#and exposure over time to reactionary ideology

[thedreadvampy]

feels shit tbh watching people you know are fundamentally, as much as anyone is fundamentally anything, good and caring people just fucking go slowly step by tiny step towards reactionary bigotry in ways you can't even. put your finger fully on.

[evilelitest2]

Hi, “tankie" here, and I’m going to be charitable and assume you are well-meaning but ill-informed on your posts. You seem to imply that since American Marxists are critical towards America, they must have neutral-to-positive views on Russia. Not only is this a false dilemma fallacy (acting as if being anti-American and being anti-Russian are the only two, diametrically opposed, options), but is also broadly incorrect. Aside from a few baby Marxists and LARPers, there is a general dislike of the Russian Federation among Marxists due to its leaders (Yeltsin, Putin) being responsible for the illegal and undemocratic dissolution of the USSR. However, you may be confusing something else. As Lenin said:

“For the Socialist of another country cannot expose the government and bourgeoisie of a country at war with “his own” nation, and not only because he does not know that country’s language, history, specific features, etc., but also because such exposure is part of imperialist intrigue, and not an internationalist duty.”

As an American Marxist, it really doesn’t matter if I’m the most pro-Russian person in the country or curse Putin’s name. At the end of the day, the effect I have on the political development of Russia is essentially zero. Rather, I have to trust Russian Marxists to be the ones to shepherd their country in the right direction. Conversely, as an American the effect I have on American political development, while still close to zero, is appreciably more than I have on any other country. Thus, it’s my duty to primarily focus my criticisms on the USA, as it is both the country where my words hold the most weight as well as a country I am intimately familiar with. People who don’t understand this reality may choose to take that as being nothing but an ideology of being anti-American, which is clearly incorrect.

Hello, I hope you are having a good day. The problem with your thinking Friend, is that the world has changed since Lenins time...and also Lenin himself was not the best adherent of that principle. We are in a massively interconnected global community now, and international powers are actively getting involved in other people's politics, you can't just separate one state from the rest. For example, the conflict in Syria directly led to the election of donald Trump, these things are connected.

"Aside from a few baby Marxists and LARPers, there is a general dislike of the Russian Federation among Marxists due to its leaders (Yeltsin, Putin) being responsible for the illegal and undemocratic dissolution of the USSR."

God I fucking wish this was true, but go through the various Marxists blogs i'm arguing with now, so many of them are echoing a pro Putin line, one created from the Russian Federation's propaganda in regards to Ukraine. And it leads to self described communist supporting a far right reactionary anti communist regime. When the default Marxists-Leninist position on Ukraine is inseparable from Tucker's Carlson's position then there is something rotten in your movement

"At the end of the day, the effect I have on the political development of Russia is essentially zero."

You need to pay more attention to Russian politics friend cause that is really not the case

"Thus, it’s my duty to primarily focus my criticisms on the USA, as it is both the country where my words hold the most weight as well as a country I am intimately familiar with."

Your duty as a Marxists is to fight against fascism don't get yourself limited by state borders because what happens with this attitude friend is that you take the typical American Centric attitude towards other nations of "America good, foreigners bad" and just flip it, you wind up with the same basic attitude though. "America bad, foreigners good" is still just as reductivism and America centric, and honestly as toxic. For example, take the 2014 euromaiden uprising, where millions of Ukrainians rose up against there far right authoritarian government and over threw him, something which Marxists should support (and indeed the communist parties in Ukraine did support). Almost any time I go unto Marxist-Leninist sites, they present this as a CIA backed coup which is just...massively insulting to the agency of Ukrainians, suggesting that they don't have any autonomy of there own but only act as extensions of the US. I see a lot of Tankies viewing the conflict in Ukraine with the same blinders that Americans used to view the Vietnam war, not seeing the conditions on the ground or the historical events that led to this, but only seeing it as a front in the global war between communism and capitalism, which is both reductive and self destructive.

Thanks for the polite response though

[spock-buys-houses]

I would like to suggest that corporate pride is not actually always the cynical and manipulative capitalist scheme that people portray it as on the internet. Corporations are bad and American capitalism is bad and it's funny to make fun of the silly candles at target but I actually think that a) it's a very complicated project to try to actually judge the level of dissonance involved in the actions of a corporation and a large corporation can simultaneously make a choice to invest money and lobbying efforts in support of an anti-queer politician or political party that actively denies the humanity of queer people as a fundamental part of their political ideology AND make a relatively socially benevolent choice to release some kind of pride statement those things can exist at the same time within an organization of that scale without a top level executive convening some sort of meeting where everyone sits around and talks about their cynical plot as a company to manipulate the queer and clueless ally marketplace. I actually think that one of the big problems with corporations is that as primarily profit-motivated entities, even if people in the company have good social intentions, it may be economically unfeasible for the corporation to structurally carry out those intentions. In my view the actual problem with corporate pride is structured not as "cynical and manipulative corporate evil," which is how people talk about it on the internet but as a fundamental problem with trying to view corporations as coherent moral entities. It's overly reductive to say that corporate pride is good or evil because, like many other things in the world of socioeconomic phenomena, it simultaneously produces harm and good. b) I think that corporate pride is a spectrum. It's very silly and ultimately not very bold or productive for Home Depot or whatever to make their logo rainbow for a month however if a company has made an active investment in donating to advocacy organizations or hiring queer designers or even making a highly public statement in support of queer people that is probably producing an undeniable social good, even if the company is doing harm in other ways. c) The level of public exposure of queer people and queer rights issues today is a vast improvement over where we were at even five years ago and I think that corporate pride is to some extent a symptom of that. It would be much harder for a kid to grow up with a complete lack of awareness of queer issues now than it was when I was growing up and that's a really good thing in some ways, even if it means that corporations try to sell us silly rainbow products one month a year. d) as a caveat to all this I will note that I think that corporations have for the most part chosen to collect the most marketable and palatable version of queer culture under their various pride practices. One of the reasons I am personally frustrated by corporate pride is that I think it tends to promote an extremely white, monosexual, male, allosexual version of queer culture which is yet another example of corporate moral incoherence.

Basically, corporate pride is quite frustrating and silly but also a spectrum and complicated and that's a very hard reality to negotiate with any kind of nuance. Ultimately like I think that we should all keep making fun of foolish products that target sells and giggle about the home Depot logo being rainbowified and be enraged by the fact that so many companies donate so many millions of dollars to reactionary political organizations that deny that we should have basic human rights but I also think that if we can't approach this whole issue with any kind of nuance nothing will ever change.

Anyway...

[theculturedmarxist]

     By    Kevin Reed    

       17 August 2019  

Recently published news reports and legal studies have revealed that the US government has been violating basic democratic rights by using facial recognition to monitor and track the public. These reports have also shown that facial recognition is used widely as a preferred form of police biometrics, i.e., the science of identification and tracking through facial signatures and other kinds of unique individual measurements such as finger, palm and voice prints and dental and DNA profiles.

Every level of law enforcement—from city and state police departments to federal border patrol and military-intelligence—has been participating in the mass collection and analysis of facial images. This includes photos taken for government-issued ID cards and driver’s licenses and others captured from hidden surveillance cameras in public places such as border crossings, highways, parks, sporting events, sidewalks and airports as well as those scraped from social media accounts.

Georgetown Law published a study on May 19 called “America Under Watch” which documented the widespread use of facial recognition by the city governments and police departments of Detroit and Chicago. As part of its conclusion, the Georgetown report said, “real-time video surveillance threatens to create a world where, once you set foot outside, the government can track your every move. For the 3.3 million Americans residing in Detroit and Chicago, this may already be a reality.”

However, just as public outrage over these revelations had begun to emerge and several cities have been forced to ban the use of facial recognition—including San Francisco and Oakland, California as well as Somerville, Massachusetts—it became clear that the latest media exposures have a twofold political purpose.

On the one hand, the most conscious sections of the ruling establishment are concerned about the explosive reaction of millions of people to unfettered 24/7 state monitoring of their activities and whereabouts. Therefore, significant political pressure is being applied to force Congress to adopt as soon as possible a federal regulatory framework for the expanding biometric surveillance apparatus.

On the other hand, Democratic Party representatives and their supporters are using identity politics to conceal the serious implications of secret facial profiling and the trend toward a police state that it represents. By focusing exclusively on studies indicating race and gender bias in facial recognition tools, the Democrats are seeking to divert public anger away from a mass struggle by the working class in defense of democratic rights and into support for laws that will legalize the surveillance.

Among the most often referenced of the race and gender bias studies has been the MIT Media Lab Gender Shades project by Joy Buolamwini—a self-proclaimed “poet of code” and campaigner against “algorithmic bias”—who published her first results in 2017. The initial Gender Shades analysis of facial analysis technology from IBM, Microsoft and Face++ showed that “male subjects were more accurately classified than female subjects,” “lighter subjects were more accurately classified than darker individuals” and “all classifiers performed worst on darker female subjects.”

A follow-up study in 2018 by Buolamwini also showed that facial recognition tools from Amazon and Kairos exhibited the same trends performing “better on male faces than female faces” and “better on lighter faces than darker faces” and “have the current worst performance for the darker female sub-group.”

A similar—although far less scientific—test was performed by the ACLU on Amazon’s Rekognition facial analysis software in July 2018. A database of 25,000 mugshots was compared against public photos of every member of the US House and Senate. Amazon’s tool returned 28 false matches identifying them “as other people who have been arrested for a crime.”

The ACLU report then said, “The false matches were disproportionately of people of color … 40 percent of Rekognition’s false matches in our test were of people of color, even though they make up only 20 percent of Congress.” Since Amazon’s Rekognition is currently being used as the facial analysis tool of choice by city, county and state police departments across the country, false identification rates of minorities are of legitimate concern among workers and young people.

However, the political objective behind the Gender Shades and ACLU studies is not to prove that facial recognition should be stopped immediately, but to insist that the technology can be improved upon. The ACLU says that what is needed is “transparency and accountability in artificial intelligence” and a moratorium on law enforcement use of facial recognition until “all necessary steps are taken to prevent them from harming vulnerable communities.”

In other words, according to the ACLU, police surveillance with facial recognition of the working class is fine and can go forward with appropriate technical adjustments that reduce false identification of minorities and with the adoption of acceptable federal government guidelines for its use.

Essentially, the MIT and ACLU findings have been seized upon by the New York Times, the Democrats and organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America as a means of burying fundamental democratic questions beneath race and gender politics. What they are advocating is, in essence, a racialist ideology and politics that serve to divide the working class and prevent a unified struggle against the growing threat of a police state in America.

For example, in entirely predictable fashion, the Times published a snide article on February 8, 2018 with the headline “Facial recognition is accurate, if you’re a white guy,” which featured Joy Buolamwini and her Algorithmic Justice League.

What becomes clear in the course of the Times interview with Buolamwini is that she is on a mission for “inclusion” of minorities and women into the corrupt corporate world of government-sponsored artificial intelligence surveillance technology. Through the efforts of the Gender Shades study and others, organizations like IBM and the Ford Foundation—who talk to the Times about how they are “deeply committed” to “unbiased” and “transparent” spying on the public—get to pose as “progressive” companies.

On July 10 of this year, the Times also published a comment by its graphics editor Sahil Chinoy headlined, “The Racist History Behind Facial Recognition,” that mechanically and ahistorically sought to draw a direct line of causality between the reactionary eugenics and racialist pseudoscience of the 19th and early 20th centuries—that claimed head shape and facial morphology characteristics were predictive of behavior and mental capacities—with modern biometrics.

The purpose of the Times reporting is to show that, through the anti-bias efforts of Buolamwini and others who call for “fairness and inclusion” in facial recognition, the corporate partners of the FBI and the surveillance state itself can be convinced of the value of “standards for accountability and transparency.”

However, as was clearly shown in the second Gender Shades study, the result of this campaign against race and gender bias has been the improvement of software algorithms by the developers. Although this aspect of Buolamwini’s study has been given little attention, the 2018 results showed, “Within 7 months, all targeted corporations were able to significantly reduce error gaps … revealing that if prioritized, the disparities in performance between intersectional subgroups can be addressed and minimized in a reasonable amount of time.”

This was also echoed in a statement sent to Buolamwini by IBM which, according to the Times, said that within a month of her second study results, the company “will roll out an improved service with a nearly 10-fold increase in accuracy on darker-skinned women.”

The race and gender bias campaign has also fueled efforts by Democratic Party politicians across the country to cover up their own role in the creation and maintenance of the surveillance state apparatus by posturing as opponents of the false identification flaws of the software.

The racialist character of identity politics was on full display during a hearing of the House Oversight and Reform Committee on May 22, for example, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat of New York)—a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—concluded her questioning of the panelists with a stage-managed exchange with Buolamwini who was a key witness. After being asked by Ocasio-Cortez what demographic facial recognition tools are “mostly effective on” and “who are the primary engineers and designers of these algorithms?” Buolamwini responded multiple times with “white men.”

Ultimately, the efforts of the Democrats, the DSA and identity politics advocates are aimed at diverting the anger of the working class against the mass surveillance into demands for congressional action that would make it legal to spy on the public with facial recognition tools as long as it is “fair and unbiased.”

The defense of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to these representatives of the affluent middle class who are employing methods of deception to conceal their own moneyed interests in getting on board with the private surveillance industry as well as the true meaning and historical implications of what is unfolding in society.

The growth of extreme economic inequality, the unending US wars in the Middle East and elsewhere and the evolution of the administration of President Donald Trump toward authoritarian rule—with the support of the Democratic Party—are all aspects of decaying democracy in advance of a massive confrontation between the working class and the ruling establishment in America and internationally.

It is in preparation for this conflict that the surveillance state is being erected and perfected. Workers, students and young people must unify across all national, racial, gender and language differences—independently of the government, the corporations and the middle-class pseudo-left—to make their own preparations for the major class battles now on the horizon.

[rainworlds]

The Blur

We are beset by static—in the thrall of constant, relentless movement, we lose ourselves to the permanent accumulation of momentum. We have been primed to charge forward, into a direction unknown, and while everything else recedes into periphery, there are other things coursing through the slipstream, catching up with us. All this movement, this ‘progress’—where does it lead?

Contemporary reporting, in all its breathless, pounding rhythm cares little for the context out of which movement emerges, nor how momentum steers us towards the void. The result is a kind of blur that systematically annihilates our sense of history and, with it, our capacity for Déjà vu. Memory is subject to the corrosive effects of capital, so how do we recognize that something has been lost—that we have been here before?

                                                                              * * *

  Wrapped in the briar of enterprise, critics under capital are incentivized to perform discovery—that is, framing their critique as the first, unique approach to any given topic—which remains convention because it places individual contribution at the center of an ongoing conversation. Of course, credit must be given where credit is due: critics perform labor, after all. But as capital pushes the communal components of all labor further into the margins, the erasure of pre-existing work for the sake of building personal legacies seems all-encompassing; we must, as Devyn Springer put it, cleave individualism from our practice, reject the description of ‘creatives’ and think of ourselves as participating in the production of a culture from which to strike at reactionary elements that seek to prevent harmony and productive labor. We must remember that we do not conjure from the void.

It should be noted that this culture does not have to be ‘popular’ in the sense that ‘popular culture’ is; it can remain separate for as long as it is necessary. But, in the same vein, the totality of ‘popular culture’ and its many fragments cannot be conceded to reactionary ideology.

                                                                              * * *

  People are taught to breach the confines of lines and letters—explicit text—to do excavations upon marginal spaces. This, of course, holds financial benefits in an age where the rapid pace of communication complicates how we capture attention and revenue: it should be apparent, then, that to drape the self in discovery is a practice of domination; it is the colonizer’s impulse. Avant-garde, a term with decidedly militaristic connotations that originates in the Metropole, should clue us into its use: artistic expression and thought are delineated as a ‘frontier’ unto which ‘pioneers’ may move to mark territory, but, of course, not all are permitted to do so equitably.

To perform discovery in this way can be read as a desperate attempt by subjects under kyriarchy to rupture the relentless rhythm of enterprise and insert permanence into capitalist structures driven by the demands of mobility and flexibility. But, of course, that is an extraordinarily charitable reading. To practice discovery means to cut deeper into wounded flesh: it romanticizes a heightened individualism under which writers must fend for themselves. Violently obscuring foundations is not a trivial offence, regardless of whether it happens consciously or not; after all, intent is not required to produce negative consequences.  

Attribution of marginal work as a counter-practice has been discarded almost entirely. To bring it to the forefront demands conscious effort. Stitching back together the histories that ‘discovery’ has torn thread from thread to weave a propaganda of the ego requires a delicate sort of restoration; the seams are scars, after all, and the needles must puncture flesh. Of course, it comes at great personal cost: the market demands the performance of discovery: participants are required to frame themselves and their work as products; the profitability of commodities, in contemporary economy, hinges on being distinct and separate from those that came before; the market adores novelty. Historicizing within the constraints of word count limitations can be a difficult proposition, but it must be undertaken whenever possible.

Marginalized ingenuity has been openly sacrificed on the altar of novelty, but as aspiring keepers of the record, we may attempt a resurrection of sorts: the task of reconstructing histories must serve to train an audience that has previously been unwilling or unable to confront the injustice of life at the margins. ‘Critics’ who present themselves as ‘charting’ or ‘taming’ a previously ‘wild’ and ‘uninhabited’ space in contemporary discourse need to be exposed for what they are: their discovery is nothing but the colonization of the vast landscapes of marginalized thought and criticism that have been violently cast aside. But exposure is not enough: radical attribution and the re-thinking of our relationships under capital must follow.

                                                                              * * *

  The rhythm of contemporary journalism (of capital) cultivates the impression of movement to obfuscate not just the pace at which popular culture moves but the direction in which it moves: it is the grand theater of progress, a sleight of hand. To speak of ‘growth’ or ‘dynamism’ is foolish, because we know these acts of accumulation are performed to distract from the elemental truth that there is no ‘automatic progress’ in all this movement. It is a mechanism meant to prevent introspection, the act of ‘taking stock’ that would reveal the tides of history.

It is a conventionally held position that the financial viability of platforms that practice criticism depend in large part on their ability to capitalize on the rapid pace of information that flows from industry; this applies, in particular, to those that cover popular culture. But that information comes with an expiration date; access is compromised. It is the speed with which such information needs to be processed that requires writers to navigate corporate content at breakneck pace. This relentless schedule occupies a disproportionate amount of any worker’s most precious resource: it devours time, all of it.

Observing and describing the status quo in this way are crucial activities, because the minuscule shifts and adaptations performed by capital to capture wholly our discourse horizon are pre-requisites for understanding and envisioning an alternative future. But, we need to see these shifts and adaptations as what they are: minuscule. This requires knowledge that can illuminate the contexts in which these adaptations occur.  

As analytical tools with which we see the world, observation and description thus require constant re-calibration; they cannot remain static. Rather, what needs to be observed and described are trends over time, so that the context of individual events is not lost in the furious rhythm of digital publishing. Otherwise, organized thought perishes in our desperation to capture a permanent moment that, in truth, does not exist.

                                                                              * * *

  Curation is frequently presented as a natural process built on the observation and subsequent interpretation of publics. As such, the process is often directly linked to the behavior of publics. It should be clear, however, that the practice of curation is not a natural process in which actors possess a supernatural disposition to sense the ‘zeitgeist’ and act accordingly, but a series of decisions made by institutions that determine the boundaries of their actions.

We tend to frame curation as if publications are receptacles for publics, as if the direction of reporting naturally emerges from a realm external. But this has become part of a larger strategy to relocate and externalize the labor of curation unto systems perceived to be ‘organic’, such as social media, to shun and obfuscate a responsibility for elevating the margins that every self-respecting institution of journalism should embrace.

A refusal to see the ways in which our work may produce culture, of course, reiterates on a politics of apathy, and seamlessly transitions into the reproduction of the status quo. To rely on technology is seen as a way of observing the world on its own terms, a lens unto ‘objective’, ‘natural’ reality that arises organically from the will of the public. But even as we accept this dubious claim, the observation of such unreliable, massive amounts of data still requires the observer to make a series of decisions: attention is limited, so it follows that what we may observe is limited, too.

Information and communications technology cannot be permitted to slip into the role of an invisible hand that determines what appears on any platform. It is not autonomous, neutral or objective: algorithms, as experts never tire to tell us, are crafted by people. It is important to recognize the myriad ways in which the technical architecture of popular networks and platforms shape what individuals and publications are able to see online. But the limitations of such architecture do not provide salient justification for publications to capitulate in the face of the enormous task that curation presents.

Rather, publications need the resources to engage in an active process of seeking out material that constitutes real alternatives to the doctrines of industry. Observing social media is part of the repertoire, but, even there, unpaid labor engages in a process of curation that remains invisible, and visible only if it acts in aggregate; attribution is crucial. Popularity determines coverage, when coverage, ideally, should introduce publics to new works, which may or may not become popular; curation is work. We cannot rest on the assumption that what is ‘worth covering’ will somehow ‘trickle up’—defying gravity—to the editorial board, re-asserting the primacy of viral success and/or corporate backing. Publications are active participants, complicit in a process that turns our collective understanding of ‘value’ into something that is not a threat to the status quo.

                                                                              * * *

  Attribution, contextualization and curation are tools with which we can avoid making the same mistake as the institutions currently writing about popular culture; they have become so thoroughly compromised that 'transformation’ is not longer a sufficient prescription. It must be annihilation. The short-term memory evident in the problem-of-the-week dynamic is a problem that is rooted in the rhythm of digital publishing and capital, which seems to ward off any attempts to build momentum for causes that are capable and robust enough to support more radical ideologies. To break this cycle, these institutions need to be fought.

[bibleteachingbyolga]

I woke up on November 1, 1973, a happy 23-year-old within the Communist Party. I had entered the University of Michigan graduate school after reporting for The Boston Globe, along with travel on a Soviet freighter and the Trans-Siberian Railway. A comfortable fellowship let me have my cake and advocate eating the cake of others. Professors complimented me on my Marxist analysis. Free love beckoned.

I had just received a visit from two leaders of the Michigan Communist Party. They admired not only my volumes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, but my three volumes by Bulgarian communist boss Georgi Dimitrov. I told them of my just-approved plan to create, with university funds, a mini-course featuring Soviet scholar Georgy Arkadyevich Arbatov. He had just published in English (translated from Russian) a book with a best-seller title: The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations: The Imperialist Doctrine, Methods, and Organization of Foreign Political Propaganda. Great stuff, as I considered it at the time.

Plus, everything was coming up red roses around the world. At a meeting of the Young Workers Liberation League in a University of Michigan seminar room, we heard good reports about the coming North Vietnamese victory over US forces, and progress in key targets for communist activity over the next decade: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Nicaragua. In Washington, Vice President Spiro Agnew had just resigned in the face of bribery allegations, and Attorney General Elliot Richardson had resigned during the Watergate “Saturday night massacre.”

As an undergraduate at Yale, I had gained exposure to the best and the brightest that “bourgeois culture” could put forward, and found them wanting. Marx and Lenin taught me that the crucial determinant in human history is economic and social class, and I concluded that the bourgeois class had swung and missed: war in Vietnam, poverty at home, corruption in Washington. Time for the working class to take over, under the leadership of the vanguard of the working class, the Communist Party, those willing to do whatever it takes to take over the Capitol and eliminate the betrayers in power.

Frozen in My Chair

At 3 in the afternoon on November 1, I was in my room and sitting in my red chair, rereading Lenin’s famous essay “Socialism and Religion.” In it he wrote, “We must combat religion — this is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently Marxism.” Following Marx, Lenin called religion “opium for the people . . . spiritual booze in which the slaves of capital drown their human image.”

Nothing new. I had abandoned Judaism and declared myself an atheist when I was 14. But suddenly the strangest experience of my life began. Since I had never taken LSD or had a concussion, hallucination, or near-death experience, I can rule out those possible explanations for why I sat in that chair for eight hours, looking at the clock each hour with surprise that I still hadn’t moved.

During those hours, over and over, I saw myself as walking in darkness, but invited to push open a door into a room of brilliant brightness. Meanwhile, questions battered my brain: What if Lenin is wrong? What if God does exist? What is my relationship to this God, if he’s there? Why, when he is kind to me, do I offer evil in return? Why goodness in, garbage out?

Then I started thinking about my journalistic attitudes: Is America really Amerikkka? If not, why am I turning my back on it? Mixing theology and ideology, I started wondering why capitalist desire for money and power is worse than communist desire? Why had I embraced treasonous ideas? Why?

From where were these thoughts emanating? In my brain, Marxism was settled social science. Lenin’s hatred for the “figment of man’s imagination” called “God” was not new to me. It’s hard for me to convey the strangeness, the otherness, of this experience. I have trouble sitting still during lectures. I like to walk while thinking. Yet here I was sitting in the chair, hour after hour, suddenly believing I had done something very wrong by embracing Marx and Lenin.

At 3 in the afternoon, I was an atheist and a communist. When I arose eight hours later, I was not. I had no new data, but suddenly, through some strange intervention, I had a new way of processing data. Over and over, the same beat resonated: I’m wrong. There’s more in heaven and earth than I previously recognized.

Hound of Heaven

It seems mystical, and I can’t even describe well the experience, but it reversed the course of my life.

At 11 that evening, I stood up and spent the next two hours wandering around the cold and dark University of Michigan campus. To borrow an image from nineties basketball, I bounced past the Michigan Union, off the Literature, Science, and Arts building, past Angell Hall, off the Hatcher Graduate Library, nothing but nyet: a firm No to the atheist and Marxist weeds that had grown in me for ten years.

During the next three weeks, I resigned from the Communist Party and read criticisms of the Soviet Union: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Whittaker Chambers, The God That Failed. I felt I should pursue the question of God’s existence, but disciplined myself to spend the following three weeks writing term papers.

By then the initial glow had faded. I escaped all-encompassing questions by joining the board of the Cinema Guild, a student movie-showing group, and thus gained two free tickets to any of the four or five movies shown on campus each night, with resultant dating opportunities.

But the Holy Spirit wasn’t finished with me. While I ran from reality, God pursued, in a process described by Francis Thompson’s powerful poem “The Hound of Heaven”:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways.

God came after me “with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace.” He turned each of my attempts to escape into new encounters.

Russian Gospel

God came after me. First, I had studied Russian to speak with my Soviet big brothers and had to continue with that to fulfill a PhD language requirement. One night in my room, I picked up the only unread Russian-language work in my bookcase, a New Testament given me as a travel souvenir and retained because it seemed exotic and might be useful for reading practice. With a Russian-English dictionary in front of me, I dived into the Gospel According to Matthew. I was delighted to find chapter 1 easy going: in the second verse Abraham begets Isaac, and other begats lope down the page.

Then came the Christmas story I had never read, followed by a massacre of babies and John the Baptist’s hard-hitting words: “You brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7). It held my attention, and after a while I didn’t punctuate the verses with sneers. Needing to read slowly and think about the words was helpful. The Sermon on the Mount impressed me. All the Marxists I knew were pro-anger, devoted to fanning proletarian hatred of The Rich. Jesus, though, was not only anti-murder but anti-anger: “Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:22). Marxists held to a two-eyes-for-an-eye kind of justice, but Jesus spoke of loving enemies and turning the other cheek.

Reading the Puritans

My next push to faith came in 1974 when, as a graduate student, I had to teach a course in early American literature: it was in the course catalogue, but none of the professors wanted to teach something they saw as dull and reactionary. I had to prepare by reading Puritan sermons, including those of Increase Mather and Jonathan Edwards. Since the Holy Spirit had prepared me, those dead white males made sense to me. Some love Puritan arguments and others hate them, but my childhood prejudice that Christians were stupid people who worshiped Christmas trees faded fast.

The little I knew of Christian thought came largely from my observation of Boston Catholicism, heavy on ritual. The Puritans were different: they believed God is the agent of conversion and regeneration, with humans responsive yet not leading the process. God does not ticket for heaven those with good social conduct: God saves those he chooses to save, regardless of their acts. Salvation then leads to better conduct, sometimes slowly.

That was good news for me. I had broken each of the Ten Commandments, except literally the prohibition of murder (but Jesus called anger a form of murder, Matthew 5:21–22). I certainly was glad that God, if he were anything like the Puritans described him, would not judge me by my works. I assigned to students Thomas Hooker’s sermon on “A True Sight of Sin,” in which Hooker describes our insistence on autonomy: “I will be swayed by mine own will and led by mine own deluded reason.” That was my history, and Hooker seemed to be preaching to me.

Unstoppable Spirit

I was slow. In 1975, instead of visiting a church to find out what flesh-and-blood Christians believe, I started reading about Christianity in the University of Michigan library. I headed down a rabbit trail with Gabriel Marcel and other Christian existentialists, as well as neoorthodox theologians who said they had wedded Christ without much concern for whether the Bridegroom actually existed. I was also in no hurry to leave behind some of the transient pleasures of atheistic immorality.

But I had not left communism merely to believe in pleasant myths or flings. The question was and is truth: as the apostle Paul put it, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. . . . If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:17–19) So, the Holy Spirit worked on me, and in 1976 I finally made a profession of faith. I relished and still love Psalm 73:24–25: “You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but you?”

That sums it up. God offers wisdom now and heaven later — and what good alternative do we have? I had relied on my deluded reason. I was a fanatic who, apart from God’s mysterious intervention, could not be reasoned with. Happily, the Holy Spirit, while not unreasonable, is unstoppable.

[parachronismx]

Advertisement done WRONG. Memes are great. Here's some .edu Info from 2007 On theories of media: The University of Chicago :: Theories of Media :: Keywords Glossary :: meme Works Cited 1. McGrath, Alister. 2005. Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. 2. “Meme.” Draft revision June 2001. The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ 00305506? 3. Dawkins, Richard. 1976. (1989 edition copyright Richard Dawkins.) The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press. 4. Dawkins, Richard. “Viruses of the Mind.” 1991. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi /Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html 5. Leiber, Fritz. "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee." The Best of Fritz Leiber. Sidgewick & Jackson, 1974. 6. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2003. “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction.” Modernism/modernity. Vol. 10, no. 3. pp. 481-500. Johns Hopkins University Press. 7. Blackmore, Susan. Preface by Richard Dawkins. 1999. The Meme Machine. New York: Oxford University Press. Notes meme The concept of a reproducible element of culture has deep roots, and the transliteration of a word for it from a Greek root seems to have occurred on multiple independent occasions. Donald T. Campbell introduced the term “mnemone” for such an element in 1960. [1] Still, the word “meme” entered common usage only recently, with Richard Dawkins’ treatment of the word, and did not appear in the 1989 Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The online OED defines a meme as “A cultural element or behavioural trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (esp. imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene.” [2] This entry tracks the word only as far back as Dawkins and The Selfish Gene in 1976. In this book, Dawkins himself claims to invent the word and dictate its use and pronunciation. His etymology of the word comes not from the same Greek root as Mnemosyne, the embodiment of memory and mother of the muses, but from “mimeme,” or something that is imitated. [3] “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme... It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.” [3] Dawkins would subsequently become indelibly associated with the meme, and his opinions and statements on the state of the theory would be used by many as the most important gauge of the theory’s health. Nevertheless, memetics does not begin and end with him. The need of a word for the meme existed before The Selfish Gene and has only increased since. For the whole history of human culture, traditions have been inherited and thought has been given to how they may be faithfully inherited and how they can change. Efficient, prolific, and faithful means of mechanical reproduction created an environment where culture could behave much like a gene pool and abstract cultural elements could be more easily personified. Currently, the need for a vocabulary to discuss memetics partially owes to the fields of cybernetics and “biocybernetics,” which study the mingling of life and artifice on a broader scale and could be said to encompass memetics. W.J.T. Mitchell’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction” characterizes the emerging cybernetic sphere in a way that not only allows for the inclusion of memetics, but strongly implies it: “within the very heart of the cybernetic the bios rears its head in very concrete forms – most conspicuously in the computational virus, but also in subtler forms… It’s not simply that living things become more like machines, but that machines now more than ever behave like living things.” [6] The analysis of non-living and culture-based phenomena in biological terms is a practice that goes beyond memetics, and a media student may do well to find connections between purely informational and material cybernetics. Because the analogy with the gene is part of the definition of the meme, it is presumable that, just as a creature has no control over its own genome, and just as a prospective parent may not be aware of the genetic disorders being passed to the child, memes can be given and received involuntarily. Dawkins notes in “Viruses of the Mind” that hardly anyone consciously admits to being affected by an advertisement, but businesses continue to invest in advertising and continue to observe its desired effects taking place. [4] Of course not everything transmitted through a medium is consciously received; more interesting to the media student is the possibility of a completely unconscious sending of a meme through a medium. Although it is only implied in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins would later expressly characterize some pieces of self-replicating memetic information as “Viruses of the Mind” in his controversial essay of the same name. [3] By doing so, he connects memetics to the ancient motif of harmful sensation. Harmful sensations, both real and imagined, are diverse in the means by which they cause harm but united in their phobic message that curiosity can be taken to excess and that the prospective targets of media are lucky to be ignorant. Memes notwithstanding, harmful sensations either cause direct harm with their medium rather than its independent message, (such as a mythical killing gaze or David Cronenberg’s Videodrome signal,) or else they carry messages that are harmful for the states of mind they induce or the terrible truths they reveal (such as the fruit of Genesis or H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu mythos”). In either case, the message is either an inconsequential decoration of the medium or a lifeless weapon to be exploited by others. However, if a sensation is harmful because it carries a virulent meme, then the message becomes a personified enemy and the medium becomes a non-essential, replaceable weapon. The prospect of a cultural virus is even more terrifying than the simple killing gaze of a gorgon or basilisk, because overly fatal units of information would limit their own ability to spread. The most frightening meme, like the deadliest virus, gives the host time to infect others. From this perspective, exposure to media can become a threat to the integrity of the self or destroy the feeble boundaries of the self entirely. Also, the reversal of importance in the medium-message relationship and the personification of the message create concerns in the areas of ethics, authorship, and intellectual property. Words like “culprit,” “aggressor,” “author,” and even “victim” struggle to keep their meanings when malicious information is perceived as evolving and self-disseminating. The study of self-replicating pieces of information is divided among the triad of genetics, computer science, and cultural studies. Parallels have been drawn between each pair, though all three are not completely alike. In “Viruses of the Mind,” Dawkins sets cultural and digital media together as he compares faiths and other virulent memes to computer viruses. “Any cynic familiar with the theory of selfish genes and memes would have known that modern personal computers, with their promiscuous traffic of floppy discs and e-mail links, were just asking for trouble. The only surprising thing about the current epidemic of computer viruses is that it has been so long in coming.” [4] From the perspective of media studies, it is worth observing that treatments of memetics often assume that memes are medium-neutral. Perhaps deceptively, it stands to reason that an ideology read from a book can be the same meme as an ideology passed on orally or spread through comic-book tracts [http://www.chick.com]. The perception that “self-interested” units of culture can wind through any media to find their hosts openly defies the appeals to medium specificity made by media theorists such as Clement Greenberg. To extend the comparison with genetics, media would be the sex organs by which memes are propagated to bury their seed in new minds. Even so, memes can clearly influence the way individuals relate to media, just as genes determine the traits of a creature’s sex organs. An alternative, somewhat conflicting way to compare memes with their media is to imagine media as the ever-changing environments in which memes compete for the means they need to survive and reproduce. Are memes at an evolutionary disadvantage when they switch media, as the proponents of medium specificity would predict, or might they grow out of control like a foreign species in a new ecological environment? Memes are often thought of as dependent on verbal media for propagation, or at least as dependent on interpersonal experience that includes articulated information. To complicate the matter, completely nonverbal or inarticulable memes are likely much more difficult to track. However, speculation exists on the subject, such as Fritz Leiber’s short story "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH- Tee" about a cadence coupled with an image that are so “catchy” or memetically fit that they spread across the human population and severely hamper humanity’s ability to do anything but reproduce them.[5] It may even be even possible for a meme to transcend the rift between word and image, conveying its memetic material on a frightening variety of fronts. Some empirically minded or reactionary followers of media studies ask whether memes can be said to exist at all, and the multitude of manners and moods in which the word is used brings its practicality into question. Alister McGrath argues that “Dawkins talking about memes is like believers talking about God – an invisible, unverifiable postulate, which helps explain some things about experience, but ultimately lies beyond material investigation.” [1] Even the postulate, he argues, is vague and unnecessary compared to the foundationally solid and scientific theory of the gene to which the meme’s definition is bound. He says that “perhaps the most significant criticism of the ‘meme’ concept is that the study of cultural and intellectual development proceeds perfectly well without it. Economic and physical models – especially information transfer – have proved their worth in this context.” [1] Upon merely mentioning the meme as a unit or entity, the cultural or media theorist has to defend against criticisms and alternate models such as these. Another concern about memetics is that the inheritance of memes seems to be “Lamarckian,” meaning that changes acquired during the lifetime of a meme are inherited by its progeny. This model of evolution, named after Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, has long been widely dismissed as a terrible model of biological evolution, and some definitions of “evolution” specifically include the presence of a non-Lamarckian environment. [7] The observation that memes change their hosts’ experiences endangers the very definition of the meme, if we use the Oxford definition that includes analogy to biological evolution. Whether memes can truly involve in a Lamarckian environment, and even whether memes always follow the Lamarckian pattern, remains in question. The fidelity of media is another issue in memetics, because the question of identity between memes is not as clear-cut as that of identity between genes. Dawkins himself admits that the meme cannot be currently located or isolated, and this makes the distinction between memes somewhat slippery and unscientific: “Another objection is that we don’t know what memes are made of, or where they reside. Memes have not yet found their Watson and Crick; they even lack their Mendel.” [7] Susan Blackmore puts it more elegantly, “Is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony a meme, or only the first four notes?” [7] Can two memes propagated through different media be identical? What separates a “mutated” meme from an entirely different meme? Could one ever decode a complete human memome? Genes are, so to speak, digital, while culture is the intangible analog that instills the genetic frame with infinite individuality. As a word with a specific, recorded, recent origin, it is simpler to trace the totality of attitudes and analyses of “meme” than much of the vocabulary of media studies. The general question that encompasses the debate and criticism around the word is not “What should its meaning be?” but rather “Can the theory behind this word fruitfully describe the real behavior of culture?” Compared to most areas of media theory, memetics remains in a crisis that is unusually immediate, strongly linked to the empirical sciences, and potentially terminal. Bill Volk Winter 2007 The University of Chicago :: Theories of Media :: Keywords Glossary :: meme http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/meme.htm

[obiternihili]

I want to like ssc, but every time I go to the site to read stuff there's... something in the air that really rubs me the wrong way. And I'm not really confident in my ability to articulate it and definitely not in a way that would make ~respectable discourse~ or whatever it'd be called. Of course I'm gonna try because, ???, I'm a prick???

But it's like, not really that major anyways. Just maybe hopefully some insight to be had about people who don't like his writing style? I hope?

But like, if I tried to articulate it at all, he's too Sam Harris-y. That's something bad about EY, that's something bad about rationalists as a whole. That's something bad about para-rationalists as well, including fucking me so maybe I'm throwing stones. If you finish this, do please keep in mind that my opening paragraph is admitting that I don't really read him in a habitual aspect. Anyone can rub anyone else the wrong way and first impressions count for a disproportionate lot, even if it's multiple first impressions over a period of a few years. You can feed even a rational inference machine unrepresentative data, like the point of that post of mine that went viralish a little while ago But some Sam Harris-y traits:

We like to be married to our strawmen, even after it's been repeatedly explained to us that the strawman is (shockingly) not a good model of the inner motivations of the people we're criticizing. But unfortunately when you throw out strawmen, the most likely people to respond seem to be the most like the strawmen for some reason, which I feel is happening with the lazy garbage commies who go on hate campaigns against him (the serious ones ignore him actually). And I supposed that almost certainly what happens with me and ancap-types, but I don't really have evidence to support that like I feel I have with Scott's situation.

We have a tendency to talk about new studies like they're objectively correct while ignoring the consensus. That's... not how science works. It's especially common when the conclusion is convenient to our biases, which in Scott's case really seems to mean "is interesting" more than any particular ideology. But like for Harris types it's one thing to think pomo's influence on the sciences has issues, it's another to think that while also using the same philosophical tools to critique sciences that aren't achieving concordance. Like you're going too meta there and throwing the baby out with the bathwater instead of really doing the work to get out the good data in your own framework. It's probably my own biases in assessing my writing but I don't feel like I'm as guilty of this as I used to be, with my being worst at it ironically around the time I started reading rationalist-adjacent stuff; maybe it's because I came into this with a strong allergy to that kind of pattern from my own experiences in the atheism wars and alt-medicine.

Scott mostly just ignores trolls (and ineffectual critics) which is really good behavior, but Sam Harris types also have this tendency to mistake "trying to talk in a neuter tone" with "talking in a neuter tone" (and with Scott he doesn't seem to take a lot of blogging very formally to begin with, which, that's fine, it's incredibly fine, but it affects the synthesis of a wannabe neutral tone and laid back assumptions) and feel offense when someone else doesn't understand them or gets mind-killed early on. Instead of looking over their own work for their own weaknesses as a "neutral writer" they (we) instead have the unfortunate habit of talking about mind-killing like it's the other party's fault. Scott kind of gives off this vibe (I probably do too).

But this comes off as incredibly snide and condescending and is almost a pan-rationalist vice. Like I'd name names but this is already me being an ass as it is. Most of the people I follow do this to some degree, actually. And this might be a bad opinion, but, some topics are not neutral no matter how much you want them to be and your bias is gonna get the better of you if you don't mindfully wrestle with it. Maybe I over-anthropomorphize as well but ideas aren't to be trusted, because they want to take advantage of you so they get passed along; so do expect that they have ways of breaking into and fucking around with your cold, distant, neutral demeanor even if you think it's a game or at least you have no stake in the game.

To be honest - and maybe this is a terrible thing that negatively effects the strength of what I try to say - this is why I try to wear my biases on my sleeve. Because when I don't the impact tends to be heavier than I'm usually prepared to deal with. And when I see my thinking in plain english instead of trying to cover it up I generally feel like I'm handicapping myself when the discussion eventually devolves to tone. Because on there should be my own mistakes so I can avoid trying to be a hypocrite, instead of the shadows of my mistakes obscured even from me such that I defend myself as if I don't cast a shadow.

(Which - casting a shadow, as opposed to deity-like glowing radiance (and which I'm quick to point out radiant bodies also cast shadows, such that not even the gods are perfect even if it's not obvious) - is a metaphor I've used for imperfection and probably isn't an obvious metaphor, sorry if explaining this feels condescending)

There's also probably something to be said about ~revealed preferences~ but I don't really like that piece at all. It seems true to me that people that like certain models of the mind tend to think that way themselves, though, but in general I think the revealed preferences assumes people are more rational than they really are and that people's actions don't really correlate to their inner worlds. There might be *something* to the argument that if you give off the impression of being a reactionary (or tankie, or psycho, or narcissist, or pedo-lover or gay-hater or brown-people-genocider or [positive and neutral things I can't juxtapose against the previous because it would imply they're a natural set] or whatever) through the actions you take such as who you fight or policies you support or mistakes you're willing to make, it might be because you have reactionary (etc) pattern-matching biases in your writings creeping in from your own world, but like if inner worlds really correlated with actions I'd be dead so it'd probably come across as incredibly hypocritical to try to point out that it seems like model held to be true has negative implications and bullets you're willing to bite about yourself. Don't even know if Scott buys into that piece anyways, maybe barking up a wrong tree.

At least this shit is why places like r/badphilosophy have anti-Harris memes. Their applicability to rationalists and para-rationalists and really anyone is probably more of a subjective impressionistic thing than an absolute fact. Harris fans like to say he's taken out of context, for example. My own experiences with the guy are like he's like Marx - taken out of context, but the context gets taken out of context because he's kinda low key a pompous windbag and actually at the next level of context above the context looks like the smallest layer of context again. Like Marx's opiate of the masses quote.

-

Like I said I don't (habitually) read ssc tho. I'm particularly quick to confuse disagreement with moral failing probably, half this shit's probably not even characteristic of his writing and is just an incorrect set of impressions I've gotten over years of only reading his weakest pieces or second-and-triple hand exposure to him. I really like the anonymized-esque quasi-professional advice he's given on things like depression and he's had a number of jokes I've laughed at or points about non-psychiatric topics I've thought were well articulated. I don't have anything against him and he's a worker who does something I could never do with less free time than I could manage with blogging mostly casually in that free time, so like having lofty expectations that he caters to my preferred writing styles is dickish anyways.

I just tried reading stuff of his again yesterday while running errands because a reactionary-feeling blog was shitting on him, was put off by something I couldn't actually put my finger on while wanting to like him, and tried to describe nebulous gut feelings 12 hours later in a moment of lucidity while being woken up from medication side effects augmented by stupidly poorly managed time on my part, so take me with a boulder of salt

EDIT I also wanted to add a point about how people have this habit of talking about things like everyone else assumes the same points. I'm particularly atrocious at this and basically it can come off as really snide and patronizing if you don't and feels like going A > C because A > B without establishing or referencing why B > C but I forgot to add the point. Rationalist jargon is basically all about shorthanding A > C and Harris is particularly atrocious about it as well, and between it and the other Harris-y stuff is why everyone hates rationalists

[filmanalysis21341753]

AV Essay

MELISSA COFIE 

21341753

Hypothesis: Zootopia employing a Neo noir framework in order to present a criticism by creating an illusion with comparison to the film Se7en. Is Zootopia criticizing the genre?

The genre of Neo Noir can be known for its ability and power to provide filmmakers with a method of engaging, reacting and responding to current social and cultural factors playing a part in our present day society. An example of this would be the Disney animation Zootopia (2016) directed by Byron Howard and Rich Moore. This film utilises and demonstrates the stylistic traits and character types represented by political reactionary through racial and gender stereotyping. The Disney animation has won a Golden Globe, an Annie Award, including an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature film as it approaches its audience in all levels and ages. The film’s collective central style and subject matter of the fictional storyline can be classed as a classic Neo noir film as what initially started as a clear and minimalistic plot gradually revealed itself as a deeper social conspiracy.

Zootopia can be analysed and described as an immersive toon noir which indirectly covers controversial topics such as systematic racism and socio political affairs. The sequence successfully works as it directly reflects the episodic truth of our human daily lives with regards specifically to the animal kingdom and the process of classification rather than directly addressing racism, alienation, prejudice, sexism and patriarchy. Through this lighthearted and upbeat animation, Moore and Howards reflect and describe our reality through a fictional world and utopian society where all animals, both predator and prey learn to live amongst each other in harmony with the mantra that “Anyone can be anything”. The city of Zootopia, that the film takes place in, is crucial to the key element of character building throughout the story by mimicking an entire society, this including a variety of subcultures interacting with real social dynamics. “Film Noir was a movement restricted by time and place” (Paul Schrader, 1997) The family friendly neo-noir tale with political undertones quite clearly addresses societal problems of today’s world with fictional political situations. This is most evident through the introduction of anthropomorphized animals talking, dressing and working together similar in comparison to the way human beings live, with emphasis on their goals, motives and emotions. On a scene by scene basis, the film tries to provide the viewer with an understanding of the way prejudice works through the heavy use of allegory.

Co-writer of the film, Phil Johnston, “Audience expectations point towards female characters needing a love interest, and that is not the case”. This marks a turning point for Disney as this is the first film where the motives of the protagonist and female lead are led without the addition of romance as a key aspect to the film’s plot. Especially evident with Judy being the only woman working in the police department, women are integral to the plot especially when referring to the villain, the assistant Mayor of Zootopia and female sheep, Dawn Bellwether (Jenny Slate).  

When Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) joins the police force, she is challenged in terms of power and authority, being the first female and first of her species to join the specific sector of work. Her incentive being the determination to prove herself against the stereotypically masculine species, that predators and prey can work amongst each other in harmony despite size or gender. “The more sophisticated we get as storytellers and stray from that old formula that is so tired, the more exciting films are going to get and the more interesting female characters we’ll see in movies.” (Phil Johnston) Despite the strong sense of masculinity in the work environment, Judy quickly adapts to how toughness required to enforce the law by taking on the main mysterious and unsolved case facing the precinct. At this point in the film and throughout, her main aim and motives remain the same. Her challenge being working alongside criminal, Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a sly fox who proves to make her job harder with emphasis on the predator prey relationship between the fox and rabbit population.  

On the whole, although Judy pushes for equality alongside more domineering animals as her colleagues, this is not only as example of a woman in a hostile working environment but essentially a woman of a different race, in this case species. Similarly, Bellwether wants to subvert the system and put herself on top. Together these two represent and symbolize the competing ideologies of matriarchy and female equality, therefore accentuating further the power given to the female protagonist and antagonist by Disney in this particular example.

In relation to the topic of cinematic masculinity, Zootopia is far more oblique, as it never comments on Judy's singleness. In strict comparison with David Fincher’s ‘Se7en’ (1995), Fincher has a very strong reputation for his protagonists consistently being male. When looking at both Somerset & Mills, both characters initially seen as complete opposites. Somerset being the calm, calculated & experienced while Mills the young, loud and irrational. This demonstrates the difference in generations and foreshadows the way each character will react as the film progresses and more clues are picked up. The element of emasculation is also a strong and steady theme explored in the film. This is first shown when Mills is attacked and he’s not able to fully defend himself ending with scars and cuts on his face and fracture of bones. This results in his manhood being threatened because his character is a very loud hothead but is suddenly kept at bay. This is the calmest Mills is in the film. Another aspect of when Mills is emasculated is the moment the John Doe reveals he murder Mills wife. The audience see Mills break down and start to cry – this is the most vulnerable we have seen him throughout the course of the film. And his inexperience is really brought forth when he makes the decision to kill John Doe. One can see this as glorious and justifiable rage but also brings out the inner ‘Monstrosity’ that John doe had proclaimed was dormant within mills.  

In addition, the use of males and guns is seen regularly in neo-noir. It can be interpreted as a form of masculinity, with regards to the use of phallic symbols, as the protagonist usually would do their final deed with that specific gun. Similarly, it can also be viewed and interpreted as a modern aesthetic of male ego and confidence. This also links back to the aspect of hyper-masculinity. It adds a persona to the character and their traits would either be centered around that item or be altered once they have received it. In the case of Se7en, Mills is always swaying his gun and ready to use it. It is tool that he uses to showcase his position of power and level of authority by ranking as compared to Somerset who was armed but barely brought it out. He consistently carried and used tools like pens, paper and books thus showing his older and more experienced persona and furthermore throughout the film, each character traits are exposed and brought forth through the tools and aesthetics they have.  

On the contrary the film Zootopia doesn't directly address or comment on the aspect of the protagonist being female, despite this the understanding still exists. Judy is dismissed and degraded as too adorable, too miniature in size, too weak and overly emotional. A kind of prejudice mainly aimed at women, not just race in particular. “Neo-noir develops new vocabularies for classic themes” (Spicer, 2002). One element often used in neo-noir is the use of police officers or detectives as protagonists. Through this it changes the method one would follow a basic character. From their introduction to developing them as the film progresses. When dealing with someone in a position of some sort of power they are much more complex characters. Their decision making usually have a butterfly effect – as the story goes on each choice they make either takes them forward or brings them back. With officer Judy we get the sense of she knows her position and ranking but in order for her to rise to the top she must be willing to make mistakes and grow as a person to reach that next level. Her arrival to the ZPD, she is immediately stereotyped and looked upon as just young and inexperienced. Through the spectacle of neo-noir we see that she uses that as a catalyst to go on and beyond what she initially though her work was set to be. She as a character and a hungry enthusiastic officer has now gained a motif of not wanting to be the overlooked and underappreciated. When looking at se7en, each time Mills was irrational in his actions they would end up with another dead victim and John Doe out of their grasps again, which for some part became more of a cat and mouse chase. Their egos and high ranking causes them to go back to square one and restart and review their investigation multiple times.  

Additionally, by having a female character as an officer – something that is male dominated throughout neo-noir. It can be seen as an advancement and upgrade of the genre. It can be used a tool to challenge the male and patriarchal gaze. Certain utterances and behaviors that would be deemed as normal because of the over-exposure of male characters performing them. By Judie playing that role of an officer, who is faced with trials and tribulations – seeing her perspective and her execution in addressing the situations open up a different element to neo-noir. Something that had been narrowed to a specific distinct way on how the protagonists or officers of power were to be portrayed had now been broadened to a contemporary audience.  

All in all, Film Noir is argued as not just reduced to a genre, but mainly defined by its the tones, themes and qualities which describe it. Zootopia has managed to keep the key elements of neo-noir such as solitude and social hierarchy but able to embed new values and topics of discussion, through this it is able to prove the wellness of the neo-noir genre but also critiques the strongly held traditional neo-noir structure in aims to update and contemporize it effectively.  

Bibliography

Spicer, A. (2002) Film Noir, Longman/Pearson Education

Porfirio, R & Cornard T M. (2006) ‘The Philosophy of Film Noir’, University press of Kentucky

Mohanty, C. T. (1991) ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ Indiana University Press, pp. 51-80

Crenshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, pp. 139–67

Timothy Shary, E. (2013) ‘Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema’ Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press

Kirkham, P. & Thumim, J. (1995) Me Jane : masculinity, movies, and women, New York : St. Martin's Press

Articles

Superhero Feed (2016) ZOOTOPIA Movie Clip – Assistant Mayor Bellwether

Flint, H. (2016) ‘People want Disney to #GiveElsaAGirlfriend because of the lack of LGBT representation in their films’ [online] Metro

Travers, P. (2016) ‘Zootopia’, Rolling Stone, 3 March [online]

mtv braless (2016) Is Zootopia an Intersectional Feminist Utopia? [online]

Genzlinger, N. (2016) ‘Review: In ‘Zootopia,’ an Intrepid Bunny Chases Her Dreams’ [online] The New York Times

Lucas, S. (2016) ‘Why Disney’s Zootropolis might be the most important film you see this year’ [online] The Conversation

Aekaputra, S. (2017) ‘Zootopia: A Film Theory of Gender’ University of Cambridge [online]

Collin, R. (2016) ‘Zootropolis is the Chinatown of talking animal films – review’, The Telegraph, 24 March [online]

Woods, A. (2016) ‘Zootopia’s Judy Hopps: A Unique Female Protagonist in a World of Animated Men [online] Animation World Network  

Romero, A. (2016) Zootopia, An Analysis of Female Characters as Active/Passive Females [online] Women Watch Films

Dominick, S A. (2016) Film Review: Zootopia A cute, manic Disney movie that has a little extra to say [online] Consequence of sound

Christensen, M. (2016) The Gender Politics Of Zootopia [online] Biola University

No Film School – The stylist elements of Film Noir

BFI – 10 great American noir films

[theculturedmarxist]

     By    Barry Grey    

       17 September 2019  

Last week, it was revealed that the Trump administration has taken extraordinary steps to continue the 18-year cover-up of Saudi government involvement in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

On Thursday, September 12, one day after the 18th anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people, a federal court filing revealed that Attorney General William Barr has asserted the "state secrets" privilege to block the release of an FBI report detailing extensive relations between some of the 19 hijackers and Saudi government officials. Victims of the attacks and their families are pushing for access to the 2007 report as part of a lawsuit against the Saudi government launched in 2003 charging the despotic monarchy with coordinating the mass killings.

Barr declared there was a “reasonable danger” that releasing the report would “risk significant harm to national security.”

The court filing also revealed that the FBI has agreed to turn over to the families’ lawyers the name of a Saudi individual that is redacted in a four-page summary of the FBI report released in 2012. The summary lays out evidence concerning three Saudis who provided money and otherwise assisted two of the hijackers in California in finding housing, obtaining driver’s licenses and other matters.

Government investigations have established that the two people who are named in the FBI summary, Fahad al-Thumairy, a former Saudi consulate official, and Omar al-Bayoumi, suspected by the FBI of being a Saudi intelligence officer, were working in coordination with the Saudi regime. The third person, whose name is redacted, is described in the FBI summary as having assigned the other two to assist the hijackers.

Lawyers for the families last year subpoenaed the FBI for an unredacted copy of the summary based on the contention that the third person was a senior Saudi official. But as part of the court filing, citing the “exceptional nature of the case,” the FBI issued a protective seal to prevent the name of the third Saudi from becoming public. The agency also refused to provide any of the other information requested by the families.

An FBI official said the agency was shielding the name to protect classified information related to “ongoing investigations” and to protect its “sources and methods.”

In fact, the extraordinary measures taken to conceal the role of the Saudi regime in the 9/11 attacks are driven by the need of US imperialism to maintain its reactionary alliance with the Saudi sheiks and continue the false cover story on 9/11 that has served as an ideological pillar for aggression in the Middle East and the buildup of a police-state infrastructure within the US, carried out in the name of fighting a “war on terror.”

The Saudi monarchy has been a key ally of the United States in the Middle East for 70 years, and since 9/11 it has become, alongside Israel, Washington’s most important partner in the region. It has played a central role in the bloody wars for regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, which have killed more than a million people and destroyed entire societies. It is also the world’s biggest purchaser of US arms.

Its intelligence agencies have long worked in the closest collaboration with the CIA and the FBI. The exposure of Saudi complicity in 9/11 immediately implicates sections of the US intelligence establishment in facilitating, it not actively aiding, the terror attacks, and sheds light on the multiple unanswered questions about how 19 men, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals, could carry out such a complex operation.

The 9/11 attacks were eagerly seized upon by the George W. Bush administration, with the support of the Democratic Party and media allies such as the New York Times, to implement longstanding plans to wage aggressive war in the Middle East.

The cover-up of Saudi involvement has been carried out over three administrations, Democratic and Republican alike. It began within hours of the attacks themselves. Eight days after the attacks, at least 13 relatives of Osama bin Laden, accompanied by bodyguards and associates, were allowed to secretly leave the US on a chartered flight. One of the passengers, a nephew of the supposed number one on Washington’s “most wanted” list, had been linked by the FBI to a suspected terrorist organization.

The US association with bin Laden went back decades. Under the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, conducted between 1979 and 1989, the US and Saudi Arabia provided $40 billion worth of financial aid and weapons to the mujahedeen “freedom fighters” waging war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, an operation in which then-US ally bin Laden played a key role. The proxy war in Afghanistan was pivotal in the later creation of Al Qaeda.

In July of 2016, the US government released to the public a 28-page section, suppressed for 14 years, of a joint congressional inquiry into 9/11. The 28-page chapter dealt with the role of the Saudi government and contained abundant and damning evidence of extensive Saudi support for the 9/11 hijackers in the period leading up to the attacks.

Among its revelations were:

▪ Two of the Saudi hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, lived for a time in Los Angeles and San Diego in 2000, where they obtained pilot training. They were given money and lodgings by Omar al-Bayoumi, who worked closely with an emir at the Saudi Defense Ministry. Both were under CIA surveillance while attending an Al Qaeda planning meeting in 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and placed on a “watch list” for FBI monitoring if they came to the United States. Nonetheless they were allowed to enter the US on January 15, 2000.

▪ Al-Bayoumi “received support from a Saudi company affiliated with the Saudi Ministry of Defense,” drawing a paycheck for a no-show job. The company also had ties to Osama bin Laden. His allowances jumped almost tenfold after the arrival of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. Al-Bayoumi had found an apartment for the two, which they shared with an informant for the San Diego FBI, advancing them a deposit on the first month’s rent.

▪ Al-Bayoumi’s wife received a $1,200 a month stipend from the wife of Prince Bandar, then the Saudi ambassador to the US and later head of Saudi intelligence. The wife of his associate, Osama Bassnan, identified by the FBI as a supporter of bin Laden, received $2,000 a month from Bandar’s wife.

▪ Three of the hijackers stayed at the same Virginia hotel as Saleh al-Hussayen, a Saudi Interior Ministry official, the night before the attacks.

Despite such evidence, and much more, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission appointed by George W. Bush concluded that there was no conclusive evidence that “senior” Saudi officials played a role in the 9/11 attacks. When the 28-page section of the congressional report was released in 2016, Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, denounced all suggestions of Saudi involvement as baseless.

However, former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission, said, “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government.”

Former Democratic Senator Robert Graham, cochair of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, said that there was “a pervasive pattern of covering up the role of Saudi Arabia in 9/11 by all of the agencies of the federal government, which have access to information that might illuminate Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11.”

In the lawsuit filed by the families of the victims, he filed an affidavit that stated, “I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia.”

It is significant, but not surprising, that the corporate media has given only the most perfunctory and muted coverage to the moves by the Trump administration to once again suppress the role of the Saudi regime in 9/11, and the Democrats have been completely silent.

One should compare this response to damning evidence of Saudi culpability and US cover-up in relation to an event that took nearly 3,000 lives to the hysteria of the anti-Russia witch hunt led by the Democratic Party, the New York Times and the bulk of the media, based on completely unsubstantiated charges.