#allegedly written to humanize immigrants

[fe-noumenal]

Apostles of Mercy - meaning

The third book in Noumena series is allegedly named “Apostles of Mercy”. It’s a reference to a quote from H. G. Wells novel “War of the Worlds”. It was written at the end of XIX century, so CW for time period accurate racism:

“And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

A very loaded quote with many implications. Will humanity burn? Or will Superorganism share the fate of Martians? 

Or maybe the tittle will be more literal like @noumena-ramblings suggested in their post. Whatever’s the case we have a full year to speculate. 

I’m so hyped already. 

[beardedmrbean]

A Mexican national facing up to 20 years in prison for traveling to Florida from Georgia with passengers who were undocumented is going to trial on criminal human-smuggling charges, after a judge late on Wednesday rejected an argument that the state law behind his arrest is unconstitutional.

The criminal case against Raquel López Aguilar — an undocumented father of two from the state of Chiapas living in Tampa and working as a roofer — will be one of the first tests for a state law championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis as he seeks to combat illegal immigration.

López Aguilar, 41, was arrested in August for allegedly driving a van on I-75 with six passengers that were all found to have entered the country illegally, according to a police report.

His arrest is part of a broader effort by the DeSantis administration to crack down on undocumented immigrants who seek to travel or live in Florida — making López Aguilar’s case just one example of the impact the governor’s policies could have on the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants living in the state and on the organizations and companies that interact with them.

Opponents of the human-smuggling provision have worried the state law, passed last year, could lead to the prosecution of individuals who are driving family members or groups such as churches for transporting immigrants into the state.

López Aguilar’s attorney, paid for by the Mexican government at the request of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, tried to dismiss the human smuggling charges. The defense argued the state law is written too broadly and vaguely, leaving “citizens of ordinary intelligence and law enforcement officers charged with enforcing the law with no hope of understanding what the [state law] prohibits and to whom it applies.” They also argued the state law is preempted by federal immigration law.

A Hernando County circuit judge disagreed with those arguments, saying in part that because the state law did not deal with addressing “removal proceedings or any other aspect of immigration,” the state has the authority to enforce a law targeting individuals who transport undocumented immigrants into the state.

Furthermore, the judge disagreed with the defense’s argument that the state law is discriminatory.

“The statute is clear that it does not discriminate; citizen, non-citizen, state resident, or out-of-state resident — all are affected equally under the statute,” Judge Stephen Toner wrote in his ruling.

López Aguilar has been in jail for seven months as he awaits his trial, scheduled for April 8. He was arrested after a Florida Highway Patrol trooper pulled him over, noting that the van had dark window tints and large cracks on the windshield, according to the police report.

When authorities stopped López Aguilar, he was in the driver’s seat, according to Florida Highway Patrol arrest report documents obtained by the Miami Herald. The six passengers, including a 7-year-old, were all Mexican nationals, according to the FHP document.

Under Florida law a person can’t transport into Florida “an individual whom the person knows, or reasonably knows, has entered the United States in violation of the law and had not been inspected by the federal government since his or her unlawful entry.”

The law, which took effect last June, strengthened a version of a previous human smuggling law.

López Aguilar is accused of “knowingly and willfully” transporting undocumented immigrants into the state and is facing four separate third-degree felony human smuggling charges, each of which could be punishable by up to five years in prison. He was also charged with a misdemeanor for driving without a license.

The state determined that López Aguilar had traveled from Georgia because he had several receipts for money transfers in his pocket that indicated he had been there. The vehicle, a 1997 van registered in Georgia and processed as evidence, belonged to a construction firm there, according to the Mexican consul in Orlando. Public records from the neighboring state show the van’s owner also has a roofing company registered to the same address as the vehicle.

But Mexico’s consul has argued that there is no proof that Lopez Aguilar was the driver when he crossed the Georgia state line into Florida

[jokingjustice]

PAKISTANI-AMERICANS VISA REFUSAL  -  SOMEWHAT SIMILAR CONDITION  PAKISTANI-BAHRAINIS FACE IN 2014 –  FIRST TIME FURY AND UNITY IN PAKISTANI

COMMUNITY WITNESSED, HENCE RESULT!

                Following the US State Department press briefing raising a question regarding visas of Pakistani-Americans being rejected for travelling to their homeland, the Pakistan Embassy in Washington has denied this allegation.

2.     Till end 1970s Pakistanis used to be top in number expatriates working in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Due to the so called “awareness” created by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto amongst the working class that “مزدورو  فیکٹری  ٹمہاری  ھے” resulted in uncontrolled unionism and the working class going out of any discipline, the number of Pakistanis started receding.  First Indians and then Bangladeshis started taking over due to their low salary demand and untiring hard work with discipline.  Today Pakistanis stand number three in the number game.

3.     The Kingdom of Bahrain, one of the real welfare state remaining in the world, in recognition of the long services of the Pakistanis and their contribution in development of Bahrain, awarded Nationality to thousands of Pakistanis.

4.     Today Pakistanis are on top in numbers having been honoured by the State with its nationality.

5.     When Nawaz Sharif introduced the Overseas Pakistanis pick pocketing scheme in the name of a separate national identity card in English (NICOP), it was declared and is written on it that the holder of the Card even if holding a foreign nationality will be entitled to land Pakistan without a Visa. 

6.     January 2014 all of a sudden airlines in Bahrain stopped issuing tickets for Pakistan to the Bahraini Passport holders (Pakistani origins) unless they had a valid visa.  Likewise at Bahrain airport, Immigration refused boarding unless one had a valid Pakistani Visa on the passport.

7.     At Pakistani airports people coming back after their holidays in Pakistan were refused boarding cards without having a valid Pakistani Visa on their Bahraini Passports which could had regularized their stay in Pakistan entitling, then, return back.

8.     There were lot of families who were stranded at Lahore and Karachi airports and their logical pleas that they came visa free on strength of their NICOPs, hence they should now, this time, are entitled to return back.  These affected families allegedly had to reduce their pocket weight from Rs. 30,000 to 50,000  (then in 2014) to return timely on their duties.  How did they arrange such amounts at airports is not a topic here, but being Pakistanis we can all well imagine.

9.     There was a lot harassment amongst the Pakistani Origins as it had created a difficult situation.  On their contact to the Pakistan Embassy they were told that the Pakistan Government had withdrawn the visa free entry facility but the very logical frustration was as to how all of a sudden without pre-announced and without giving a sufficient marge specially to those who had already gone to Pakistan and were to return on strength of their NICOP, could be done this?

10.   Pakistan Club Bahrain was flooded with frustrated people.  The club office bearers (and perhaps also the then Member in Bahrain of Overseas Pakistanis Council, Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis and Human Development) became active.  The club then got a constitutional petition ready and for further course of action a meeting of concerned Pakistanis was conveyed in the Pakistan Embassy premises.  I myself did not attend.

11.   The audience was told by the Embassy that that it was a matter for the Government of Pakistan and not with it.  

12.   At this stage, a Pakistani, in frustration, showing extraordinary courage stood up flashing a folded paper in his hand, went to the dais and presented the same to the President, Pakistan Club.  When the President read contents of it, it transpired it was a letter from the Community Welfare Attache, Pakistan Embassy Bahrain to the Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Interior, Islamabad.

13.   The letter started with words that “it has come into knowledge of the Embassy” that having obtained Bahraini nationality and without informing that effect to the Embassy, such Pakistanis travel visa free to Pakistan on basis of their NICOPs on which an immediate Ban be placed.

14.   The Deputy Secretary concerned, himself appearing to be from the سفارشی lot, hence naturally incompetent.  He did not know that Pakistani constitution did not allow any discrimination on any ground and as such no ban could be imposed on a section of Pakistanis residing in a particular country while the rest remained exempt from such a ban.  There was at this disclosure an uproar amongst the audience.  The concerned Community Welfare Attache who too was present took the plea that one of his staff took his signature on the letter without his knowledge.  It was a too foolish argument showing further that he had not just the  خباثت  ذہنی  but was incompetent so much that staff could get his signature on anything legal or illegal.  His Excellency the Ambassador “showed” his complete ignorance about this letter.

15.   After this exposure and the wording of the Member Council that he was to take up the matter with the President whom only a month earlier met in Isllamabad, the same very Community Welfare Attache signed himself another letter, or perhaps once more got signed from him by some junior without Attache’ knowledge, informing the same very Dy. Secretary that the Law allowed the holder of NICOP visa free Entry hence the illegal ban imposed be removed.  It was not written in this second letter the ban imposed by himself.  Till that time in our most august Parliament the famous advice “ کوئ شرم ہوتی ہے کوئ حیا ہوتی ہےّ “ had not echoed.

16.   The plea taken for imposing ban was that these Pakistanis after obtaining Bahraini Passports don’t inform this change to the Embassy.  This in itself shows how disassociated our Embassies generally are from the community.  Indian Embassies through the network of local Indian clubs & associations keep themselves in contact with almost every member of Indian community. Indian Embassy since decades invariably monthly holds an Open House for Indians to attend for any complaint, service, suggestion or general update.

17.   Applying for a Renunciation Certificate is not mandatory for a Pakistani origin.  It is the requirement of the country, under the law of that country, awarding nationality to a Pakistani to surrender his Pakistani nationality and then formalize the new nationality.  If any “Shaagees” want that every Pakistani origin applied his Renunciation Certificate by presenting himself before the concerned Honourable “Shaagee”, then the “Shaagees” need to approach the Parliament, not any interior ministry deputy secretary, to amend the law to read that a Pakistani obtaining a foreign nationality automatically forthwith seizeed to hold his Pakistani nationality as the Indian “Shaagees” have legally done.

18.   A million worth question arises, while in Bahrain there are only a few hundred Pakistani origins holding Bahraini passports while there are hundred times more in USA and UK.  Did they all contacted Pakistan Embassy in Washington on obtaining US Passports to update their profile?  Has any community welfare attache there courage “impose ban”?

19.   The letter directing Islamabad to ban travel of Pakistani-Bahrainis on strength of their NICOP said to the had been got signed from the Community Welfare Attache without his knowledge explained that these Pakistanis on obtaining Bahraini nationality did not inform this fact to the Pakistan Embassy Bahrain.  There could not be more bigger day light lie than this.  This not just showed our bureaucrats can not just speak lies but are in effect mostly incompetent with empty skulls.  When a Pakistani in Bahrain is “offered” Bahrain nationality, he is handed over a single page very simple Form with the advice to fill it up, attach so and so and return back with Passport Fee. This Form is Application Form for a new Passport.  The Pakistani concerned, in no case whatsoever is able to submit it back unless first he approached the Pakistan Embassy.  When the concerned Pakistani visits Pakistan Embassy, what for is that?  Is this not that he has come to inform formally the Embassy that he was getting Bahraini Passport.  Here comes the question of good governance and competency.  His arrival to the Embassy in a good governance is taken into main data.  In addition, when such a Pakistani origin with his Bahrain or any other passports lands at Karachi or Islamabad and presents his NICOP, the Immigration enters his arrival with his Passport No etc the main national profile of the person concern is automatically updated showing he was a Pakistani and now had a foreign Passport.  But this simple thing is only for a competent bureaucrat.

20.   US State Department briefings world over are taken extraordinarily serious.  Tough the world capital keep a constant watch, live, on these briefings, yet the Embassies in US immediately transmit the relevant content to their respective Capital with their own comments or observations added.  It is universally believed that where there is a smoke, beneath definitely there is a fire.  Might be there in Washington a “Shaagee” sitting.

21.   I said above I did not attend the meeting.  Why?  Because I had a bit information that “Shaagee” was trying for the nationality and the morning he got that, in the afternoon the ban will vanish in thin air.

            Regards,

                                                                               Muhammad Javed

                                                                                Kingdom of Bahrain

[irvinenewshq]

Human trafficking trial of seven Chinese language nationals postponed

The trial of seven Chinese language nationals arrested for alleged human trafficking and baby labour was on Monday postponed within the Excessive Court docket in Johannesburg to Friday subsequent week because the courtroom tries to safe a Mandarin interpreter. “It emerged in courtroom that the earlier interpreter spoke Cantonese and the accused have been battling to observe proceedings as they didn’t perceive the language,” the division of employment and labour mentioned. “Cantonese is without doubt one of the dialects of the Chinese language language.” The accused are Kevin Tsao Shu-Uei, Chen Hui, Qin Li, Jiaqing Zhou, Ma Biao, Dai Junying and Zhang Zhilian. “In October 2021, the accused in a written assertion learn by their legal professional Jannie Kruger made an request for forgiveness for violation of a number of South Africa’s labour legal guidelines. Nevertheless, the opposite expenses – to which they pleaded not responsible – nonetheless stand and they’ll proceed to face trial on these.” In keeping with the division, expenses embody trafficking in individuals, contravention of the Immigration Act, kidnapping and pointing a firearm. Others are debt bondage, benefitting from the providers of a sufferer of trafficking, conduct that facilitates trafficking, illegally helping individuals to stay in South Africa and failure to adjust to the duties of an employer. “In one other growth … Chen Hui, tried to flee South Africa utilizing the Lebombo/Ressano Garcia border publish,” it mentioned, including he was arrested final month and is in custody. Zhilian can also be in custody after she violated her bail situations by attempting to flee the nation and was arrested at OR Tambo Worldwide Airport on 24 February, 2021. The opposite accused are out on bail. They have been arrested in 2019 for allegedly operating an unlawful enterprise referred to as Lovely Metropolis Pty Ltd, positioned at Village Deep, “allegedly processing the inside cotton of blankets utilizing recycled clothes”, the division mentioned. The operation was led by the division’s Inspection and Enforcement Companies with the South African Police Service Directorate for Precedence Crime Investigation and the division of residence affairs. This text initially appeared on South African Authorities Information Company and was republished with permission. Learn the unique article right here. ALSO READ: Kidnapping and trafficking circumstances on the rise in SA Originally published at Irvine News HQ

[awed-frog]

Hi, sorry, I just wanted to say I didn't understand your Parasite tags? Did you like the movie? I only saw it last month and I don't know if I liked it or not, what's your opinion? Thanks!

I liked the movie a lot and will probably rewatch it soon, but I don’t know if I understood what it had to say about capitalism and class.

Like - when I was a teen we watched A Short Film About Killing by Kieślowski. It shows a man planning a murder, and, later, the state planning his execution. It’s supposed to be against the death penalty because it compares how the two killings are essentially the same, but the murder itself is shown so crudely, it actually had the opposite effect on me and made me wonder for the first time in my life if it’s actually okay to execute some people, you know what I mean? The guy was just evil, no rational motive, no redeeming qualities - I walked away thinking, ‘Whatever, they were right to kill him’.

And here it’s sort of the same. I’m sure I’m missing a lot of symbolism and metaphors and stuff because I don’t know Korean culture and cinematography very well, but for me, the obvious message didn’t stick. Like, sure - it’s profoundly unjust the Kim family is living in some basement while the Parks have a mansion to themselves, but by choosing to frame the families in the way he did, I feel like Bong Joon-ho didn’t help us focus on that inequality. Because the thing is, the Kims are terrible people. Ki-woo takes advantage of a teenage girl, Ki-jung poses as a therapist so she can fake-treat a sick child for money? They manage to get two people fired for no good reason except ‘I want that for myself’. The young driver could suffer from life-long consequences if Mr Park tells anyone about what (allegedly) happened, and as for Moon-gwang - first of all, the peaches stunt could have killed her? And even if her husband hadn’t been living in the basement, what is a person her age going to do? Mrs Park won’t recommend someone she thinks has an infectious disease, and Moon-gwang’s worked her entire life in that house. She was happy there. As for the Park family - yes, the way they live is symptomatic of a sick society, but they’re not bad people. Mrs Park is a bit of an idiot and does her best to look after her kids. Mr Park may be a snob, but he was never openly rude to his employees and paid them well. In the end, the Kims’ scam resulted in the death of four people, and I think some forgot that the title of the movie was meant to refer to both families - the Parks are parasites because they need others to survive, but the Kims are also parasites, because they cuckoo their way into someone else’s home and wreck it. 

I don’t know. I think it was a masterpiece and well worth a watch, but I’m not sure about its political message, if any.

[servicetopkaradanvers]

I'm not sure if this is exactly the right place to say this, but I don't know if there is. And you're a smart person and critical thinker who has talked about this before. If this is totally weird, you can just delete it ofc. I've never properly watched Supergirl but I started reading fanfic around the time my mental health got real bad so it was a comfort thing I didn't bring too much thought to. I really identify with Lena and in the past, part of me has understood her actions-

and I know that they're wrong. The anti-alien rhetoric is obviously an allegory for racism or homophobia. She's violated people's basic human rights. And I'm scared that I'm a bad person because sometimes, I kind of get it. Which is insane because i'm a lesbian enby of color, i mean i get targeted by most of the -ist/ism actions. And I'm also too tired to think about things critically all the time. Supercorp was my comfort fic, content thing-

I knew it was problematic (the whole James thing makes me sick to my stomach, scared and sad) but I didn't know that Lena as a character was written that way. The metaphors never really clicked in my head because I never thought about it, but now I feel absolutely horrible about myself because I like and identify with Lena. I'm not really sure how to move on from here- I'm just tired. I wish there could be just one thing, one piece of media that wasn't prejudiced (granted sg is not the place to go if you want decent rep and the like) and all of those things I said earlier. Its just me somehow trying to justify how I felt and empathized with something I shouldn't have. So yeah, sorry that was really long. I hope you have a lovely day- sorry for the spam

FIRST of all, you’re fine, babe! Both in sending me this and in enjoying The Bad Media. That’s my thesis here: You’re fine. With this in mind, let’s unpack this big ol suitcase:

We’re living in a fandom moment where more than ever before, we’re thinking about the ideas we consume in fiction and how they may or may not affect us. This is a net positive! Fiction is not reality, but it undeniably impacts it, so for this and many other reasons, we should always think critically about what resonates with us and why. Does this mean dissecting every facet of something to find all the ways it might fall in line with oppressive power structures? Absolutely not.

You, as an individual, do not owe anyone an explanation for why you enjoy anything. Period. How you relate to a given character or why you like them is nobody's business but your own.

Supergirl, as a piece of media, is singularly awful in its lackluster lipservice to progressivism while simultaneously refusing to deliver any progressive themes. Socially and politically, it is a useless liberal wet dream. Kara is an immigrant from a dead culture working as the muscle for a secret FBI offshoot with zero accountability for all of the other aliens in diaspora she has rounded up and dumped into a cell without trial. Alex is allegedly a lesbian, but the key points of her endgame relationship are constantly deemed not important enough to get screen time, which is made even more absurd when examined from the angle that this series is marketed directly toward LGBT people. An embarrassing percentage of villains on this show are women of color, which is particularly loud when there are only 2 women in the main cast who aren't white. And "main" is extremely generous, given that Kelly is just there to Give Advice Good and everything M'gann says and does is as dry as toast.

My point here is that the whole show is rotted to its roots, and whatever quietly libertarian or even fascism-enabling bullshit they push onto Lena in a given week is par for the crusty, shitty course. Kara deciding that she's ok with the alien detection device because "there are bad aliens" is a lovely (read: awful) microcosm of why this show sucks so fucking hard. "People are entitled to their opinions" is for debates on whether pineapple goes on pizza, not for whether we should casually out, endanger, and disenfranchise our [insert minority metaphor here] because some of them are mean.

But what I would love for this fandom to wrap its head around, and what I hope you understand, anon, is that just because it happens on the show, doesn't mean we have to give a rat's ass about it. What the hell is The Canon, anyway? Especially in the case for Supergirl, which can't even get its own continuity right. Especially for an IP that has been rebooted dozens of times before and will be rebooted again in the future. We can just decide that Lena realized the horrible injustices she enabled through her position of power. We can even decide that they just didn't happen at all! This is all fake. It's not set in stone. Who came up with it, anyway? A network with a list of buzzwords they want included and a couple of D-tier showrunners cranking down caffeine to meet an absurdly tight deadline. It's not special. I can guarantee that you care about it infinitely more than they do, and you haven't even watched the damn show.

On a more personal level, people who are hurt, depressed, or traumatized have always and will always look for themselves in fiction. Myself included! And despite what lofty platitudes there may be on the matter, suffering does not make us kind. It does not make us better. Sometimes it's just suffering. Often it pulls us further from who we are meant to be. Often it just makes us "worse."

Trauma has made Lena emotionally brittle. A lifetime of manipulation and abuse has taught her to compartmentalize herself and lock her feelings behind a maze of doors. When she does let love in, she accepts it so wild and vulnerable that she can't see the red flags behind the rosy lenses. She latches so hard onto people she deems virtuous that she holds them to a standard none could fulfill. Her pain has to go somewhere, so it oozes out of her, into Non Nocere, into the post-reveal rift. She's a powder keg, and Kara spent 4 years shoveling more gunpowder onto the pile while holding the match between her teeth.

And despite these fatal flaws that make perfect sense through the eyes of Lena's trauma, she is so full of love. Like Kara, her suffering did not make her kind. She is kind in spite of her suffering. These are the characters we are drawn to when we're hurting. Lena’s trauma is an inextricable part of her, but it is not all of her, and neither are her mistakes.

There truly is not and never will be a piece of media that is absolutely innocent of the harmful structures thrust upon us by society, because we ourselves also participate in that society whether we are critical of it or not, whether we strive to change it or not. I'm flawed. You're flawed. Bettering ourselves is not a journey toward an ultimate destination of perfection. It is a garden we nurture in an endless labor of love because the joy that comes from seeing it flourish and change vastly outweighs the work we put into it and the weeds popping up around its unkempt edges. This is a lesson Lena herself could probably stand to internalize. Probably with lots and lots of therapy. Lots. And lots.

So, to circle back to the start of this? You're fine. You recognized the logic in a traumatized character's mistakes because our own gravest errors more often than not stem from the ways we have been harmed in the past. It's what makes Lena (or, at the very least, the many adaptations of Lena that exist in this fandom) a good character. She is, to her core, characterized proof that a crumbling foundation and poisonous soil do not define us. Which is why watching her heal and grow and learn a healthier kind of love is so, so wonderful.

In closing, I think it's worth mentioning that being critical of media does not mean that we stop enjoying the parts of it we like. There is a lot of gold to be pulled from the steaming pile of shit that is CW Supergirl, and that's why we're all here in the first place. So I really hope you can continue to enjoy it in whatever way makes you smile <3

[seriousbusinessforhumans]

Feb 2018

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted over 100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called "alt-right" — a movement that continues to access the mainstream and reach young recruits.

On December 7, 2017, a 21-year-old white male posing as a student entered Aztec High School in rural New Mexico and began firing a handgun, killing two students before taking his own life. At the time, the news of the shooting went largely ignored, but the online activity of the alleged killer, William Edward Atchison, bore all the hallmarks of the “alt-right”—the now infamous subculture and political movement consisting of vicious trolls, racist activists, and bitter misogynists.

But Atchison wasn’t the first to fit the profile of alt-right killer—that morbid milestone belongs to Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who in 2014 killed seven in Isla Vista, California, after uploading a sprawling manifesto filled with hatred of young women and interracial couples (Atchison went by “Elliot Rodger” in one of his many online personas and lauded the “supreme gentleman,” a title Rodger gave himself and has since become a meme on the alt-right).

Including Rodger’s murderous rampage there have been at least 13 alt-right related fatal episodes, leaving 43 dead and more than 60 injured (see list). Nine of the 12 incidents counted here occurred in 2017 alone, making last year the most violent year for the movement.

Like Atchison and Rodger, these perpetrators were all male and, with the exception of three men, all under the age of 30 at the time they are alleged to have killed. The average age of the alt-right killers is 26. The youngest was 17. One, Alexandre Bissonnette, is Canadian, but the rest are American. 

The “alternative right” was coined in part by white nationalist leader Richard Bertrand Spencer in 2008, but the movement as it’s known today can largely be traced back to 2012 and 2013 when two major events occurred: the killing of the black teenager Trayvon Martin and the so-called Gamergate controversy where female game developers and journalists were systematically threatened with rape and death. Both were formative moments for a young generation of far-right activists raised on the internet and who found community on chaotic forums like 4chan and Reddit where the classic tenets of white nationalism — most notably the belief that white identity is under attack by multiculturalism and political correctness — flourish under dizzying layers of toxic irony.

The Killings Started in California

The timeline for alt-right killers began on May 23, 2014.

On that day, college sophomore Elliot Rodger stabbed his three roommates to death before driving to a sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and shooting several women. He then killed or injured several pedestrians with both gunfire and his vehicle before exchanging fire with police and eventually taking his own life. He ultimately killed seven and wounded 14.

Rodger left behind a sprawling 107,000-word manifesto titled, “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” which contained passages lamenting his inability to find a girlfriend, expressing extreme misogyny and various racist positions including disgust for interracial couples (despite the fact that he was multi-racial himself (half-Chinese)).

“How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself,” Rodger wrote. “I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves.”

Rodger frequented PUAhate, a deeply misogynistic forum populated by failed “pick up artists” dedicated to revealing, “the scams, deception, and misleading marketing techniques used by dating gurus and the seduction community to deceive men and profit from them.” Discussions about women on the forum are at best objectifying and at worst, violent.

The term, “white sharia,” allegedly coined by Sacco Vandal of the popular alt-right site Vandal Void, is a radical response to Patrick Buchanan’s argument in Death of the West: that the increase in immigration and decline of white birthrates is leading to the end of Western civilization. Rodger’s celebration at the 504um, one of the premier alt-right forums, is the rule rather than the exception, and locates misogyny at the core of the alt-right.

Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer’s founder and chief propagandist, has his own troubling history of vicious misogyny, tracking all the way back to high school.

In the aftermath of Rodger’s killing spree, a user at 4chan/b/ posted a photo from Rodger’s Facebook page with the note, “Elliot Rodger, the supreme gentleman, was part of /b/. Discuss.” This sentiment was echoed by other /b/ users who found similarities between his lexicon and that of the noxious board, including the term “beta,” used by men online to describe themselves as lacking the physicality, charisma and confidence associated with alpha males.... The term resurfaced on 4chan/r9k/ in the wake of a shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, by Chris Harper-Mercer, who killed nine and wounded at least seven others at the college on October 1, 2015. “This is only the beginning. The Beta Rebellion has begun,” one anonymous user wrote. “Soon, more of our brothers will take up arms to become martyrs to this revolution.”

Although never proven, it is widely speculated that Harper-Mercer was a user on the board as warnings against attending school the following day that circulated on the eve of the shooting. Authorities believe Harper-Mercer, who like Rodger was multi-racial, was also motivated by white supremacist ideas. The Government Accountability Office categorized the Roseburg killings as “white supremacist” in an April 2017 report.

2017: A Year of Alt-Right Violence

The first killing in 2017 that can be tied to the alt-right occurred on January 29 in Canada. A 27-year-old university student named Alexandre Bissonnette allegedly brought a semiautomatic rifle into the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City and shot and killed six worshippers while injuring 19—two critically.

On May 20, 2017, Sean Urbanski, a 22-year-old University of Maryland student, allegedly stabbed and killed newly commissioned Lt. Richard Collins, III. Authorities described the attack as “totally unprovoked.” Urbanski approached Collins, who was black, and two friends at 3 a.m., seemingly intoxicated, and said, “Step left, step left if you know what’s best for you.” When Collins refused, Urbanski stabbed him. Urbanski, however, was a member of a Facebook group called “Alt Reich: Nation”.

Less than a week later, Jeremy Christian, a 35-year-old Portland resident, allegedly stabbed and killed two people and severely wounded another passenger on a train while they were defending two young women from his anti-Muslim and racist remarks. Christian, who identified as a white nationalist and had a history of violence and mental illness, had a Facebook page filled with racist and bizarre political content. Witnesses at an alt-right free speech rally in the month preceding the stabbing saw Christian wearing an American flag cape, yelling racial slurs and making Nazi salutes. 

Two months later, on July 14, 2017, Lane Maurice Davis, 33, allegedly stabbed his father, Charles Davis, to death at the family home in Skagit County, Washington, after accusing his father of pedophilia. Davis, a conspiracy theory obsessive who went by the name ‘Seattle4Truth’ online and accused his father, not based on his own experience, but instead on his belief that liberals around the world are participating in secret pedophilia rings. Davis was reportedly a researcher for Milo Yiannopoulos and claimed to have ghost written pieces on Breitbart News for the former tech editor. 

In the months leading up to Unite the Right, members of the alt-right colonized and organized themselves on the gaming chat platform Discord. This includes Auernheimer who was a frequent participant in the Daily Stormer’s server, “Thunderdome,” where he regularly interacted with site readers and put out calls for action.

Young, White, Angry, Male

According to Dr. Eric Madfis, author of a 2014 paper on the intersectional identities of American Mass Murderers, young, white, middle class, heterosexual males commit mass murder at a disproportionately high rate relative to their population size in the United States.

The rate of mass murders spiked in the 1970s and 1990s. Between 1966 and 1999, there were 95 cases of mass public shootings. Between 1976 and 2008, mass murders occurred roughly twice per month, claiming an average of 125 deaths each month. A more recent study published by Mother Jones identifies 95 mass shootings in the United States since 1982. Of those, 55 (59%) were committed by white men.

FBI crime data suggests that ages 16 to 24 are peak time for violent crime. According to Dr. Pete Simi, Director of the Earl Babbie Research Center at Chapman University, "This is a period of substantial transition in an individual's life, when they're less likely to have significant attachments in their life that deter them from criminal violence."

Madfis’s 2014 paper from the University of Washington investigates the role of intersectional identities in mass murder incidents and argues that young, white males' unique downward social mobility, relative to his expectations, accounts for their overrepresentation as perpetrators of mass murder.

Only one in five mass murderers are “likely psychotic or delusional,” however, according to Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University.

A 2001 study conducted by Meloy examining 34 adolescent perpetrators of mass murder found that 59% were the direct result of a triggering event. That rate jumped to 90% among adult mass murders. 

Dr. Elliott Leyton, an expert on serial homicide, argues that contemporary mass murderers often target the perceived source of lost financial stability or class prestige. The alt-right, which couches its mission in terms of surviving literal extinction, routinely laments so-called reverse racism and affirmative action as well as immigration in all its forms.

The grievances collected by those motivated by the white nationalist ideology at the heart of the alt-right often do not begin with racist propaganda, but rather in the toxic communities of the men's rights movement... The age-old racist argument - that black men are 'taking our women' — is made regularly. Racist slurs are chucked around casually. There seems to be a significant overlap with organised white supremacy." 

Andrew Anglin once wrote “[o]ur target audience [for the neo-nazi website Daily Stormer] is white males between the ages of 10 and 30.”

Wiring Young Neurons

“Our target audience is white males between the ages of 10 and 30,” Anglin wrote in his “PSA: When the Alt-Right Hits the Street, You Wanna be Ready.” “I include children as young a ten, because an element of this is that we want to look like superheroes. We want to be something that boys fantasize about being a part of. That is a core element to this. I don’t include men over the age of 30, because after that point, you are largely fixed in your thinking. We will certainly reach some older men, but they should not be a focus.”

[Richard] Spencer told Mother Jones in December of 2016 before a contentious speaking engagement at Texas A&M University. “I think you do need to get them while they are young. I think rewiring the neurons of someone over 50 is effectively impossible.”

Undeniably, their efforts have had success. Mainstay racist conferences, like the annual gatherings of American Renaissance and the National Policy Institute, are attracting larger audiences, no longer dominated by their once singular demographic of middle-aged white men.

On a panel at Harvard University in October, Derek Black, son of longtime white supremacist Don Black, who once represented the future of the movement until he renounced racism during college, described his surprise at seeing so many young participants in Charlottesville:

I can say for sure my entire life in white nationalism I went to conferences many times a year. I spoke at them. I tried to organize them. I organized online through my dad's site [Stormfront] through organizations whether Jared [Taylor]'s AmRen or David [Duke]'s EURO or Council of Conservative Citizens … Everybody at these things is gray-haired. Me and two other people would be under 40. That was it. Which is partly why I took this impression that this is not gonna last. And a lot of that is because young people have a lot to lose … Young people who show up to a rally like that are going to get their identities exposed online and then it's gonna be hard for them to get jobs … I cannot actually explain what changed. The one striking thing about Charlottesville…was there's a ton of young kids like college-age or actual college students who got on buses and went to this who I don't think had been to an event like that before. 

Alt-right groups such as Identity Evropa and Vanguard America are marketing themselves exclusively to college and high school-aged individuals.

Then, on October 19, barely two months after the chaos of Charlottesville, the University of Florida was forced to host a Spencer speaking engagement under threat of a lawsuit........................ Hours later, three of his supporters were arrested for attempted murder after an alleged confrontation with protestors in which Spencer’s supporters threw stiff-armed salutes and one fired a shot at the urging of his accomplices. 

Not Even 21

James Alex Fields was only 20 years-old when he drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of attendees and protestors during August’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, injuring 19 and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Fields stood with members of Vanguard America during the rally and carried a shield with the militaristic, alt-right group’s insignia on it.

According to police records, Fields also had a troubling history of childhood domestic violence — which experts see in about 1 in 6 mass killers. In 2010, Field’s mother called 911 after he attacked her for telling him to stop playing a video game. Other records reveal that he brandished a 12-inch knife at her on a separate occasion. His disabled mother uses a wheelchair.

Just three months prior to Unite the Right, another young, white man with a history in the alt-right, 18-year-old Devon Arthurs, allegedly killed two of his roommates... in Florida. Arthurs, who was taken into custody by authorities after holding employees of a tobacco shop hostage, had converted to Salafism, an ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam, and begun defending ISIS online a year prior. He was previously a leader of a National Socialist group known as the Atomwaffen (“Atomic Weapon”) Division which formed on the fascist forum Iron March. 

In the year leading up to the shooting, Arthurs appeared to be blending his alt-right beliefs with his newfound adherence to extremist forms of Islam. His username changed from Weissewolfe to Kekman Al-Amriki, a combination of the trollish god of “meme magic” common to 4chan and the name of an American member of al-Shabab, an Islamic militant organization. According to VICE, Arthurs also spoke of “white sharia,” a concept exemplifying the brutal, misogynistic core attitudes of the alt-right and those it has inspired to violence.

Leaderless Resistance

In 2014, after longtime Klansman Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. killed three at a Jewish community center and a retirement home in Overland Park, Kansas, Brad Griffin of Occidental Dissent published an article on the topic of “self detonating lone wolf vanguardists.” According to Griffin, “a ‘self detonating lone wolf vanguardist’ is someone who is radically alienated from society and who has given up on persuasion, a fanatacist who is inclined toward violent methods of bringing about eschatological political change, who usually acts alone or with an accomplice in the name of a movement without the support of assistance of any group, and who typically explodes, lashes out, or ‘self detonates’ without warning in rampage shootings, murder-suicides, and bombing campaigns.”

In its just over four years of operation, the Daily Stormer’s audience included at least three readers who were either convicted or indicted for murder. 

"An Age of Ultraviolence"

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Storm Roof killed nine African-American worshipers and wounded one while attending a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof, then 21, told his victims, including Reverend and State Senator Clementa Pickney, that, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

In a manifesto posted to his website, lastrhodesian.com, Roof cited the Trayvon Martin case as his inspiration for searching on Google for “black on White crime.” According to Roof, “I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief.”

On March 22, 2017, another Daily Stormer reader, James Harris Jackson, was arrested after stabbing 66-year-old black man Timothy Caughman with a sword in Manhattan. Jackson, an army veteran, was 28 at the time of the alleged stabbing. He travelled to New York from Baltimore, Maryland, to conduct a “practice run” for what was intended to deter white women from race-mixing. He told a media source after his arrest that, “the white race is being eroded.” 

On Friday, December 27, a 17-year-old white male, reported to be Nicholas Giampa, allegedly shot and killed the parents of his ex-girlfriend in Reston, Virginia, before turning the gun on himself. According to reports, the parents had facilitated the break-up after learning that Giampa held neo-Nazi beliefs.

Giampa’s account also attempted to engage with those of alt-right leaders and organizations like Mike Peinovich, VDARE, the Traditionalist Worker Party, Identity Evropa, as well as Vanguard America, the neo-Nazi group that James Fields was photographed with in Charlottesville. One of Giampa’s main obsessions, however, was the hardcore neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen.

2018 is already off to a disturbing start. On January 2, Blaze Bernstein, a college student who was gay and Jewish went missing and was later found murdered. Friends of the accused murderer, Samuel Woodward, told ProPublica that Woodward was a committed neo-Nazi and member of Atomwaffen which may have as chapters in as many as eight states.

This former Atomwaffen member also said that the events in Charlottesville had a major impact on the group. Its membership doubled.  

(selected sections of article)

[maddie-grove]

Little Book Review: The Color of Law

Author: Richard Rothstein.

Publication Date: 2017.

Genre: Nonfiction (history).

Premise: Rothstein details how the U.S. government not only allowed discriminatory practices that led to segregation in housing and neighborhoods, but actively encouraged and subsidized segregation while sabotaging attempts to create neighborhoods where white and black people lived together (such as refusing to give federal funding to integrated low-income housing projects, making them impossible to build). He also describes the cumulative negative economic and social effect of this federally backed segregation on black Americans (for example, the lack of opportunity to accumulate wealth due to having to pay higher rent on shoddier, more crowded housing and being shut out of home ownership).

Thoughts: Of all the first-year courses that I took in law school, Property was the most unexpectedly enjoyable. It offered the historical grandeur of Constitutional Law, the human messiness of Torts, and the fascinating dilemmas of Criminal Law. (Criminal Procedure and Contracts can go straight to hell.) The first two cases we covered were illustrative: one ruling on the legitimacy of the international slave trade, and the other ruling on whether indigenous Americans had title to lands pre-colonization. Property law, as it turns out, is a thorny business with an ugly history, full of discrimination and fear and greed. All houses are haunted, not just the one in Stambovsky v. Ackley (which was literally haunted, allegedly). 

Rothstein covers a smallish slice of this history in The Color of Law, which focuses on the pro-segregation, unconstitutional efforts of the U.S. federal government in housing matters from roughly WWI to the 1970s. He refutes the idea that segregation in housing was purely de facto (i.e., due to the decisions of private individuals). There were, of course, many white people who refused to live in the same neighborhood or building as black people, and many black people who didn’t try to live near white people out of fear, but the government also actively discouraged private individuals who did want to integrate: black families trying to live closer to work, white families (mostly immigrants) who didn’t see an issue with living near black families, idealistic developers, activists, etc. Some of these efforts were fairly passive and familiar to me from reading other books (allowing half-assed policing of racist terrorists, letting state courts enforce restrictive covenants) while others were more blatant and deliberate (not giving funding to any remotely integrated housing project during WWII, a time when the nation was going through a housing shortage). 

The writing isn’t flashy or particularly creative, but Rothstein is clear, and he does a great job of communicating the devastating cumulative effect (economic, social, and even physical) on black Americans from generation to generation. It reads like a book written by a lawyer, in the sense that Rothstein is building a case, but it’s relatively jargon-free. I get why this was the hot book when I was in law school

Hot Goodreads Take: A lot of people question why Rothstein wants the government to take reparative actions towards black Americans, when the government did all this harmful racist stuff in the first place. I don’t know, dude, why should someone who crashes into my car pay for repairs when they crashed into my car in the first place? And who else should do it? Wendy’s? 

[back-and-totheleft]

“Make it for the soldiers”

The three-time Oscar winner is back with a new book—Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game—and turning its pages is like entering a Stone movie. The one-time infantryman had a single condition in granting HUSTLER this Q&A: “Make it for the soldiers. You’ve got to make it interesting to them.” Movie stars are often household names, but Oliver Stone is one of the few screenwriters and directors to have a high public profile. Now he’s released a new book, and it’s a rip-roaring, rollicking read, full of tense drama and trauma. The 342-page memoir focuses on Stone’s life through the age of 40 and sheds light on what forged Hollywood’s movie maverick and makes him tick.

After the Allies liberated Paris, his father—Colonel Louis Stone, who served on General Eisenhower’s staff—met the Parisian Jacqueline Pauline Cezarine Goddet. In December 1945 they married, which Stone wryly writes was “possibly the greatest mistakes of their lives,” and sailed from France to live in New York, where Louis, a Yale graduate, resumed his Wall Street career as a stockbroker. Stone reveals how their divorce affected him and, for the first time ever, describes in detail his combat experiences in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Coming under fire in Indochina’s jungles ignited an intense mistrust of government and hatred of war that actually compelled Stone to become a filmmaker. As the Chasing the Light subtitle indicates, the book zooms in on four movies and provides a behind-the-scenes peek at Stone’s maneuvering through Tinseltown’s machinations. Stone scored his first Hollywood triumphs as the screenwriter of 1978’s Midnight Express, winning an Oscar and a Golden Globe. Like his script for 1983’s Scarface, Midnight Express lampooned the so-called War on Drugs. This set the stage for Stone to tackle President Reagan’s secret war in Central America with 1986’s hard-hitting Salvador, followed later that same year by his grunt’s-eye view on the Vietnam War, the no-holds-barred Platoon. At the 1987 Academy Awards ceremony, Stone was in the rare enviable position of competing against himself in the Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen category for both Salvador and Platoon. Although he won neither, his boyhood idol Elizabeth Taylor did give Stone the Best Director Oscar for Platoon, which also won for Best Picture. The book’s curtain closes as Stone earns his sublime moment in the limelight, emerging as one of the movie industry’s most celebrated writer-directors of all time. His future body of work—1987’s Wall Street, 1991’s The Doors and JFK through 2016’s Snowden—are only mentioned in passing, if at all. An exception is 1989’s Best Picture-nominated Born on the Fourth of July, for which Stone was awarded his second Best Director Oscar, for helming this searing cinematic biopic about maimed Vietnam War vet Ron Kovic, whose relationship with Stone began during the period his memoir covers. HUSTLER interviewed Stone when he returned to Los Angeles in between trips to Europe to promote his book. In this candid conversation Stone opens up about the Vietnam War, drugs, censorship, Edward Snowden, Larry Flynt, Jackie Kennedy, his new Kennedy assassination film and so much more. HUSTLER: How did Chasing the Light come about? Did you write any of it while sheltering in place? OLIVER STONE: No. I was finishing up in that phase. I wrote it over two years. It was final draft, checking things, draft edits, around February, March… I was working on other things, documentaries and so forth. In your memoir you write about your time in Vietnam. Have you recounted those personal experiences extensively before? No. No, I haven’t. In interviews I’ve shared some of it. But no, this is all fresh material. The movies were dramatic presentations. I talk about Born on the Fourth of July and my relationship with Ron Kovic [the paralyzed Vietnam War vet portrayed by Tom Cruise in the 1989 feature]. And a lot about Platoon. Because both were written in 1976 [the year Kovic’s book was published], which falls in the period I’m covering in Chasing the Light, up to 1986. They play a significant role—the failures of those two films to get made haunted me. You were wounded twice in Vietnam—where you served with distinction as an infantryman, winning a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. So what do you think about President Trump allegedly calling dead soldiers “losers” and “suckers” and stating that military parades should exclude wounded vets? It’s a strange statement. I don’t know if he made it, but it sounds very bizarre. Obviously, I don’t agree with it. On the other hand, I don’t believe we should be over-glorifying our veterans either, because that leads to other sets of problems, which we’ve seen in the spate of recent wars. To prepare for this interview, I watched Scarface again. In your book you mention that you were probably conceived in Europe, your mom was an immigrant from France, and it struck me that Scarface is very much an immigrant’s saga. How do you view the Trump/Stephen Miller immigration and refugee policies? I abhor them. I do believe in immigration—it’s what the American way is about. This country has been built on immigration. Even in this lifetime of mine we’ve had such a new spate of immigration from different countries, Third World, Asia. It’s remarkable. In Scarface we talk about Latin Americans who are coming into Miami, some good, some bad. It’s a rich mix, and that’s what had given America its experimental nature. There’s no fixed America in my mind. It’s 250 years—it’s a constantly changing soup. Scarface, like Midnight Express, is drug-themed. Your memoir is quite candid about your own use of substances. What do you think of the War on Drugs? Who won? [Laughs.] It’s a ludicrous objective. It should not be called a “war.” Listen, I partook of drugs. I’ve been very honest about it. It started for me in Vietnam. I smoked it in the base camps, in the rear, when we came back. I smoked it to relax. I go into the reasons for it. It helped me get through that war as a human being. Very important to me. I respect it. I also talk about drug use later on in my life, like cocaine—which I don’t think worked for me at all, and I said why. So I’m on both sides of it. But I do think it’s an individual issue, of individual responsibility and education. The treatment for it is not punishment but hospitalization or medical help or psychiatric help. The War on Drugs is a waste of money, and again, it’s political. I saw that in Scarface, the birth of the Drug Enforcement [Administration]—very political, huge budgets; it’s growing every year. The Reagan war and all that—they call it a war. Everything in America is a war. But we don’t win any one of them. Have you encountered political censorship in Hollywood for your movies’ dissident politics over the years? You posit that Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig being on MGM’s board may have affected an early effort to make Platoon. Yes. It’s been a long haul. And I emphasize the word may, because you never know when they turn it down. They never tell you, “It’s because of political reasons that we don’t want to make your film.” They never say that. They couch it in economic terms or, “This is too depressing.” “It’s blah-blah A, B or C.” You never know. In this case, it was a very easy deal for them to make. Dino De Laurentiis was behind it—as my producer he was financing the film. MGM had a distribution deal with Mr. De Laurentiis, and they didn’t live up to it. He was making very risky movies at that time, like Blue Velvet. MGM had to make a minimal investment in distribution costs, and they did not do it. Why? Well, I would assume that the president of MGM at the time, Frank Yablans, said that he had gone to the board and they had turned [Platoon] down, but I’m not sure he’s telling the truth. Because they sometimes don’t even bother to go to the board because they don’t want to take any heat. On the board, of course, were two very conservative men on Vietnam who I’d classify as war hawks. So, I mean, it became a political issue. I do believe that; I have no proof. Also, the Pentagon passed on the film, calling it completely unrealistic. This is an important issue because the movie is realistic. I was there, and I saw it on the ground. I was in four different platoons, in four different units, in three combat platoons. I served in the south and in the north and saw quite a bit of action. And I’m telling you, three things I wrote in the book, about the three lies in Vietnam, I believe apply even today to all fought wars. One is friendly fire. American soldiers get killed by their own side, by small arms fire, artillery and bombs. It’s not precision bombing. About 20 percent of the casualties, wounded and dead, comes from friendly fire. This is a very important point, because it is buried over and over again by the Pentagon in their after-action reports. Recently, the Arizona Cardinals’ Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan, and there was a whole mess in trying to get to the reasons for his death. Of course, that was a celebrity-type killing, but this goes on all the time in every war. In Vietnam, in the jungle, you can imagine the asymmetric aspect of it. When fire happens, you don’t even know where the fire is coming from. People are firing—you don’t know if it’s coming in or out. And various things like that are happening all the time. I believe my first wound came about through friendly fire. The second lie I talked about was killing civilians, trashing villages. Racism was really a huge factor in that. We treated the civilians mostly as enemies, as people who were supporting the enemy. [Secretary of Defense] Robert McNamara estimated three to four million Vietnamese killed. The third lie, the biggest one of all: “We’re winning the war.” We heard that lie again and again and again. It was fed to the American people. Even from the beginning, we never had a chance. In Neil Sheehan’s book A Bright Shining Lie, [Lieutenant Colonel] John Paul Vann made it really clear, in 1962 this was a hopeless situation, a hopeless war, because true patriotism was to fight for your country. This was a war, as he said, of independence that was fought against us as colonizers in the wake of the French. Inflating body counts, lying about enemy movements, CIA involvement in the war, no question about it. Misguiding the war. Often bad information, among other things, about the My Lai massacre in March 1968, when 500-plus villagers were killed in cold blood by [U.S.] units who were told that the enemy would be in the village. Not a single enemy bullet was fired in that whole day. And this was investigated by the Army itself, by an honest [lieutenant] general named [William Ray] Peers. He didn’t believe it at first. He thought it was bullshit, that the Seymour Hersh revelations were bullshit. He went in there and investigated thoroughly and came up with the conclusion. That’s what my movie I wanted to make on the My Lai massacre is about. He indicted 20-plus officers all the way up to the top of that division. He indicted the general of that division for his negligence. It’s a disgusting story. But it happens all the time in war and is covered up. Covered up for the dignity of the family, for the dignity of the death and so forth and so on. “How can you criticize the military?” You know, that horrible kind of righteousness, which prevents us from seeing what war is. Although you’re a decorated Vietnam veteran, the Pentagon denied you any support for Platoon—and, I assume, for your other Vietnam War-related movies. Yes, that’s correct. But other directors such as, say, Michael Bay, who never served in the military but who make pro-war, pro-military films, are given permission to shoot at U.S. bases, use of armed services personnel, access to high-tech equipment, etc. What do you make of this double standard? Does it violate the First Amendment? I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly a violation of morality. It’s much bigger than Michael Bay—there’s a book that came out in 2017, National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood by Matthew Alford and Tom Secker. James DiEugenio, who works with me, has covered this issue separately in another book, Reclaiming Parkland. These two books cover the involvement of the Pentagon in Hollywood. Alford and his coauthor talk about 800-plus films that were made with Pentagon cooperation. You’d be stunned at some of the films made. Among case studies are Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down—which is basically a whitewashing of the affair in Somalia—Charlie Wilson’s War, Hotel Rwanda, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Rules of Engagement, The Terminator, 13 Days, United 93, Wag the Dog. Talks about people like Tom Clancy, of course a big military supporter, and the CIA too. TV series such as Alias, Homeland and 24—which had a tremendous effect on the American public in glorifying the CIA, making it seem like it was a backstop for our security, which is a lie too. It undermined our security. All this is much bigger than Michael Bay. In Chasing the Light you mention “surveillance” a number of times, and of course you made 2016’s Snowden. On September 2, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the NSA’s warrantless mass surveillance—which Edward Snowden exposed—was illegal and possibly unconstitutional. What do you think of that, and what should happen to Snowden now? [Laughs.] It’s obviously correct. Snowden should be brought back to the country. I don’t know if he should be pardoned for his wrongs—because he never did anything wrong. He should be pardoned immediately, as should [WikiLeaks’] Julian Assange. The fact is, the NSA has been breaking the law for so many years. We owe it to George Bush and that administration. That was reported on as early as around 2004, but buried by The New York Times until after the election. The Pentagon Papers was released by The Times because they hated Nixon, but I guess with Bush, they gave him a pass. Terrible. It [NSA’s bulk surveillance] has resulted in this sense of unease—you’re always monitored, we have to check our behavior, we’re under control. This is a disaster for the world. Also, other countries have responded accordingly. The World Wide Web is very dangerous. It goes back to the worst days of J. Edgar Hoover. Free speech is a recurring theme in a number of your films. How were you involved in the making of 1996’s The People vs. Larry Flynt? I was a producer. It was written by Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander. It was their script. Milos Forman developed it with them. I did feel that Larry Flynt had a case—he won the case [against Reverend Jerry Falwell Sr.]. I’m glad. I’m proud of the movie. After Platoon was released, you quote Jacqueline Kennedy, who wrote you and said, “Your film has changed the direction of a country’s thinking.” Your movies presented a counter-narrative to the Reagan regime’s reactionary agenda. Modesty aside, do you think that Salvador, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July may have helped stop Reagan and Bush from turning their Contra Wars in Central America into full-fledged Vietnam-like invasions? I don’t believe that they did. What happened was the fortuitous fuckup by the CIA when Eugene Hasenfus was captured after his plane was shot down. He was a contractor—he was in Nicaragua supplying [weapons to the U.S.-backed anti-Sandinista Contras]. It leads to the larger story of Oliver North, Reagan, George Herbert [Walker] Bush and the Iran-Contra affair. That’s what stalled them. Not that it was revealed in its entirety—that’s another story, of course, that’s been buried by The Washington Post’s Katharine Graham, who has been lionized in another kind of movie. But basically that scandal at least was enough to stop the momentum of an invasion, and Reagan did not have the power, the ability, the credibility anymore after October ’86. Which of course helped Platoon too, because it came out right in that juncture, and that revived Salvador, which was rereleased. Both films had an impact, but whether that would have changed the course of Reagan without the accident with the CIA—I don’t think so. Tell us about your new film, JFK: Destiny Betrayed. It’s a four-hour documentary, and it has the facts. More facts than ever. We deal with everything that happened after—in terms of documentation—since [JFK] came out in 1991. Very interesting. Because the assassination records review board, which was created from the JFK film with the JFK [Records] Act—although it was stymied by many restrictions, it did manage to release a fair amount of documents. Not all. And in those documents there’s quite a bit of information, including, of course, Operation Northwoods, that the Pentagon was operating to undercut Cuba. What are some of the highlights you learned since 1991 about the liquidation of President Kennedy? Well, I think you have to wait for the movie. [Laughs.] But certainly the ties of [Lee Harvey] Oswald to the CIA. That’s more explicit. Certainly, the evidence. We revisit the original evidence presented by Mark Lane but with new witnesses; new characters have come forward. Many people [didn’t] talk, but they start talking after the movie in the 1990s…People talk. All these informational signals come from all directions. You explain that your book title, Chasing the Light, refers to a moviemaking term. But does it also allude to your personal quest for enlightenment? And if so, have you attained it yet? Well, I’m much older [now] than when the book ends. But certainly that is an important moment, in 1986. After wanting to achieve a dream of writing and directing since I was 22 and being rejected and defeated many times, having some success along the way, and after having almost given up at 30—finally, at the age of 40, I really had a breakthrough of major proportions, with two solid movies back to back that really convinced the world, as well as myself, that I was a writer-director. It was a core victory for me and an important fact. That sets the tone for the foundation of my character. There’s going to be changes, more detours, pushes and turns in the story, but certainly, it’s established in 1986. So your memoir ends in 1987. That means a lot of your other classics are yet to come. So, in that grand Hollywood tradition, will there be a sequel to Chasing the Light? Well, I hope so. I do hope so. I hope the book does well enough to justify it. What’s next for you? I have two documentaries. One is the JFK documentary, four hours long, that won’t be out for a year. Another one is unedited, about the future, the need for clean energy, which includes nuclear energy. It’s based on a book I bought called A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow, by Joshua Goldstein and a Swedish scientist, Staffan A. Qvist. I understand you’re traveling these days. I’m about to promote the book in Paris. I just came back from Italy, France and Germany… It was big in Italy—they loved me. [Laughs.] Much better than in the United States.

-Ed Rampell, Hustler, Jan 16 2021

[theshedding]

Don’t tell people not to laugh.

Friends, today is not a day to be shamed of your joy and hope. Wave your flag HIGH. Some people would have you to believe you should hide your glee, your excitement or your elation at finally seeing the caravan of retribution, cosmic justice and old-fashioned “reaping and sowing” reach the gates of its own demise. You should not. The universe is doing what it’s doing and, acknowledging that as the only “justice” we can be sure to have, or hope for, is well-earned and beyond our control. But just in case you still feel a bit self-conscious about the universe’s timing:

Remember the children  -as young as babies- in distress, traumatized from parental separation, with ID numbers written on their arms as they’re shipped around the US quietly on night flights, lodging in Best Western hotels while this administration claimed they are “keeping families together”. Remember how their family members -pre pandemic- were packed in cages so tight no one could even lay down and SLEEP and how lawyers went to COURT on their behalf to advocate for them having access to basic hygiene products and influenza medications.

Remember the "shithole" Bahamians (a former Caribbean free-slave society with "Black Leadership") that were denied temporary refuge in the US after a monstrous hurricane stalled over their island homes for nearly 3 days-destroying their entire habitat, food/water supply & livelihood. Think of all the Republican politicians & White Americans who then joined in to support and affirm this un-neighborly treatment, who hide their tax-free profits in their banks and HAPPILY vacation there each year but proudly expect the service of Bahamian people during their pseudo-Caribbean "getaways”.

Remember the Puerto Ricans 🇵🇷 (& Vieques, Culebra, USVI 🇻🇮) who were told they were too "Lazy" to deserve adequate FEMA relief; relief that was sitting in cargo bins and supply ships stuck in port for weeks while surviving families, children & the elderly scoured around the island for water & food. Remember how the big ‘White Man’ and his posse flew in on a PR gambit to cover-up administrative incompetence. How they forced the hand of local government officials to “erase” lives by agreeing to concede lower death counts. How he threw paper towels at human beings in need of food and water from across a room, delighted with the televised spectacle of groveling survivors to cover-up an ill-prepared disaster response. How he required literal “thanks and praise” for benevolently distributing resources which they are entitledto by law, then flew back to the states, lied on those same leaders and then told the citizenry (overriding the NOAA) the same monstrous hurricane was "changing course" to Western Florida and Alabama because he knows better about meteorological science.

Remember the families of Paradise California-having lost all their life’s possessions, standing in the ashes of torched forests, had to acknowledge the welcome of a man who couldn’t bother to offer condolences let alone research the name of the very town he traveled to for a photo op. How he then minimized their devastation by recommending those agencies and families "rake leaves" like the Scandinavians do-to combat a Climate Change phenomenon he believes is a hoax. 

Remember Heather Heyer, who lost her life, run over by a speeding driver in a crowd-on film, who's mother wasn't offered so much as a condolence card for the loss of her only daughter during a protest against Nazis HE STILL WONT CONDEMN, that descended on her hometown to spew epithets, obscenities while terrorizing ethnic, religious and sexual minorities with old-fashioned torches one fine Friday evening. Remember how it looked and sounded to witness the chilling resurrection of the chanting ghosts in our country’s violent, barbarous history be welcomed in equivocal affirmation by a head of state, staff and colleagues.

Remember Khzir Khan, his wife and fallen son who are to this day still mocked, denigrated and roundly dismissed for their immigrant history and military service-to this country's ideals and imperialistic motivations in their own places of birth -whilst simultaneously offering up White soldiers and their families who served in the same wars as the epitome of American valor, respectability, 'legitimacy' and political currency. And how he later condemned his own Defense leaders as being hungry for war to satisfy a “military industrial complex”.

Remember the vile ‘mysogynoir’ directed at Rep. Fredrica Wilson (FL) by his Chief of Staff, himself a gold-star military father, caught blatantly lying about material facts he used to denigrate her concerning the death of a Black soldier and his grieving widow. How he defended a callous condolence call and gaslight an entire press corp to bolster an unpatriotic narrative of a Black soldier that "He knew what he was getting into"...and never apologized for it.

Remember the Trans women and men serving in the Miltary who woke up one random morning to read on Twitter that their hard work and dedication was now a distraction and “threat to cohesion” because their identity had become "too expensive" to sustain. This after being assured their jobs and “LGBTQ rights” would be honored beyond 2016. Remember the grift of inter-agencies, the re-allocation of Defense funds towards a border wall “Mexico would pay for” and the $84 Million in subsidies for erectile dysfunction medications for male military officers (in contrast to “overspending” claims on Trans hormonal care). Remember this vulgar scapegoating to satisfy a group of mysogynistic theocrats and non-profit “interest groups” self-defined by Biblical “principles” and simultaneously bearing the most false of witness against these their neighbors.

Remember the show hearings with Dr. Ford, a victim of sexual abuse, white patriarchy and the most acute manifestations of rich, male, Christian privilege, who was not be afforded a thorough background investigation into her abusers and the veracity of her case; who was eventually mocked and discredited by grinning Senators eager to affirm a petulant, entitled drunk of a pious Juris Doctor, just so he could rule in favor of a “Muslim Ban” from a guy who pledged a “total Muslim ban” before being sworn-in to office. And the irony of discrediting Ford’s testimony on ‘insufficient’ evidence while being employed as a result of 10 years of election campaigns exploiting fears of coming “Sharia Law” they claim mistreats women places like Iran and Afghanistan.

Remember the nearly $110 million dollars for a 2017 Presidential inauguration still unaccounted for but nevertheless was somehow needed to hire acts like The Rocketts, the “US Border Patrol Pipes & Drums”,  celebrity season winners on “America’s Got Talent” or the high-priced “1st Calvary Division Horse Calvary Detachment”. Remember how he got an inauguration: through outright lies, mockery, demonization of Latinos, the Disabled, the American Indigenous (remember “Pocahontas”?) and Blacks/African-Americans…before insisting the public believe an easily refuted lie about crowd and attendance.

Remember the dead that are still being killed overseas in various theaters of war: the dead Kurdish people (a.k.a. our “allies”); the dead soldiers for whose lives someone received a $100K bounty payment from Putin; the dead migrant adults and children who succumbed to abuse, infection and disease in holding cells (pre-Covid); the charred bodies trapped in their neighborhoods from fires raging in the West; the traumatized and/or dead protestors shot by sanctioned White vigilantes in cities “protecting businesses”; Black/Latino men and women shot by law enforcement or the 72 y/o Buffalo man with a permanent brain injury pushed to the ground by a “task force” of colleagues dutifully walking away as his blood spills on the sidewalk; the 205,000 DEAD of Covid-19, a purported “Democratic Hoax” that would miraculously disappear by Easter 2020, yet could be sufficiently treated with ultraviolet lights, “injections” of cleaning solution and for which -according to this man- “no one” has died even from (including your friend or your family member). He calls them “no one”.

Oh, and lest we forget-he is said to have only paid $750.00 in Federal taxes as a BILLIONAIRE…in the 10 years. Not to mention having allegedly RAPED or SEXUALLY ASSAULTED over 25 WOMEN. 

As you tell me and everyone else not to “laugh”, dismiss or revel in this President’s current status, or that of his staff and family, REMEMBER THAT.

-R

[justforbooks]

Towards the beginning of The Golden House, there’s a soireè scene, where the eldest of the three Golden sons, the loquacious Petya, offers a brilliant display for the guests. The narrator recounts:

“That night he talked and drank without stopping, and all of us who were there would carry fragments of that talk in our memories for the rest of our lives. What crazy, extraordinary talk it was! No limit to the subjects he reached for and used as punching bags.” 

Those subjects range from the collapse of foreign currencies to the sex lives of British royals, from the lyrics of Bob Dylan to the flaws in Stephen Hawking’s theory of black holes. Petya, “glittering-eyed and babbling like a brook,” flies from topic to topic, drawing spontaneously on his vast reservoir of knowledge, “like a whole cable box full of talk-show networks that jumped channels frequently.”

Veteran readers of Salman Rushdie will recognise this tendency from the author’s body of work. Like Petya, Rushdie is a polymath. His books – and his lectures -– overflow with myriad allusions, digressions, and stories within stories, sweeping through eras, continents, and cultures. However, unlike Petya, who suffers from a crucial “flaw in the program,” Rushdie is the master storyteller in his latest book, never losing control over what is, ultimately, a suspenseful thriller.

Return to realism

In The Golden House, Rushdie abandons the fantastical elements of much of his previous fiction, choosing realism over the magical realism for which he has become renowned. His return to realism may not be all that surprising in a novel that examines life in the United States in recent years. Actual events in America have proven to be so bizarre that the need to invent fabulous ones may have been eliminated.

In any case, this book is set firmly in the real world – in contemporary Bombay and New York – the city of the author’s birth and the city where he now resides. Its present action coincides with the eight years spanning Barack Obama’s Presidential term. As in some of Rushdie’s earlier work, most notably Midnight’s Children, the story of individual characters runs parallel to that of a nation caught in the throes of transformation.

The novel’s immediate setting is the Gardens, a grassy quadrangle in the heart of Manhattan that forms “an enchanted, fearless space” for the exclusive community that resides around it. It is in this idyllic space, where fireflies sparkle on summer evenings and children play freely, that our millennial narrator René lives with his liberal, academic, parents. At the beginning of the novel René is “just a young man dreaming of the movies.” He is, in fact, an aspiring filmmaker, in search of a subject.

On the day of Obama’s first inauguration, an event marked by a sense of unbridled optimism across the city, the grand mansion that has lain empty behind the Gardens for years is finally occupied, by a wealthy foreign family who refuse to divulge any information about their previous lives. The family’s imperious patriarch, like many immigrants before him, seeks to reinvent himself in America. He christens himself Nero after the last of the Caesars, and his sons choose their own names – Petronius (Petya), Lucius Apulius (Apu), and Dionysius (D). The mansion itself is renamed The Golden House.

Nero Golden shares many characteristics with another American literary hero – a mysterious past, unexplained wealth, decadent parties, a mythic property. Like Jay Gatsby’s guests, Nero’s new acquaintances try to fill the gaps in his narrative by spinning tales about him. René, who fancies himself as a modern-day Nick Carraway, makes several references to Fitzgerald’s novel. But unlike Gatsby, Nero is not alone.

The golden sons

In a sense, this is a story of fathers and sons. Each of Nero Golden’s sons is idiosyncratic and distinctive. Petya, afflicted by high-functioning autism, is an incredibly intelligent and erudite but socially awkward man who spends much of his time inside his bedroom bathed in the blue light of computer screens. When he is not expounding on the many subjects that crowd his brain, he immerses himself in the virtual world of gaming. Petya’s manic conversations conceal a deep and endless suffering.

The second son, Apu, is the artist in the family. Romantic and political, Apu becomes a successful painter and dabbles in activism before growing disillusioned with what he regards as liberal posturing and ineffectualness. He has a way with women, which places him and Petya firmly on the warpath.

The youngest son, the beautiful, androgynous D, is forever the outsider. Born of Nero’s extramarital liaison with “a woman of no consequence” 18 years after Apu, D has never felt like he really belongs in this family. Tormented by his illegitimacy and plagued by questions about his sexuality, D is the first to leave the Golden House and find refuge elsewhere – in Chinatown – outside the cloistered precincts of the Gardens. There is something deeply tragic about each of the sons. Their vulnerability shines through at key moments. These are the most moving sections in the novel.

Compared to the men, the women seem less vulnerable. From a relatively minor character such as the exotic Somali sculptor Ubah Tuur to the “astonishing” Vasilisa who presides over the novel, their physical perfection and power over men make them both magnificent and slightly removed from the reader. Even when they suffer – and they do suffer, often because of actions taken by the men – we rarely get inside their souls in quite the same way as we do with the men. At one point René makes a telling statement when he says, “‘The art of the cinema,’ Truffaut allegedly said, ‘is to point the camera at a beautiful woman.’” It is perhaps fitting then that our narrator is a filmmaker.

Watching from the window

However, this does not mean that the women are not interesting or indeed fascinating. And no one is more so than the one whose machinations change the destiny of the Goldens: the Russian émigré Vasilisa. At once goddess and witch, Vasilisa is seductive, manipulative, and ruthless. It is her all-encompassing ambition of living a life “worthy of her beauty” that propels the plot forward. In a book about immigrants, Vasilisa embodies the immigrant desire to start over. “The past,” she says, “is a broken cardboard suitcase full of photographs of things I no longer wish to see.” Contradicting forces for good and evil literally struggle within her soul. Again, this seems more mythic than human, but whether or not she will ultimately prove to be one or the other is one of the many mysteries the narrator will have to uncover.

The auteur-narrator makes numerous references to movies throughout, and the influence of cinema, both on him and on the novel, is unmistakable. Like Jeff in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, René watches the Goldens – and other neighbors – from his home, overhearing noises and catching glimpses of scenes that hint at secrets and scandals. He soon discovers that the place the Goldens have fled is none other than Bombay. His research – and imagination – reveal that they left behind a city infested with corruption and crime, a world of underworld violence and international terrorism. “The worlds are less different than we pretend,” Nero tells him.

Initially, René is only a witness, but soon he finds himself becoming a participant and getting further and further entangled in the events. Poet, philosopher, and chronicler, René serves as the conscience of the book. And while he is flawed and complicit in the events that unfold, he says, “Allow me this at least: that I am self aware.” That he is, and it makes him the most endearing character of all.

Truth and lies

Even though this is not a work of magical realism, the distinction between lies and truth is often blurred. The Goldens of course tell “stories about themselves, stories in which essential information about origins was either omitted or falsified.” The characters frequently betray each other. The structure of the book further contributes to the blending of lies and truth, as René begins to invent scenes for his film in progress. Several sections are written as script, with scenes dissolving or ending with the director’s cut, and the camera zooming in and out. Some include voiceovers and other stylised effects. At times it’s difficult to say what really takes place and what is invented by René. If you don’t know the truth, fellow filmmaker Suchitra tells him, use your imagination.

Meanwhile, even as truth and lies begin to collide inside the Gardens, outside it, in the wider world of America, the greatest betrayal of all begins to take shape. The world readies itself for the 45th US presidential elections between two unlikely contenders. On the one hand there is Batwoman, “who owned her dark side, but used it to fight for good, justice, and the American way.” On the other is the Joker – a green-haired, white-faced, red-lipped, real estate tycoon who is “utterly and certifiably insane.”

Rushdie uses rants by minor characters on the streets of Manhattan, as well as observations by our protagonists, to explore the growing “discontent of a furiously divided country.” It is tempting to find the author’s own well-known views on certain topics in the characters, for instance, when Apu chastises “wishy washy” liberals for attempting to sanitise language due to political correctness, or when René defends his suspicion of organised religion. While much of this author’s prior work has dealt with political events, this book’s preoccupation with many of the burning issues of the day makes it particularly urgent and relevant.

The personal and the political

Of all those issues, the question of gender identity is especially prominent. The Museum of Identity where Riya works represents the quest for identity in general, but for D, this quest is very personal. “Come inside and learn about the new world,” Riya tells him. What follows is an education, mostly about transitioning and “gender identity, splitting as never before in human history, spawning whole new vocabularies that tried to grasp the new mutabilities.” Some of their dialogue on this subject sounds didactic, like an introductory lecture on the transgender community for a beginner, which of course is what D is. Nevertheless, the effect of this new education on him is profound and real and will eventually lead to the most poetic, moving section in the book.

Rushdie’s prose is as always both dazzling and dizzying. Replete with clever wordplay and digressions, it includes allusions to Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, the ancient Chinese hexagrams of divination, the 1956 chess Game of the Century between Bobby Fischer and Donald Byrne, video games, superheroes, and Seinfeld, to name only a small fraction. References to current affairs range from Planned Parenthood and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States to the telecommunications scam and the 2008 terror attack against Bombay’s Taj Mahal Hotel in India.

People often appear and disappear within a few lines, but are given their own histories and eccentricities. They are, in René’s words, “minor characters who might not make it past the cutting room floor.” These people, like some of their dialogues and many of the allusions, might at times seem a tad gratuitous. The long, packed, meandering sentences can feel overwhelming. But, then, so is New York. Together, the obviously significant and the apparently insignificant help create the teeming, chaotic world of the city to which the book is a tribute of sorts.

The novel can be read as a chronicle of America in recent years, leading up to the present, troubled, Presidency. But that is only a part of it. At the heart lies a page-turner that is the stuff of blockbusters. There’s something breathtaking about the combination of contemporary events that we have all witnessed and are part of even now, and the gripping story of crime and passion, all narrated in such baroque prose.

Much suspense is created through René’s laments as he recollects events of the past eight years. Statements such as “it concerned all of us less than it should have,” and “I should have known there would be trouble,” suggest impending doom. Always, looming over us is the premonition of tragedy. “What would it mean,” René ponders, “if the Joker became the King?” The innocence, of both the Gardens and of Obama’s inauguration in 2009, cannot be sustained. This is the tale of a dysfunctional family within a dysfunctional nation, both hurtling toward disaster. At times it may be horrifying to watch, but it is impossible to look away.

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

[therebelwrites]

New York City will pay $3.3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of the teenager who spent three years at the Rikers Island jail complex after being accused of stealing a backpack, becoming a symbol of dysfunction in the criminal-justice system.

In 2010, 16-year-old Kalief Browder, originally from the Bronx, was arrested and held at Rikers on $3,000 bail. He spent time in solitary confinement and returned to court dozens of times. In 2013, the charges were dismissed. After his release, Mr. Browder died by suicide in 2015 at the age of 22.

“Kalief Browder’s story helped inspire numerous reforms to the justice system to prevent this tragedy from ever happening again, including an end to punitive segregation for young people on Rikers Island,” a spokesman for the New York City Law Department said on Thursday. “We hope that this settlement and our continuing reforms help bring some measure of closure to the Browder family.”

The city didn’t acknowledge wrongdoing in the settlement.

“This was a fair and reasonable settlement,” said lawyer Sanford Rubenstein, who represents Mr. Browder’s estate.

The $3.3 million settlement includes attorney fees and expenses. A surrogate judge will determine how the money is distributed among Mr. Browder’s family members.

A 2014 profile in the New Yorker magazine about Mr. Browder prompted national outrage. Over the next several years, his name was frequently mentioned by advocates and elected officials pushing changes to bail, pretrial detention and conditions in jails, among other criminal-justice issues. In 2016, President Obama cited Mr. Browder’s case while arguing to reduce the use of solitary confinement.

The problems surrounding Mr. Browder’s case were well known in low-income communities and communities of color, said Tyler Nims, executive director of the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, which advocates for changes to the criminal-justice system. But the human element of his story drew mainstream attention to issues that previously had flown under the radar, he added.

“It was hugely important in starting the push to close Rikers Island and some of the other justice reforms we are starting to see today,” Mr. Nims said.

Mr. Browder’s story also drew attention to individual cases that had once been largely ignored. Another Bronx teen, Pedro Hernandez, spent more than a year at Rikers on weapons charges before Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, an advocacy group, posted $100,000 to bail him out. Prosecutors eventually dropped those charges.

“If it wasn’t for Kalief Browder, that may have never happened,” said Mr. Hernandez’s lawyer, Alex Spiro. “He helped save Pedro’s life.”

FIRST OF ALL:

Always note the SOURCE of every piece of information that you ever receive. Even the most allegedly “objective” information is written through the lens of the writer. (I explained this in my post, “In Google We Trust: Why You Should NEVER Take All Google Search Results at Face Value,” stating:

Which is why you should always, always, ALWAYS examine the source of your search results, in addition to evaluating the bias of even those sources who SEEM to be most reputable! (Yes, National Geographic would be considered a credible source about all things animal related, BUT remember that their articles are written through an overwhelmingly WHITE, MALE, UPPER-CLASS LENS, which means that you should always ask yourself: “When they highlight a specific trait about an animal, are they pushing an agenda??”)

Add to this the fact that most people do not even realize their bias, nor do they take the time out to observe the systems in which they partake, and you have a bunch of blind MICE who all swear by the SUN that they are SEEING.

All of that is to say that the source of this article is highly revealing. This article neglects to mention the fact that not only did Kalief consistently deny ever stealing the backpack in the first place, BUT he did not merely “spend time in solitary confinement”, as the article states: he spent TWO THIRDS of his time behind bars in solitary confinement. Conveniently omitting the number makes it seem as though Kalief might have possibly only spent a day, a week or a month imprisoned and completely alone. The fact that this 16 year-old Black child was TORTURED has been redacted from The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of this event. I KNOW this because I READ other sources. I intentionally CHOSE this source as a teaching point. It MATTERS because newspapers are the (RECORD) KEEPERS OF TIME--or at very least, the human existence. We need to ensure that all of the FACTS are properly RECORDED today so that they can be properly RESEARCHED, RECALLED and RECEIVED tomorrow!

SECOND OF ALL:

Check my italics:

*Rubenstein says $3.3 million --which includes his fees-- is “fair and reasonable.”

*Kalief’s death “helped save Pedro��s life.”

LAST OF ALL:

Do the math:

WE--Kaliefs, Blacks--die, THEY--Rubensteins, Whites, Jews-- profit.

WE--Kaliefs, Blacks--die, THEY--Pedros, Hispanics, People of Color, Immigrants--LIVE.

We die.

We die.

We die.

AND SOMEBODY ELSE *ALWAYS* BENEFITS.

This is what it means to be LAST...OF ALL.

[greengay]

lol you guys are acting as if this is a deep friendship and kat has been signing her instagram posts with "heil hitler" and that billie should have known!!!11!!

this is like. a celebrity friendship. they probably hang out maybe once every couple years and it isn't Immidiately Recognizable that kat is allegedly anti semitic

like, djsjdkd i'm a jewish person who is invested in social justice and i literally had no clue about these rumors, you think billie, a 45 year old man who didn't know how to end his livestreams is googling "YFIP" before he hangs out or collabs with someone?

like as someone who has actually experienced antisemitism, and isn't being performative with my moral outrage, it isn't immidiately noticeable. like, you can be friends with someone for YEARS and then they'll throw in a jew joke that comes out of left field.

AGAIN. Kat lives in LA and runs a makeup empire and her own tattoo shop and we all know billie is off doing a million things, do y'all really think they're talking about anything slightly controversial? no, they're probably talking about music, sobriety, tattoos, etc, the 1-2 times they hang out, like

i'm not excusing her and i don't think that billie is perfect, but you guys are crazy if you think normal people google everyone they collaborate with to see if they're problematic djsjkdkdsk

even IF billie knew (which. lmao) she "claims" that she didn't actually send the picture that said "burn in hell jewbag" and that someone took one of her stock photos she gave out for autographs and made her look bad (i don't believe that, but there ya go. but also. why would they talk about something from 2008 that wasn't well publicized), the equating the slaughter of animals to the holocaust is fucked up, but AGAIN. it was 1 post that billie may or may not have seen and could be written off in his mind as her just being REALLY into animal rights. like, uh, the shoah is literally one of the worst things to happen in human history and i don't blame people for not being fully able to connect people making comparisons of it to people being antisemetic.

but ANYWAYS that's implying that billie was at any point fully invested in googling kat von d's history to make sure she's never said anything bad, which is a ridiculous expectation. she is not outwardly a nazi, at a surface glance she seems like a nice lady, and she definitely isn't spitting racist rhetoric every time she opens her mouth, so how would he POSSIBLY know??

and lmao guys he isn't perfect either, like i said. u think i believe the bs he says at concerts abt how we all love each other whether we're liberal or conservative? must be easy to say that when you live in the Most Liberal Part of california!!!! i don't like how he makes molestation jokes even though he probably thinks it's okay because he's always the butt of the jokes. i don't like how he used the n-word in a song, even though he was "quoting a racist".

your favs aren't morally pure, YOU guys aren't morally pure, you talk about not wanting to buy her product so you don't seem like you're supporting antisemitism when all your clothes are made from child laborers in sweatshops overseas. ever shop at urban outfitters/free people/anthropologie/zara? they're like. VERY antisemetic, and that even shows through in some of their products, unlike kat's line. ever eat/drink a nestle product? they give free samples of formula to women in africa so they stop making breast milk and are forced to buy their product, and then hike up the price. ever shop at walmart? they've been known to steal people's passports from a shrimp processing plant in thailand and force them to work to get them back which can literally be considered human trafficking. not to mention how they treat their workers in the USA or the immigrants they hire and force to work 7 days a week or else they'll deport them.

the world is fucked up!!!! if u are gonna be disappointed in anyone who even ASSOCIATES with someone or something that's problematic u ain't gonna have a fun time!! u can't put billie on a pedestal and expect him to never associate with anything harmful ever!!!

[aion-rsa]

Bruce Lee Forever! Shannon Lee Reflects on Her Father’s Legacy

https://ift.tt/3nm3pcn

Bruce Lee stands among the greatest icons on the planet. But such notoriety comes with a price and it’s one that Bruce pays more heavily than any other celebrity. He’s also the most ripped off. Brucesploitation is an entire genre of film dedicated to Bruce Lee impersonators. Bruce Lee clones proliferate fighting video games more than any other person, real or imagined. His image has been poached illegally for all sorts of random things like for Zhen Kungfu, a major Chinese fast food franchise with some 300 restaurants, all of which use his likeness without permission. No one else can claim this level of image piracy.

For years, Shannon Lee has fought hard to guard the family name and see that her dad receives the respect he is due. Now at the helm of the Bruce Lee Family Company, Shannon continues to champion her father’s work, dedicating herself to preserving his message of harmonious individuality and curtail those who would steal his image for their own gain. She has dedicated herself to bringing the real Bruce Lee to the world. 

As we approach Bruce Lee’s 80th birthday this November, the Little Dragon remains as hot as ever. The Bruce-Lee-inspired Cinemax series Warrior has kicked off its second season. On October 6th, Shannon releases a new book, Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee. And there’s more coming in November in celebration of her father’s auspicious birthday. Den of Geek caught up to Shannon Lee to talk about where the Bruce Lee estate is now. 

Den of Geek: Warrior is based on the treatment that your father did that was allegedly turned into David Carradine’s Kung Fu series?

Shannon Lee: Well, I guess that’s a matter of some debate.

Yeah. Which is why I’m asking you this.

Yeah. My father was definitely up for the lead in Kung Fu, and he was definitely not given that role because he was Chinese interestingly. And at the same time, he had also developed and pitched this show. Warner Bros.’ point of view is that they had been working on a show – their show – for a long time prior to involving my father. And if you speak to my mother, she will say that my father was working on this treatment for a number of years before he pitched it as well.

So the two shows are very similar in some ways and very different in some ways. What we do know is that my father was turned down to star in the show and we have no idea how much his ideas influenced the ultimate vision for Kung Fu. 

Very diplomatic answer. One thing that’s continually impressed me about your father was how incredibly prolific he was. Even today, and I remember when he passed, I still see new material from him. Did he have any other show ideas that you might have kicking around?

Most definitely.

Oh, that’s very intriguing.

Yes. So he did have a number of other treatments in various states of readiness and even one full script that I still have, and that I am working on developing, in different ways.

That’s incredibly exciting. How close do you feel that Warrior is to your father’s original vision of it?

I think it’s actually very close, in the sense that I think that the show captures the perspective that he was hoping to capture. Meaning, his treatment was written more as 1970s episodic television; it was more of an adventure of the week format, which shows were back then…I think he would be really pleased with how the show turned out today, because I think we have more of an opportunity to tell the story that he would have wanted to tell, than he would have had back then.

What can fans expect from Season 2? 

We have the warring Tongs. We have the political goings on and plotting. We have the Irish labor workers really coming into more conflict with the Chinese workers. We have the cops on all sides of this as well, really coming up against the Chinese. So it’s very complicated and the weaving of the story is really brilliant and the stakes are really high. And you’ll see what happens.

As an immigrant tale, how do you feel this is playing out given the current politics surrounding immigration right now?

It’s crazy how relevant our show is. I think that its issue’s not just of immigration, but also of racism, of the involvement of the police, of xenophobia, of ‘us versus them’ mentality. There’s a lot of themes in the show and, quite frankly, where the show culminates toward the end of the season is very reflective of where we find ourselves right now, which is interesting since we filmed it last year.

But I think that it’s because this is the natural outcome of these types of policies and attitudes toward our fellow humans. And also what happened historically, so history is rather repeating itself.

How does it feel to be working on this show with a predominantly Asian cast?

It’s phenomenal. I know that there are a number of shows that, especially in the half-hour genre, that have Asian casts, but in the one-hour television format, there really aren’t that many. Even shows like Into the Badlands who have Asian characters, they’re not necessarily predominantly Asian characters.

So I feel really proud of our show that we got to make the show we wanted, that we got to create these multi-layered, complicated three-dimensional characters for all our cast. And I think that it’s actually a huge win for representation.

You used to have a pretty wicked spinning back kick. Are you still practicing?

[laughs] Not as much as I used to. Every now and again, I get back to it. It’s been a little harder in quarantine, not because I’m not able to exercise on my own. Certainly I am, but I’m much more used to working with others in the space. So I would say I’m a little rusty right now.

I think we all are during the pandemic. I could totally see you doing a cameo in Warrior like a singer at Ah Toy’s place or something. Are you thinking about that?

We definitely talked about it for Season 2. Just by the time we were talking about it, the season was already written and there didn’t seem to be the perfect and right feeling opportunity to do something like that.

Right now, Season 3 is a little uncertain. There are not plans to move forward, just given that Cinemax has canceled their programming and their original programming… If there are, then I will definitely look to try and sneak on set for part of that.

Do you ever think about going back into acting?

I don’t think about it as a career. I think if there were opportunities, if the right opportunity came along, I think it would be a lot of fun. I would definitely have, from a creative standpoint, an interest in doing that for myself, but not as a career.

You have a book coming out the same week that Warrior drops. Tell us about Be Water, My Friend.

I wrote this book, over the last year or so, and it is called Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee. It is a book about my father’s water philosophy, what it means, and what it meant to him, what it means to me, and also how it can be accessed and utilized by the reader.

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And, for me, it was a really personal, internal journey to write this book, to really sit with my father’s words and to really try and express in as simple and in as simple and clear a way as I could, what this is and to provide it as a tool for the reader to utilize, or even just something to think about for themselves.

I find my father’s words to be extremely soothing and extremely healing and extremely thought provoking. And my hope is that people will pick up this book, regardless of whether they’re into martial arts or whether they’ve recently had, because it’s really for everyone. It just really speaks to this human journey that we are all on. And I hope that people will find something beneficial for them in it.

I really admire what you’ve been doing with the Bruce Lee Family Company. Your dad has been the most ripped-off icon of all. Nobody has an entire film genre like Bruceploitation that’s dedicated to him. What are some of the battles you’re fighting trying to control his image? 

Yeah. Look, it’s always a challenge. It’s really hard to know what the best course of action is. I’m certainly very protective of him and his legacy. And at the same time, I try not to be unreasonable or overly difficult, but I really do think he requires respect. And that’s really what I’m asking for most of the time.

If somebody can show up and have a honest conversation with me and be open minded and listen to me, then I will always give them the same in return. It is really hard. The laws are different in all different places and it’s really challenging because it’s on a global level and you got to pick your battles and you only have so many resources to put towards these different types of things.

But I really feel like when I’m asked to speak up about, and give my opinion on something, I definitely will and do. And when it seems like a fight worth fighting, then I have no problems with that. I’m willing to stand up for myself and my family. And it doesn’t mean I’ll always win, but for me, it’s not about winning. It’s about doing what I feel is appropriate and right.

The CW reboot of Kung Fu is getting some buzz again, which feels as if it is in the wake of Warrior now. That’s ironically recursive given the unusual relationship that Bruce Lee’s treatment had and what we spoke about, when we first started this conversation. They’re putting out that it’s going to be all female leads, and that Asian community is reclaiming this property, but who knows? What are your thoughts on that?

Listen, I’m not in competition with anyone. I’m trying to put forth the best projects that I could put forth. And I never want to be in a place of wishing someone to not do well or be well. Right?

I don’t know anything about that show other than its existence and exactly what you just said. I haven’t read any scripts. So it’s really hard for me to say what it is. I don’t even know. And look, it’s hard to get a show made. I think that whatever happens with the show, I know these things are always a labor of love and or just a labor. So either way, it’s hard enough. And I just really couldn’t comment because I really don’t know, but I certainly never wish anyone any ill will.

That’s fair. What does your mom think of Warrior?

Oh, she loves it. She really loves it. She really is like, “Oh, I think your dad would love this show. I think you really did your dad proud.” My mom was married to Bruce Lee, so she’s no shrinking violet when it comes to action. She just thinks the show is great and a lot of fun. She’s really impressed with Andrew Koji and with the whole cast, and she just thinks it really captured the right energy and the right spirit.

What’s next for the Bruce Lee Family Company? 

Oh, my gosh. So much. We’re really excited. In November, we’re going to be celebrating my dad’s 80th. How crazy is that? Eighty years of Bruce Lee in the world. And so we have a lot of celebrations planned, mostly virtual and online and through our store, and on social media and those types of things.

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We were hoping to be able to do some kind of bigger events, but of course, with the current state of the world, we’re changing it up a little bit, and our timelines have been a little delayed on some of the bigger things that we’re working on, but we will be having some interesting announcements and fun drops and things that’ll be available in November. And so I’m super excited to celebrate that. I’ve got a number of other film and TV projects in the works, which hopefully I’ll be able to announce soon.

We’ve got a bunch of exhibits that we’re working on with different museums around the world, revamping the exhibit in Hong Kong and in Seattle but also other places. We have our social initiatives we’re doing through the foundation. We’re about to launch and revamp that website to have some different social initiatives that we’ll be promoting as well as our camps for kids that we do. And the exhibits that we’re doing, and we’re working on a permanent exhibition space as well for my father. So there’s no shortage of things going on. And we’re all really excited to share what we can do with the world.

That’s great timing because it will still be in the rollout of Warrior Season 2. You’ve got the show, the book, and the celebration, so we’re looking at a Fall season of Bruce Lee.

Yeah. And we have a new season of the Bruce Lee podcast. That’ll be dropping in October also.

Has Warrior met up to your expectations in terms of what you envisioned when you first embarked on this?

Absolutely. I would say it met it, and it exceeded it. Obviously, in small details, sometimes there are things you’re, like, “Oh, I wish we could have done this differently or that differently.” But those things are nothing in comparison to the full force of the project, the scope, the storytelling, the cast that we have, the crew that we have, the writing that we have. I really couldn’t be happier.

Look, I think there are always places to go and things to be improved. Nothing is ever perfect, but I think that it’s as good a show as I could have hoped for. I’m so thrilled because I think it captures my father’s spirit and his energy without being like a copycat of him in any way. I think it tells his story. I think it’s entertaining. I think it’s got awesome action. I think it’s got amazing characters with storylines. I think it’s dramatic. I think it’s very binge worthy. It’s like one of those shows where you’re like, “Oh my God, what’s going to happen next.” You know?

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Warrior Season 2 can be seen exclusively on CINEMAX. Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee is available wherever fine books are sold. For more on Shannon’s work and the Bruce Lee Family Company, visit BruceLee.com.

The post Bruce Lee Forever! Shannon Lee Reflects on Her Father’s Legacy appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[socialjusticeartshare]

ICE Hysterectomy Doctor Wasn’t Even a Board-Certified OB-GYN

Dr. Mahendra Amin has been accused of performing unnecessary uterus removals on detained immigrants.

The doctor at the center of a scandal over unwanted hysterectomies at an immigrant detention facility in Georgia is not a board certified OB-GYN, The Daily Beast has learned.

Dr. Mahendra Amin came under scrutiny after immigrant rights groups issued a report accusing him of conducting unnecessary or unwanted gynecological procedures on women detained at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia. 

On Friday, a spokesperson for the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology told The Daily Beast that its records show Amin is not certified by the organization. A spokesperson for the American Board of Medical Specialties, the leading organization for physician board certification in the U.S., said Amin was not certified by any of the 24 ABMS member boards.

Azadeh Shahshahani, an attorney with one of the immigrant rights groups that filed the complaint, said it was “outrageous” that ICE would send detainees to a doctor who had not passed this quality control. 

“It shows the lack of care that ICE feels for detained immigrants, for their wellbeing and healthcare,” said Shahshahani, the legal and advocacy director for Project South. “It’s really disturbing."

ICE declined to comment on the record about Amin’s certification or policies concerning board-certified physicians. The agency has previously said it "vehemently disputes the implication that detainees are used for experimental medical procedures,” and cautioned that "anonymous, unproven allegations” should be treated with skepticism.

Reached by text message, Amin declined to comment on his board certification and deferred all questions to his lawyer, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the issue.

Amin has practiced in Douglas, Georgia for at least two decades, both in his own private practice and as the medical director for the labor and delivery department at Irwin County Hospital. Business records reviewed by The Daily Beast show he also incorporated a new “Amin Surgery Center for Women” in September 2019, and sought state approvals to build the facility two months afterward. Gayle Evans, a consultant for the project, said the surgical center is still under construction and has not started seeing patients.

Amin completed medical school in India and a residency at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey. He appears to maintain an active license with the Georgia Composite Medical Board. A spokesperson for the organization said he could not answer questions on any ongoing complaints or investigations. 

Earlier this week, a nurse at ICDC came forward to allege that an unnamed doctor, later identified as Amin, was surgically sterilizing a high number of immigrant women at the facility who “don’t know why they went [to the doctor] or why they’re going.” The nurse, Dawn Wooten, described Amin as “the uterus collector,” and claimed women often returned from his office confused and upset.

Since then, lawyers representing 17 detainees have claimed their clients received unnecessary medical gynecological procedures from Amin, according to the office of Rep. Pramila Jayapal. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has launched an investigation into the allegations, and the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee said his panel would also look into them.

An attorney for Amin said the doctor “vehemently den[ies]” Wooten’s allegations, noting that one of the whistleblower’s attorneys acknowledged not having spoken to any of the women directly in comments to  the Washington Post. 

“Dr. Amin is a highly respected physician who has dedicated his adult life to treating a high-risk, underserved population in rural Georgia,” attorney Scott Grubman said in a statement. “We look forward to all of the facts coming out and are confident that, once they do, Dr. Amin will be cleared of any wrongdoing.”

Grubman did not respond to specific questions about Amin’s board certification. 

Board certification is a voluntary process meant to enhance a specialist’s expertise beyond state licensure. (Georgia state law requires only one year of education after medical school to obtain a license.) Physicians seeking ABOG certification must pass a written and oral exam and demonstrate experience in treating women's health care. They are also required to participate in a program to keep them abreast of the latest evidence-based treatments.

Marc Jackson, the vice president for education at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said board certification is “a key process that helps ensure that women’s health physicians maintain the necessary knowledge, skills, and competence that are needed to provide high-quality care.” Although the process is voluntary, the group finds it so important that it requires it for any fellows in the organization.

Court records show Amin has previously settled lawsuits with at least two patients or their family members outside the detention center. In one case, Amin was accused of discharging a pregnant patient despite “life threatening abnormal lab values.” According to the suit, the woman returned to the hospital 48 hours later with contractions, blurred vision, high blood pressure and vaginal bleeding. She received an emergency cesarean section and died shortly thereafter. In a court filing, Amin denied any negligence and any knowledge of the abnormal lab values.

In another case, the doctor settled with a mother who claimed that Amin and nurses at the Irwin County Hospital did not respond quickly enough when her baby’s heart rate plummeted during delivery, causing him to die of lack of oxygen. An attorney for the mother said it is common for an OB-GYN to face such suits, and that Amin’s conduct on this instance was “not anything that would go to any egregious behavior.” 

Amin and eight other doctors at the Irwin County Hospital also agreed to pay $520,000 to the federal government in 2015, after the Department of Justice accused them of fraudulently billing Medicare and Medicaid for services they did not provide. The complaint named Amin as the owner of MGA Health Management, which was contracted to run the hospital, and also identified him as a part owner of the institution. 

According to the complaint, doctors at ICH billed the government for procedures as if they had performed them themselves, when in fact they were performed by nurses and technicians. The hospital also reportedly inflated the costs of CT scans, performed unnecessary tests on residents of the attached nursing home, tacked on pointless fees to operating room bills, and retaliated against a pair of whistleblowers.

The complaint further identifies a kickback scheme whereby Amin and other physicians directed patients to ICH instead of other institutions. Because of Amin’s ownership stake in ICH, he allegedly profited off every such referral. 

According to the annual questionnaires ICH submitted to the Georgia Department of Community Health, MGA continued to manage the hospital until October 2015—six months after the settlement was finalized. It is unclear if Amin still maintains his ownership stake.

A number of women claiming to be Amin’s patients sprung to his defense after the whistleblower complaint was released, forming a Facebook page titled “We Stand With Mahendra Amin.” Dozens of women posted in the group to say they had happily delivered their babies with the doctor, and described him as attentive, generous, and kind.

But Elizabeth Mathrene, a Georgia immgiration attorney who used to represent women in the detention center, said several of her clients were concerned about the doctor. One woman, Nancy Gonzalez Hidalgo, refused to see Amin even when she had a fever and was doubled over in pain after a miscarriage, Mathrene said. She estimated four other women came to her in the same year to complain that they did not know why they were being taken to the doctor.

“The things that was most clear and troublesome was the similar accounts of him hurting them—that he was rough, he didn’t talk to them, he didn’t treat them like human beings,” Mathrene said. “They didn’t know what was happening with their situation and that made them fearful and upset and concerned.” 

A second lawyer, Benjamin Osorio, told The Daily Beast that two of his clients received hysterectomies while detained at ICDC.

Shahshahani said her organization is still working on discerning the total number of women who received surgery against their will. While she described the attention given to the hysterectomies as “well-deserved,” she cautioned against putting all the blame on an individual doctor.  

“At the end of the day, it was the doctor that was performing these procedures but the buck really stops with ICE,” she said. “The U.S. government had the responsibility for the welfare and protection of these women.”

Article Source

[khalilhumam]

Uzbekistan as creative chaos: A photographer's interpretation of his nation's search for identity

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/uzbekistan-as-creative-chaos-a-photographers-interpretation-of-his-nations-search-for-identity/

Uzbekistan as creative chaos: A photographer's interpretation of his nation's search for identity

“I felt like a child who re-opens his own country”

” Logomania : Owning the world at half price”, 2019. Photo by Hassan Kurbanbaev, used with permission.

The Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan is mostly known for its breathtaking Silk Road architecture and rich cultural heritage. Beyond the postcard image, however, lies a society still grappling with its own identity. Following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the nation's difficult transition from socialism has left many struggling economically — but because they are so keen on promoting the country as a dream tourist destination, Uzbek authorities are very sensitive to the way it is portrayed by photographers. In the Soviet tradition, photography was a political art ordered to show only glowing aspects of the state in order to serve its propagandistic aims. After it gained independence, Uzbekistan applied the same rules: in 2010, independent photographer Umida Akhmedova was accused of “insulting the Uzbek nation” because the photos she published allegedly did not reflect Uzbek society in positive tones. She was charged in an Uzbek court. To understand the current state of modern independent photography, I spoke to Hassan Kurbanbaev, an emerging photographer who has started exhibiting his work abroad, online and soon, he hopes, in Tashkent, where he is based. Filip Noubel (FN): Many of your photos focus on various interpretations of identity, and often contrast modernity — and its obsession with brands — with the reality of daily life in Uzbekistan. How would you describe your work? 

Hassan Kurbanbaev (HK): It seems to me that these things are complementary — the search for self-identification and the country itself in the context of time. What is modern Uzbekistan? I think this question ultimately leads to a global reflection on everything that surrounds us, including our everyday life. Our behavior, the way we dress, all demonstrate in a very revealing way our desire for a certain luxury that we could not afford but watched on TV. These symbols for me are a reflection on the question of identity and of a search for it. Recently, I talked with a guy from Albania who now lives in Tashkent — he said that for him, Uzbekistan is a sort of chaos, where everything is mixed — the beautiful East, the Soviet Union and the imitation of the West, both visually and mentally. It seems to me he determined the state of the country in very accurate terms. We all need to think about this. In my case, I didn't take pictures for a while. After a break, [I] returned to photography and realized I was in fact taking a course on studying my country while using a camera. I felt like a student, a kind of a child who re-opens his own country. Therefore, my series of photos is, at first glance, very simple. For example, [my piece] “Logomania” is based on the irony found in everyday life and in street chic that can be obtained in the most affordable way.

Young man lying on the roof of a Soviet Zhiguli car in Oksoy near Samarkand, June, 2019. Photo by Hassan Kurbanbaev, used with permission

FN: Being a non-commercial photographer in Uzbekistan is no easy life. How did you come to this form of art, and how do your subjects perceive your role when you approach them? 

HK: I think it's important to define what we mean by non-commercial photography. If you [compare me] with wedding or advertising photographers, then yes, I am not a commercial photographer. But I can work, for example, for the Financial Times, and get paid for my work — so I am an independent photographer who also works in the commercial field. In the West, independent photographers can be represented by galleries [and] sell prints but here, there is no domestic art market for photographers. I would really like this situation to change, because [there is] a growing interest from local young people who want to be independent, to make their own series about themselves or their country, but they don't have the resources to do it. I very often have to face financial difficulties in order to make a project; sometimes I feel desperate. Therefore, I have to focus more on the Western market. I believe that independent photography can be commercially successful and the state itself should be interested in this, if it wants to develop art. If we talk about my working methods, I just try to tell very simply why I take photographs, and sometimes this is enough for people to agree to a portrait.

Ozodbek, a young performer in Samarkand, September 2018. Photo by Hassan Kurbanbaev, used with permission

FN: Is there a recognition of contemporary photography in Uzbek society and a space for photographers like you to meet and exhibit their work? Where is your audience, primarily?

HK: Such a community existed, but among the older generation photographers, such as photo correspondents. There is no domestic art market in the country as such; this, of course, also applies to contemporary photography. The absence of curators and years of state censorship have eventually led to a crisis in art. But there are good changes — last year in Tashkent, photographer and human rights activist Timur Karpov opened an independent space for artists, the 139 Documentary Center. He has great plans to develop independent photography, to do well curated exhibitions. For me, this is an important event considering our context. Today, the whole world has switched to online and we need to use it, especially for artists for whom this is, sometimes, the only opportunity to show their work. For example, I write on Instagram in English to reach a large audience, although I don't speak English very well. [This] is a chance not only to share my vision, but also to show Uzbekistan, which still seems completely unknown as a country.

A blanket with two tigers in love in the Zarafshan Mountains in Southern Uzbekistan, June, 2019. Photo by Hassan Kurbanbaev, used with permission.

FN: What themes are you working on currently? 

HK: I am working on a series about youth from all countries of Central Asia. They are the first generation of people in the so-called five Stans — “new countries” created after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 — that continue to emerge as independent societies. These young people are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Indigenous people, immigrants, people who were deported to Central Asia for political reasons. They interest me because they are the ones who will make our countries better in every sense. If I manage to find a budget along with the series, I would like to shoot a documentary film.

Find out more about changes in Uzbek society here.

< p class='gv-rss-footer'>Written by Filip Noubel