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justforbooks · 1 year

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Martin Amis, the author of Money and London Fields, has died at the age of 73. Here are some of the most memorable quotes from interviews over the course of his career.

On writing

“What makes you a writer? You develop an extra sense that partly excludes you from experience. When writers experience things, they’re not really experiencing them anything like a hundred percent. They’re always holding back and wondering what the significance of it is, or wondering how they’d do it on the page.”

“I find that people take my writing rather personally. It’s interesting when you’re doing signing sessions with other writers and you look at the queues at each table and you can see definite human types gathering there … With Julian Barnes, his queue seemed to be peopled by rather comfortable, professional types. My queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags and people who stare at me very intensely, as if I have some particular message for them. As if I must know that they’ve been reading me, that this dyad or symbiosis of reader and writer has been so intense that I must somehow know about it.”

“To me it seems like a part-time job, really, in that writing from 11 to 1 continuously is a very good day’s work. Then you can read and play tennis or snooker. Two hours. I think most writers would be very happy with two hours of concentrated work.”

“Any smoker will sympathise when I say that after your first cup of coffee you have a sobbing, pleading feeling in the lungs as they cry out for their first cigarette of the day, and my desire to write is rather like that. It’s rather physical.”

“There are pains you have to go through when writing a novel. If I wrote a novel without that – where it was all flowing, from beginning to end – it would make me very suspicious. It has to have the admixture of pain. But otherwise it seems to me a hilariously enjoyable way of spending one’s time. Assigning life to all these propositions, and (usually) dreaming up people, rather than taking them from life.”

“I have no patience for anything experimental or obscure – above all, obscure. I have to know at all times exactly what’s going on. I’m very committed to the pleasure principle. You read literature to have a good time. Or why else would people go on doing it?”

On his father, Kingsley Amis

“He was brilliantly indolent: he never gave me any encouragement at all. I later realised how valuable and necessary that was.”

“I left the proofs [of The Rachel Papers] on his desk and went off on holiday. When I came back, he’d gone on holiday. But he left a brief, charming note saying he thought it was enjoyable and fun and all that. I think that was the last novel of mine he read all the way through.”

“I always thought if he had been born a generation later, he would have written my novels. And if I’d been born a generation earlier, I would have written his novels.”

On cancel culture

“Every fibre in my being resists. It’s a philistine manifesto. It’s anti-creativity. Appropriation means taking without permission – who do you ask permission of? It’s getting that way in every direction. I got bollocked for writing about the working classes in Lionel Asbo. But I’d been doing that since I started.”

On his comments about Islamism

“Well, there was an unpleasant flurry [at that time], and I certainly regretted having said what I said; already by mid-afternoon on that day I ceased to believe in what I said. Collective punishment is obviously ruled out by definition – it was the sort of thing you say towards the end of a long interview without really having time to clear it with yourself. But that never felt like a great convulsion in my life. One death threat and a lot of chat. It wasn’t much of a cancellation.”

On feminism

“I’ve been a passionate feminist since the mid-80s. It was Gloria Steinem who converted me in a single day in New York. It’s the rhetorical device she uses throughout, and it’s very effective: she just reverses the sexes – what if men menstruated, what if men had babies? It’s unanswerable.”

On politics

“I’m secure in my conviction that socialism doesn’t work, because it goes against human nature. The idea of people acting out of social altruism is not part of human nature. It’s an element in it, but it’s not a guiding principle. I’ve always been a gradualist.”

“One of the real truths of the 21st century, and earlier, is that history is speeding up. We’re all on a sort of rollercoaster now. There are existential threats that weren’t fully acknowledged not so long ago. We are sort of hurtling forward. It’s more of a task to ask people to slow down.”

Remembering Christopher Hitchens

“He had a greater love of life than me. He really enjoyed everything, so much. I quite like life, but I’m not as crazy about it as he was. It somehow formulated itself in me that, now he was dead, it was my job to love life as much as he did.”

“Christopher was a real contrarian. One of things I’m proud of is that friendship. We never had even the slightest froideur about disagreements. I think it’s a good rule never to lose a friend over an argument. Never get into these sincerity contests: “I feel so strongly about this that I never want to see you again.” Rubbish. I disagreed with Hitchens violently over literary things as well as political things. But it never got to the point of raised voices. That’s partly because real friendship is rare, particularly male friendship.”

On ageing

“My father said to me that when a writer of 25 puts pen to paper he’s saying to the writer of 50 that it’s no longer like that, it’s like this. The older writer, at some point, is going to lose touch with what the contemporary moment feels like, although some writers do amazing jobs, Saul Bellow being a good example.”

“I feel I’m only going to write short stories and novellas from now on. Chekhov said, toward the end of his life, “Everything I read strikes me as not short enough.” And I agree.”

“In the old days it came quicker, the prose. Now it’s a battle. It’s not about coming up with striking adverbs, it’s more about removing as many uglinesses as I can find.”

“I don’t want this to get out of control or I’ll be drowning in schmaltz, but it all starts to look very beautiful now that I know I’m not going to be around indefinitely. You know, the way that to a prisoner condemned to death, water tastes delicious, the air tastes sweet, a bread-and-butter sandwich makes tears spring to the eye.”

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#JUST FOR BOOKS #Martin Amis #Quotes

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sang8262 · 1 year

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JP's move names have been fully translated!

i almost forgot to share here lmao, here's the link!!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LPyFZ3pSIA-L8eJPXU86W2iUM0unnJCptS8jA-Yc4uY/edit?pli=1#gid=0

it's been a collaborative effort between several JP fans all around the world, im so glad he has such dedicated fans ♡

extra commentary from me:

The mythology references!! and to be so specific to his (supposed) country of origin too, like with zilant, the firebird, or sackman/ bogeyman. Or like, how the Triglav mountain is quite the significant national symbol for Slovenia. That's so specific and you can totally imagine JP himself learning this fact as he prepares his fake ID.

It's interesting that they mixed normal animals that exist in real life with these fantasy ones too. To me, it goes in line with his theme of duality, and also his knowledge about local cultures or history once again. Also, it's the heavy versions of buttons that are mythological creatures (like j.HP being Unicorn), so it maintains a theme that the stronger attacks are also the more mystical animals.

The verbs and other nouns they chose, like Spite, Prank, or Knife are really interesting too. They reflect his underhanded, cruel nature, which obviously fit quite well.

'Knife' in particular, when he deflects Kalima's attack with one from the comics, which he calls "such tricky things"...

'Prayer' gets a shout out for being so unique. I dont think they ever mention him being religious, or imply he is, but I can see him interested by the effects (and effectiveness) of religion upon the masses. And 2HP does look a bit like a praying pose lol

But stuff like his throws all being natural disasters (Tornado, Hurricane, Avalanche) is quite ominous as well!! I like that they recognize just how strong throws are in the game, like a destructive, inescapable force of nature..... :)

I think I mentioned this already, but the fact that his Drive Impact and Reversal are in Spanish for some?! reason!? Sword again, like Knife.. I'm almost imagining he knows how to wield a sword or idk, as a sport, like fencing.The way he holds his cane in his Parries suggest it too a bit.

Then of course, Exile. It could just be that Drive Reversal is 'exiling' the opponent, with the attack, but I'm so hung up on the fact that it's in Spanish. They put so much thought into the rest of his move names, I swear these arent random! But we may never know for sure;;

Final shoutouts to the series of "low/ smart/ quick/ light" blows. I think they're his easily cancelable, chainable normals too, so it makes sense that they share this naming scheme.

I think my favorite has to be 6MK, Guillotinna, which ironically requires minimal translating, as it means 'Guillotine'.

It's obviously fitting for how the axe kick looks ofc, but guillotines also invoke images of beheading kings, revolutions, the Reign of Terror, and public executions as a spectator sport. Clearly there's a lot there that works well for JP.

#sf6 jp #jp rambles #jp refs #i love how much thought they put into this character!!!#i wish i could say more about the contrast between 'bylina' and 'Amnesia'; something about historical poems vs forgetting...#also love how lvl2 is called 'Trap'; it's a mix up ofc but can also be set up as an unblockable

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ruanbaijie · 3 years

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just a few thoughts after recent events bc I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking from both sides given how touchy the topic is

the wounds left from wwii are still very raw in this part of the world that goes without saying, and no amount of elaboration I can do here will be able to summarise the pain and feelings of injustice and anger that still linger till today

yes he did wrong. he shouldn’t have done those even if back then he wasn’t as famous. yasukuni is infamous for being the representation of japan’s refusal to admit its past and it really baffles me why he would agree to go there (apparently he was invited for a wedding?) let alone take pictures there

but yes antis also dug it up on purpose to smear him (c-ent is brutal I think most of us who’ve been around in the cdrama/ dangai circles are pretty aware of that by now)

the two can coexist and acknowledging the latter DOES NOT equate to belittling the consequences of wwii NOR does it equate to being an imperialist

does he deserve to be cancelled? how does one judge? yes wwii rhetoric has been and still is manipulated till today in politics esp in the countries concerned, yes nationalism plays a very big part. but yes he did also knowingly do things that still remind people of an especially painful period. so how does one balance and judge between the knowing manipulation of painful memories to serve political agendas and the very effect of the painful memories itself?

yes it is strange and somewhat unsettling to see ardent fans voicing their support for him esp since the dust from wu yifan has barely settled bc it’s so easy for an outsider to see this as blind support

but remember the context of c-ent and antis and how far they can go to tear celebrities they dislike down

and that blindly labelling someone as white just because they seem to continue supporting him while “ignoring” or “making light of” the historical baggage is just being prejudiced

yes reverse racism does not exist but that doesn’t give anyone a free pass for being prejudiced and painting every single member of a certain community with the same brush

white people have feelings too and I’ve met a lot of white people who are careful about this unfamiliar culture they may perhaps be engaging with for the first time, who ask questions and do their research to make sure that they don’t unknowingly belittle or misconstrue anything, which I very deeply respect

I know it’s easy to hate and blame a boogeyman esp when racism and the sidelining of minority races still continues to be prevalent today

but please realise the context that this is happening in before piling on

and before adding oil to the fire of ad hominem attacks

tl;dr:

his actions were disgusting, but also disgusting is how people can actually hate a successful person so much that they would dig so deep just to find ammunition to shoot him down with and tear him down with mob justice

and if you disagree with my point of view or anyone’s point of view

please argue against the subject of the argument

instead of attacking the person themselves (or any other communities, whether said person belongs to them or not) and sending death threats

it really does not reflect well on your own character

if what I’ve said doesn’t sit well with you, please go ahead and unfollow and block me

and if you really want to pull the same trick and still want to attack me as a person instead, here’s your homework done for you: I am chinese, I am diaspora, I live in asia, I know this culture (maybe not as deeply as I should, but well enough), I know my history, I wrote my goddamn final year university thesis on the lingering sentiments of wwii in the region

#*ramblings #zhang zhehan

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zero-affect · 3 years

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On Mark Fisher, Hauntology and Acid Communism

17 May, 1980 – On the night Ian Curtis killed himself, he watched Werner Herzog’s Stroszek on the BBC. Herzog’s existential tragicomedy is an askance vision of the American dream where the soul and sanity slowly erodes. Escaping physical torment in Berlin, alcoholic busker Bruno Stroszek migrates to rural Wisconsin with prostitute Eva and elderly neighbour Scheitz in hope of a better future, only to be broken further by illusionary promises of prosperity. Here, they kick you spiritually, Bruno says, and ‘do it ever so politely and with a smile, it’s much worse’. Eva leaves Bruno as bills amount and his mobile home is repossessed and auctioned off. Scheitz (whose mind has decayed) and Bruno attempt to rob a bank. They find it closed and instead stick up a barber shop. Scheitz is arrested and Bruno flees to a drab Cherokee amusement-park in a truck with his remaining possessions: a shotgun and a frozen turkey. The film’s conclusion reproaches any promise of a meaningful future existence as life deteriorates into absurd repetitions: the truck drives itself in circles until it catches fire, Bruno rides a chairlift up and down until he shoots himself – “Is this really me![?]” emblazoned on the back of the seat – and, most prominently, a chicken dances around and around and will not stop.

Watching these final moments now, it’s easy to see how Stroszek could have resonated with the Joy Division frontman and acted as what Herzog would call a ‘ritual step’ to his suicide hours later. The inane loop that Herzog presents feels like he was wiring directly into the interior world of the depressive, a place where any anticipation for the future is foreclosed by a sense of pervasive liminality. In my own experience, this mindless repetition is what depression is most like. Feelings of emptiness pervade much more so than any abject sadness. To be sad suggests the reverse is possible. Instead, life feels devoid of meaning, so there isn’t anything to feel in the first place. You simply go through the motions of life despite feeling that they are pointless and, often, ridiculous. Journeying the arctic wastes, getting closer to nowhere. Joy Division was jacked into this void. Driving bass lines and mutated disco rhythms spoke to the heart of nothing more than gentle instrumentation and whispery vocals ever could – you can dance, but what for?

But to be depressed is often more than just a chronic mood of despair felt within. The depressive enters an exchange with the world where their mental state is projected onto their surroundings, the same surroundings that seem conducive to that very depression. The repetitive motions of daily life are thus not just absurd to you but seem innately so. In a world that seems destined to collapse in a cocktail of geo-political crises, (cyber)wars and the obsoletion of meatspace it feels pointless to work towards a future that will decay into nothing. Existentialism is a pervasive mood for us younger generations and the increasingly endemic state of mental illness in Britain is not just a reflection of today but of the fact that tomorrow looks no different.

Mark Fisher believed that this psychological loss of the future is the pathological condition of 21st century subjectivity. In Ghosts Of My Life, he argues that our sense of a linear progression of time has drained away – the futures that were promised yesterday have failed to transpire today. For Fisher, this ‘slow cancellation of the future’ (quoting Franco Berardi) is felt at a cultural level. The rapid forward momentum of 20th century cultural production has been displaced, we no longer experience the radical breaks and dislocations in culture that were felt in the previous century. Instead, a formal nostalgia dominates the present as contemporary mass culture expresses an overwhelming tolerance for the archaic. UK music provides his best examples as artists such as Adele and the Arctic Monkeys have naturalised ‘a vague but persistent feeling of the past’ through their reconfiguration of 20th century sonic qualities. Any progress is now minor and incremental, weighed down by declining expectations – the cutting edge has been dulled. The result of this cultural anachronism is the experience of time being lost, ‘it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet’. As Adam Curtis says at the beginning of his recent documentary series Can’t Get You Out of My Head, today’s paralysis is ‘giving you today another version of what you had yesterday and never a different tomorrow’.

This cultural impasse is the product of structural and political conditions. Fisher argues that neoliberal capitalism has deprived us of the resources for artistic experimentation, not only in economic terms but also at the level of consciousness. Increasing demands on time, money and attention means we are we are too tired for original cultural production and attentive consumption; comfort and profit is safe within the already proven familiar. The intense rhythm that life now runs at has reduced our capabilities to dream. Massive collective overstimulation means we are no longer able to journey into the depths of subconsciousness and reach out to what’s on the other side. Our lives in hypermediated cyberspace have replaced neural pathways with proxy minds that endlessly trigger us into states of simultaneous boredom and anxiety, beyond thought and concentration into rapid-fire data processing, what Fisher calls ‘post-literate schizo-subjectivity’.

As Frederic Jameson explains in his influential essay ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, the schizophrenic experience (used descriptively, not clinically) is one of temporal discontinuity; time and meaning breaks down and the schizophrenic subject can do nothing and becomes no one. Jameson similarly claims this experience of schizophrenia is an expression of the logic of late multinational capitalism whereby consumer society folds into obsessive repetition, an intense, hallucinatory and unbearable experience of being ‘condemned to live a perpetual present’. Stroszek’s temporal loop seems particularly resonant here: the tireless demands of subjectivity create a pointless dance that repeats endlessly and the resulting depression that envelops Bruno is the same that plagues us now. The ‘crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion’ of the 21st century that Fisher describes means we are unable to create unimaginable futures.

If popular music culture was Fisher’s most applicable symptom when writing in 2013, then popular cinema is the abject example of cultural stasis today. Fisher cites Jameson’s other feature of consumer capitalism’s postmodernity, pastiche, as demonstrative of how culture disguises its archaic form via new technologies. But Jameson’s example of pastiche’s mass culture manifestations, the ‘nostalgia film’, needs to be updated. If Star Wars gratified a deep longing to revisit Buck Rogers serials hidden within its special effects, the continuation of Star Wars today gratifies a longing to return to itself, demonstrating a new level of formal nostalgia. The first of the franchise’s sequel trilogy, The Force Awakens, is shameless in its re-hashing of the (un)original A New Hope. Minute upgrades to iconography, lazy name changes that do little to guise the recycling of archetypes and the pageantry of original cast members and classic props illustrates how the “new” Star Wars is an overt re-run of its own past. Pastiche is now fucking itself.

The dominance of this hyper-pastiche, the prevalence of reboots, remakes and latter-day sequels, speaks to how the nostalgia film is no longer obfuscated as new but foregrounded as a revival of past forms. An overwhelming reliance on recovering recognisable titles and building franchises based on past media churns out zombie forms that market nostalgia as the norm, a sign that the slow cancellation of the future’s gradual waning of cultural progression has reached its final halted form. Cryostasis. Mass culture doesn’t need to pretend to be new anymore, technology now facilitates artificial immortality to endlessly force a reverence for the past and never move on. Nowhere is this more evident than in the resurrection of actors via CGI. Late capitalism’s relentless desire to sell us the same product on repeat has risen the dead. And it is the inherently soulless and uncanny nature of these undead non-performances which is so exemplary of how popular cinema and the rest of our lumpen mass culture feels so deflating.

Nothing has changed since Ghosts Of My Life’s release in 2014, at least not for the better. But whilst Fisher was able to chart the slowdown of time by contrasting the lassitude of today with the futures projected by the ‘recombinatorial delirium’ of Jungle, Trip Hop and the rest of the experimental music culture he experienced in the 90’s, I’m part of a generation that has only ever known the malaise of the 21st century. The depression that Fisher describes is caused by the failure of the future, life getting worse, whereas young people today have no sense of difference, we’ve never had a future. The full realisation of Jameson’s postmodernism, where there are no new styles and worlds to invent, means art can no longer offer visions beyond today’s faltering economy, unstable job market and dismal political landscape, not to mention the apocalyptic weight of climate change that the youth of today will be the first to truly contend with. Having never known culture’s true escapist capabilities and only ever a postmodern fragmentation, this generation exists without hope or meaning, even for something that has been lost. The return of the void (Fisher writes: ‘If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it’s because they capture the depressed sprit of our times’). It’s no wonder that British youth live only for occasional weekends and short-lived summers. A half-life of binge drinking in parks, shit club nights and raves-that-aren’t-what-they-used-to-be in hazes of lager, cannabis and amphetamine/ketamine/benzodiazepine infusions that stimulate some remnant of feeling (“I love you mate, but I don’t know who you are”) only to come crashing down into unbearable mornings-after, heart palpitations and devastated mental health. We don’t want to grow up, because there’s no world to grow up into.

This isn’t to say that contemporary culture is completely devoid of anything worthwhile. There are glimpses of the new and the other, but these arrive disparately. The internet has completely restructured consumption. Paradoxically, the interconnected digital world has made culture feel disconnected from the individual in that it now seems to only exist in the realm of cyberspace, separated from real life and away from something tangible. The spaces of subculture have been reduced to forums and comment sections, drawing in members from around the world but retreating its presence from the milieu of everyday life. Without this tactility, there isn’t a sense of a cultural project, that you’re a part of something bigger. Punk’s outward anger rears its head now and again, yet in the age of personal instability, this energy is often inverted inwards into the mental turmoil and isolation of Post-Punk (see Black Country, New Road). Fisher’s argument is that what is lost in the 21st century is a trajectory, the creative force to create new worlds. The classic YouTube comment-turned-meme, “I was born in the wrong generation”, now seems more than just an adage for 13-year-olds discovering Led Zeppelin or Nirvana. It’s a yearning for a time when cultural production coalesced into a shared energy with which to sculpt the future.

It’s this emotion of yearning that constitutes Fisher’s reaction against these lost futures, his adaption of Derrida’s concept of hauntology. Hauntology is explained through Freud’s notion of melancholia: a refusal ‘to give up the ghost’ – Fisher’s refusal to adjust to the current conditions. Freud writes that ‘melancholia behaves like an open wound’ and, for Fisher, this wound is his longing for the ‘resumption of the processes’ of the cultural and political momentum of the 20th century. It’s not that the culture of the past was necessarily better than the anachronistic reconfigurations of today, but that the aforementioned energies of cultural production promised more. The libido remains attached to this original, uninterrupted timeline. Hauntology is the virtual spectres of what should have been, a stain on the temporal loop that reminds us that time was supposed to move forwards.

It admittedly took me a while to “get” hauntology, probably because I’ve never known anything but the depression of the 21st century. The pages that make up most of Ghosts Of My Life are essays about certain hauntological traces and phantom presences that still linger. At first glance, these chapters seem to be little more than disparate fragments of Fisher’s own haunted house, nostalgic vestiges of things he used to love. I wasn’t sure if these ghosts were able to rupture the fabric of futurist defeat. The use of hauntology to describe the sonic textures of artists like Burial and The Caretaker complicated things further in my mind. Hauntology seemed instable, although this is part of its appeal and its very nature. I soon started to understand that the identification of hauntology was an act of resistance, but it wasn’t until I read Fisher’s introduction to Acid Communism that the yearnings started to make sense as alternative possibilities.

Acid Communism calls for the resumption of the momentum of 60’s and 70’s counterculture. The spectre of this period – ‘a time when people really lived, when things really happened’ – offers a return to the open modes of consciousness that defined countercultural thought and promised unbridled freedoms, freedoms which Fisher again argues have been thwarted by the project of neoliberalism. Fisher writes that the 60’s still haunts us today because the futures projected by the counterculture have failed to happen – another future lost. The exploration and experimentation of new modes of consciousness in this period turned the metaphysical into the mainstream and ‘promised nothing less than a democratisation of neurology itself’. To re-ignite the psychedelic, spiritual and social imagination of the counterculture today would allow us to interrogate the very conditions that subjugate us to the temporal loop and reduce us into somnolent agents of mindless cyberspace. Going back to the notion of depression as a suspicion of modern life’s inherent absurdity, adopting new modes of thought and perception can make us lucid to just how ridiculous our lives today really are. Fisher’s commentary on Jonathan Miller’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is particularly evocative: ‘In the solemn and autistic testiness of the adults who torment and perplex Alice, we see the madness of ideology itself: a dreamwork that has forgotten it is a dream, and which seeks to make us forget too’. What Acid Communism proposes is what hauntology yearns for. To reconnect the trajectories of the past to where they should be now, to carry on where the counterculture left off, to continue the mass exploration into new ways of seeing and thinking, to find the energy needed to break out of the cultural impasse and to invent the futures that are unimaginable now but were once seemingly inevitable.

However, just like the counterculture, Acid Communism is an unfinished project. Fisher committed suicide in early 2017, leaving behind just a draft of the introduction. Acid Communism has become hauntological in itself, leaving us to wonder what new futures could have been imagined if the book was completed and if Fisher lived on and continued to confront our absurd postmodern (un)reality. The phantom that remains, the phenomenal body of work that he left behind, collected in books, articles, lectures and in the databanks of k-punk, haunts us because Fisher’s philosophical resistance, (cyber)punk attitude and unrelenting intellectual creativity continues to be needed and the ideas are only becoming more pertinent.

Further into the depths of cultural inertia, hauntology is now more important than ever. To keep the wound open resists accepting the continuation of the depressing conditions of the 21st century. But having only ever known time in stasis, it’s hard to be melancholic for a cultural trajectory that I’ve never been a part of. Perhaps the only hauntological trace that can truly resonate for me is Fisher himself. It’s no coincidence that this first blog post is about him. Fisher writes that beginning his k-punk blog was a way of working through his depression and my reasons for writing are similar and directly inspired by his work (the title of this blog comes from a phrase Fisher used to describe the bleakness of depression). Moving through my early twenties has frequently felt unbearable as I’ve become more conscious to how meaningless life is, or rather, how meaningless life now feels. Looking to the future is often an unsettling process in that it’s difficult to imagine anything positive. This sense of precariousness isn’t unique to this time. Yet, I wonder if growing up in the 21st century isn’t wrought with uncertainty but, rather, with a certainty that things will always be empty. Fisher introduced me to alternative possibilities from this painful existentialism. His work is all about uncovering traces of the Outside, finding the future in the strangest of places. Through Fisher I started thinking beyond again, reconnecting with the weird dreamworlds of my childhood.

The loss of Fisher leaves us with an imperative to continue the project, to continue tracing hauntological spectres, cultural fragments and new (or forgotten) ways of thinking into awakening the future. If we can’t immediately conjure up the counterculture, then we can continue the trajectory of the more immediate ghost that is Fisher’s spirit of resistance. This feels as difficult as it is crucially important. For my generation, depression is inborn, life feels immobile, defeat is hardwired. However, whilst Ian Curtis found confirmation of life’s futility in Stroszek, David Lynch was watching the very same transmission and reportedly was filled with joy and inspiration which motivated him through the difficulties of filming The Elephant Man. This story speaks to Fisher’s optimism at the end of Capitalist Realism: ‘The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity[…] From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.’ Life has become malleable, and the void should be seen as a blank canvas. The challenge is to dream again. To find a way to detach ourselves from the numbness and insomnia of cyberspace and the dopamine-laced seduction of the pleasure principle. Exploring the depths of consciousness is not just an experiment of isolated self-discovery, it’s a mode to rediscover a universal humanity. Disconnection becomes connection. Somewhere in the mind lies a communal future and, at a time when there seems to be no such thing, the answer may be unexpected, strange and just what we need.

Thanks Mark, I miss you.

#mark fisher #hauntology #acid communism

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alrightsnaps · 2 years

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johnny depp is proof that cancel culture not only doesn't exist for men but it actually has the reverse effect on the worst of them

#my random ramblings

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riotmlllf · 3 years

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Penny for your thoughts?

how did human society as a whole fuck up so badly? like its cool to have a few things wrong with it, a few kinks that needed ironing out but. jesus christ. we’ve had dozens of thousands of years to perfect it, and yet it’s so, so bad. we’ve basically already killed our planet, with less and less time to reverse the effects. so many people are systematically oppressed for so many reasons that are always out of their control. the earth has provided everything we need to survive and thrive here, and yet we have to pay for food and water and shelter. call me a commie but i literally don’t understand why that has to be.

and that’s not even including the little, more recent things, such as cancel culture, cell phone addiction, and wage gaps. (why do we need politicians????? why can’t we just have some rules to follow, like dont kill and don’t steal shit from other people????)

theres so much stuff i havent mentioned. politics. colonization. bigotry as a whole. i hate to be such a downer. theres so much beauty in this world. like the josh fight. little josh won :). but it’s something i realized lately, which is just that modern civilization just fucking sucks.

tl;dr: i hate capitalism, i hate bigotry, and i hate modern society as a whole. humanity has had so long to figure out how to run things and we’ve done it all wrong.

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jgthirlwell · 4 years

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2020 Year In Review

This year once again I invited some friends and colleagues to reflect on 2020

JG Thirlwell

Composer

Foetus Xordox Manorexia Steroid Maximus Venture Bros Archer

www.foetus.org

2020 was a troubling and disturbing year. I created a lot of music and experienced a lot of nights waking at 5am in a panic. I deeply missed the sacred experience of being able to see live music. In its absence of that I listened to a lot of music. It was difficult to whittle down this list but here are a lot of albums I enjoyed in 2020, in no particular order.

Le Grand Sbam Furvent (Dur Et Doux) John Elmquist’s HardArt Group I Own an Ion (900 Nurses) Roly Porter Kistvaen (Subtext) Liturgy Origin Of The Alimonies (YLYLCYN) Clark Kiri Variations (Throttle) Dai Kaht Dai Kaht I & II (Soleil Zeuhl) Chromb Le livre des merveilles (Dur Et Doux) Horse Lords The Common Task (Northern Spy) Ecker & Meultzer Carbon (Subtext) Insane Warrior Tendrils (RJ’s Electrical Connections) Jeff Parker Suite For Max Brown (International Anthem) Jacob Kirkegaard Opus Mors (Topos) Tristan Perich Drift Multiply (Nonesuch) Bec Plexus Sticklip (New Amsterdam) Vak Budo (Soleil Zeuhl) Merlin Nova BOO! (Bandcamp) The The Muscle OST (Cineola) Zombi 2020 (Relapse) Regis Hidden In This Is The Light That You Miss (Downwards) Rival Consoles Articulation (Erased Tapes) Sarah Davachi Cantus, Descant (L.A.T.E.) Sufjan Stevens The Ascension (Asthmatic Kitty) Idles Ultra Mono (Partisan) Daedelus The Bittereindeers (Brainfeeder) Boris No (Bandcamp) Aksak Maboul Figures / Un peu de l’ame des bandits / Onze Danses Pour Cobattre La Migraine (Crammed) Noveller Arrow (Ba Da Bing) Felicia Atkinson Everything Evaporate (Shelter Press) Ital Tek Dream Boundary (Planet Mu) Author and Punisher Beastland (Relapse) Sparks A Steady Drip Drip Drip (BMG) Corima Amatarasu (Soleil Zeuhl) Code Orange Underneath (Roadrunner) Deerhoof Future Teenage Cave Artists /Silly Symphonies / To Be Surrounded../ Love Lore(Joyful Noise) Sote Moscels (Opal Tapes) Run The Jewels RTJ4 (Jewel Runners) Oranssi Pazuzu Mestarin Kynsi (Nuclear Blast) Master Boot Record Floppy Disk Overdrive (Metal Blade) Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith The Mosaic Of Transformation (Ghostly International) / Ears (Western Vinyl) Michael Gordon Acquanetta (Cantelope) Neom Arkana Temporis (Soleil Zeuhl) Rian Treanor Ataxia / File Under UK Metaplasm (Planet Mu) Helm Saturnalia (Alter) Ivvvo doG (Halcyon Veil) Robert Normandeau Figures (Empreintes Digitales) Ben Vida Reducing The Tempo To Zero (Shelter Press) Beatrice Dillon Workaround (Pan) Dan Deacon Mystic Familiar (Domino) Sea Oleena Weaving A Basket (Higher Plain Music) Elysian Fields Transience Of Life (Ojet) Rhapsody Symphony Of Enchanted Lands II - The Dark Secret (Magic Circle) Duma Duma (Nyege Nyege) Ulla Strauss Tumbling Towards a Wall / Seed (Bandcamp)

Honorable mentions Carl Stone Stolen Car (Unseen Worlds) Nazar Guerilla (Hyperdub) Iwo Zaluski with the Children of Park Lane Primary School, Wembley The Remarkable Earth Making Machine (Trunk) Nahash Flowers Of The Revolution (SVBKVLT) Cindy Lee Whats Tonight To Eternity (Bandcamp) Insect Ark The Vanishing (Profound Lore) 33EMYBW Arthropods (SVBKVLT) Declan McKenna Zeroes (Tomplicated) Layma Azur Zeii (Bandcamp)

FILM TV Succession ZeroZeroZero Escape at Dannemora 1917 Small Axe : Five films by Steve McQueen Pirhanas Monos The Hater Better Call Saul

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Drew Daniel

Matmos, The Soft Pink Truth

an alphabet of 2020 recordings

Arca “KiCk i” BFTT “Intrusive / Obtrusive” clipping. “Visions of Bodies Being Burned” Duma “Duma” Eilbacher, Max “Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani and a Fly)” Forbidden Colors “La Yeguada” GILA “Energy Demonstration” HiedraH Club de Baile “Bichote-K Bailable Vol. 2” Ian Power “Maintenance Hums” Jeff Carey “Index[off]” Kassel Jaeger “Meith” Laurie Anderson “Songs From the Bardo” Mukqs “Water Levels” Negativland “The World Will Decide” O’Rourke, Jim “Shutting Down Here” Perlesvaus “These Things Below with Those Above” Quicksails “Blue Rise” Rian Treanor “File Under UK Metaplasm” Slikback “///” Terminal Nation “Holocene Extinction” Ulcerate “Stare Into Death and Be Still” Various Artists “HAUS of ALTR” William Tyler “New Vanitas” Xyla “Ways” Y A S H A “Summations” :zoviet-france: “Châsse 2ᵉ”

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Sarah Lipstate (Noveller)

With all live performances canceled, this was truly the year of demo videos and home studio recording for me. These are 10 pieces of gear that came out in 2020 that helped keep me feeling creative and inspired during lockdown. In no particular order:

EHX Oceans 12 Dual Stereo Reverb - The Oceans 12 ticks all the boxes for what I’m looking for in a great soundscaping reverb. I used the Shimmer and Reverse algorithms in conjunction a lot when I was composing music for a film score.

Chase Bliss Audio Blooper - While I don’t actually own a Blooper, I had the pleasure of borrowing one from Mike of Baranik Guitars after NAMM this year. He made an incredible Blooper-inspired guitar and I was completely charmed by them both. Chase Bliss always delivers pedals that push me creatively and the Blooper truly hits the mark.

Cooper FX Arcades - I love everything Cooper FX has released to-date so the opportunity to access those sounds in one pedal via plug-in cartridges is just awesome.

SolidGoldFX NU-33 - I was asked to do a demo of this pedal for its release and ended up being really charmed by this box’s approach to lo-fi nostalgia. I’ve used it a lot for film scoring and highly recommend adding it to your collection.

Demedash Effects T-120 DLX V2 - I LOVE a good tape echo and the T-120 Deluxe V2 ranks up there with the best I’ve tried. This pedal made its way to me this Christmas and I look forward to making some beautiful sounds with it in the new year.

Hologram Electronics Microcosm - The Microcosm is one of those pedals where you should fully read the manual before diving in but once you put in that initial effort you’ve got a massively powerful tool on your hands. It does glitch like no other. Definitely worth the homework

Azzam Bells MP019 - I discovered this unique instrument through a post on Reverb’s IG page and immediately looked it up and ordered one. These experimental percussion instruments are hand-made in Italy and they’re as beautiful visually as they are sonically. I used it for bowed cymbal and daxophone sounds on a film score and it was absolutely haunting.

Echopark Dual Harmonic Boost 2 - I love the control you have over dialing in the perfect amount of grit with these dual boost circuits. I use it a lot as a textural tool when I’m laying down drones or bringing in big distorted swells. It’s one of the most versatile overdrives in my collection and I love that.

Fender Parallel Universe Series Volume II Maverick Dorado - I was smitten with the Maverick Dorado when I first saw it at NAMM. It has a lot of the specs that I look for in a guitar and the body shape with the Mystic Pine finish just blew me away. I hope that I get to use it live soon.

Polyeffects Beebo - The Beebo is one of those pedals that I genuinely feel is smarter than I am. It’s like an entire computer in one small touchscreen box. I can’t claim to have mastered using it yet but the sounds that I have managed to get out of it so far have been brilliant. I’m looking forward to spending more time with this box in 2021

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HELM 2020 REVIEW

Let's get the bad stuff out the way first, 2020 was undoubtedly an awful year. I'm still not sure how to really respond to seeing a global pandemic bring the capital to its knees and everything I love and hold dear to a grinding halt. Our government fucked it's response, putting profit before people and killing tens of thousands. The Labour Party descended into farce with the newly elected leader Sir Keith revealing himself as a bland centrist with no opposition or ideas. On a personal level it sucked not being able to travel or see my friends in different parts of the world - or even the same country - who I am starting to miss a lot. However, I was fortunate enough to get through the year with my sanity intact. Music, art and culture once again being my main positive. I think I listened to more music than I have in any year ever. I read more books than I have done since I was a teenager probably. I also re-discovered the joys of walking long distances and am extremely thankful for living near a lot of incredible green spaces: Epping Forest, Walthamstow Wetlands, Walthamstow Marshes, Wanstead Park, Wanstead Flats...

Music. My favourite albums of the year.

Oranssi Pazuzu - Mestarin kynsi Wetware - Flail Raspberry Bulbs - Before The Age Of Mirrors Necrot - Mortal Rope Sect - The Great Flood Private World - Aleph Oneohtrix Point Never - Magic Oneohtrix Point Never Pyrrhon - Abcess Time CS+Kreme - Snoopy Speaker Music - Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry Drew McDowall - Agalma Regis - Hidden In This Is The Light That You Miss Nazar - Guerilla Zoviet France - Russian Heterodoxical Songs (and all the ZF reissues!!) Triple Negative - God Bless the Death Drive Permission - Organised People Suffer Actress - Karma & Desire Acolytes - Stress II The Gerogerigegege - >(decrescendo) Chubby & The Gang - Speed Kills Flora Yin-Wong - Holy Palm Eiko Ishibashi - Hyakki Yagyo The The - See Without Being Seen Prurient - Casablanca Flamethrower Henning Christiansen - L’essere Umano Errabando La Voce Errabando Subdued - Over The Hills And Far Away Rian Treanor - File Under UK Metaplasm Komare - The Sense Of Hearing Shredded Nerve - Acts Of Betrayal Jesu - Terminus Autechre - SIGN Hey Colossus - Dances / Curses Sparkle Division - To Feel Embraced Mark Harwood - A Perfect Punctual Paradise Under My Own Name Still House Plants - Fast Edit The Bug & Dis Fig - In Blue Kommand - Terrorscape Haus Arafna - Asche Khthoniik Cerviiks - Æequiizoiikum Worm - Gloomlord Kraus - A Golden Brain Faceless Burial - Speciation

A shout-out to Jon Abby's AMPLIFY series on Bandcamp / Facebook, which I contributed a new piece of music to.

A shout out to the labels where most of the music I listened to seemed to come from:

The Trilogy Tapes Iron Bonehead Penultimate Press Dais La Vida Es Un Mus

Gigs. Despite live music being destroyed in 2020 I still saw a few unforgettable performances at the beginning of the year.

Graham Lambkin @ The ICA, London Puce Mary / JFK @ The Glove That Fits, London Demilich @ Finnfest, The Garage, London Container / PC World / National Unrest @ Venue MOT, London S.H.I.T / Asid / Chubby & The Gang @ Static Shock Festival, ExFed, London

Books I enjoyed. Most not published this year, but all read in 2020.

Joe Kennedy - Authentocrats David Balzer - Curationism Tom Mills - BBC: The Myth Of A Public Service Simon Morris - Consumer Guide: Special Edition Luke Turner - Out Of The Woods Various - Bad News For Labour Mike Wendling - Alt-Right Baited Area issues 1 & 2.

Film. Three good films I saw this year which I hadn't before.

Suspiria (Remake) Midsommar Cannibal Holocaust

Podcasts. I listened to a lot of these whilst walking.

We Don't Talk About The Weather Novara Media Tysky Sour & Novara FM Grounded with Louis Theroux System of Systems Red Scare loveline episodes Suite 212 NOISEXTRA Social Discipline CONTAIN

TV.

Didn't watch a huge amount and what I did was mostly trash. For some reason I rewatched both series' of This Life, a British drama from the late 90's about a group of young professionals house sharing and navigating their careers. Very cringey and has aged terribly, but it was perversely fascinating to revisit something from that time in the age of the pandemic. Following on from this I binge watched the entire series of Industry which was entertaining enough. A programme about a bunch of horny bankers with what felt like a confused ideology behind it. It seemed stuck between trying to criticise and glorify the culture around the industry, but also protect the industry itself from outside criticism by portraying anyone who may oppose as an insufferable wanker. Currently halfway through Succession which is OK. The Murdoch documentaries on the BBC were excellent and a rare respite from their descent into client journalism.

Thanks to anyone who listened to my music this year also. Best wishes to you all for 2021.

Luke Younger

http://hhelmm.com | http://alter.bandcamp.com

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Elliott Sharp

composer

1. My Nr. 1 lesson: patience. Whether it's bouncing through 30 seconds of severe turbulence at 39000 feet or slogging through 30 minutes of a interminable piece of concert music, one attribute I've tried to develop is the ability to see past the discrete and awaited ending, the exact framing of the immediate process, but put it into the context of a larger time frame. I've found that this year more than all others has demanded it. Breathing helps...

2. Books: revisiting old favorites from the realm of Thomas Pynchon and Philip K. Dick (both especially relevant), digging into John Lomax's portrait of Jelly Roll Morton, the works of Colson Whitehead, random things off of the shelf…

3. Composing: with touring off the table, I focused on that which needed to be written, some requested and commissioned, some spontaneously springing forth. Composing requires that one open the windows wide to the world, which at this moment brought in grief, terror, uncertainty, anxiety, visions of plague and pestilence and incipient fascism. Okay, now shut the window and get to work! How to process, translate, transform? The work can be a comfortable and obsessive cocoon once one learns to handle the radioactive materials and put them into the creativity reactor.

4. Beans! We have long been a fan in our house of the wide world of legumes but this year brought two stars to the front: the black bean and the red lentil. The black bean commands the lofty peaks but the seemingly infinite variations of dal surround it. Ginger, garlic, turmeric, smoked paprika, cayenne, onions, and olive oil form the basis then imagination builds.

5. Online teaching substituted for my canceled conduction of workshops in the Pyrenees Mountains of France. Between the participants and myself, we built a temporary but very congenial space online to share concepts and music. In addition, private lessons brought conversation and music with new friends in Germany, Italy, California, Australia, Illinois, Denmark, Pennsylvania, Spain, Florida, Brazil.

6. What started out as "stress baking" (before I even had heard of the term) soon became a frequent practice that yielded very edible results. The twins preferred the sweeter forays into banana bread and chocolate cake. I tried to find a balance between tried-and-true techniques and experiments in texture and taste with yeasted pumpernickels, multi-grains, and seed breads.

7. While not the same as performing 'live ', online gigs proved that it was possible to generate a surprising amount of adrenaline even without the pheromonal handshaking of a room filled with receptive ears. As a corollary, online recording collaborations with friends worldwide proved to be inspiring and a suitable substrate for sonic experimentation, exploration of new instruments, tunings, effects programming, structures. In these realms, shout-outs to Helene Breschand, Mike Cooper, Henry Kaiser, Tracie Morris, Mikel Banks, Dougie Bowne, Payton McDonald, Billy Martin, Colin Stetson, Jim O'Rourke, Scott Amendola, Roberto Zorzi, Jason Hoopes, Eric Mingus, Melanie Dyer, Dave Hofstra, Don McKenzie, Sergio Sorrentino, Veniero Rizzardi, Taylor Ho Bynum, Scott Fields, Bachir Attar, Karl Bruckmaier, Robbie Lee, Matthew Evan Taylor, Matteo Liberatore, Al Kaatz, David Barratt, Jessica Hallock, Kolin Zeinikov, Robbie Lee, Jeremy Nesse, James Ilgenfritz, Sergio Armaroli, Steve Piccolo, Sandy Ewen, David Weinstein, Jim Whittemore, Chris Vine, Werner Puntigam, William Schimmel.

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Daniel O’Sullivan

(Grumbling Fur, Guapo, Miasma & the Carousel of Headless Horses, Ulver, Sunn O))), Æthenor, Laniakea, Miracle, Mothlite, and This Is Not This Heat.)

Music Richard Youngs - Ein Klein Nein Alabaster DePlume - Instrumentals Hildegard von Bingen - O Nobilissima Viriditas Francisco de Penalosa - Missa Ave Maria Peregrina Carlo Gesualdo - Responsoria 1611 Dirty Projectors - Five EPs Sonic Boom - All Things Being Equal Brother Peter Broderick - Blackberry Richard Horowitz - Eros Of Arabia Duncan Trussell Family Hour Cocteau Twins in the bath

Books/comics Alexander Tucker - Entity Reunion II Derek Jarman - Chroma Stephen Harrod Buhner - Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm The Penguin Book Of Irish Poetry - edited by Patrick Crotty The Gospel Of Ramakrishna - translated by Swami Nikhilananda Lucretius - De Rerum Natura Plotinus - Enneads Ram Dass - Grist For The Mill Lisa Brown - Phantom Twin

Other Fasting / meditation / macrodosing Walks in freshly coppiced woodland (for the smell mainly). Plants / Foraging / Growing Traditional ferments Douglas Sirk movies Mandolorian Writing songs on the piano Rediscovery of Kenneth Graham via my kids

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Karl O’Connor (Regis)

01.Wolfgang Press - Unremembered, Remembered 02. Klara Lewis - Ingrid Live at Fylkingen 03. Jesu - Terminus 04. Dave Ball - Leeds Poly Demos 1979 05. Edwin Pouncey - Rated Sav X (the Savage Pencil Skratchbook) 06. The Bug - In Blue 07. New Order - Power,Corruption and Lies ( Writing Sessions ) 08. JG Thirlwell and Simon Steensland - Oscillospira 09. FM Einheit and Andreas Ammer - Hammerschlag 10. Thurston Moore - By The Fire 11. Body Stuff - Body Stuff 3 12. Ann M Hogan - Honeysuckle Burials 13. Rob Halford - Confess (Autobiography)

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Caleb Braaten (Sacred Bones Records)

Shirley Collins Hearts Ease Dehd Flowers Of Devotion Duma Duma Bob Dylan Rough and Rowdy Ways Green-House Six Songs for Invisible Gardens John Jeffery Passage Drew McDowall Agalma Sweeping Promises Hunger For a Way Out Colter Wall Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs Woods Strange to Explain

My Favorite 90’s Nostalgia Movie Rewatches

Colors Ghost Dog Menace II Society The Player Rounders Safe Starship Troopers Trees Lounge Vampires Waiting For Guffman

Most Culturally Bankrupt Year : 1997

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Charlie Looker

(composer, Psalm Zero, Extra Life, Seaven Teares)

Ten Things That Didn’t Happen in 2020

1. I didn’t write a ton of new music. Don’t get me wrong, I wrote some. I always do. But mostly I focused on my new YouTube channel, essays, and on getting old recordings released. I haven’t even been working a day-job so I thought I was going to write my next Ring Cycle, but I really didn’t find Covid inspiring.

2. Trump wasn’t re-elected. Cool.

3. I didn’t lose anyone to Covid. I am, of course, profoundly grateful for this. But I feel pretty embarrassed remembering group-texting ten friends in March, “We are all going to see a loved one die. Every single one of us. Don’t kid yourselves”. I can get hysterical, and that was somewhat irresponsible of me.

4. No revolution happened. I don’t mean to be smug or cynical, or to belittle anyone’s participation in the protests. But, as far as I can tell, nothing happened in 2020 that promises to reduce police brutality or human suffering of any kind. We’ll see. That burning Minneapolis police station was exciting to watch at the time, if only on an aesthetic level.

5. I have a stack of unread books I bought this year, just staring at me, with nary a crease among them. These include:

Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (looks amazing, but I haven’t touched it) Marx, Grundrisse (it’s 1000 pages for fuck’s sake. Amazon also accidentally sent me two copies, and its double presence in the stack is just comical) Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit (the first 15 pages blew my mind, then my mind blew it off)

6. I didn’t settle into living in LA. I moved here six months before Covid and I was just starting to cultivate some friendships and play shows. This was quashed and I still feel like I still live in New York. I still barely know the layout of the city here.

7. No brand-new buzzy musical artists burst onto the scene, that I can recall. No new hyped micro-genre of the moment. There was just no way for there to be a hot new trend. I’d say that was refreshing, but it wasn’t.

8. Tyson’s return was not awesome. Two minute rounds, ended in a draw. I’ve been getting way into boxing this past year. This fight was a bummer. I’m looking forward to Mayweather vs Logan Paul (LOL) because we know it’s comedy ahead of time.

9. For three weeks in July, I didn’t do a single thing other than watch street fight compilations on YouTube and Worldstar. That’s just grim.

10. There were no school shootings in March. Apparently, this was the first March with no school shootings since 2002. Not a single 7th grader got a hand job in March either. I cannot begin to imagine what it’s like to be a kid now.

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Chuck Bettis

https://chuckbettis.com

Other People's Music released this year:

Coil "Musick to Play in the Dark" (Dais)

Duma "s/t" (Nyege Nyege Tapes) Twig Harper "External Boundless Prison/ in 4 parts EP" (self-release) I.P.Y. (Ikue Mori, Phew, YoshimiO) "I.P.Y." (Tzadik) Kill Alters "A2B2 Live Stream 11/13/2020" (self-release) Krallice "Mass Cathexis" (self-release) Lust$ickPuppy "Cosmic Brownie" (self-release) Doug McKechnie "San Francisco Moog: 1968-72" (VG+ Records) Merlin Nova "Boo!" (self-release) Omrb "Milandthriust, The Graths of Mersh" (self-release) Akio Suzuki & Aki Onda "gi n ga" (self-release) Yoth Iria "Under His Sway" (Repulsive Echo) Wetware "Flail" (Dais)

My own music released this year:

collaborations

Chatter Blip "Microcosmopolitan" (Contour Editions) Matmos "The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form" (Thrill Jockey) Reverse Bullets "Dreampop Dsyphoria" (self-release) Snake Union "live at Roulette" (self-release) Snake Union w/ Hisham Bharoocha, Bonnie Jones, Heejin Jang, Matthew Regula "Three Arrows" (Rat Route) Thomas Dimuzio "Balance" (Gench Music) YoshimiO & Chuck Bettis "Live at the Stone" (Living Myth)

solo Chuck Bettis "Arc of Enlghtenment" (Living Myth) Chuck Bettis "Motion Parallax" (Living Myth)

compilation Various Artist "Polished Turds Vol.1" (Granpa)

Music Books read this year

"Intermediary Spaces" by Eliane Radigue/Julia Eckhardt (Umland) "Ennio Morricone In His Own Words" by Ennio Morricone/Alessandro De Rosa (Oxford University Press) "Free Jazz In Japan: A Personal History" by Soejima Teruto (Public Bath Press) "Rumors of Noizu: Hijokaidan and the Road to 2nd Damascus" by Kato David Hopkins (Public Bath Press)

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Maya Hardinge

(musician / artist)

list of things i liked this year

first ever solo road trip through new mexico and Texas right before lockdown experiencing manhattan with no cars on the road . having a car to escape in to nature. (which i craved so much) walks and bike rides with friends… FRIENDS! The web site ‘workaway’ that helped me feel that there were options for escape. playing games weekly on zoom during lock down teaching yoga weekly on zoom. Witnessing and being part of the BLM protests. witnessing and being part of the demise of T sitting on my couch at 6am drinking a cup of tea, appreciating my apt. making time to meditate. halloween without tourists .

some music I’ve bought and/or enjoyed this year Elvis Perkins-Black Coat Daughter Patricia Kokett -Soi soi Henning Christiansen - OP201 Bryce Hackford- Safe Svitlana Nianio and Oleksander - Snayesh yak? rozkazhy Brannten schnure - Sommer im Pfirsichhain Killing Joke - Nighttime David Shea - Tower of mirrors Shakey - Shakey Woodford halse tapes Coil - Musick to play in the dark

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BJ Nilsen

sound artist / composer

Work 2020

Despite Covid 19 lots of things actually did happen.

In Feburary I visited the only active nuclear plant in The Nederlands as part of my "Expanded Field Recording” project together with SML. In March revisited the Acousmonium at the Elevate Festival in Graz with an additional trip deep inside the Schlossberg recording old mining trains. In March and April I did two daily recording projects “Pending and Auditory Scenes” - both of Amsterdam during lockdown. In May did my first Zoom field recording workshop with the CAMP project. In June & July two research trips in Waldviertel, Austria with Franz Pomassl. In August recorded bells and organs in 10 different churches around Amsterdam for Jacob Lekkerkerker. In September recorded Kali Malone at the Orgelpark in Amsterdam. Performed at Heart of Noise Festival in Innsbruck and A4 in Bratislava. Also went ice-skating for first time in 20? Years. In November and December I travelled to Jeju island to record field recordings for a project by Femke Herregraven for the Gwangju Biennale, commissioned for 2021. Did lots of gardening, released two tapes “Call it Philips, Eindoven” and “Zomer 2020” with Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson. NOW! Looking forward to 2021.

http://bjnilsen.info https://soundcloud.com/bjnilsen/sets/auditory-scenes-amsterdam

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Vicki Bennett

(People Like Us)

Negativland - True False https://negativland.com/products/truefalse-cd (this came out last year but is so THIS year) Bob Dylan - Rough and Rowdy Ways https://www.bobdylan.com/albums/rough-and-rowdy-ways/ The Soft Pink Truth - We from Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase https://thesoftpinktruth.bandcamp.com/album/shall-we-go-on-sinning-so-that-grace-may-increase Carl Stone - Stolen Car https://unseenworlds.bandcamp.com/album/stolen-car Porest - Sedimental Gurney https://porest.bandcamp.com/album/sedimental-gurney Matmos - The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form https://matmos.bandcamp.com/album/the-consuming-flame-open-exercises-in-group-form Domenique Dumont - Miniatures De Auto Rhythm https://antinoterecordings.bandcamp.com/album/atn044-domenique-dumont-miniatures-de-auto-rhythm The The - See Without Being Seen https://www.thethe.com/product/see-without-being-seen-cd/ Ciggy de la Noche - Hold Tight HMRC https://soundcloud.com/ciggydelanoche/hold-tight-hmrc Neil Cicierega - Mouth Dreams http://www.neilcic.com/mouthdreams/

and my details: http://peoplelikeus.org/ https://peoplelikeus-vickibennett.bandcamp.com/ pic: http://peoplelikeus.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Welcome-Abroad-promo3-2-scaled.jpg

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DJ Food

Music - Type 303 - Sticky Disco / Analogue Acidbath 7" (45 Live) The British Space Group - The Ley of the Land CD (Wyrd Britain) Squarepusher - Be Up A Hello LP / Warp 10 NTS mix (Warp) dgoHn - Undesignated Proximate (Modern Love) LF58 - Alterazione LP (Astral Industries) Robert Fripp - Music For Quiet Moments series (DGM) Run The Jewels - RTJ4 (BMG) Simf Onyx - Magenta Skyline / The Unresolved 7" (Delights) Luke Vibert - Modern Rave LP (Hypercolour) JG Thirlwell & Simon Steensland - Oscillospira (Ipecac) Aural Design - Looking & Seeing 7" / DL (Russian Library) Luke Vibert - Rave Hop (Hypercolour) Clipping. with Christopher Fleeger - Double Live (Sub Pop) APAT - Terry Riley's 'In C' performed on Modular Synthesizer (YouTube) Field Lines Cartographer - The Spectral Isle LP (Castles In Space) Jane Weaver - The Revolution of Super Visions single (Fire Records) King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - K.G. LP (Flightless) Humanoid - Hed-Set - forthcoming on (De:tuned)

Film / TV - Inside No.9 (BBC) What We Do In The Shadows Season 2 (Netflix) Tales From The Loop (Amazon) Keith Haring - Street Art Boy (BBC) John Was Trying To Contact Aliens (Netflix) The Social Dilemma (Netflix) The Mandalorian (Season 2) (Disney+) Long Hot Summers - The Style Council documentary (Sky Arts) Zappa (Alex Winter)

Books / Comics / Magazines Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell (Profile books) The Often Wrong - Farel Dalrymple (Image Comics) Edwin Pouncey - Rated SavX (Strange Attractor Press) Jeffrey Lewis - Fuff (all issues - really late to the party on this one) Rian Hughes - XX - A Novel, Graphic (Picador) Cosey Fanni Tutti - Art, Sex, Music (Faber) Caza - Kris Kool (Passenger Press) Dan Lish - Egostrip Vol.1 Electronic Sound magazine Decorum - Jonathan Hickman & Mike Huddleston (Image) John Higgs - Stranger Than We Can Imagine Simon Halfon - Cover To Cover (Nemperor)

Very few exhibitions or shows this year for obvious reasons

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34 notes · View notes

theliterateape · 3 years

Text

Bringing a Smartphone to a Gunfight

By Don Hall

As demonstrated by Dave Chappelle and J.K. Rowling, if you don't give a shit about the Tweetstorms and cultural hit pieces when you dare refute the orthodoxy of the shrieking micro-minority and their performative allies, you are effectively uncancellable.

The difficulty faced by those within that in-group of the Rage Profiteers is if there aren't enough of you to seriously foment change, change ain't happening. If everyone offended by Chappelle's statement that “gender is fact” and his admonition that a transgender woman is not a woman simply cancelled their Netflix subscription en masse, it still wouldn't be enough to move the dial much. That's ultimately why Netflix has deflected the complaints.

As businesses are waking up to the fact that the numbers do not match the noise, the corporate flagellation in the face of moral indignation is diminishing. One can only cry wolf so many times before the game is exposed. Too many cries of outrage and the online campaigns become easily ignored.

A lot of us centrist-types are not, as so many on the lunatic fringe want to charge, against the sorts of changes they so fervently advocate for.

Oxford Languages defines the adjective “liberal” as:

willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas.

relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.

Arguments for reformed policing, protections for transgender individuals, reversing the course of man-made climate change, adjusting the system that allows for such extraordinary income inequality are right there in our wheelhouse. It's the hysteria over things that only matter to the fewest like shrill (and deeply unpopular) calls for white atonement, language changes that eradicate the male/female biology, censorship of art and political speech, and the belief in looting and property destruction as legitimate forms of protest that don't jibe.

This is not good for the things that actually matter. There are far more pernicious people out there who have proven themselves impervious to the relentless propaganda of the Twitter Warriors.

The most prolific of the Twitter Warriors comprise less than 3 percent of the population who, in turn, drive the most noise about issues.

As the Democrats are flailing in approval and the base of voters on the Left become more despondent at the lack of immediate progress under Biden, the so far uncancellable Donald J. Trump and his treasonous bunch of cohorts are preparing for another coup attempt. This time it will likely succeed.

Now, while a second Trump presidency might be a phenomenal boost to the finances of anti-right groups (because the money flows big time when there is a monster in charge), his next time will potentially be the last honest presidential election in our lifetimes. The stakes are pretty high, kids, and your amazing facility with your smartphones is no match.

When the GOP takes the House and Senate in 2022, the dinner table is set. Trump gets in legitimately (as in actually wins the election) and we're all toast. And the loudest micro-minority is only really good at protesting in the streets during a time of pandemic lockdown and taking selfies to prove they were there. Most of the time, they are charging in to cancel professors who show Othello and comedians who once tweeted something vaguely homophobic a decade ago.

There's plenty to say about the other micro-minority of raging dickweeds on the right side of things but you have to hand it to them—while the Woke trashed Portland, their mouthbreathing dopes did a smash-and-grab on the United States Capitol. They brought guns with them, too.

The first big test of whether or not Democrats can show even a modicum of initiative and spine is in the handling of Trump crony Steve Bannon, who could soon be held in contempt of Congress for his refusal to answer a subpoena pertaining to Trump's coup and the January 6 insurrection. In theory, this is a jailable offense and Bannon should be in danger of a dramatic perp walk. Bannon clearly believes Democrats don't have the guts to do it. Democrats, however, are insisting otherwise.

"He will be prosecuted, that's our expectation," Rep. Adam Schiff of California told MSNBC. "He apparently feels he's above the law. But he's about to find out otherwise."

Big talk, but can they make good on it?

The process of actually doing so — described by CNN as "a series of steps needed to move forward," including holding meetings, writing a report, and referring it to the House for a vote, then referring it to the Justice Department — doesn't inspire confidence. Every step allows the notorious cowards in the party to get cold feet and telling themselves an idiotic story about how inaction somehow plays better with the voters than action. No wonder Bannon is so sure he'll get away with this.

SOURCE

While our most ardent revolutionaries are busy digitally obsessing over Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan, a fuckface like Steve Bannon is likely to skate past Congress.

What the Twitter Warriors do not comprehend is that most Americans don't see their outrage over micro-aggressions as righteous but as petulant. Only 22 percent of the 330 million Americans use Twitter; 80 percent of all tweets from American adults come from the top 10 percent. I don't call it a micro-minority out of pique but out of fact. The most prolific of the Twitter Warriors comprise less than 3 percent of the population who, in turn, drive the most noise about issues.

The fragility of that crowd, unable to have deep conversations with the rest of us about the changes they'd like to see, is crippling any persuasive potential. Get off your phones and start listening to those people you've decided you can't abide because they vote. That vote will only matter for a few more years if Trump lives past 2025 because if you think he’s going quietly, you aren’t paying attention.

#Dave Chappelle #JK Rowling #Twitter Rage #liberal definition #Trump 2024

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dereksmcgrath · 3 years

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The League of Villains are not the easiest people to root for. But censoring how violent they are, and how violent their opponents are, is not making it easier to see them as compelling antiheroes, at least not as easy as it was in the manga.

I again am wondering what happened in the production of this season--and whether other studios should take over some arcs of My Hero Academia.

“Revival Party,” My Hero Academia Episode 109 (Season 5, Episode 21)

An adaptation of Chapters 218, 224, 225, 226, 227, and 228 of the manga, by Kohei Horikoshi, translated by Caleb Cook with lettering by John Hunt and available from Viz.

My Hero Academia is available to stream on Crunchyroll and Funimation.

Spoilers up to My Hero Academia Chapter 326.

Before I get started, I should put a disclaimer that has been largely unspoken in these reviews. I tend to capitalize “Hero” and “Villain” when writing about the literal jobs or legal titles given to characters in My Hero Academia. If I just meant what role a character has in the story, I would have lowercased it. For example, the League of Villains is made up of Villains, but in this arc, while they are not our heroes, they are definitely our antiheroes.

And that detail has made it even more difficult to write about an episode like this.

I delayed writing this review largely due to scheduling and time availability. Seriously, look again at the top of the post and how many chapters this episode is trying to cram in. Even with just a few pages out of each chapter, that’s a lot of content. I’m not asking for a One Piece pace, but there is something to be said about how helpful the two-chapters-adapted-per-episode guideline was in previous MHA seasons.

And those chapters also contained a lot of content for me to compare back and forth to really figure out whether the anime was censoring much from the manga. (Answer: the anime censored a lot, but even those chapters from the manga were not as bloody and gory as I remembered.)

All of that being said, while time availability has been a challenge this week, that’s not the only reason I delayed getting to this episode. I can’t lie that, given the difficult content ahead, this isn’t exactly fun viewing or entertaining writing. This is digging into the dark side of this series and what it says about larger societal concerns with mental health, corporate power, abusive families, gore, and what amounts to one-person natural disasters like Shigaraki. Not everything in the superhero genre is sunshine and lollipops. But I anticipated how much of a marked departure this arc was going to be in terms of violence and tone, given how far along I’m at in the manga: as this series is going, it’s going to keep being pretty grim until Izuku returns to UA. Engaging in that story is difficult, compared to how comparatively lighter the series has been up to now. And I’m even including All For One’s revelation at Kamino that he effectively kidnapped the grandson of the woman he killed--and now, looking at that grandson in this arc, we’re reaching the logical conclusion to that darkness.

It has been past time to really delve into Shigaraki’s origin story, and like what we learn about Toga in this episode, I feel underwhelmed. We’ll get to more about Shigaraki in the next episodes, but this one felt like it could have stood a little more room to breathe. If the opening could have been moved to the previous episode, if this one could have started with Toga facing Curious, and if the episode had ended with Toga passing out, I think all of that may have given Studio BONES more time to offer something more visually impressive than what we got, as well as add back content in the manga but cut from the anime, such as actually showing Re-Destro, Skeptic, and Trumpet mourning Curious’s death.

(And did the anime change Skeptic’s dialogue from the manga to make it sound like, in this anime, Skeptic doesn’t know Toga just murdered Curious? The man has surveillance everywhere and didn’t see that? But I’ll have a lot more to say about how incompetent the MLA comes off, and how that makes any victory by the League less exciting.)

As I said before, if you’re going to show how systematic change is needed and can be achieved, having one set of villains fight another set of villains isn’t the worst approach.

But it is also an approach that can obscure just what you’re supposed to be fighting against.

The Meta Liberation Army is shown to have its hands in various corporations, political groups, and mass media, all of which is not without its own set of unfortunate implications.

I hate the word “elite” used as an insult. by itself, the word should just mean the best of the best, yet, rather than “elitist” being a fair criticism against a system that elevates only the best at the expense of what is good for as many people as possible, the word instead usually is used to attack people who already have power but are in no way the best of the best. Seriously, how do you look at a post-2016 United States--or a post-W, or a post-Reagan, United States--and ever think these clowns at the top of the Republican Party are the best of anything aside from being the least pungent of all choices of horse shit that party puts in front of you? What I’m getting at is, lambasting the elites only works if the elites were the worst thing to fear. An argument can be made that the elites, when they are apathetic, are the problem; but when people with power, but who lack the skill to handle it expertly, abuse that power, those aren’t elites, they’re not the best of the best--they just suck at what they do, and their incompetence causes problems for everyone.

With all of that in mind, I can’t help but wonder if the MLA in MHA are elites or just incompetents.

When My Hero Academia presents the elite as the villains, that can be bothersome. Showing that the most influential and most successful in electronics, business, politics, and mass media also happen to run a cabal from the shadows is bothersome, as it reinforces distrust in such systems not based on evidence but on the worst suspicions we have about that power. It’s not like this is original to this series: fear of the shadowy forces working in the background have been pivotal to superhero stories, whether Cadmus in Justice League Unlimited or, showing that even the heroes can be bad guys, the Illuminati in Marvel Comics.

Mitigating the more problematic aspects of this portrayal is the fun Horikoshi obviously took with some details: you wouldn’t name Curious’s villainous mass media company after your own publisher without some biting-the-hand humor involved to poke fun at your own role in a power structure. You know, kind of like how I can’t pass up remarking how the villainous group in this arc shares its initial with the most notable literature and languages academic organizations in North America--even as I get the sense that academics won’t get my joke, given the continued separation between serious academic work and serious fan/pop culture work. Or the fact that a lot of academics have little to no sense of humor--myself not excluded.

But going back to “the heroes being bad guys,” this approach with the elite being the villains is not unwarranted. We’ve seen the best of the best in the forms of Pro Heroes and realizing they are not without their problems: All Might’s role as a symbol allowing others to not rise to the occasion when they expect him to save the day, and Endeavor is a domestic abuser. So it makes sense, after sticking with the Pro Heroes for so long, that we finally get a group of Villains that are really a legitimate threat, having operated in the shadows for so long until the time is right. That should be a monumental moment for this series. We reverse it to finally show Villains who are at the top of their game.

And the Villains at the top of their game are going to get their asses handed to them so quickly by a ragtag group of misfits. How disappointing.

It’s not unexpected: history and previous pop culture are full of the ragtag underdogs beating out those in power. But as with previous victories for the League, it feels less like they were really that much better than the MLA. Rather, it’s more so that the plot gave them last-minute power-ups (including revealing this late in the game Shigaraki’s back story to show us, no, he always had this power, this isn’t an author’s ass-pull, you’re imagining things). And it’s more so that the MLA is just foolish. It’s one thing to have Re-Destro be so overconfident to challenge the League in this manner; it’s another to not have better contingencies. Shigaraki brings a kaiju, Re-Destro couldn’t sacrifice a few bucks for a Trypticon? But perhaps I’m not being fair: I complain about All For One being too overly prepared, now I’m complaining about Re-Destro being so under-prepared.

It doesn’t help that I couldn’t figure out Skeptic’s plan. Is he cloning Re-Destro with Twice’s ability so that they can have a figurehead? That would make sense. Or is he cloning Re-Destro with Twice’s ability to keep Re-Destro always present? Because, if so, he does know that Twice’s Quirk cancels when he’s knocked out or dead, right? I mean, if he doesn’t, that helps clarify that the MLA is not as all-knowing as they seem--which makes Re-Destro’s goal to do what the government has not and take down the League all the more comical given how overwhelmed Re-Destro ends up being by these sidelined outcasts.

With the MLA, it’s too bad that, even when we get to see villains supposed at the top of their game, their portrayal is hampered by the series itself, whether by introducing the MLA so late in the run that their successes are going to immediately become pathetic (worsened by how the anime has handled adapting the manga this season) or by making the League losers for so long that, while we get behind them as the underdog in this fight, it can feel like too little, too late.

The League of Villains, when not benefiting from All For One’s resources and Shigaraki’s planning, have just been victims of luck: any victory has had its cost, given what happened to Magne, and there hasn’t been an obvious strategy on Shigaraki’s part for bringing in admittedly powerful members like Toga, Twice, and Dabi but who have their own flaws that get in the way of what the League could accomplish. Even the victory against the Shie Hassaikai and the Pro Heroes had more to do with how brutal the Villains were willing to be, less than some brilliant strategy, regardless Shigaraki’s game metaphors thrown back in the face of the now armless Overhaul. This arc was supposed to be a good opportunity to show some of the League unlocking their potential and showing how audience members like me underestimate them at our peril. And I don’t get that sense of peril, when Toga’s victory is thanks to a last-minute power-up, one that was already vague in the manga--“awakening” now being something Quirks can somehow do--and almost completely unstated in the anime--largely cut in this episode, along with Curious’s world-building information about “Quirk counseling” and other government assistance that I wanted to hear about in this series but keep having sidelined for under-animated action.

And speaking of under-animated action, I was really expecting something more brutal in this Toga story, and it wasn’t there. I should be grateful: I did say I was hesitant to watch this gory an episode. I went back and forth between this episode and the manga chapters to try to figure out what was being censored and what wasn’t. The wiki helped, but I also think the black and white colors of the manga somehow made how brutal all the damage was look more impressive. This anime needed to up what was already in the manga--and instead, Toga gets blown up a few times yet looks comparatively still together. I know Curious’s followers had their blood made explosive, so no wonder they died in such shiny (and censored) fashion, but Toga gets out of this largely in-tact and her outfit relatively fine? Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful this didn’t turn into cheap fanservice, but I expected something more graphic. Everything, even the blood, just looked so cartoony that I didn’t feel the dread I expected. I really don’t want to sound desensitized to violence, because I’m not: I just think BONES made a stylistic choice for how to mitigate the intensity of this kind of violence so not to turn away a younger audience, and instead they are not letting this show grow with its audience and show that, no, something this gruesome has to be made to look gruesome.

At least the choice for how to show Curious and others dying was visually creative. The manga showed the bodies largely in shadows as they hit the asphalt: effective, but not that creative. Here, the anime shows a spray of blood in the air--creative, although without the well-done parallels that could have happened (see Spy x Family making a spray of blood look like simultaneous fireworks happening nearby).

Too bad Curious is gone. I’m a sucker for criticisms of mass media, and yet another woman character gets frigid. Now we’re stuck with the other MLA members having largely little to no personality. Seriously, I’ve seen people do better with Skeptic by amping up his social awkwardness so that there is at least something there other than only “over-confident tech CEO.”

While the personalities of the other MLA members are less interesting, the acting and casting made significant improvements, thanks to better material to work with. Takako Honda and Tara Sands knocked it out of the park as Curious, bringing all the right beats of how a media mogul would talk, especially as on-air talent. I had initially had some concerns with the voice chosen for Ben Diskin’s performance as Skeptic, but it’s working for me now--very guttural, befitting his grunge Gorillaz-inspired design and theming. It was odd how the voice direction was trying to make the usually reserved Dabi more fiery. But it makes sense for the choice to have Geten sound so icey cold--especially as, of course, Endeavor’s son Dabi would freak out this much when hearing about another prodigy having their Quirk overworked since childhood and the stress that’s put them under. And Sonny Strait was given such a good dialogue with Giran that was really effective, bringing a lot more civility to this uncivil person.

But that still leads to the other problems with this episode: so much content has been cut from the manga that, as other writers online have said, we’re kind of thrown into the story just assuming we’re to know who Re-Destro is and what his deal is. Summarizing all of that with a narration by Izuku--and I’ll circle back to why having him having any role in this episode is just lazy--is far less effective than how the manga handled it. I can’t do justice to summarizing the problems when other writers online have done better, so, I’ll just say, go read the manga instead: Horikoshi’s allusion to The Killing Joke is excellent visual shorthand for understanding what Re-Destro is all about, imbuing him with sad clown details that complicate his overall thuggishness and make you question whether that’s all he is or whether he really does love these people. Given what we will learn soon about Geten, I do think he loves these people, all the more reason why cutting the scene where he is crying over Curious’s death a significant flaw for what is supposed to be contained in this episode. As I said, this episode should have centered on Curious and Toga--not a cliffhanger about Twice, not foreshadowing Shigaraki’s origin story and power-up, not starting the Geten and Dabi fight, just that woman and that girl, that’s it.

I don’t think the animation was up to the task. Today on Twitter, a few clips have popped up from the Re-Destro and Shigaraki fight, and while I see potential that is pulling from similar animation techniques used in the Sports Festival--the arc that, so far, has been the arc to beat for this series in terms of quality animation--it still felt like it lacked impact.

This episode as well has the same problem. I understand that an episode will pick the scenes to under-animate to save money, but when it is obvious which scenes those are--any time Deika residents stand frozen surrounding Toga--it is not longer a stylistic choice but one that takes viewers out of the episode and make them realize how cheap this looks. Given how intentionally cartoonish these Deika residents are, given their various appearances, the freeze-frame approach is drawing attention in the wrong way to what should be a unique feature of this series and instead fixates on those character designs at what should be a tense moment.

The overall animation has been suffering this season, and while making Toga in Curious’s arms look more like a painting was upping what is already in the manga, it also felt like a cheap trick, along with how bloodless Shigaraki’s attacks look compared to how brutal it was in his first use against Aizawa in the first season. Twice’s conversation with himself in the manga came across like a voice in his head, while the anime seemed to make it more an ongoing conversation he’s having in real-name, which is less interesting and leads to that really awkward scream face he’s making under his mask that wasn’t horrifying to me, it was just goofy. Even Re-Destro in his moment with Giran looked off and would have benefited from more thought as to how to position him to match a 3D model while also not looking so uncanny as to not be believable.

Season 5 of MHA has had far too many problems to sit through without griping on my part. This arc was the first time we were centering on only the Villains, and it has felt like a typical MHA episode. Only now did I finally notice the opening theme changes the card to read My Villain Academia--which is its own set of problems, originating from that same gag in the manga, as there is no school for these Villains for the re-naming to work either. For an arc this pivotal to the story, a new opening theme was needed; instead, we have an opening this season that combines parts of the Endeavor Agency Arc and the League vs MLA Arc. We needed another narrator other than Izuku to introduce Destro and to do the next episode preview--especially when Izuku shouldn’t be knowing this stuff. I understand that this narration is long after Izuku returns to UA after the PLF Arc, but if so, when Izuku still sounds the same age in these narrations, it doesn’t come across as “Izuku narrating from far into the future”: I anticipate Toho and Funimation could not have accounted for everything, but maybe telling the actors for Izuku, “Sound older,” would have been the approach to take. And as I said last time, Present Mic introducing the Villains’ Quirks is a missed opportunity to have Giran do that instead.

But I started this post wanting to talk about making the Villains and Villains fight each other--and I end this post conflicted whether anything worthy was accomplished. I know having Curious be so obsessed with getting the big story is supposed to make it humorous that she died, potentially biting satire about headline-obsessed sensationalized journalism. But it’s also a cheap way to have her die--her obsession makes her ignore her oncoming death, and it’s as if the story is trying to parallel her potential mental condition to Toga’s. I don’t know what to do with all of that from a disability studies perspective, as I don’t feel comfortable taking this argument further yet without more consideration. But the fact that Curious actually calls Toga “insane” in the subtitles only reinforces how awkward I feel talking about it. What was gained in this episode? We learned about Toga’s backstory--and it breezes by pretty fast, albeit buoyed by Curious making sure to emphasize how it is reflective of larger societal concerns, before we drop any further discussion about them so we can get back to action. None of that has me looking forward to how rushed and potentially un-gory Shigaraki’s origin story will be animated. We set up a potential storyline where we meet the proto-Izuku classmate she sucked blood out of--which, given how long it took the woman All Might saved in Kamino to show up again, likely won’t get a pay off any time soon. And we gave Toga a power up--that the video games already gave her years ago because otherwise her combat abilities, while impressive, are not going to do much against powerhouse opponents.

It makes me wish this episode had, as I said, more room to breathe, to actually adapt the manga instead of sticking so close to it, so that we could get more interiority to Toga to understand why she picked Ochaco’s blood (so she could be closer to someone she is obsessed with) and see her intelligence (she picked up really quickly on touching everyone despite having Ochaco’s Quirk just these few moments, and she knew how to deactivate it, too). While the production is obviously present, especially in animating Toga’s use of Ochaco, all of which was impressive and well-acted by all parties involved, this felt like a rush job. If Studio BONES is going to keep making original MHA films instead of trying to adapt the seasons well for TV, then either make the next arcs their own theatrical films and skip a TV broadcast (despite how unsafe that is during a global pandemic and how limiting that is for people who can’t afford that expense compared to monthly streaming costs) or, as I suggested before, have another studio take over some arcs for the sake of variety and theming.

#my hero academia #anime review #mha spoilers #himiko toga #Chitose Kizuki

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mariaiscrafting · 3 years

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idk I think it's all about phrasing. there are certain conventions and expectations with how people interact on Tumblr that is very different from on Twitter. and given what happened recently on Twitter (doxxing, death threats etc) I think it's not weird at all that we think we're a bit better than that.

there are a lot of those welcome posts that I feel like moreso are the posters preference rather than a universal hard rule but ykno. I don't feel like picking a fight over it.

also I do think that mcytblr is aware of its own problems to a certain extent but like if we have newcomers of course we're not gonna collectively bring it up ykno

Hmm. This is a pretty good ask, and I have mixed feelings about it, so let's go through it systematically since what else do I have to do at 6 in the damn morning besides watch more SDV guides?

First, yeah, I guess, but those conventions and expectations are something that should be learned and naturally developed over time, not dictated. There has been a significant rise in Tumblr trying to codify its culture, humor, and types of posts, and frankly, it's kinda ruining the magic a little bit (a lot). A lot of the harmful shit that comes from Twitter that should actually be prevented is only perpetuated by the accessibility Twitter users have to content creators. Attempts to spread doxxes, start cancelling hashtags, and reply nasty things under CC posts are all things that simply won't happen hear, no matter how hard people try, because CCs aren't on here (Ranboo lurking, notwithstanding). Probably the only thing that should genuinely be prevented - because it isn't just an objectively harmless thing that some rando mcytblr user dislikes, and it isn't contingent upon the presence of CCs - has been the tip on not making callout posts. But to pretend that Tumblr is any different from Twitter when it comes to this practice is ridiculous and delusional. Twitter had its fair share of people who would point out how harmful and pointless it is to call out specific users, just as Tumblr throughout the years has had massive issues with people explicitly picking fights with others, and creating and circulating block lists. The latter was a particular problem in this fandom because of its response to EBblr, which has actually significantly grown because of the damned blocklists that were spread. Yes, dissuade new users from engaging in "cancelling other users" practices, but don't act like that is a solely Twitter problem. This kind of attitude is what obliterates the possibility of self-growth within this fandom, it's the same kinda stubbornness that pervaded the homophobia and fetishization discourse from back in January and February, and just as it did then, it will result in very little growth on the greater fandom culture or individuals' actions.

Second, I've come across at least twenty of these posts in the few hours since I logged onto Tumblr tonight, and I think one of them worded their "tips" as things that specific user preferred/would've like to know upon first entering Tumblr. Again, because mcytblr has this superiority complex at its core, it's very easy for that complex to seep into every facet of people's posts and interactions with others, and this is perfectly exemplified in the many posts where personal preference are phrased as objective truths/rules.

Third, good. You are a better person than me, then. I kinda pick fights about everything, it's my thing 😉 (/nm)

Fourth, I think that in many ways, mcytblr was aware of it's own problems. But lately, with the response to the sleepytwt callout thread, the Dream Reddit posts, and the fundamental misunderstanding and ignorance on the part of most of mcytblr on both matters, I'm becoming more and more skeptical of mcytblr's own self-awareness. The fandom is becoming more and more of an echo chamber, and I think that's likely a natural result of that aforementioned superiority complex and the practice of blocking anyone with undesirable opinions. While I much prefer Tumblr's practice of blocking people on sight, to engaging with every person you disagree with just to yell hateful vitriol at them, there's no denying that a distasteful side effect has been the creation of a pretty hardy echo chamber for most of mcytblr. When you never see anyone's criticism, constructive or not, of the media you consume, the creators you adore, or your own practices and actions, there is very little chance you will realize there's something wrong that you need to change in order to grow. I used to like how dynamic and ever changing this fandom space was because it was refreshing; while most Tumblr fandoms I've been a part of since 2014 have been fractured and wont to stay stagnant, this one seemed like one open to self-critique and self-improvement. But as it has continued progressing, we've moved into this stagnant, liminal space that all Tumblr fandoms seem to edge into eventually, and it's pretty disheartening to see. Maybe the newcomers will help kickstart a reversal, maybe they'll only reinforce this shift in mcytblr culture. I have yet to see.

#asks #discourse #mcytblr

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sotina886 · 3 years

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Racial Discrimination: One Doctrine, Multiple Masks

Source Title: Racial Discrimination: One Doctrine, Multiple Masks

In recent years, racism has become an increasingly common term in American public discourse. Since the rise of the black civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950s, the understanding, interpretation and use of this term have never stopped.

The death of George Floyd, a black man, in a police violent law enforcement incident in May of this year has become the fuse for a new round of racial conflicts accumulated in the United States. The large-scale street protests triggered by the "Black people's fate" movement renewed people's attention to racism.

As a historical phenomenon, the issue of racism has been entwining the United States and has become a social disease that is difficult to eradicate. The main reason is that racism has always been deeply embedded in various American systems and life, and manifested in different forms, continuously exerting destructive effects on American society and individuals. Under the impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, anti-racism has a long way to go in the United States.

Three major manifestations

Racism is an ideology as well as a social behavior: it believes that different races or skin colors can explain the differences in characteristics and abilities between people, and that certain races are superior to other races; it is also a form of reliance on race or color. Color judgments trigger prejudice or discriminatory words and deeds. In this sense, racism and racial discrimination can sometimes be used interchangeably in meaning.

According to the definition of the United Nations "International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination" (1965), "racial discrimination" refers to any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent or ethnicity, and its purpose or effect is to cancel Or damage the recognition, enjoyment or exercise of equal status of human rights and fundamental freedoms in any other aspect of political, economic, social, cultural or public life. It should be noted that "preferential" is also regarded as a form of discrimination.

In a society based on the concept of racial hierarchy, racial contradictions and conflicts will inevitably breed. In other words, a group of people or individuals in a particular social class has a discriminatory or derogatory attitude towards another group of people or individuals in society based on their perceptions of race and color. The former usually have more social power and resources, and use these powers and resources to constantly maintain and strengthen the racial prejudice from "up" to "down".

Therefore, it is necessary to understand racism in the prevailing social and cultural power relations. "Individual racism" and "structural racism" are considered to be the two main forms.

For many people, individual racism is racism in the usual sense, that is, a person treats the other person differently because of their race or skin color, usually (intentionally or unintentionally) through ideas, words, expressions or behavior It manifests itself in such a way as to cause estrangement, rejection and even resentment between people. In the United States, it occurs between whites and minorities, as well as between different minorities, the so-called "horizontal racism."

Structural racism is mainly embedded in the practice of certain institutions or institutional systems. The racial discrimination it reflects is caused by various institutions or institutional arrangements in society, such as enterprises, governments, schools, hospitals, courts, etc., and is sometimes referred to as institutional or systemic discrimination. The main manifestation is that, through certain public policies, departmental actions, cultural performance and other norms and standards, certain ethnic groups are always in a state of inequality, often accompanied by coercive methods, such as discriminatory legislation, residential segregation policies, and low-income groups. Level of medical care, low education, unequal economic opportunities, etc.

The consequences of the two forms of racism are clearly different. The former are discriminated against by individuals or a few people; the latter are discriminated against by a large number of people. In addition, the former is easy to recognize, detect and correct; the latter is more concealed, more accustomed, and more difficult to correct.

In addition to these two forms, there is also an implicit racism. When racial discrimination is generally regarded as a social cancer that needs to be eradicated around the world, the blatant racial discrimination in the past has gradually been replaced by implicit racial discrimination. Implicit discrimination can be individual or structural. It is not easy to be noticed by the public, and sometimes it is even vague in its definition. It does not seem to be racially colored, but it is not.

American complex reality

Although the American Civil War that broke out in 1861 radically abolished slavery and brought the country back to unity from a state of being on the verge of division, ethnic issues still exist and continue to tear American society apart. Although various laws and ideas about slavery and racial discrimination have been abolished, their residual influence has continued to this day.

More challenging and stubborn is structural racism, which is manifested in many aspects of American politics, economy, military, and society. The Chinese Exclusion Act, the Hanapepe Massacre, and the Japanese-American detention camps in history are all typical cases that have caused a huge wave of racial disputes.

For some minorities, structural racism is still ubiquitous, but some whites do not think so, because it satisfies the vested interests of the white majority of the population, and because its victims often live in slums and detention centers. Or prisons and other "invisible" places.

Compared with the past, more ethnic minorities are now getting good jobs and have certain social status. Some white people are beginning to reflect on structural racism, and even worry about the phenomenon of so-called "reverse racism"-that is, governments at all levels Minorities provide more welfare and relief programs, open borders, and implement affirmative actions. These benefits make white people feel discriminated against in society. This difference in perception has to a certain extent aggravated the domestic racial problems in the United States.

The "Death of Freud" in May triggered protests and anger that swept across the United States and the world, not only because of its cruel images, but also because of its occurrence at the time when the new crown pneumonia epidemic in the United States continued to spread.

On the one hand, the U.S. government has long failed to ensure that ethnic minorities enjoy equal rights in health, housing, education, and other fields; on the other hand, African and Hispanic Americans suffer the most poverty due to lower incomes and higher debt. This means that they are more likely to live in crowded spaces, have to choose more public transportation, and are exposed to the virus at work. This makes it more difficult for them to protect themselves during the epidemic, resulting in huge differences in the prevalence and mortality of the new crown pneumonia epidemic in the United States at the ethnic level.

Anti-racial discrimination has a long way to go

Why is it difficult to eradicate racial issues in American society? One can make a long list of reasons. The most fundamental of these is that racism is deeply rooted in the American political and cultural system and has been internalized as an integral part of the American social structure.

First, racism has been internalized in the social, economic and political life of the United States. The United States is a country of immigrants, composed of races with different cultures, languages, and skin colors. However, white Europeans have always accounted for the majority of the entire population of this country and are in a dominant position in American political and cultural life.

Second, on the ideological level, racism has never completely withdrawn from the stage of history in the United States. Although various laws and concepts related to black slavery and racial discrimination have been abolished, the old and outdated white colonial consciousness and psychology still exist. The difference between "contemporary colonists" is that they stay away from war and weapons, and instead use culture, language, and education to make people accept and recognize the concept of "white supremacy".

This type of symbolic power makes minorities subconsciously accept, endure, and adapt to the reality of their racial subordination and unequal status, thereby producing self-identity and cognitive psychological inferiority and depression. For some ethnic minority immigrants, joining the "mainstream society" in the United States means integrating into a white-dominated society.

Third, racism is often used as a political tool in the United States. The civil rights movement and "Freud's death storm" both have important political driving forces behind them. Immigration has become an important issue in the political confrontation between the two parties in the United States, and ethnic politics has also become an important incentive for the resurgence of racism in recent years.

As the demographic structure of the United States has changed, the growth rate of the minority population has accelerated, and one of the fastest-growing groups is the "mixed race." One prediction is that due to the higher birth rate of non-white babies, the white majority of the population may not last long, and there may be situations in the United States where no ethnic group alone can constitute the majority of society. While the domestic ethnic politics and social development in the United States have become more diversified, new risks have followed one after another. Anxiety, fear, and irritability have once again made the argument of white supremacy rise again.

Obviously, racism has questioned the two core "American myths" repeatedly narrated. One myth is "destiny determined by heaven", which emphasizes the sacred nature of America’s belief in democracy and freedom; the other myth is "American Dream", which is engraved in the ideals of immigrants and believes that the future of this chosen country is beautiful. And it will be beautiful.

These two myths are portrayed as the reality of American daily life, and they frequently appear in people's daily speech. People aspire to live in a racially equal society, but in the United States today, reality and ideals are still far away.

The chronic disease of racism in the United States needs to be eradicated through profound social reforms, especially from the two aspects of ideology and social behavior. It should not only pay attention to anti-racism at the individual level, but also at the entire social level. As a global ethical value, anti-racism requires the active participation and action of all people.

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uk-news-talking-politics · 4 years

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'As far as I care, you can sleep in your car': The Corona tenants

By Chaminda Jayanetti

"As far as I care, you can sleep in your car."

Maria had just discovered what it means to be a tenant in the time of corona. It was June 5th and her landlady was ordering her to move out of her lodging that very day.

Just 24 hours earlier, she had given Maria a month's notice to leave, accusing her of using too much water when she washed her hands in line with government advice, and of damaging the property.

Now all of a sudden, she was being summarily kicked out.

"I was feeling all the emotions at the same time," Maria says. "I was scared, I was anxious, I was confused, I couldn't believe what was happening. I wanted to cry."

Maria had been lodging in the house in Bristol for three years when the pandemic hit. Despite there being five other occupants, the landlady blamed her alone for the rising water bill.

"She would be literally breathing on my neck [when I washed my hands], checking on how much water I'd use. She kept watching me all the time," Maria says.

"One day she came up to me and shoved the water bill in my face. She wanted me to pay £300 extra."

On June 4th, she gave her a month to move out after accusing Maria of deliberately damaging her bedroom window - "Why would I damage my own window?" Maria asks - and the next day, she called her into the bathroom they both used and unleashed an even more bizarre accusation.

"She points at the ceiling in the bathroom. And she's like, 'oh, what is that?' I was like, 'what do you mean?' 'Oh, there's black mould on the ceiling'.

"She accused me of pouring water and bleach on the ceiling on purpose to damage the property. That's what she accused me of. Why would I do that? Like, that doesn't make any sense.

"She said I'd have to leave the house immediately, and I looked at her and I was like, 'why would I damage the bathroom on purpose?' And she's like, 'no, you have to leave now or I'm going to call the police'. And I was like, where am I going to go?'

"I go, 'you can't put me on the street in the middle of a pandemic'. And she said, 'as far as I care, you can sleep in your car'.

"And the worst thing about it is she's a nurse."

Private rented tsunami

Despite everything, in some ways Maria got lucky - she was able to stay at a friend's place for a week before finding a new long-term tenancy, though she has little hope of getting back her £420 deposit.

But the situation facing tenants is perilous. Amid a crisis exacerbated by underlying inequalities, lodgers like Maria face more inequality than most, with few legal rights or protections. But even renters with long-term tenancies face a multitude of threats.

Politics.co.uk has heard of numerous cases of rising rent arrears and illegal evictions since lockdown began. Vital repairs have been delayed, with one block of flats left without running water at a time when personal hygiene is paramount. Some landlords have even tried to put the rent up in the middle of the pandemic.

Many migrants are at particular risk due to their insecure legal status and lack of access to benefits.

"If you are undocumented or you don't have the right to be here, then obviously that makes it a bit more complicated, because the landlord, if they know that, they hold some power over you - so whether you're going to stand up to them is another matter," says Fizza Qureshi of Migrants' Rights Network.

And then there's section 21.

Section 21 is the 'no fault' eviction route. It allows landlords to kick tenants out for any reason, as long as the correct procedure is followed and three months' notice is given.

The government suspended legal evictions at the start of lockdown, first until 23rd June and then until 23rd August.

But as incomes fall and rent arrears rise, section 21 eviction notices have been piling in, ready to take effect once the evictions ban is over.

“Nobody should lose their home because of coronavirus," says Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter. "But if the government fails to act, tens of thousands of renters who’ve lost their livelihoods will soon face this terrifying prospect.

"When the evictions ban lifts on 23rd August, anyone in rent arrears could face automatic eviction from their home. This could unleash a tsunami of homelessness that councils would struggle to cope with."

Aidan Cassidy of Acorn, which campaigns for tenants' rights, says he is aware of 10-20 cases of landlords issuing section 21 notices during lockdown, just among Acorn's thousand members in Bristol.

"Due to coronavirus and the whole load of financial issues that it's caused, a lot of people have missed rent payments," says Cassidy. "Lots of landlords have unfortunately decided to act without any sort of thought for the wellbeing and health of their tenants, and have essentially evicted them or given them a section 21 notice because of these rent arrears."

One such case is an elderly self-employed handyman who can't work during the pandemic and has faced delays to his benefits, leaving him £150 in arrears on his rent.

It's a relatively small amount - but it's proved enough to trigger a section 21 notice.

"Instead of the landlord being sympathetic or reasonable, he's just said, 'no, we're not even going to talk about this, you've got three months to get out'," says Cassidy.

What makes this even worse is that he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung condition that makes it hard to breathe and places him firmly on the 'shielding' list of people at heightened risk from coronavirus.

"Obviously if he is now evicted, he's at massive risk," Cassidy explains. "There's absolutely no way he can go about his normal business looking for a new place. The lockdown might be over but the virus is very much still out there and I think any suggestion that life is back to normal for people who are very susceptible to coronavirus is just nonsense."

And evictions have a sting in the tail that increase the risk of enduring homelessness.

"If people are evicted with rent arrears under section 21, the landlord can then take whatever they can off those arrears from their deposit," says Portia Msimang of Renters' Rights London. "So people are left with no deposit with which to get another property. And this is how people fall into homelessness."

It's raining rents

Short of eviction notices, rising rent arrears are a looming crisis. With the economy likely to be hamstrung for months to come, many tenants will be financially squeezed while landlords come knocking for missed rent - one of the biggest sticks of dynamite in a bulging debt timebomb also comprising utility bills, loans and council tax.

"The biggest problem we've faced is people saying that they're worried about getting behind on the rent. And those that are getting behind on the rent aren't getting the help they need from landlords," says Caitlin Wilkinson of Generation Rent.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) calculates there were 11 percent fewer rental payments in April and May than a year before. Both the debt advice service StepChange and the Resolution Foundation think tank have estimated that just under 600,000 tenants in the private rented sector are in arrears, while Generation Rent says arrears have trebled.

The government has boosted Universal Credit, reversing years of cuts - but still not enough to cover average rents in a local area.

It has also advised tenants to negotiate rent reductions with their landlords - a laughable prospect for many tenants. Acorn branches report occasional successes, but for the most part landlords hold the whip hand in Britain's housing crisis and don't want to know. The IFS has found only one or two percent of tenants have received a rent holiday.

Biting back

What makes the situation particularly egregious is that the Tories promised to abolish section 21 evictions in their 2019 manifesto. Yet nothing has happened.

A statement from the ministry for housing in response to this article did not specifically mention a ban on section 21: "We are committed to bringing forward legislation to enhance renters' security as part of the largest changes to renting in 30 years.

"We are working with the judiciary to ensure when evictions proceedings start again, arrangements, including rules, are in place to give appropriate protections for those who have been particularly affected by coronavirus.”

Most organisations campaigning for renters' rights agree on the need to increase Universal Credit to cover average rents, and scrap section 21.

The issue of arrears is more contentious. Forcing landlords to waive rents and cancel arrears may contravene the Human Rights Act - one reason Labour dropped this approach under Keir Starmer, sparking anger from campaigners who fear Labour's new policy would leave tenants with unpayable debts.

Generation Rent's solution is to effectively extend the government furlough scheme to landlords, covering 80 percent of their monthly income up to £2,500 a month per tenant - with councils able to restrict the payment on the basis of need.

Then there are rent strikes. Heather, in Haringey, lost her work income during lockdown. After her landlady refused her request for a rent reduction, and with benefits not covering the shortfall, she got involved with the London Renters Union and simply stopped paying. She hasn't heard from her landlady for two months.

"For me it's not just a means thing," Heather says. "It started out like that, but now it feels much more like part of a movement against landlords, against this culture of people accruing lots of wealth by not actually paying anything into the system."

And this is a feature of Britain's economic response to coronavirus. Employers have taken a hit. Workers and tenants have taken a hit. But landlords, the part of the economy that produces the least value, have had the most protection of all.

The names of tenants have been changed in this article.

Chaminda Jayanetti is a freelance journalist. Follow him on Twitter here.

#coronavirus #housing

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magaden · 4 years

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Why Are Progressives So Illiberal?

By Victor Davis Hanson January 31, 2021

Progressives adopted identity politics and rejected class considerations because solidarity with elite minorities excuses them from concern for, or experience with, the middle classes of all races.

One common theme in the abject madness and tragedies of the past 12 months is that progressive ideology now permeates almost all of our major institutions—even as the majority of Americans resist the leftist agenda. Its reach resembles the manner in which the pre-Renaissance church had absorbed the economic, cultural, social, artistic, and political life of Europe, or perhaps how Islamic doctrine was the foundation for all public and private life under the Ottoman Sultanate—or even how all Russian institutions of the 1930s exuded tenets of Soviet Marxism.

Pan-progressivism

To be a Silicon Valley executive, a prominent Wall Street player, the head of a prestigious publishing house, a university president, a network or PBS anchor, a major Hollywood actress, a retired general or admiral on a corporate board, or a NBA superstar requires either progressive fides or careful suppression of all political affinities.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 98 percent of Big Tech political donations went to Democrats in 2020. Censorship and deplatforming on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies is decidedly one-way. When Mark Zuckerberg and others in Silicon Valley donate $500 million to help officials “get out the vote” in particular precincts, it is not to help candidates of both parties.

Google calibrates the order of its search results with a progressive, not a conservative, bent. Grandees from the Clinton or Obama Administration find sinecures in Silicon Valley, not Republicans or conservatives.

The $4-5 trillion market-capitalized Big Tech cartels, run by self-described progressives, aimed to extinguish conservative brands like Parler. Ironically, they now apply ideological force multipliers to the very strategies and tactics of 19th-century robber-baron trusts and monopolies. Poor Jack Dorsey has never been able to explain why Twitter deplatforms and cancels conservatives for the same supposed uncouthness that leftists routinely employ.

Silicon Valley apparently does not believe in either the letter or the spirit of the First Amendment. It exercises a monopoly over the public airwaves, and resists regulations and antitrust legislation of the sort that liberals once championed to break up trusts in the late 19th and early 20th century. As payback, it assumes that Democrats don’t see Big Tech in the same manner that they claim to see Big Pharma in their rants against it.

Wall Street donated markedly in favor of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden in their respective presidential races. Whereas conservative administrations and congressional majorities are seen as natural supporters of free-market capitalism, their Democratic opponents, not long ago, were not—and thus drew special investor attention and support from Wall Street realists.

The insurrectionist GameStop stock debacle revealed how “liberals” on Wall Street reacted when a less connected group of investors sought to do what Wall Street grandees routinely do to others: ambush and swarm a vulnerable company’s stock in unison either to buy or sell it en masse and thus to profit from predictable, artificially huge fluctuations in the price.

When small investors at Reddit drove the pedestrian GameStop price up to well over a hundred times its worth, forcing big Wall Street investment companies to lose billions of dollars, progressives on Wall Street and the business media cried foul. They compared the Reddit buyers to the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6.

One subtext was: Why would nobodies dare question the mega-profit making monopolies of the Wall Street establishments? The point that neither the Reddit day-traders nor the hedge-fund connivers were necessarily healthy for investment was completely lost.

Surveys of “diverse” university faculty show overwhelming left-wing support, reified by asymmetrical contributions of 95-1 to Democratic candidates. The dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. to make race incidental to our characters no longer exists on campuses. Appearance is now essential. More ironic, class considerations are mostly ignored in favor of identity politics. “Equity” applies to race not class. The general education curricula is one-sided and mostly focused on deductive -studies courses, and in particular race/class/gender zealotry that is anti-Enlightenment in the sense that predetermined conclusions are established and selected evidence is assembled to prove them.

We are also currently witnessing the greatest assault on free speech and expression, and due process, in the last 70 years. And the challenges to the First and Fifth Amendments are centered on college campuses, where non-progressive speakers are disinvited, shouted down, and occasionally roughed up for their supposedly reactionary views—and by those who have little fear of punishment.

Students charged with “sexual harassment” or “assault” are routinely denied the right to face their accusers, cross examine witnesses, or bring in counterevidence. They usually find redress for their suspensions or expulsions only in the courts. What was thematic in the Duke Lacrosse fiasco and the University of Virginia sorority rape hoax was the absence of any real individual punishment for those who promulgated the myths.

Indeed in these cases many argued that false allegations in effect were not so important in comparison to bringing attention to supposedly systemic racism and sexism. In Jussie Smollett fashion, what did not happen at least drew attention to what could have happened and thus was valuable. It was as if those who did not commit any actual crime had still committed a thought crime.

Almost all media surveys of the last four years reflect a clear journalistic bias against conservatives in general. Harvard’s liberal Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy famously reported slanted coverage against Trump and his supporters among major television and news outlets at near astronomical rates, in some cases exhibiting over 90 percent negative bias during Trump’s first few months in office. Liberal editors can now be routinely fired or forced to retire from major progressives newspapers if they are not seen as sufficiently woke.

No major journalist or reporter has been reprimanded for promoting the fictional “Russian collusion” hoax—and certainly not in the manner the media has called for punishment, backlisting, and deplatforming for any who championed “stop the steal” protests over the November 2020 elections. The CNN Newsroom put their hands up and chanted “hands up, don’t shoot”—a myth surrounding the Michael Brown Ferguson shooting that was thoroughly refuted. Infamous now is the CNN reporter’s characterization of arsonist flames shooting up in the background of a BLM/Antifa riot as a “largely peaceful” demonstration. BLM, of course, has been nominated for a Nobel “Peace” Prize. After the summer rioting, one could better cite Tacitus’s Calgacus, “Where they make a desert, they call it peace”.

A George W. Bush or Donald Trump press conference was often a free-for-all, blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy. A Barack Obama or Joe Biden version devolves into banalities about pets, fashion, and food. The fusion media credo is why embarrass a progressive government and thus put millions and the planet itself at risk?

Andrew Cuomo’s policies of sending COVID-19 patients into rest homes led to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Still, the media gave him an Emmy award for his self-inflated and bombastic press conferences, many of which were little more than unhinged rants against the Trump Administration. Anthony Fauci’s initial pronouncements about the origins of the COVID-19 virus, its risks and severity, travel bans, masks, herd immunity, vaccination rollout dates—and almost everything about the pandemic—were wildly off. Yet he was canonized by the media due to his wink-and-nod assurances that he was the medical adult in the Trump Administration room.

It would be difficult for a prominently conservative actor or actress to win an Oscar these days, or to produce a major conservative-themed film. Bankable actors/directors/producers like Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson operate as mavericks, whose films’ huge profits win them some exemption. But they came into prominence and power 30 years ago during a different age. And they will likely have no immediate successors.

Ars gratis doctrinae is the new Hollywood and it will continue until it bottoms out in financial nihilism. When such ideological spasms contort a society, the second-rate emerge most prominently as the loudest accusers of the Salem Witches—as if correct zeal can reboot careers stalled in mediocrity. Hollywood’s mediocre celebrities from Alec Baldwin to Noah Cyrus have sought attention for their careers by voicing sensational racist, homophobic, and misogynist slurs—on the correct assumption their attention-grabbing left-wing fides prevents career cancellation.

Hollywood, we learn, has been selecting some actors on the basis of lighter skin color to accommodate racist Beijing’s demands to distribute widely their films in the enormous Chinese market. Yet note well that Hollywood has recently created racial quotas for particular Oscar categories, even as it reverses its racial obsessions to punish rather than empower people of color on the prompt of Chinese paymasters.

Ditto the political warping in professional sports. Endorsements, media face time, and cultural resonance often hinge on athletes either being woke—or entirely politically somnolent. A few stars may exist as known conservatives, but again they are the rare exceptions. For most athletes, it is wisest to keep mum and either support, condone, or ignore the Black Lives Matter rituals of taking a knee, not standing for the flag, or ritually denouncing conservative politicians. Those who are offended and turn the channel can be replaced by far more new viewers in China, who appreciate such criticism directed at the proper target.

Again, what is common to all the tentacles of this progressive octopus is illiberalism. Of course, progressivism, dating back to late 19th-century advocacy for “updating” the Constitution, always smiled upon authoritarianism. It promoted the “science” of eugenics and forced race-based sterilization, and the messianic idea that enlightened elites can use the increased powers of government to manage better the personal lives of its subjects (enslaved to religious dogma or mired in ignorance), according to supposed pure reason and humanistic intent.

Many progressives professed early admiration for the supposed efficiency of Benito Mussolini’s public works programs spurred on by his Depression-era fascism, and his enlistment of a self-described expert class to implement by fiat what was necessary for “progress.”

Even contemporary progressives have voiced admiration for the communist Chinese ability to override “obstructionists” to create mass transit, high-density urban living, and solar power. Early on in the pandemic Bill Gates defended China’s conduct surrounding the COVID-19 disaster. Suggesting the virus did not originate in a “wet” market was “conspiratorial”; travel bans were “racist” and “xenophobic.” In contrast, had SARS-CoV-2 possibly escaped by accident from a Russian lab, in our hysterias we might have been on the brink of war.

So it is understandable that progressivism can end up as an enemy of the First Amendment and intellectual diversity to bulldoze impediments to needed progress. To save us, sometimes leftists must become advocates of monopolies and cartels, of censorship, or of the militarization of our capital.

The new Left sorts, rewards, and punishes people by their race. And some progressives are the most likely appeasers of a racist and authoritarian Chinese government and advocates of Trotskyizing our past through iconoclasm, erasing, renaming, and cancelling out. San Francisco’s school board recently voted to rename over 40 schools, largely due to the pressure of a few poorly educated teachers who claimed on the basis of half-baked Wikipedia research that icons such as Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Washington were unfit for such recognition.

Absolute Power for Absolute Good

There are various explanations for unprogressive progressivism. None are necessarily mutually exclusive. Much of the latest totalitarianism is simple hula-hoop groupthink, a fad, or even a wise career move. Loud progressivism has become for some professionals, an insurance policy—or perhaps a deterrent high wall to ensure the mob bypasses one for easier prey elsewhere. Were Hunter Biden and his family grifting cartel not loud liberals and connected to Joe Biden, they all might have ended up like Jack Abramoff.

More commonly, progressivism offers the elite, the rich, and the well-connected Medieval penance, a vicarious way to alleviate their transitory guilt over privilege such as a $20,000 ice cream freezer or a carbon-spewing Gulfstream by abstract self-indictment of the very system that they have mastered so well.

Progressives also believe in natural hierarchies. They see themselves as an elite certified by their degrees, their resumes, and their correct ideologies, our version of Platonic Guardians, practitioners of the “noble lie” to do us good. In its condescending modern form, the creed is devoted to expanding the administrative state, and the expert class that runs it, and revolves in and out from its government hierarchies to privileged counterparts in the corporate and academic world.

Progressivism patronizes the poor and champions them at a distance, but despises the middle class, the traditionally hated bourgeoise without the romance of the distant impoverished or the taste and culture of the rich. The venom explains the wide array of epithets that Obama, Clinton, and Biden have so casually employed—clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, dregs, ugly folk, chumps, and so on. “Occupy Wall Street” was prepped by the media as a romance. The Tea Party was derided as Klan-like. The rioters who stormed the Capitol were rightly dubbed lawbreakers; those who besieged and torched a Minneapolis federal courthouse were romanticized or contextualized.

Abstract humanitarian progressives assume that their superior intelligence and training properly should exempt them from the bothersome ramifications of their own ideologies. They promote high taxes and mock material indulgences. But some have made a science out of tax evasion and embrace the tasteful good life and its material attractions. They prefer private schooling and Ivy League education for their offspring, while opposing charter schools for others.

There is no dichotomy in insisting on more race-based admissions and yet calling a dean or provost to help leverage a now tougher admission for one’s gifted daughter. Sometimes the liberal Hollywood celebrity effort to get offspring stamped with the proper university credentials becomes felonious. Walls are retrograde but can be tastefully integrated into a gated estate. They like static class differences and likely resent the middle class for its supposedly grasping effort to become rich—like themselves.

The working classes can always make solar panels, the billionaire John Kerry tells those thousands whom his boss had just thrown out of work by the cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline. It is as if the Yale man was back to the old days when the multimillionaire and promoter of higher taxes moved his yacht to avoid sales and excise taxes and lectured JC students, “You study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

There is no such thing as “dark” money or the pernicious role of cash in warping politics when Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg, both through direct donations and through various PACs and foundations—channeled nearly $1 billion to left-wing candidates, activists, and political groups throughout the 2020 campaign year.

In sum, the new tribal progressivism is the career ideology foremost of the wealthy and elite—a truth that many skeptical poor and middle-class minorities are now so often pilloried for pointing out. Progressives have adopted identity politics and rejected class considerations, largely because solidarity with elite minorities of similar tastes and politics excuses them from any concrete concern for, or experience with, the middle classes of all races. The Left finally proved right in its boilerplate warning that the “plutocracy” and the “special interests” run America: “If you can’t beat them, outdo them.”

Self-righteous progressives believe they put up with and suffer on behalf of us—and thus their irrational fury and hate for the irredeemables and conservative minorities springs from being utterly unappreciated by clueless serfs who should properly worship their betters.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/31/why-are-progressives-so-illiberal/

#progressives #liberals #biden #trump #politics

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shadowfae · 4 years

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One of my friends a while back asked for the explanation of how Chaos worked in Lore (my Ranisson / AdventureQuest Worlds canon) and what it’s like in a hivemind, so I gave them an explanation over discord dms. Since I don’t feel like writing up another post about it, I’m just going to copy paste under the cut. Bolded was their second question. It’s not formatted for an actual post, being in all lowercase, but eh.

As always, I take questions if any are thought up.

magic in lore works like a tiered triangle, in four tiers. the first tier up at the top is raw, pure, balance magic. it's very, very unstable and volatile, exceedingly rare, and kills most people to get near. i only know of three people who could use it, and only one who did so in a proper, balanced way. (his name was warlic. his magic ran in reverse - the more he used, the more he'd get. he was very very good at his job.) underneath balance on tier two are the two binding elements, order and chaos. they do exactly that, they don't really exist on their own but they can be used to hold other elements together. if met together without anything to hold, they cancel out. my theory is that if the two coexisted in a world properly and naturally, they'd remove all magic from the world entirely. hence why there are two versions of lore: the one i was in, and the one we called the mirror realm. (the mirror folks called us the mirror realm and they were the normal ones. as one does.) order existed in the mirror realm, chaos existed in ours. underneath them in the third tier are the eight 'pure' elements. they're called pure because people didn't know about the tiered structure until drakath's husband (he's important) figured it all out. you got water, fire, wind, earth, light, darkness, lightning, and ice. ice would be more accurately called chill, and fire more accurately heat. water's opposite is actually lightning, not fire. if you take one or more tier three elements and slap a tier two on it, you get tier four: every other element that exists. if you combine darkness and fire with chaos, then you get a type of death energy. bind them with order you'd get something else, change either element or hell, even the ratio of them relative to each other, you'll get something else.

that's how magic works. but it also works in tandem with people. the magic system was set up probably by lorithia, a creation-aligned goddess who's worshipped religiously but it's more cultural than religious tbh. she set in place three spots for mortals to take up regarding magic: the avatar, the champion, and the orb-bearer. the avatar of a given tier two or three element exists once, and only once. they're naturally immortal but can be killed, and once they're gone, you'll never get another avatar of that element without lorithia interfering, or something. their second in command is the champion: there's always a champion, or someone intended to become them. they hold the throne while the avatar's out, and while you can be both avatar and champion, avatars aren't that common and we don't know much about them, so. under the champion is the orb-bearer: the orbs exist for tier-two elements, and act as the conscience of the element. if you want to pick a fight with lightning itself, go find the orb-bearer and go yell at them, i guess. drakath's husband was the avatar of chaos. his name was daniel arkhane, and i refer to him only as the avatar because it's rude to say anything else. i'll specify if i mean another avatar, but literally no other one ever showed up in anything i had anything to do with afaik so i don't care about them. he became the avatar because for his final project in warlic's class at his university, he was handed a classgem (concentrated bits of tier two-to-four elements that tune your magic to that 'class', very similar to an rpg) of mysterious origin and told to figure out what it was and everything to do with it. except that classgem was pure tier-two chaos, which realized it was handling someone whose magic ran in reverse and who could probably handle balance magic without dying, and he ended up avatar. he took the natural chaos in the world and went about engineering it, seeing what he could do. he was pretty angry at sepulchure for trying to colonize his people (the lunaris sentinels, they're a canon thing) and killing his adopted mother, as well as everything sepulchure's ever done to drakath (it's like what dragonfable tells you, but with way more trauma), and he never got too far in it because sepulchure's raids dropped a building on him. the chaorruption i've got tells me his skull got crushed in, which i didn't need to know but okay sure. drakath is the champion of chaos. he took the avatar's research and went farther with it, until he had something past raw magic, that could actually take a form, and he went about using it and experimenting with what it could do. he wanted the war to stop, and figured if he had a classgem of the championship of chaos (as being the champion requires the classgem of the championship, and those fuckers teleport if they think they're not getting found), he might actually make it work. so he created a version of chaos magic that wouldn't kill you if it took you: it would just bind you to it. say you're a paladin, with a classgem of a paladin class, which is water-air-light bound with order? yeah, now he's binding water-air-light with chaos, and you're still a paladin but now you're chaorrupted. if you used raw chaos with water-air-light, you wouldn't get a paladin. idr what you'd get but it wouldn't be that. his version literally corrupted it magically. now, all the tier two and three elements can corrupt, if you tune them right. i've seen magicorruption from other elements and it's never fun, but drakath's chaos did it in a way that could be fun, if you were the right kind of person. drakath was, effectively, a uni student in his mid twenties who had seen too much and was basically a punk with anarchist leanings. so he needed an army to stop the war, and he needed to not get caught, and so he took those nobody would miss. those a moment before suicide, those who worked in swordhaven doing what nobody wanted them to do (gamblers, prostitutes, etc), those who were getting hurt. he took everyone that might be happier with him, and left nothing but a trace of his chaos magic - which was bright as fuck purple goop that sent you into a coma if you touched it and got infected when he didn't want you to. he made an army of the people nobody on either side wanted, and nobody save for a few adventurers noticed, because nobody cared. he also ended up with a few people from other worlds, because he wasn't the avatar and couldn't control it completely. (i showed up later. i have ranisson's memories and she has mine, but we're separate people who spent a bit of time swapping bodies for a bit. hence why we're now 'kin with each other. one of my longtime mutuals was also in this position. his name's lance and we're still bffs.) and then he went and chaorrupted alteon, straight up murdered sepulchure, and started an alliance between what was left of their armies as everyone turned on him. smug tall bastard. guy was 6'7" and already saved the world when sepulchure told him to gather all the orbs and he fused with the dragon of light to bind them to keep from basically nuking the world. that dragon was the aforementioned fluffy. he then lost the orbs in a volcano and we never went back for them, rip. but here's what chaorruption does to you: it's a hivemind, in the way that everyone's hooked up to a peer-to-peer database network. telepathy across the entire network. if you know a Fact, everyone knows the Fact. people know automatically what triggers those around them, without consciously knowing it: you just know not to bring it up if you get close to the topic. if you try really really hard, you can swap identities with others. this proved very useful when we had most of the army turn into drow (dark elves, who were virtually extinct) at the order of chaos lord vath, a pissed off drow who grew up with dragons after dwarves basically genocided his people. he wanted more drow like him and for a time we could make that happen for him, so we did. it also had the avantage of nobody knowing who the fuck actually just killed their little sister: all they knew is that a chaos drow did it, not that it was actually johnny mcgee who's actually a water draconian. we all knew who each other was, but nobody else did. it also meant that with our telepathy, we could and would confuse the fuck out of everyone. we could chatter and cross language barriers. didn't matter if you were yelling gibberish at me, i'd know through the chaos what you meant to tell me. if you explained some concept i'd never understood but another chaorrupted person would, then so long as i was actively using my magic and chaorruption, i'd be able to do it. not as well as the person who understood it normally would, but i'd be able to do a passing job. so what we'd do is yell everything at each other in various languages and out of order, and we'd know what was going on, and nobody else would. it really did reinforce the idea of chaos- if you weren't in the know, it was nonsensical and impossible to follow. we could change an entire strategy of attack in about five seconds, because the chaos was faster than we could be otherwise. the only way to defeat us was straight up overpowering us, which only happened if we couldn't move as fast as you could. it happened, but eh. so basically i'm very used to a hivemind and there's nothing quite like it. it's actually terrifying if you're not properly one of us, which is what minos went through in that fic - he was part of the hivemind, but he wasn't part of chaos, hence why it was killing him slowly from the inside out. if any of us had found him, we would've dragged him in to get initialized and he would've probably been fine. but ah, everyone i know who hears me talk about chaos knows it as this great, really nice thing, and i wanted to drive home that for everyone else, it was fucking terrifying. but for me? it was great, and it's such a huge part of what and who i am that i feel it'd be impossible to not notice if you knew what you were looking for, yeah?

"I'm curious though, does that mean that in the hive mind, you could change your appearance through chaos magic? Or was it a skill shared throughout the hive mind? I'm also curious as to what you mean by swapping bodies?"

if someone else had what you wanted, yes! you could kind of mix and match? like, if someone had straight snow white hair and yours was bright green and curly, you could take their hair entirely, but you couldn't get a light green or curly white hair, or straight green hair. but you could take just their hair and someone else's eyes. and if they changed their hair to someone's red buzzcut, you couldn't take their hair at all unless you own the red buzzcut, in which you can just swap with each other. if you wanted to make a triangle of swapping you could, but it'd take actual engineering of the magic versus just deciding to. and if you weren't using your magic actively you'd go back to your actual form, hence why if we died we'd transform back. and as far as the magic was concerned, your identity was just another feature. a trans guy and a cis girl absolutely could swap genders if they wanted to. but that part was kind of experimental, meant for those who generally had so much trauma they couldn't be themselves at the moment and needed a break, and there was bleedthrough. if you swapped to get someone else's gender, you were likely to get chunks of the rest of them, too. people absolutely tried to swap traumas and it kind of worked, though it wasn't very commonplace. and you couldn't just take, you had to give whatever you were replacing. so if you wanted to get rid of your curly green hair, someone had to take it, or you had to talk to someone who specialized in engineering (chaosweavers) to permanently alter you, replacing what you had with raw chaos. it wasn't perfect, but if you had raw chaos instead of something else, it would effectively spit out what a fully-chaorrupted person might look like. it had a template. spiky black hair, grayish-violet skin, bright purple eyes with white or black sclera, open sores with a layer of dragonscales underneath instead of flesh, purple blood, way too many teeth, around 5'8"-6'2", muscular builds with thick legs and upper arms. occasionally extra eyes. since this made for a better disguise than the drow thing usually did, a lot of people opted for that when they had traits that nobody they found really wanted. though if someone did eventually want the trait that the chaosweavers removed, odds were good they'd wake up with it unexpectedly and it'd be permanent unless the chaos was removed from them entirely. it was always fun to wake up in the morning and wonder if today was the day you rolled on that 5% chance you look different now. i don't remember if anyone was against it, but it was definitely unexpected, tbh

[and another tangent a few messages later]

people really liked their motifs in lore. like, morality was... surprisingly different. there was no "you're a good person" or "you're evil", because people referred to swordhaven as Good and shadowfall as Evil. you could be a kind, really nice person who was Evil, but by our terms, not necessarily evil. are you evil if you don't kill people, even if your friends all do and you're cool with it? are you good even though you throw people out of your city for trying to do illegal things just to survive? these aren't questions that you'll find in lore at all. your personal morality means nothing, it's what faction banner you're under. the only time that stuff matters is if you're an adventurer, because they only ally with who gets them the resources they want. (heroes are a type of adventurer, they have prophecies about them and are regarded as not real adventurers, because they didn't get a choice. i knew quite a few heroes who refused to say they were because the prophecy was secondary to their adventures.) adventurers are all over the place, but morality as a personal thing as we know it was... basically nonexistent? it was really different

#luteia laments #otherkin #fictionkin #violet mist

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spiritualdirections · 4 years

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Why it’s hard to fix both “the cancel culture” and “systemic racism”

Two thoughtful articles addressing two urgent contemporary political problems show the difficulties of balancing the liberal goal of free speech with the progressive/leftist goal of ending impersonal, systemic racial injustice.

Zaid Jilani, writing in Persuasion, argues that the answer to the cancel culture in corporate life is to make it harder for companies to fire people, by replacing “at will” contracts with “just cause” contracts favored by unions:

At the moment, most American workers are subject to “at-will” contracts. As long as their employers do not fire them on the basis of a narrow set of protected characteristics, such as gender, race, and sexual orientation, they can lose their jobs at any time, for any reason. Nor is there a due process requirement: Companies are under no legal obligation to investigate whether the ostensible reasons for axing an employee are grounded in reality...

The prevalence of at-will employment makes it easier for employers to engage in knee-jerk reactions to short-lived social media controversies. For instance, a Hispanic electrician working for the San Diego Gas and Electric company was fired for cracking his knuckles in a photograph because a social media mob believed that he was flashing a white power sign. The man who took the picture has since admitted that he probably misinterpreted the interaction, and thousands of people have now signed a petition, asking the electrician’s former employer to reverse the mistake. But since the employee has already lost his job, it will be hard for him to obtain justice. As in many other cases, both parties would have been better off if the law had required the company to afford due process to an accused worker before deciding whether or not to fire him. There is a better alternative: Contracts negotiated by labor unions often provide so-called “just cause” protections for employees. The tests of just cause typically include questions such as whether the employee was forewarned of the consequences of his or her actions, whether the rules were applied evenly, and whether there was an objective investigation into the employee’s conduct. In other words, it forces employers to conduct a fair process before firing their employees, which gives the accused a real chance to defend themselves. If we really care about free speech and due process, these protections should be available to every American.

This makes lots of sense. If the employer has to follow a process designed to put the brakes on moral panics (“knee-jerk reactions to short-lived social media controversies”), it forces the employer to make a more substantive case that the firing is justified. Without these sort of union-negotiated deals, the employer can just cancel the employee when the Twitter mob starts to attack.

On the other hand, those opposed to the “systemic racism” of the police argue that it’s exactly this feature of union contracts--their placing obstacles to firing employees without making a strong case--that makes it so hard to reform the police. Here’s Lyman Stone, arguing in The Public Discourse:

A recent study found that crime tended to rise after high-profile killings by police offices. These increases were driven not by criminals getting more dangerous or police facing blowback, but by police unions responding to criticism by organizing “slowdowns,” in which large numbers of police violated their oaths to protect the public and simply stopped doing as much police work. As a result, violent crime rose. Moreover, historically, police unionization has led directly to increases in police killings, but no change in crime...

To summarize: police killings have risen despite no increase in social or criminal violence generally. Police killings have risen despite a decline in actual killings of police officers (and, as related data show, a decline in assaults of police officers, too). Police killings have risen, but this rise is not driven by reported officially justified homicides, nor is it associated with a larger share of police killings involving armed victims. Instead, what we’ve seen is a rise in police killings across the board, untethered from actual threats to society, with the victims often being unarmed innocents. About 15 to 25 percent of police killings are of unarmed people.

This killing is largely driven by the same kinds of bureaucratic malfeasance and self-dealing that conservatives have criticized in other public sector unions. When incompetent DMV workers are not fired, when abusive teachers are reshuffled around schools, when bureaucrats use administrative gimmicks to thwart the electorate’s desire to rein in excessive spending, we conservatives are quick to (correctly!) identify the pernicious work of public-sector unions...Police unions, which cause higher rates of police killings by shielding bad cops from discipline, are an especially horrible case of the general problem. Police killing is not the work of vigilant warriors defending society at great personal cost, and sometimes going too far: it is the day-in, day-out petty tyranny of a taxpayer-funded bureaucratic lobby group. The difference is that, unlike other public sector unions, police unions have military-grade equipment they can use to violently crush protests against their abuses, and they are legally immune from most consequences. They’re teachers’ unions, but with tanks and endless get-out-of-jail-free cards.

Police unions negotiated their labor protections because it’s particularly tempting for politicians to cancel and scapegoat individual officers when they make a mistake or when a difficult judgment call is second-guessed. If the cops have to consider the political implications of every split-second decision they make under pressure, it might discourage effective policing, or even dissuade people from joining the police at all. The thinking is that without these union protections, it might not be worth it for, say, a white officer to chase a black suspect into a largely black neighborhood, because if something racially controversial happens, even accidentally, he might get fired or go to jail. But because of those union protections, police departments have to prove racism (and personal racism, not just racism of results) in order to fire an officer--and that’s deliberately hard to do.

The traditional way our small-l liberal justice system works is that both sides present evidence and have to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. The assumption of this system is that we only punish people who are morally culpable for their crimes, and that it’s better to let off several guilty people than to mistakenly punish an innocent person. This puts a brake on the scapegoating aspects of the cancel culture. However, when the complaint is that almost nobody is provably and culpably racist, but that very many people are subtly and passively racist, our traditional ideals of justice and the institutions that protect the rights of the accused make it difficult to make sweeping structural changes.

This debate shows a key difference between liberals and leftists, between those who think that cruelty and tyranny are the greatest evils, and those who think that justice must be achieved by any means necessary.

#racism #systemic injustice #police unions #cancel culture

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