and Summoner waits until the door closes behind her before speaking.

“Bets that she goes to ground or sells us out?”

“No bet,” I murmur thoughtfully, because I have a good feeling about Mirage, and will kill her if that feeling proves misplaced. “But today has been far more interesting than I expected. Shall we attend down to Sara’s café? I find myself ready for lunch.”

+++

Doctor Rimeheart (Supervillain Coffee Shop)

Handicapped

Power Rests in the Eye

Nuclear Option

Incidental Villain

Cut a Deal

First Summon

Even Supervillains run from Fangirls

The Blackest Coffee

Deal with the Devil

Opportunity for Advancement

Fear and Coffeegrounds

Personal Space

Broken Countertops

Christmas Cookies

Revealed

Wannabe Wannabes

Home Life

Shadows Unleashed

+++

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[moondeerdotblog]

On the American Upside Down

While the beltway press, the pundits, the influencers, the organizers, and the cogs that compose the political machinery at large desperately cling to those norms and precedents with which order has so long been coaxed from chaos, the unprecedented leaves breadcrumbs for the fresh-eyed to trace towards the trailhead, near the clearing within which it has planted itself openly as invitation for observation.

The history of our nation lives (as did we all up until some undefined moment transpired last decade) within the realm of what I will come to define as the Upside Up. The ideological spectrum has always been a wide band; but, historically, its entirety lay within a single shared reality. It is within the framework of this common reality that we would squeeze that band between the jaws of civil discourse until, all having tired of being squeezed, common ground was found upon which all might rest.

When social media supplanted print media as a news source within our information ecosystem, the system itself was bifurcated (how this happened is beyond the scope of this post … but it’s all there, held in my head … perhaps I’ll let it out someday). Dissonance discouraged inter-ecosystem messaging. The glass we clasped when seeking to quench our thirst for knowledge now held even parts snake oil and water.

The two systems developed into echo chambers (again … I have the how … but this isn’t meant to be the how post). The feedback within each chamber delivered the requisite energy for conjuring concrete realities for chamber occupants; and, America’s dual reality bubbles were birthed.

For the purposes of this post we will call the first of these reality bubbles (some may refer to this bubble as Earth One) as the _Upside Up_…

and…

we will call the second of these reality bubbles (and yes … all Earth Two queries shall be redirected here) as the Upside Down.

What the norms-and-precedents crowd have seemingly failed to witness (disbelief, fear, incomprehensibility … there is perhaps a reason uniquely tailored for each entity by employing measurements drawn from their pre-bifurcation base of knowledge and experience) was the mass exodus of nearly half the ideological spectrum out of the Upside Up, choosing to resettle within the Upside Down.

We are become now a nation near equally divided betwixt two distinct realities. Between these realities nearly every message-able characteristic may be matched to its inversion within its dual.

The exploitation of these realities has engendered a general disposition of the Upside Up housing what we have historically referred to as reality and the Upside Down housing its inversion. I have, however, recently stumbled upon a slice of the Upside Up wherein the inversions are themselves inverted.

But, I digress. Where were we? Fabrication. Okay … so, having the infrastructure in place for encapsulating portions of the ideological spectrum within closed information ecosystems greatly frees up the range of platitudes, vulgarities, and propagandic material one might pluck from one’s cap to be fed to one’s constituency without penalty. Any pushback constitutes an inversion of the morsel fed … and this inversion, by its nature, will reside outside the closed system within which it was served.

Confirmation bias greatly aids in dampening any crosstalk between the two ecosystems.

If there is a better atmosphere for encouraging tribalism than the segregation of a populace into two distinct realities, I haven’t thought of it. Tribalism also works wonders where dampening crosstalk between the two ecosystems is concerned.

What might we find were we to look at the ideological spectrums within the Upside Up and the Upside Down as self-contained reality constructs rather than as a continuous spectrum divided between dual realities?

Doing so shall require a method for sorting the ideological spectrum across this additional dimension. This is where the principal characteristic of message inversion may be exploited. We can pick out specific dual reality message pairs and sort the messengers by the reality within which the message they deliver originated.

So which messages might we want to consider for such a purpose? The most valuable message / inversion pair will be that which carries maximum magnitudes for both inherent dissonance and societal significance.

How about The Big Lie / Stop the Steal as our first message / inversion pairing? The Upside Up message might consist of something along the lines of,

The 2020 election was the most secure ever to be held for the office of the President of the United States; therefore, Joe Biden is the duly elected leader chosen by the people. Claiming something to the contrary without evidential certitude constitutes a große Lüge intended solely to serve a propagandic purpose in the subversion of our democracy.

Inverting this message to generate the Upside Down message might read like so,

The 2020 election was the most insecure ever to he held for the office of the President of the United States; consequently, ballots were tampered with, counts were falsified, and Joe Biden is a leader installed against the will of the people, subverting our democracy.

Certainly, we can all agree that both of the above messages may be found in the wild (at least in sentiment). Note that for our legislators, the binary choice of selecting one or the other of these contradictory assertions was preserved within the congressional records in the form of the confirmation or rejection of the electoral college counts that were submitted by each state in our union. We have a definitive data point for any legislator serving today that gained office prior to November of 2020.

Let’s find one more, one with which we might sort our legislative freshmen. What about the Insurrectionist / Tourist message / inversion pair permeating any and all discussions exploring the events of January 6th, 2021.

The Upside Up message might read a bit like so,

Insurrectionists aiming to disrupt the transfer of power (from the demagogue desperately attempting to install himself at the head of an authoritarian regime rather than cede the office to the leader a nation chose for his replacement) launched an assault upon the Capitol (during which gallows were raised, mortal blows exchanged, and mortalities incurred) that was ultimately foiled by the brave men and women sworn to protect these sacred halls (and its occupants) from the threat of mob violence.

The Upside Down inverse might go something like,

Patriots gathered together at the Capitol for the purpose of preventing the theft of a presidential election from a leader the people had re-elected (during which this peaceful gathering, of what one might almost describe as a gaggle of tourists, were subject to the physical abuse doled out by traitorous men and women forswearing their constitutional oaths) only to find this patriotic display twisted into a distorted narrative to serve as grounds for their persecution by the invisible machinations of the deep state.

Again, I propose that both of the above messages may be found in the wild (at least in sentiment) and that a binary choice supporting one or the other of these messages was documented for all our current legislators (freshmen included) in the form of January 6th commission votes.

With our additional dimension of data points collected (sourced from GovTrack), what might the bifurcated ideological spectrum reveal? For our freshmen, the reality with which they associate will have to be our only data point as we await next year’s ideology score card. An asterisk is used to denote the absence of a traditional ideology score.

For everyone else, we get two data points: an ideology score in the range of 0.0 through 1.0 (most politically left through most politically right) and a reality association (bubble one or bubble two).

Here is the bifurcated ideology spectrum for sitting United States Senators:

With so many House members, labels were necessarily condensed to districts (and color-coded caucus affiliations were added). Here is the bifurcated ideological spectrum for sitting members of the House of Representatives:

It’s the addition of the caucus colors that drew my attention. Look at the caucus groupings when the reality bubbles are viewed in isolation.

Here, in the first reality bubble (a.k.a. Earth One … a.k.a. the Upside Up), we find the two-party system with which we are all familiar (and that the norms-and-precedents crowd still believes to be operational).

What might we find in the inverted reality bubble?

A sea of red. A one-party system. If you, too, were captivated by the size of the flames being emitted by that 2020 dumpster fire … something just audibly clicked between your eardrums.

What might a map of these United States look like were our representatives’ reality associations under consideration?

Here is just such a map correlating to sitting United States Senators:

Here is one correlating to sitting members of the House of Representatives:

Here is one correlating directly to the 2020 electoral college counts:

Understanding our bifurcation into dual realities does not, in itself, bring any understanding as to how we might halt the societal devolution we are witnessing as its consequence.

I would postulate, however, that a failure to understand prohibits any such solutions from being brought forth.

[arcticdementor]

So the NYT newsletter lineup has been unveiled. I suppose the expectation is that I would make fun of this but I’m not moved to do so. Whatever else its problems, and I’m about to lay them out here, the Times does not suffer from a talent deficit. I don’t know what this is all going to look like in practice, or what the financial inducements are for the writers. But I’ll read several of these with interest and I’m excited to see what comes from the experiment. Let writers write. I imagine the Times has some extremely complicated and arbitrary rules about original reporting appearing in these newsletters; I’m told there are a lot of turf issues over there on 8th Avenue. But that’s not my concern. I’m in favor of giving people freer rein to explore their interests in writing, and from my vantage it seems like this setup could result in a lot of cool stuff. I for sure will read Jane Coaston and Jay Kang. I for sure will not read Frank Bruni. For the rest, we shall see.

Of course, what none of these people will do is what no one at the Times can do: publish things that upset the subscriber base. And it’s precisely the willingness to do so that has powered the financial success of newsletters like this one.

If you’re new around here, the basic scenario is that we’ve had a years-long moral panic in which elite white tastemakers adopted the political posture of radical Black academics out of purely competitive social impulses, trying on a ready-made political eschatology that blames the worlds ills on whiteness and men and yet somehow leaves space for an army of good white people and good men to cluck their tongue about it all. Concurrently, the most influential paper in the world emerged from decades of fiscal instability by going hard on digital subscriptions, paywalling more and more of its content and rattling its tin cup more loudly than ever before. The result has been boom times, attenuated only by the end of the immensely lucrative Trump years. (I believe Chris Hayes is covering Trump’s latest spray tan tonight.) The trouble is that this model leaves them even more dependent on a particular social and political caste, namely the educated white professional class that graduates from top 25 universities, moves to Echo Park or Andersonville or Austin, then sends Zane and Daschel to pre-K that costs more than their Audi. Oh and they, like, care about justice and stuff. Conservatives hate read the NYT and thus have traditionally brought in advertising revenue, but they don’t hate subscribe, and the end result is that a paper that was about a 6.5 on a ten-point Liberal Elite Scale when I was a kid has moved to a 9.5. And there’s nothing internal to the publication that can stop this leftward march.

This will invite reprisals for speaking out of turn, but all of the following comes from public knowledge, other people’s reporting, what former and current employees have said, and a little bit of gossip. The social and professional culture within The New York Times is notoriously toxic, the confluence of people with immense career ambitions and total shamelessness about using social justice rhetoric to attack their enemies; watercooler shit-talking and mean-girling has moved to Slack, where it’s somehow even worse than it was before; all of the younger staffers see their jobs as straightforwardly activist positions, and the role of the paper to advance a pro-Democrat social justice ideology rather than to report objectively or to present a range of viewpoints; executive editor Dean Baquet is afraid of his own employees; the Sulzbergers don’t want to have uncomfortable conversations with their fellow white liberal elites at the food co-op or whatever; and in general absolutely every internal incentive within the paper points towards uncritically advancing a Robin Diangelo-approved race and gender ideology, a class-never, deferential-to-woke-norms soggy social justice politics that says nothing remotely challenging to said staffer cliques or the Hermosa Beach soccer moms who now fund the paper. When Bari Weiss resigned the media Borg represented it as all about Weiss, but her story was really about the kind of perspective that can’t exist anymore at The New York Times. I’m sure the blob would deny this stuff, but again none of these are well-kept secrets. If Ben Smith was not paid by the New York Times he would have reported this out long ago.

…

You can talk about Bari Weiss, you can talk about the Cotton brouhaha, you can discuss the inherent and ugly incentives of the subscription model for the paper. But the Donald McNeil firing is truly the bellwether. A reporter with 45 years of NYT experience on an absolutely essential beat said something clueless but utterly anodyne to some spoiled adolescents on a trip that 99% of people their age can’t access. Despite the fact that what he said would have been totally unremarkable even in liberal circles five years ago, the situation caught the staff’s attention and its ire and they vented that ire with the typical absurdist claim that McNeil had put them “in danger” in some incredibly vague way. (On Twitter, of course). So McNeil was duly dispatched, and the basic power dynamic of the modern day New York Times was laid bare: a handful of the paper’s untouchable celebrities can kick up the junior staff into a frenzy, and once that catches fire on Twitter, there is no one in the paper’s leadership who has the honesty and integrity to tell them no. No one. (The NYT’s self-exonerating reaction to McNeil’s defense is quietly hilarious.) The simple fact of the matter is that Baquet has not demonstrated anything like the public courage it would take to face down a Twitter storm prompted by Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., and there’s no reason to think that that’s going to change anytime soon. The media types would reject all of this, if anyone at a big-shot publication had the integrity to write a story about these open secrets. But I’m not lying.

What annoys me about resistance to this narrative, from within the NYT or the media writ large, is that sometimes they admit that the point now is to advance social justice, which is to say to support a specific ideological project associated with one party. Wesley Lowery’s “moral clarity” piece remains a remarkably frank confession on the part of the Times that they have accepted what’s been obvious for a long time, that even they don’t believe in their own vestigial gestures towards evenhandedness anymore, that it’s all a naked pretense to please the last lingering greyhairs involved with the organization and that in due time they’ll be no less explicitly Democrat-aligned than DailyKos. (I think of David Brooks and Tom Friedman at the Times like children whose parents have handed them Xbox controllers that aren’t plugged in.) Watching the establishment media accept the fundamental claim of Lowery’s piece, that elite journalists possess such enormous moral wisdom that they have transcended the notions of subjectivity and embedded perspective, has been pretty wild, for the inconsistency if nothing else. They step from “of course the MSM hasn’t adopted full-throated social liberalism en masse, that’s absurd” to “yes we’re telling the truth now and that’s good and righteous” as rhetorically convenient.

…

In the broader perspective, what incentives are left for careers in media? The fast-then-slow-then-fast internet-enabled collapse of the industry’s financial foundations appears to be experiencing another fast phase. Everybody in the industry is aware that there’s some 22-year-old in the wings who will do what they’re doing for half price. (Those 22-year-olds are rich enough or stupid enough not to care that they will in short order be the one getting undercut themselves.) Covid killed whatever lingering cool NYC media social scene remained. Perceptions of prestige are subjective, but by my lights the indignities of the click-chasing era and pathetic Trump-humping of the past five years have erased whatever lingering prestige was left in writing for, say, The Washington Post. Along with The New Yorker, writing for the Times is one of the last privileges in the business that really walks the dog in the impress-your-normie-uncle sense - and, more importantly, provides clear benefits in the ancillary fields where affluent writers actually make their money. To get to that stage, you have to be liked by the right people. Every industry is influenced by petty popularity, but it’s particularly acute in the news business, and now bullshit me-first social justice complaints have been weaponized to enforce that popularity hierarchy.

This all leaves us in a place that’s utterly inhospitable to the noblest urge in any profession, which is to tell the profession and its gurus to go fuck themselves.

…

The only thing I can do, at this point, is appeal to the integrity of the individuals within that world. They aren’t bad people, most of them, they’re just afraid, financially precarious and terrified of being called racist in an industry which has busily drained professional success of any prerequisite other than popularity with one’s peers. You can understand a lot about media culture by understanding that most of the people within it feel like they’re barely hanging on. Well, let me put it to you all privately, here in this space away from Twitter and away from Slack, where it’s just you and me: was this really what you wanted to do, when you set out to make this your profession? To tell Bradley Whitford’s character from Get Out that he’s right about everything? To nod along with a conventional wisdom that you’re too scared to step outside of? I doubt that’s what you once dreamed of doing. The most valuable thing you can do with a prominent place in media, right now, is to point out how sick the whole business is. It’s only integrity when it hurts, guys. Something you write is only brave when it pisses off all your friends and colleagues. Why on earth did you get into journalism, instead of becoming an actuary, if not because you wanted to say the things your profession and your peers and your culture absolutely do not want you to say?

[bravagente]

hello dear mod, thank you for everything you do. i have a question i apologise if it's heavier than the tone on this blog. recently a popular italian blogger said that race in italy is racist&was a product of il ventennio. i am french&i understand that we in europe don't like to say the word 'race', but i just want to understand how the construct of racism in italy, especially with all the far right/macerata from an italian persepective. I did read amara lakhous. thanks for everything you do!

Hi! Sorry for the late answer, it’s just such a complex matter to talk about and I’m not entirely sure I have the right perspective to handle it properly both as a white woman and as someone who lives in a city where that’s still relatively not diverse. Plus I study languages so I’m not really in the area - I basically really wanted to do right by this and I hope I will.

Disclaimer: it is true that in Italy the very concept of race, at least the way we know and use it in English is racist and a product of the ventennio. Whichever its etimology and original denotation, the word race (razza) has been very clearly connotated since Fascism: if you say men have razze, you’re implying some men have a pure, superior razza and some don’t. Nowadays in Italian dogs and horses have razze, not people. So, usually, if someone uses ‘race’ in italian as opposed to, say, ethnicity (etnia, colore), you’ll be quite sure they’re racist. It’s not that just because people don’t use the word they can’t be racist, but it does say something about how hard it is for us to cope with the American concept of race and the discourse that follows. The paradox is Americans are rightly very sensitive and careful about what they call race, when from our pov they’re just seeing it all from an inherently racist perspective: there are whites and then there are “people of colour”, all of them. Basically, a white race and then all those other races. Again, all of them. We can’t quite wrap our head around it, especially since we don’t really have a concept of, say, “brown” people. Come over in August, we’ll all be brown. We like a tan. It’s just beyond us.

Moving on to racism. It is possibly the most divisive thing in Italy right now and any conversation about it will escalate quickly because a) no one ever admits to being racist b) not everyone necessarily knows they are, if they are. Like everywhere else, it’s not always glaring. It’s not always a “racist slurs” kind of thing. There are subtle forms of it even here and not just in the alt right: I believe many liberals are actually as racist as one gets, they just don’t show because they never deal with people of colour in the first place. I once interviewed an otherwise pretty decent man who told me immigrants today don’t actually come here willing to work and therefore should be sent back home, another one praised a city he visited because he saw no blacks selling stuff there. I think it speaks volumes on how complex this thing is getting: you can deal with assholes who are 100% assholes. You can ignore them and decide they’re not worth your time and energy. But when they’re half-decent it’s just disheartening and makes you wonder where we’re going. Another reason conversations about racism often won’t end well is they slip into politics and fascism is far from over. Even though more-or-less openly fascist parties didn’t do well at the latest elections, the winners (League and the Five Stars) are firmly anti-immigration, making it about law and order as any Trump of the world would.

Having said this, race as we discussed it might be rooted in Fascism, but is the same true for racism? It is and it isn’t. There’s evidence that sub-saharian Africans were of always discriminated against. We had our own slave markets we don’t learn much of in schools, and while it’d buy and sell people of any race black Africans were definitely amongst them. There’s recently been a lot of discourse about how (in)accurate Still Star-Crossed was, with someone arguing that Alessandro de’ Medici was just an example of a class of black nobles. I’m afraid that’s not true. If I’m referencing to this particular period of time it’s because Renaissance is a personal interest of mine: The Ugly Renaissance will offer information about racism against dark-skinned Africans in 15th-16th century Italy. While light skinned Africans were considered as white as any European, sub-Saharans were thought to be strong and valuable workers, but also “uncivilized simpletons who could never hope to occupy a position of parity with the white majority”. That was a long time ago, sure, but it was bound to remain embedded in people’s mindset. And it did in ways we’d think were behind us by now.

Now, subtle forms of racism aside, there are many racists of the in-your-face, insulting type, more and worse than I ever thought possible growing up. They’ve actually probably always been there, it’s just now they have the Internet so they feel somehow validated and it’s made them unashamed to be openly hateful and ignorant with the support of the right.

However I have to stress that there many, many many more, non-racists. When fascists parade in our streets, anti fascist marches will follow. There’s always a firm reaction, it’s just decency doesn’t make any noise and rarely makes it to the headlines. Anyway I’ll give a few pieces of news  encapsulating the two souls of Italy:  

Refugee drowns in Venice as people film on their phones and do nothing

Teenager saves black child from getting hit by a train in Milan

Mein Kumpf-owning man shoots black immigrants on sight

Italians protest against racism

Refugee killed in Fermo after defending his wife from slurs

1500 in march to commemorate him

Black man shot to death in Florence

Italians join black people in march to commemorate him

So there’s the bright side I guess, we are genuinely engaged and young people who actually read books know we’re a country with very diverse genes, owing much of our language and culture and even food to “others”. This matters deeply to me because I think othering is the root of most, if not all, issues in our societies. This is a cultural problem first and foremost and I actually believe that. We often speak of inclusiveness or tolerance, but these are all patronizing concepts to me. Who the hell do I think I am to include or “tolerate” someone? No, I have to know in my heart of hearts that “others” aren’t to fear.

Anyway, racism is definitely an issue that exists and that’s getting worse. I’ve personally come to conclude racist behaviours in Italy are caused  and fueled by three broader factors that often inform one another.

Ideology is the most glaring: most racists are unapologetic fascists and racism is mounting and growing together with a wave of nostalgia for Mussolini’s party. A lot of fascists obviously never lived under the Duce in the first place, but they have a misguided perception of the ventennio as a time of justice and order where trains would run in time and so on. Something you’ll hear from time to time is that the duce “ha fatto anche cose buone” (also did good things). To these people, the presence of black people or muslims goes hand-in-hand with crimes and chaos: they’ll rape women! They steal and murder! They’re drug dealers! The fact that these things are sometimes true because eventually a rapist or killer or drug dealer will statistically have to be black is irrelevant: if caught off guard they’ll admit to believing every racist stereotype out there.

Xenophobia is more nuanced. The reason I don’t necessarily associate xenophobia with racism is that, until just a few years ago, the most feared foreigners in Italy were the very white Romanians and even Albanians before them. The media are also to blame for the way headlines were worded and they still tend to, often unwillingly, magnify the one crime someone black commits as opposed to those commited by Italians. The Macerata episode was most probably “inspired” by the killing of a young girl cut into pieces by at least one Nigerian immigrant. What do you now, since the news spread every Nigerian person has become a public enemy. Another huge media-related problem is they’ve created an unjustified alarm on the refugee emergency, treating it as if more people than in the past were arriving in our country (they weren’t) and as if the situation was completely out of control (it isn’t, although it’s not easy either). Crime is just one thing, though: people are afraid because our times are scary and dangerous, there are no jobs and the welfare is dying. They are hoping the government will help them and fearing that we’re too many for it to be sustainable. There’s a common misconception for which every immigrant in Italy is being hosted in a hotel and given 30 euros per day while unemployed Italians don’t have any money to buy food: while you can argue that the immigrant will only get 3 of those 30 euros, Italians still live this as if those resources are being spent on foreigners as opposed to themselves because scapegoating is a human, if wrong, thing. Clearly this is turning into a war of the underprivilegeds that will only result in diffidence and hatred, and the staggering misinformation about black people being all but enslaved in some areas of out country isn’t helping.

Conservativism, finally, is a branch of ideology but it’s not necessarily related to actual racism (though it can be). There are some who are entirely cool with people of other ethnicities as long as they “don’t bother” them. They’re too culturally lazy to accept anything different than what they knew as children, they fear Christmas will be cancelled and they don’t want, say, mosques, because they hardly know what they even are. They’re usually the same people who are annoyed by vegans: probably harmless, but they certainly don’t help.

Again I hope this helps. I really tried to be clear and truthful and not offend anybody.

[millicentthecat]

Why The Last Jedi is a Reactionary Propaganda Film

I've been waiting for my thoughts to coalesce (and for the "spoiler" window to pass) to make a unifying analysis of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.  This is not a position piece on whether you should or should not enjoy the movie.  It is not any kind of call to action.  It is only an analysis on how The Last Jedi works as a propaganda film.  It’s my personal interpretation based on my experience with assembling message.  This post is tagged "tlj critical" and "discourse" in hopes that will assist people in finding or blocking the content they wish to read.

To begin:   

As important as diversity in representation is, so too is balanced programming of message.  Programming message involves building value by presenting the very ideologies and mechanisms which sustain paradigms of injustice.  Will these be established as inescapable, natural, desirable, or effective?  The Last Jedi (TLJ henceforth) promotes integration with these ideologies and mechanisms.  It does not promote Resistance.

There are three central messages repeating in TLJ.  They are:

1. Respect and trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy

2. Girls like guys who Join (the military)

3. It is the work/role of women to be caretakers and educators (for men)

1. Respect and trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy

After The Force Awakens, my understanding of Poe Dameron's character was that he was designed as a classic rogue-individualist pilot--a hotheaded "flyboy," as it were.  This was not the fanon interpretation, which is understandable; The Force Awakens gave us a lot of poetic material to take in different directions.  I felt my interpretation was valid as it was supported by the visual dictionary (which calls Poe a rogue, I believe) and a line in The Force Awakens novelization about how some people are inherently more important than others.

In short, Poe Dameron was an individual who trusted his own instincts more than others and didn't believe in always playing nice.  In TLJ, this manifests in his relationship with a new character: Vice Admiral Holdo.  Now one of the only things we know FOR SURE about Poe Dameron is that he has no problem taking orders from women, respecting a female General, and trusting her experience.  This is demonstrated by his relationship to Leia, who he knows.  Holdo is a stranger who Poe has never met.  She is not just a woman, but an unknown woman.  EVEN SO, Poe is willing to trust her (at first) by sharing his assessment of the situation--essentially, submitting what he knows for her consideration, sharing his thoughts.  She responds to this by withholding information, reminding him of his recent demotion, and calling him names.  She responded to his  gesture of openness and respect with domination and authority.

This is well within her right, as established by both in-universe and our-universe rules of institutional hierarchy.  Poe, however, does not blindly trust authority figures OR institutional hierarchy more than his own instincts.  It's actually pretty unusual for a protagonist in this universe to do that, for reasons.

Later, General Leia reveals to both Poe and the audience that Holdo had information she was not willing to share.  She is strongly moralized as having been "right" about her plan: Poe takes his reprimand from Leia like a boy accepting a scolding.  Holdo is martyred and established as an example of strong leadership.  Her decision to withhold information from her subordinate is never highlighted (by a narrative authority or third party, such as Leia) as a mistake.  In our society, the rules of hierarchy dictate that "superiors" do not have to share what they have with "inferiors" or treat them with respect.  Those with more power are not beholden to those with less.  Poe is reprimanded for challenging that.

I was almost willing to overlook this deliberately moralized messaging as a botched attempt at a feminist moment before encountering the reviews about TLJ.  In general, there are a large number of reviews for this film which insinuate that most of the people who dislike this film are white male bigots, threatened by the presence of women. (a, b , c , d , e , f , g , h) .  This is not my experience.  The other thing many reviews point to is how Feminist this film is (as a selling point.)  It is an eerily unanimous opinion in mainstream, corporate media that Poe mistrusted Holdo because of her femininity--not her behaviors.  On social media where unpaid people are speaking, many young women are challenging this.  The shouting-down of women's opinions by accusing us of misogyny is a separate topic, but I did want to call attention to the discrepancy between the corporate media response and the social media response.  To me this is evidence of a deliberate misdirection.

Another story arc which enforces the position that we should trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy is in the reestablishment of the Jedi Order, via Luke, Yoda's Force Ghost, and, more significantly, Rey.  Now, much has been written (on this blog, and in many more prestigious place and by better known writers.  See Tom Carson's "Jedi Uber Alles," for instance) in the way of criticism of the Jedi.  The child abducting, the mind control, the over-extension of executive powers, the militarized cult status, the extermination of the Sith race, the monopolization of the Force; their crimes go on and on.  Moreover these are not just mistakes the Jedi made--crimes secondary to their nature--but rather these are the very nature of what their institution stood for.  The Jedi are not "the Light."  They are a specific religion with specific, inherently problematic practices and ideologies.

The Last Jedi is literally a movie about how it's ok that there are going to be more Jedi.

Luke's not on board with that, at first.  Master Yoda (from beyond the grave) reasserts the divine right of the Jedi to rule, as badly and indefinitely as they like.  Because even their failure is valuable.  Try try again, one supposes.  Whatever happened to, "there is no try?"  Oh yes, I remember.  The laws of the privileged do not apply to them.  

Last but not least, the character most overtly challenge institutional hierarchy in TLJ is Kylo Ren, when he kills Supreme Leader Snoke.  This move is not specifically negatively moralized (unless you read Kylo as the villain, which I prefer to) but it also very clearly does not result in a positive or progressive change for Kylo.  At the end of the film, he is miserable; his coup changed nothing.

2. Girls like guys who Join (the military)

"It's all a machine, brother," slurs an alcoholic loner-character known as "Don't Join," sometime after dropping the news on us that Good Guys and Bad Guys buy their weapons from the same arms dealer.  His general sense of hopelessness rubs off on Finn, who grows in his story arc from being willing to Unjoin, himself (as a deserter) to throwing himself into a suicide run for the Resistance.  What stops Finn from a kamikaze end is Rose: she saves him.  For the young viewer who agrees with DJ and sees machinery in war and capitalism, this suicide run represents the realistic (and popular trope) outcome of "joining."  War leads to death.  Capitalism leads to death.  Our generation knows this and we ask, as many before have asked, "why should I be a hero?  I'll just end up dead!"

The Last Jedi does what every great work of propaganda targeting young men does.  It gives a reason.  Why be a hero?  Because girls, that's why.

Before this pact is made, however, there needs to be a little softening-of-the-way--a little grooming.  The word "hero" has been deconstructed in the language enough that people know to associate it with self sacrifice.  We are wary of heros.  The Last Jedi substitutes the word "leader" to mean what hero once meant: a person in power whose sacrifices are gratified with moral rightness in the narrative.  This subverts any counter-programming people were able to apply towards "heroic" stories.  Leadership is presented as an inherently positive and desirable quality, linked to selflessness, sacrifice, martyrdom, and rewarded with female attention.

This same re-programming wordplay is employed in Rose Tico's call to action: "not fighting what we hate.  Saving what we love!"  Question: if the behaviors and outcome are the same, does the mental engineering matter?  Is a Rose by any other name still a Rose?

Is war still war if you call it love?

At this point I also want to call attention to the fact that there is AGAIN very little opportunity in this film where to SEE the First Order committing atrocities: abducting kids, repressing a labor uprising, etc etc.  The First Order is never called fascist (nor, if I recall, are they referred to as an actual nation.)  Their politics aren't even alluded to.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that the film implies it doesn't matter which side you join, but I think there's definitely an argument that being involves with one side or the other is lauded more highly than staying neutral.

Worth mentioning: "Girls like guys who Join" is also the message of Luke's story arc.  Both Rey and Leia wanted Luke to rejoin the arena.  Rey even expresses a willingness to get closer to Kylo--while he is acting like a Joiner.  The minute he makes it clear that he wants no part in either side of the conflict (No Jedi, No Sith, no ties to the past, etc) Rey's trust is broken.  She leaves.  Her rejection IMMEDIATELY follows his insistence on leaving tribal war in the past.  It does not correspond with any immediacy to his acts of violence, nor to his stubborn declaration that she "will be the one to turn."

A brief note.  Army enrollment messaging is a necessary and functional part of maintaining an imperial state.  The in-text discourse positions an offensive/insurgent military organization against a defensive military organization, during combat.  "Join up" is therefore an aggressively interventionist and arguably imperialist position.

3. It is the work/role of women to be caretakers and educators (for men)

This is one of the oldest motifs in storytelling, so when I say it's conservative I mean really, really conservative.  Traditional gender roles and traditional family values are just that: extremely traditional.  Many people find comfort in them and are extremely threatened by their breakdown.  For this reason, storytellers are authorized to hand-wave or sexualize an inordinate amount of violence toward women in order to keep paradigms of labor as gendered as possible.

First of all, there are literal feminine-coded creatures on the island of Ahch-to called "caretakers."  These aliens watch over the island and look after the hutts where Luke Skywalker has taken up residence.

Second of all, Holdo's arc with Poe and Rose's arc with Finn are full of nods to the idea that women must teach and lead men.  Men (who are inherently dogs, apparently) will speak over us, desert us, aim guns at us, and otherwise challenge us, and it is our duty to keep them in line.  This is to be expected.  Flyboys will be flyboys.

Third, it is Rey's sacred duty to prepare Luke to return to the arena of battle.  When Luke fails to step into that role, she turns to Kylo Ren.  Rey and Leia both possess Force-related powers.  Both spend most of their time directing these powers to trying to save, protect, or heal male warriors around them.  When they do fight, rather than act themselves as subjects, they punish men who objectify them inappropriately as a corrective measure.

To be fair, Admiral Holdo and Paige Tico both act directly against the enemy.  They also both have close mentor relationships with other women.  However, Paige and Holdo both die in the course of the film.

A final personal note: in my opinion, there are many ways socially problematic and coercive content offers comfort to a population where uncomfortable traditions feel like the only option.  However, this way of life is not the only option, and this media is not comforting to everyone.

[aplusblogging]

SOC 120 Blog 5: We Are Not a Wave, We Are the Ocean

What the heck is a "wave" of feminism? The "first wave" secured women's right to vote. The second gave us access to abortion. Now we're in the third wave and we're doing trans rights. Right? It's more complicated than that. As Constance Grady wrote for Vox in 2018:

The wave metaphor can be reductive. It can suggest that each wave of feminism is a monolith with a single unified agenda, when in fact the history of feminism is a history of different ideas in wild conflict.

It can reduce each wave to a stereotype and suggest that there’s a sharp division between generations of feminism, when in fact there’s a fairly strong continuity between each wave — and since no wave is a monolith, the theories that are fashionable in one wave are often grounded in the work that someone was doing on the sidelines of a previous wave. And the wave metaphor can suggest that mainstream feminism is the only kind of feminism there is, when feminism is full of splinter movements.

And as waves pile upon waves in feminist discourse, it’s become unclear that the wave metaphor is useful for understanding where we are right now. “I don’t think we are in a wave right now,” gender studies scholar April Sizemore-Barber told Vox in January. “I think that now feminism is inherently intersectional feminism — we are in a place of multiple feminisms” (Grady, 2018).

So with the understanding that this framework is kind of reductive, let's surf these supposed "waves" a little.

The first wave (1848 to 1920) did indeed centre around women's suffrage for the right to vote. Suffragettes were originally abolitionists, but then got mad when Black men—former slaves—got the vote before them, and Black women were often barred from or forced to walk behind white women during suffrage marches. Margaret Sanger opened the birth control clinic that would become Planned Parenthood during this wave. Women also worked to secure equality in education and employment, though there was a double standard when it came to women in the workplace; Black and brown women were considered less ladylike and more capable of labour, while white women were protected by the white men who held power, considered delicate and expected to stay in the home and raise children. There's some of those differing agendas within the movement.

The second wave (1963 to the 1980s) was called such because it had seemed that feminist activity had died down until Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in '63, sparking a new "wave" of feminist activity. She talked about "the problem that has no name," which was that white middle-class women's "place" was in the home and they were being pathologised if they didn't like being stuck doing housework and childcare.

The Feminine Mystique was not revolutionary in its thinking, as many of Friedan’s ideas were already being discussed by academics and feminist intellectuals. Instead, it was revolutionary in its reach. It made its way into the hands of housewives, who gave it to their friends, who passed it along through a whole chain of well-educated middle-class white women with beautiful homes and families. And it gave them permission to be angry (Grady, 2018).

The phrase "the personal is political" comes from this time; the idea that small things that can seem like individual problems are actually a result of systemic oppression. Systemic sexism is defined as "the belief that women’s highest purposes were domestic and decorative, and the social standards that reinforced that belief" (Grady, 2018). Other things that were fought for during this time include equal pay; access to birth control (and an end to forced sterilisation of Black and disabled women); educational equality; Roe v. Wade and the right to have consensual abortions; political independence rather than being legally subordinate to husbands; working outside the home (for white middle-class women); awareness of and an end to domestic violence and sexual harassment. Some of the same things that women of the first wave were fighting for. Black feminists, however, were starting to get tired of white people obliviously hogging all the limelight; bell hooks "argued that feminism cannot just be a fight to make women equal with men because not all men are equal in a capitalist, racist, homophobic society" (University of Massachusetts, 2017). This started the tradition of Black feminist thought and womanism.

The third wave, starting in the 1990s and inspired by work in the 80s, embraced a lot of stuff that the second wave rejected.

In part, the third-wave embrace of girliness was a response to the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s, the one that said the second-wavers were shrill, hairy, and unfeminine and that no man would ever want them. And in part, it was born out of a belief that the rejection of girliness was in itself misogynistic: girliness, third-wavers argued, was not inherently less valuable than masculinity or androgyny (Grady, 2018).

In this time we had the riot grrrl phenomenon on the music scene; the continuation of the fight that started in the 80s for access to medical treatment for HIV/AIDS and the humanisation of queer people; queer politics which emphasise that there are more types of queers than just middle-class white gay men and lesbians; sex-positive feminism advocating for sexual liberation and consent; and transnational feminism, which "highlights the connections between sexism, racism, classism, and imperialism" (University of Massachusetts, 2017). Kimberlé Crenshaw's coining of the term "intersectionality" in the 80s to refer to the intersections between different kinds of oppression (woman AND Black, woman AND disabled, woman AND immigrant, etc.), became the name of the game.

Arguably, we are now in a fourth wave of feminism, an online wave, which "is queer, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven" (Grady, 2018). We use hashtags like #MeToo on Twitter and we organise SlutWalks online and we circulate our revolution magazines with hyperlinks rather than paper. We don't have to attend a rally in order to make our presence known, and we don't have to leave the house and gather together in person in order to hear each other's stories and energise each other to act. We're enabled to be lazier, but we're also enabled to do something with minimal energy when we don't have very much due to a medical condition or other disability. We don't have to exhaust ourselves after work by driving or walking to another meeting place, we only have to log on. We face less physical danger online than we do on the streets. We're empowered in different ways than our predecessors were, and we have access to information and audiences in a way they could never have dreamed of.

I won't go into too much detail about the conflicts between generations or "waves" of feminism like Grady does in her Vox article. There will always be squabbling amongst group members. There will always be splinter movements off of the "mainstream" effort. The focus should be on the goal that we all share, that of ending some kind (or all kinds) of oppression. We should be helping each other to achieve that goal and promote real equality, not letting ourselves be divided along temporal, generational, racial, gender, or any other kind of lines. Coalitional feminism is essential—"politics that organizes with other groups based on their shared (but differing) experiences of oppression, rather than their specific identity"—the opposite of identity politics, which revolve around one identity at a time (University of Massachusetts, 2017).

Unity can be difficult when some groups consider their aims fundamentally at odds, but tearing each other down rather than working to tear down the walls that separate the marginalised from the mainstream is just wasted energy. So while the wave structure can be useful when talking about different "main" events in the historical record of feminist activism, ultimately it just attempts to neatly compartmentalise something that has always been vast and complex and noisy. Feminism's nuances are part of its legacy. If there is anything that all feminisms have in common, it is that we have always been a thorn in the side of the establishment.

Vox as a media corporation is a bit left-leaning, but feminism also tends to be left-leaning. Their niche is in explaining political and social goings-on to a lay-public who may not be keeping up with all the news regarding any given topic. Their sources are credible and their reliability is rated highly by Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check.

[1,432 words]

Grady, C. (2018, July 20). The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-waves-explained-first-second-third-fourth

“Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” by University of Massachusetts, 2017. CC BY Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

(http://openbooks.library.umass.edu/introwgss/)

[talbottoalam]

Willis Response:

In her introduction to Picturing Us, Deborah Willis recounts a series of historical images that were integral to shaping her understanding of race, identity, and representation – especially in regards to how such images create and perpetuate certain societal narratives. The order in which she chooses to present these images struck me as particularly important in that she initially guides the reader through a set of three photographs that start off fairly mundane: a family Christmas photo, an image of a woman and man in the 1930s entering a car, a picture of a black woman on a Saturday afternoon. At first glance, these photographs seemingly lack any obvious deeper meaning, but as Willis carefully begins to unravel the sociopolitical layers inherent in any image, she gives her audience a framework for how to read the highly political and historical images that are to follow. By doing this, Willis makes it clear how powerful an image is in shaping a historical narrative – and how black peoples all over the world have historically not had the opportunity to craft their own stories.

Of “Saturday Afternoon, Brooklyn, New York, 1988,” Willis writes: “To capture the attitude of black women on film, without categorizing their posture as sassy, docile, and/or threatening, is a transformative act” (10). Although film may no longer be the medium of choice, I believe Willis’s sentiment is just as valuable in regards to current perceptions of black women as it is to the photograph she writes about. Many modern portrayals of black women in the media still heavily project and amplify the very same stereotypes of the “mamy,” “Hottentot Venus,” and many more that serve no other purpose than diminishing the true rich, multidimensional identities of black women. That is why I chose this photograph by Davey Adesida for Vogue Portugal’s April, 2019 issue. I believe that it captures a sense of grace, dignity, and gentleness that is lacking in both historical and modern representations of black women – not because it does not exist – but because the gaze of the photographer was shaped and clouded by images that did/do not fairly reflect the subject.

-David Orlando

[psychicmedium14]

It’s everywhere I turn—on the news, on my social-media feed, and in my daily conversations. It’s in the questions that keep me up at night, tossing and turning in an ocean of paranoid what-ifs. It’s in the words and labels we use when we’re sizing up ideas and people who might be a little different from us, who take us to that uncomfortable place just outside of our comfort zone. It’s also that nagging voice that continues to convince us that, as individuals and communities and nations, we are always going to be separate from one another. It’s that insidious belief that we are powerless to change any of this, so we may as well lock our doors, our minds, and our hearts. I’m talking about fear. We live in a fear-based culture. It’s in our daily lives. It’s in our political sphere. Hell, it may as well be in our drinking water. And we’re constantly making the choice to drink it. Fear is a trickster, so it’s not always easy to recognize. It’s really good at camouflaging itself: as information, power, discernment, superiority, righteousness, or the voice of reason. In order for us to truly recognize fear, to see it for what it is, we have to get incredibly honest with ourselves. And often, we need to be taken out of our usual environment to really grasp the hold that fear has over us. We don’t have to let fear-based thoughts determine our destiny. I'm not saying that in the developed world, we have simply made up all these complications, nor am I suggesting that tragic devastation doesn’t occur in other parts of the world. Obviously, it does. However, our tendency to fixate on apocalyptic horror and to sweat the small stuff can make everything feel overwhelming and impossible to take any action around, when it absolutely does not have to be this way. Fear is really good at camouflaging itself as information, power, discernment, superiority, righteousness, or the voice of reason. Philosophers, politicians, and world travelers have all marveled at the fact that people who seem to have very little by Western standards have an indomitable capacity to be happy in ways that most of us cannot even fathom. Why is this? Fear is the thing that makes us feel like we aren't enough. We tend to project our basic internal fear onto the world in various ways. And, at the same time, fear is shoved onto us by our culture from a very early age. Played out on a larger stage, this dance between the fear we carry both within and without can look like everything from nasty internet trolls who cut into our deepest insecurities to self-help gurus who capitalize on our inherent sense of inadequacy. It can take the form of marketing folks who tell us that we need to keep buying stuff in order to feel and be better and politicians who convince us that the world is on fire. When our sense of self is so fragile, everything around us can be perceived as a potential threat. And I’m talking about every single thing. But, let’s face it, this perception is our own doing. Few of us understand that we are largely responsible for the "threats" that seem to surround us on all sides. Instead, we are shocked by media monstrosities and we point our fingers in blame and anger—at everyone but ourselves. When we succumb over and over again to fear-based narratives, when we keep perpetuating the story that some unspeakable evil is out to get us, we actually contribute to creating a climate of fear. When we are spoon-fed fear and trauma from infancy, other possibilities don’t seem to be within our grasp. But they are! It is totally within our power to step outside the matrix of fear. It begins with simple awareness. Even when we don’t think fear has a hold on us, it seeps into the way we perceive the world around us. I know so many people who wear their battle scars with pride. But what if we honored ourselves in a different way? Now, I absolutely understand the value of diving into our stories and experiences to discover who we are and to gain valuable insight, as well as strength. There is great power in acknowledging struggles that we have overcome and in celebrating our personal healing. However, what if we also acknowledged the ways that fear has affected the way we look at these experiences? To me, fear is the thing that makes our most awful and painful moments stand out. When we define ourselves primarily on the basis of our wounds—even when we are recognizing the gifts we received as a result of those experiences—we are limiting ourselves. Often, we are acting from our unconscious fear of the same thing happening again. Many times we are still blaming the people and circumstances that led to our suffering. We are reliving the trauma in some way. We are continuing to get caught up in our own victimhood and giving credence to that big, bad monster of fear. Most importantly, let’s remember that we are truly worth so much more than our wounds and self-imposed labels. Focus on the here and now. When we decide to peel ourselves from the bodysuit of fear that has strangled our possibilities, we make the powerful choice to see our reality for what it is—not for the stories that others have told us or the things we decided to believe about life at some distant point in the past. We start building the muscle to discern what is true and what is not, based on attention to the here and now—and a willingness to be with it, no matter what is happening. When fear arises, we automatically believe the stories it tells us are true. Our reptilian brain—hard-wired by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to detect danger—still picks up the warning signals that we send it when we’re afraid, whether we are in imminent danger or not. But fear makes no sense unless we are responding to imminent danger. It serves no purpose. Now, many of us think that chronic worrying—about our kids, the environment, and the state of the world—means that we care. And some of us even subconsciously believe that if we do it enough, our world will change and our fear will dissipate. But buying into the climate of fear and adding fuel to its fire shouldn’t be mistaken for an effective way of "dealing: with it. It paralyzes our ability to take mindful action. It contributes to the very thing that robs us of true joy and the capacity to be present. We can choose a different way. We can consciously apply our awareness, our knowledge, and our power of choice—in the moment when we can actually experience our power: now. Choose to let go of fear. We all have the power to rise beyond our learned helplessness. All it takes is the realization that we are fully accountable for our experience of life. We may not choose all the circumstances, but we can certainly choose how we react. We are constantly defining our reality by virtue of past experiences and everything other people, especially authority figures, have told us. So, with this realization, we have the choice to take a good, long look at our fear and to decide whether or not it serves us. This doesn’t require putting on rose-colored glasses or denying that we are scared. It just means that we don’t have to let fear-based thoughts determine our destiny. Our fear doesn’t make us more powerful. It doesn’t make us more well-informed or more capable of instigating change. You can choose to be the kind of person who focuses on the latest act of random violence and laments how terrible things are. Or you can choose not to fall prey to fear-based information that keeps people stuck in a fight-or-flight response. You can take it a step further and choose to direct your energy into more meaningful pursuits that help make you, your community, and the world a better place. I don’t care if you’re a certified hypochondriac.You are not your fear. Repeat after me: "I am not my fear." Fear is not some absolute truth that you have to build your life around; it is merely the lens through which you have chosen to see your reality. And you have the choice to try on a different lens, to let your perception shift and your quality of life increase. You, too, can experience the same unadulterated joy that my friends in the Andes, who helped move me from severe panic into a state of serenity simply by modeling it to me, already know is well within our reach. Fear takes so much out of us. Who could we be, what could we experience if we learned to let go of needless fear? What undreamed-of possibilities could we create in our lives? What seemingly insurmountable obstacles could we overcome? If we freed up our energy so that we could express our deepest core truths, what kind of beautiful world could we create together?

[libertariantaoist]

WHY?

Years from now, when the history of this war is written, acres of print will be devoted to the question of the real cause (or causes) of the conflict: already, as we head into Day 37 of the crisis, the two big questions that loom in the minds of baffled Americans are: "Why Kosovo?" and "Why now?"

THE  WASHINGTON FACTOR

NATO  would naturally like us to believe that the Serbians, and specifically        Slobodan Milosevic, started this war by cracking down on their Kosovar        subjects; and that, furthermore, the Serbs are responsible for all the        region's problems. Yet the complex history of the Balkans, with its Byzantine        intrigues and unique intersections of politics, ethnicity, and religion, rules out this or any other mono-causal theory. Apart from a history rich with incident, in which the historical struggle of Serbs and Turkic invaders takes on the scale of an epic saga, outside factors have always played a decisive role in bring the Balkan cauldron to a boil. That is especially true this time around. In the era of American hegemony, what is happening in Washington, DC, the imperial capital, is at least as important to the peoples of the former Yugoslavia as what policies are being pursued in Belgrade – and, I would argue, more so.

NO ORDINARY EVIL

Why are we at war with Serbia? The primary causes of the war have little to        do with anything that is now occurring (or said to be occurring) in the        Balkans; nor is it a conspiracy of war profiteers, bound and determined to wring mega-profits out of the agony of the Serbian nation (although surely there are war profiteers aplenty, who are profiting from a war they naturally support). Some have pointed to the valuable mineral rescues under this much-disputed patch of territory; the war, they say, is motivated by greed. But mobilizing the military might of the nineteen NATO nations, not to mention the U.S., seems an awful lot of trouble to go through in order to acquire a few mines. Least credible of all is the theory of the "humanitarian" origins of this war: before the U.S. intervened, less than 2,000 people had been killed in Kosovo, not all of them Kosovars but also many Serbs who died at the hands of a terroristic "Kosovo        Liberation Army." American intervention has led to the exact opposite of its announced intent: instead of "saving" the Kosovars, U.S. meddling has worsened their pitiable condition, a result that was entirely predictable. No, none of these rather prosaic reasons really explain such a monstrous evil: such ordinary human motivations as greed, pride, compassion, and national feeling seem entirely too prosaic to explain why a six-year-old Serbian girl was killed, yesterday, in a NATO bombing raid that killed twenty people in her village and wiped out her entire family.

GLOBAL  AGENDA

What killed her was ideology. Not the familiar ideological bogeymen said to        haunt the Balkan landscape – which, as we all know, are xenophobia,        racism, nationalism, and other extreme forms of political incorrectness – but a militant and deadly dangerous globalism that has entranced American elites in the post-Cold War world and hypnotized certain powerful politicians. With the death of Communism, the end of the conservative crusade against the masters of the Kremlin has caused many old Cold Warriors to cast about for new enemies to confront, new conspiracies to counter. Likewise on the Left, a new spirit of internationalism has revived an otherwise moribund domestic agenda, revitalizing such tired old bromides as "national purpose" and bringing back into vogue such phrases as "standing should-to shoulder" that have not been heard in liberal circles since the great antifascist struggle of the thirties and forties. The end of the Cold War, far from giving us a respite from international tensions, has infused these ideological warriors with a new martial spirit: in the absence of any competition, any great power to stand in our way, the world is ours to supervise and shape, and both the Left and the Right have their own global agendas, which in substance if not in style have much in common. They have come together over the issue of Kosovo: the Weekly Standard and the New Republic; internationalist conservatives and their liberal counterparts, each with their own distinct (but similar) views of how and why the U.S. must shoulder its sacred and indisputable responsibility as the Last Superpower.

PORTRAITS OF THE WAR PARTY: THE NEOCONS

On the Right, Kosovo is the latest cause of the neoconservatives, a sect        that is small in numbers but hugely influential in the media and in Washington.    The neoconservatives, or "neocons," have never amounted to more than a few dozen intellectuals and publicists, nearly all of whom seem to be newspaper columnists, magazine editors, and foundation officials. A high-powered bunch, many of them started out as militant anti-Stalinists who yet retained their socialist credentials (e.g. Sidney Hook) and wound up, twenty years later, in the camp of Ronald Reagan cheering on the Nicaraguan "contras." The domestic agenda of these political chameleons has changed with the circumstances of the moment: when liberalism was fashionable, they were liberals; when free-market shibboleths replaced liberal bromides as the conventional wisdom, these seekers after the main chance were suddenly "converted" to capitalism (as least enough to give it "two cheers"). From being advisors to Hubert Humphrey        and "Scoop" Jackson, they went on to become the intellectual vanguard of the "Reagan Revolution." But none of these domestic issues really moved them, or occupied a central place in their political affections. What really got them going, however, was the issue of Communism, i.e., foreign policy, which was their ruling passion. Their views were shaped by an overwhelming desire to destroy their old enemies, the Stalinists, and evolved over the years into a reflexive bellicosity. The death of Communism did not even break their stride: they were on the job warmongering full-time weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, looking alternately   at Islamic fundamentalism and the Chinese as potential stand-ins for the        Kremlin. While most conservatives in Congress reacted to the intervention        in Bosnia with something considerably less than enthusiasm, the Weekly       Standard, house organ of the neocons, scolded and mocked the Republicans     for their skepticism, accusing them of turning "isolationist." While disdaining any ostensibly humanitarian motives, for the neocons American intervention was and is a question of maintaining hegemony, not only in Europe but over the whole globe. Editor Bill Kristol has called for the United States to impose a "benevolent world hegemony" on the peoples of the earth, and urges America to drop the republican pretense and adopt a frankly imperial foreign policy. The globalism of the neocons is the old liberal internationalism dressed up in the self-consciously  "tough" rhetoric of hard-nosed power politics: instead of the "We-are-the-World-we-are-the-children" internationalism of Ted Turner and the Clinton administration, editor Kristol defended the 1995 bombing of the Serbs in typically Cro-Magnon terms: "The Serbs do not put down their guns because they trust America will treat them fairly." wrote the Weekly Standard editors. "They do so because they know we sympathize with Bosnia, and they trust only that we will kick their skulls in if they break the peace."

A MOTLEY COLLECTION

For years, Kristol and his fellow neocons have been ceaselessly agitating for war against Serbia. Now that they have it, they are devoting entire issues of their subsidized magazines to justifying it and arguing for its escalation and expansion. The war, they admit, is "going badly," but this is due to Clinton's mismanagement, not to any inherent flaws in his policy. The problem is his irresoluteness, his character, which prevents him from doing the brave thing, and that is starting the ground war immediately. And if Clinton will not start the war on the ground in Kosovo quite yet, then the neocons have wasted no time in waging a war of words against those conservative Republicans who have become the antiwar opposition of the new millennium. They are, as the Weekly Standard       put it, "a rather motley collection of neoisolationists who simply don't believe the United States should much concern itself with overseas matters not directly threatening the American homeland; of Clinton despisers who don't trust the administration to do any serious thing seriously . . . and of ultra-sophisticated 'realist' intellectuals who have divined that America has no interests in the Balkans and who claim that to combat Milosevic's aggression and brutality is merely to indulge in soft-headed liberal internationalism." The editors then roll out a long list of conservative stalwarts, all safely within the neocon orbit. How could crusty old Jean Kirkpatrick be described as "soft-headed"?

REALISM VERSUS SURREALISM

For the Weekly Standard to denounce "Clinton-despisers" is hypocrisy on such a scale that it defies quantification or even comprehension: after calling for his impeachment, week after week, and salivating over the dreary details of the President's peccadilloes, both personal and political, relentlessly and with mind-deadening monotony, to now hear from these very same people that we must follow our Commander-in-chief into battle without question or hesitation, would be funny if it weren't so monstrous. What kind of robots do they think conservatives are, that they can be turned on and off with the flick of a switch? As for these "ultra-sophisticated" intellectuals who champion "realism"  – how "sophisticated" does one have to be to question the value of intervening in a Godforsaken backwater like the Balkans? And why not inject a note of realism into the fancy formulations of foreign policy theoreticians, who ceaselessly invent "new architectures" and enunciate grandiose policies that their sons and daughters will never be asked to die for? It is high time somebody did.

THE  CLINTON-HATERS

The idea that conservatives are opposed to jumping into the Yugoslav quagmire  because they cannot abide Bill Clinton is wishful thinking on the part of Bill Kristol and his neocon clique: this war has really isolated them from what they hoped was going to be their mass base in the GOP, and cut them off from the rank-and-file of the conservative movement, perhaps permanently and irrevocably. The rightist response to the new internationalism has been so violent and so intransigent that even National Review, that old war-horse of Cold War militarism and Anglophilic Atlanticism has been forced to acknowledge it. The current issue [May 3, 1999] contains two apologias for Clinton's war: Zbigniew     Brzezinski and Andrew J. Bacevich bemoan Clinton's apparent unwillingness       to kill enough civilians in the bombing campaign and urge the immediate       dispatch of the 82nd Airborne into the streets of Belgrade. Michael Lind has taken time off from attacking the Christian Coalition and conservatives in general and is readmitted to the right-wing fold in time to add his endorsement to the need to unleash the Marines on Belgrade. But this issue also features two significant dissents, by Owen Harries (editor of The National Interest) and Mark Helperin (a novelist and a contributing editor of the Wall Street Journal), whose eloquence and passion far outshines the pedestrian war-whoops that fill the rest of NR's pages. Harries is, one supposes, one of those "ultra-sophisticates"       denounced by the Weekly Standard for the vulgarity of their nouveau       realism. But Harries' elegant piece is not so easily dismissed. In terms of foreign policy, American ends, he argues, have always been contradicted by the means employed: the former are grandiose, the latter inadequate to the task. We got away with it for a while, because no one dared to challenge us: now, we have to put up or shut up. Although he never says so directly, one gets the distinct impression that Harries would rather have us shut up. His logic is impeccable: people never fight unless it is in their interest to do so, that is, unless they have to defend their  homes and their way of life against some actual or perceived aggression. No such aggression or threat now exists: ergo, the Americans will not  fight, and probably should not fight, for wider and more "idealistic" ends. Ripping aside the facade of "fakery," Harries makes the trenchant point that the Balkans, "properly considered . . . should be an insignificant backwater, and it has taken a good deal of determined, sustained political stupidity to make it otherwise." Harries also deconstructs the absurd propaganda device that equates Milosevic with Hitler: "The . . . characterization was nonsense, and, in typical Clinton fashion, we have heard no more about it since its initial trial        run." We are not up against a militant totalitarianism, but Serbian      nationalism, which, like the Vietnamese nationalism we fought unsuccessfully      two and a half decades ago, has all the advantages: "We are militarily much stronger than our adversary, but he has much more at stake than we have." Aside from the political unsustainability of a high-casualty ground war, "the second argument against going in deeper is that in the end it may succeed and that this may be even more daunting than defeat. Because what does one do then?" The answer: occupy Belgrade and the whole region for the next fifty years.

THAT SERBONIAN BOG

After touching on the problem of our client, the KLA – do we really want to back a Marxist-oriented guerrilla group with ties to the Albanian mafia and the international drug trade? – and warning of "an unstable, truculent Russia that still possesses 20,000 nuclear warheads (which can be sold as well as used)" – Harries quotes John Milton's "Paradise Lost":

         A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog          Betwist Damiata and Mount Casius old,          Where armies whole have sunk.

While Milton's geography may be dubious, his sense of Balkan history is sound;  Harries exhorts us to reflect long and hard before we sink much deeper  into the Serbonian bog.

A WARNING

In Helprin's piece ["A Fog That Descends From Above,"] the new        internationalism faces an even more withering scorn: as the instrument of Albanian separatism, U.S. policy in the Balkans is a standing invitation to disaster. As for the broader policy implications of our sudden championing of the Kosovar cause, Helprin asks: "Shall we join with the Basques in their struggle, or the Catalans, the Chechens, the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis?" And that is just the beginning: "If these do not suffice, Germanophones of the Alto-Adige would like very much to reattach themselves to Austria." The original purpose of NATO, to preserve the sovereignty of European nations against the centrifugal forces of secessionism and irredentism, has been not only nullified but inverted.  In both the terrain and those will be defending it against an American assault, the difficulties are inherent and obvious: one has only to familiarize oneself with the Serbian national literature, replete with such titles as Into the Battle, South     to Destiny, Reach to Eternity, and A Time of Death, and to remember that Tito's Partisans tied down 33 Axis divisions, to realize what we are up against in Serbia. "There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that an invasion to cover our miscalculations and elemental failings, and as an ally of radical ethnic Albanian separatism, and after a humanitarian crisis – that we provoked – has passed,      is not worth the life of a single American." As for those who believe it is, they are "unduly generous with other people's sons."

A SWAGGERING JUNKER

While Helprin bring passion and historical context to his argument, Brzezinski     and Bacevitch are sorely lacking in both departments. The former constructs       thought-patterns of alarming circularity: we must intervene to save NATO and prevent America's "global leadership" from being fatally undermined, but nowhere states why NATO is an end in itself, or why we have to expand its original mission. Rather, this is assumed, as is the "devastation" a withdrawal from the Balkans would wreak on "global stability." Brzezinski berates Clinton for not moving swiftly enough to save the Kosovars, but fails to say what course of action would have saved them. We must "shock and intimidate" the Serbs with our bombing campaign, he coldly states, but only succeeds in shocking rather     than convincing. There is a kind of Bismarckian arrogance in his jeremiad,       an imperious tone that any native-born American can only find repulsive.The same swaggering bullying tone, more appropriate to a German Junker of the last century than an American of any century, permeates Brzezinki's nine-point ultimatum to the Serbs: independence for Kosovo (how is this in our national interest? No answer) – no negotiations – and no more targeting restrictions: it's bombs away, and to hell with those Rembrandts! "Let's get serious" – that's the title of this Machiavellian manifesto – and we must make our commitment        "unambiguous and enduring." How long? Five, ten, twenty years  – what about fifty? There is no mention of costs, nor is there any sense that this Great Statesman has any sense of the limits of American power. The theme of this essay, and of Bacevich's, is an insufferable hubris that virtually begs to be shot down. Here, for example, is Bacevich bloviating on the alleged incompetence of the Yugoslav military: "Indeed, to attribute to the Yugoslav armed forces more than a minimal ability to wage conventional war against modern, professional forces is to give them far more credit than they deserve. These are hooligans and gangsters, not trained and disciplined soldiers." I don't think a people fighting a defensive war on their own soil against overwhelming odds can be called hooligans and gangsters, no matter what their politics: and if I were Mr. Bacevich, I would not be so sure that such a people, with such a history, will crumble at the first sign of battle. At least they are fighting for something tangible – their national sovereignty and identity – as opposed to the pallid abstraction of NATO, or the even more nebulous "New World Order." The only Americans who believe that these are worth a single life are newspaper columnists, television     talking heads, and thinktank policy wonks who wouldn't last very long on the battlefield.

THE NEOCONS: BACK TO THE LEFT?

Both National Review and the Weekly Standard invoke the names of the same Republican interventionists like a mantra: McCain, Lugar, Chuck Hagel, Bush and Dole II, etc. But they are clearly outnumbered, not only in the overwhelming opposition to this futile and destructive war among Republicans in Congress – as shown in the recent vote disavowing the air war and restricting the use of ground troops – but also among rank-and-file conservative Republicans, whose opposition is even more unequivocal. The recent convention of the California        Republican Assembly, the conservative activist group within the state GOP, recently adopted a strong resolution against the war with virtually no debate. Opposition to this war is not even mildly controversial among conservatives, and Clinton has little to do with it: they would question it no matter who was leading us into this quagmire, and it is high time the War Party acknowledged it. In the post-Cold War world, conservatives instinctively look askance at military intervention; as the memory of Communism recedes, what Eliot Cohen calls the "ornithological miracle," the transformation of hawks into doves and vice versa, is inevitable and inexorable. Sooner or later, the militant interventionism and global do-goodism that attracted the neocons to the ranks of the Right will be totally expunged from the conservative movement, and they will be forced to go back – back to the militant, do-gooding, global-crusading Left from which they      first emerged.