#how fascism works and is yet again coming VERY close to taking over | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

arcticdementor · 3 years

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In a democracy, every vote is supposed to be equal. If about half the country supports one side and half the country supports another, you may expect major institutions to either be equally divided, or to try to stay politically neutral.

This is not what we find. If it takes a position on the hot button social issues around which our politics revolve, almost every major institution in America that is not explicitly conservative leans left. In a country where Republicans get around half the votes or something close to that in every election, why should this be the case?

This post started as an investigation into Woke Capital, one of the most important developments in the last decade or so of American politics. Although big business pressuring politicians is not new (the NFL moved the Super Bowl from Arizona over MLK day), the scope of the issues on which corporations feel the need to weigh in is certainly expanding, now including LGBT issues, abortion laws, voting rights, kneeling during the national anthem, and gun control.

…

As I started to research the topic, however, I realized there wasn’t much to explain. Asking why corporations are woke is like asking why Hispanics tend to have two arms, or why the Houston Rockets have increased their number of 3-point shots taken over the last few decades. All humans tend to have two arms, and all NBA teams shoot more 3-pointers than in the past, so focusing on one subset of the population that has the same characteristics as all others in the group misses the point.

I think one reason Woke Capital is getting so much attention is because we expect business to be more right-leaning, and corporations throwing in with the party of more taxes and regulation strikes us as odd. We are used to schools, non-profits, mainline religions, etc. taking liberal positions and feel like business should be different. But business is just being assimilated into a larger trend.

Corporations are woke, meaning left wing on social issues relative to the general population, because institutions are woke. So the question becomes why are institutions woke?

…

Through the lens of ordinal utility, in which people simply rank what they want to happen, we are about equal. I prefer Republicans to Democrats, while you have the opposite preference. But when we think in terms of cardinal utility – in layman’s terms, how bad people want something to happen – it’s no contest. You are going to be much more influential than me. Most people are relatively indifferent to politics and see it as a small part of their lives, yet a small percentage of the population takes it very seriously and makes it part of its identity. Those people will tend to punch above their weight in influence, and institutions will be more responsive to them.

Elections are a measure of ordinal preferences. As long as you care enough to vote, it doesn’t matter how much you care about the election outcome, as everyone’s voice is the same. But for everything else – who speaks up in a board meeting about whether a corporation should take a political position, who protests against a company taking a position one side or the other finds offensive, etc. – cardinal utility maters a lot. Only a small minority of the public ever bothers to try to influence a corporation, school, or non-profit to reflect certain values, whether from the inside or out.

In an evenly divided country, if one side simply cares more, it’s going to exert a disproportionate influence on all institutions, and be more likely to see its preferences enacted in the time between elections when most people aren’t paying much attention.

…

Here are two graphs that have been getting a lot of attention

What jumps out to me in these figures is not only how left leaning large institutions are, but how the same is true for most professions. Whether you are looking by institution or by individuals, there are more donations to Biden than Trump. Yet Republicans get close to half the votes! Where are the Trump supporters? What these graphs reveal is a larger story, in which more people give to liberal causes and candidates than to conservative ones, even if Americans are about equally divided in which party they support (and no, this isn’t the result of liberals being wealthier, the connections between income and ideology or party are pretty weak). Here are some graphs from late October showing Biden having more individual donors than Trump in every battleground state.

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In the 2012 election, Obama raised $234 million from small individual contributors, compared to $80 million for Romney, while also winning among large contributors.

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In September 2009, at the height of the Tea Party movement, conservatives held the “Taxpayer March on Washington,” which drew something like 60,000-70,000 people, leading one newspaper to call it “the largest conservative protest ever to storm the Capitol.” Since that time, the annual anti-abortion March for Life rally in Washington has drawn massive crowds, with estimates for some years ranging widely from low six figures to mid-to-high six figures. March for Life is not to be confused with “March for Our Lives,” a pro-gun control rally that activists claim saw 800,000 people turn out in 2018. All these events were dwarfed by the Women’s March in opposition to Trump, which drew by one estimate “between 3,267,134 and 5,246,670 people in the United States (our best guess is 4,157,894). That translates into 1 percent to 1.6 percent of the U.S. population of 318,900,000 people (our best guess is 1.3 percent).” Even if the two left-wing academics who did this research are letting their bias infuse their work, there is no question that protesting is generally a left-wing activity, as conservatives themselves realize.

People who engage in protesting care more about politics than people who donate money, and people who donate money care more than people who simply vote. Imagine a pyramid with voters at the bottom and full-time activists on top, and as you move up the pyramid it gets much narrower and more left-wing. Multiple strands of evidence indicate this would basically be an accurate representation of society.

Another line of evidence showing that the left simply cares more about politics comes from Noah Carl, who has put together data showing liberals are in their personal lives more intolerant of conservatives than vice versa across numerous dimensions in the US and the UK. Those on the left are more likely to block someone on social media over their views, be upset if their child marries someone from the other side, and find it hard to be friends with or date someone they disagree with politically. Here are two graphs demonstrating the general point.

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There’s a great irony here. Conservatives tend to be more skeptical of pure democracy, and believe in individuals coming together and forming civil society organizations away from government. Yet conservatives are extremely bad at gaining or maintaining control of institutions relative to liberals. It’s not because they are poorer or the party of the working class – again, I can’t stress enough how little economics predicts people’s political preferences – but because they are the party of those who simply care less about the future of their country.

Debates over voting rights make the opposite assumption, as conservatives tend to want more restrictions on voting, and liberals fewer, with National Review explicitly arguing against a purer form of democracy. Conservatives may be right that liberals are less likely to care enough to do basic things like bring a photo ID and correctly fill out a ballot. If this is true, Republicans are the party of people who care enough to vote when doing so is made slightly more difficult but not enough to do anything else, while Democrats are the party of both the most active and least active citizens. Yet while being the “care only enough to vote” party might be adequate for winning elections, the future belongs to those at the tail end of the distribution who really want to change the world.

The discussion here makes it hard to suggest reforms for conservatives. Do you want to give government more power over corporations? None of the regulators will be on your side. Leave corporations alone? Then you leave power to Woke Capital, though it must to a certain extent be disciplined and limited by the preferences of consumers. Start your own institutions? Good luck staffing them with competent people for normal NGO or media salaries, and if you’re not careful they’ll be captured by your enemies anyway, hence Conquest’s Second Law. And the media will be there every step of the way to declare any of your attempts at taking power to be pure fascism, and brush aside any resistance to your schemes as righteous anger, up to and including rioting and acts of violence.

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From this perspective we might want to consider this passage from Scott Alexander, who writes the following in his review of a biography of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The normal course of politics is various coalitions of elites and populace, each drawing from their own power bases. A normal political party, like a normal anything else, has elite leaders, analysts, propagandists, and managers, plus populace foot soldiers. Then there's an election, and sometimes our elites get in, and sometimes your elites get in, but getting a political party that's against the elites is really hard and usually the sort of thing that gets claimed rather than accomplished, because elites naturally rise to the top of everything.

But sometimes political parties can run on an explicitly anti-elite platform. In theory this sounds good - nobody wants to be elitist. In practice, this gets really nasty quickly. Democracy is a pure numbers game, so it's hard for the elites to control - the populace can genuinely seize the reins of a democracy if it really wants. But if that happens, the government will be arrayed against every other institution in the nation. Elites naturally rise to the top of everything - media, academia, culture - so all of those institutions will hate the new government and be hated by it in turn. Since all natural organic processes favor elites, if the government wants to win, it will have to destroy everything natural and organic - for example, shut down the regular media and replace it with a government-controlled media run by its supporters.

When elites use the government to promote elite culture, this usually looks like giving grants to the most promising up-and-coming artists recommended by the art schools themselves, and having the local art critics praise their taste and acumen. When the populace uses the government to promote popular culture against elite culture, this usually looks like some hamfisted attempt to designate some kind of "official" style based on what popular stereotypes think is "real art from back in the day when art was good", which every art school and art critic attacks as clueless Philistinism. Every artist in the country will make groundbreaking exciting new art criticizing the government's poor judgment, while the government desperately looks for a few technicians willing to take their money and make, I don't know, pretty landscape paintings or big neoclassical buildings.

The important point is that elite government can govern with a light touch, because everything naturally tends towards what they want and they just need to shepherd it along. But popular/anti-elite government has a strong tendency toward dictatorship, because it won't get what it wants without crushing every normal organic process. Thus the stereotype of the "right-wing strongman", who gets busy with the crushing.

So the idea of "right-wing populism" might invoke this general concept of somebody who, because they have made themselves the champion of the populace against the elites, will probably end up incentivized to crush all the organic processes of civil society, and yoke culture and academia to the will of government in a heavy-handed manner.

To put it in a different way, to steelman the populist position, democracy does not reflect the will of the citizenry, it reflects the will of an activist class, which is not representative of the general population. Populists, in order to bring institutions more in line with what the majority of the people want, need to rely on a more centralized and heavy-handed government. The strongman is liberation from elites, who aren’t the best citizens, but those with the most desire to control people’s lives, often to enforce their idiosyncratic belief system on the rest of the public, and also a liberation from having to become like elites in order to fight them, so conservatives don’t have to give up on things like hobbies and starting families and devote their lives to activism.

#richard hanania #substack

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guardian-esper · 3 years

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Entry #0: An Introduction

Date: I couldn’t reliably tell you in my current state.

Time: Late morning. Headache-o’-clock.

This might not practically be the best time to start writing, or rather this isn’t the best personal state of physical being, but it’s not like I can do much else when I’m this hung over. Gods, my head is pounding. I don’t think I’ve ever celebrated quite like I did last night. I went ahead to the infirmary and asked for a concoction to deal with this bottle ache, hopefully that’ll kick in soon.

Anyhow, let me back up a little here, remark on some context. Yesterday, I was awarded my first ever promotion in rank for the town guard. Last night, my new fellow sergeants decided to give me the usual rite-of-passage celebration for privates who rank up. I had, ah, to be honest, never touched a drink in my life. Not like that, at least. So uh, that’s two major developments: My first promotion, and my first drunken escapade.

I don’t really remember everything after the first few rounds, but right now I think I feel mostly regret, despite my excitement. Although, I do think I accidentally bumped into one of the women sergeants, in an accident of...inappropriate contact. I think I tried to explain myself through the alcoholic fog, but based on the faint stinging on my left cheek, I feel fairly certain of the strength her backhanding capability.

I uh, I don’t think I’ll be indulging in whiskey quite like that ever again. Need to remind myself to go and apologize later.

Ahem. At any rate, I’m here writing now at the recommendation of the lieutenant I’m now serving directly under. They said it would be good to keep a record of some kind, a source of reflection on any future operations or happenings. Not that I or they expect there’ll be all that much, considering how usually peaceful and calm it is in this little town. Still, I guess it might be worth it in a general sense, at least.

I think I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself, though. I’ve completely forgotten to record an introduction. Let’s continue this properly.

Name: Ivan Stavros.

Race: Human.

Age: 21. Born on the twenty-first day of the ninth month of the year.

Title: Sergeant of the town guard of Trelynshire.

Responsibilities: Second in command to my unit’s leader, Lieutenant B’jorn. In addition to making the usual town rounds and participating in the usual drills, I’ll be sometimes sent as messenger boy between the lieutenants and the captain. In more rare occasions, I’ll be put in charge of my unit. If circumstances ever demand it, that is.

...honestly, aside from a bit of a pay raise and some more authority, I don’t expect my new station to amount to too much. Other than a rare few major incidents, not a lot of particular danger ever comes knocking on our doors. Trelynshire is a pretty quiet town, with nothing but miles of wilds and forestry surrounding. So we’re a bit on the isolated side here, and in the context of the wider world...if I’m being honest, it’s rather boring. Peaceful, yes, and full of kind and hardworking folk, but you aren’t exactly going to find many thrilling stories about imminent danger threatening the townsfolk or anything.

Many, I emphasize. There have been a few. Including, I should mention, the events surrounding what led to my somewhat sudden promotion. Which, I will get into after my introductions here are finished. I need to fully recover before I start going over those more recent events again. Otherwise, Trelynshire itself isn‘t entirely boring, or empty of intrigue or mystery. Far from it, actually, though most of its secrets are kept rather hush-hush. Again, I will get into that, probably in a future entry.

Back to myself, however, I’ve got a solid 21 years of life to recount. At this point, they’re not something I’ve sat down to think about very much. There are...some things that aren’t very favorable to reminisce. Some things I’ve only spoken to a few people in confidence about; one of them being Lieutenant B’jorn, mentioned above. The man doesn’t like to pry too much, but he has genuinely tried to help me out, even with advice on personal matters. That might be another reason he recommended I start journaling: for the supposed therapeutic aspect of it. I mean, maybe he’s right, perhaps it would be good to finally sit down and take stock of my 21 years on this Earth, but...I’m not certain how easy that’s going to be.

I think maybe I should let this hangover let up first. Let me just sleep on it for a bit.

...

The time: Early evening, same day.

Right, I feel better now. That concoction’s worked wonders, and I’ve napped the hangover off otherwise. The rain and grey skies outside helped me sleep. Just a little worn-out still. Thank the gods that I was allowed a few days off to recuperate before taking my new station.

Anyroad, where was I? Right. The story of my life. Hmm...

Let me preface by saying that, I’m not taking stock of any of this for reader’s sympathy, not to say ‘poor poor me’ or anything like that. I don’t like to stay too hung up on the past. Growing up here in Trelynshire, my mentor would often tell me that the past need not define me or anyone, yet reflection is important all the same. That it’s to be learned from, or something. Honestly, I don’t know about that. The past is what it is, and can’t be changed. In my case, I prefer to just not hinge on it. Or think about it much at all, really. It’s not like I’m going to get closure or anything like that, and besides, there’s the here and now, and the future to think about. This town has been kind and patient with me, and gave me as good of a fresh start as I could have ever asked for. What good can really come from hinging on things that can’t be changed?

Damn it, I’m delaying. I told Lieutenant B’jorn that I would try to write, if at least to keep my head clear and focused in my upcoming post as a sergeant. He needs me focused, like everyone else. C’mon, Ivan, buckle down and get it done. It’s not like anyone else is going to read this anyway.

Right, then. I guess the very beginning of things would normally be the best place to start. Yet...I think it might be necessary here to jump around a bit. At least to better contextualize past events in conjunction with where I am in the present.

It would be most prudent then to start with the fact that Trelynshire is not my native home. No, I’m actually not from anywhere quite near here. I’m from a much more largely governed area, and Trelynshire is for all intents and purposes an independent town, as far as I can tell. As much as Trelynshire is (by a long shot) more home to me than my original home was, I feel the need to tell about my origins here.

To put matters simply, I am more or less a refugee. My home city is, as far as I know, currently in a severely war-torn state. I only saw a few days of a glimpse at this conflict before I, and many other children at the time, were rescued and extracted from the children’s boarding school we had been living in. Or rather, I should say, where we were frankly being kept and groomed. You see, according to what little I’ve learned, my home city-state has fallen into a state of fascism and borderline dictatorship over the last few generations. Growing up, I couldn’t really grasp what was going on around me there, especially being one of the ostracized lower-class kids, but in hindsight, the place is and has been a right mess.

For a more broad geographical and political context: Trelynshire is located deep within forested wilds, further inland on the continent, which all major maps call Eliostar. If one travels from Trelynshire far to the northwest, they will encounter a major desert region. This region extends into a major peninsular landmass, which is the geographical home to a major empire composed of a number of distinct city-states. Well, ex-empire, I should say. Over time, the political configuration become more democratic as the various city-states began to elect representatives to rule alongside the empress, and keep her power in check. If I recall correctly, this area is now officially called The Imperial Republic of Akkacia, formerly the Akkacian Empire.

My home city, Ireithett, is actually the capitol of one the Republic’s major city-states, Vortix, which lies near the mountainous threshold between the Republic and the desert separating the peninsula from the rest of the continent. As far as the past of this city-state goes, what I do know is that it has always been notable as one of the more militarily powerful of the states, second only to Sythemar further west. In the recent decades, however, Vortix has been the cause of tension through the Republic, and by the time I was around eleven years old, any political stability it maintained with the rest of the Republic had broken down. Whatever sparked it, an armed conflict broke out between Vortix and the rest of the Republic, who in time had fought their way across Vortix’s farmlands into Ireithett itself, intent to storm the capitol, take control, and force the leaders into some kind of agreement. I don’t know what the source of the conflict was, or even if it’s close to have been resolved yet, but that’s not currently high on my list of interests to know. As far as my life there goes, however...

Ireithett was always called the ‘crown jewel’ of Vortix, being the one major city to populate the otherwise overwhelmingly farmland structure of the nation-state. But if you were asking me if that was true, having grown up on the inside of the capitol, I could tell you that is actually far from the case. Most of the city is, frankly, overwhelmingly slums. There was always a more poor district in the outer areas, but in the past, it was much smaller. Where there was apparently an existing middle class region, there isn’t really anything left of that. I snuck in once, in fact, only to find that all of the housing was abandoned, decaying, and/or used for some governing or policing purpose by those in their unreachable ivory towers, which were separated from us common folk by tall, iron-wrought walls. In short, where I lived, and everywhere I could even go, were all slums. Even more bizarrely than this, we weren’t even allowed to leave the city itself, so I never saw much of the green fields and farmlands outside the city. A decaying capitol was all I knew, and as you might guess, it was rife with danger. Crime, homelessness, gangs, violence and substance abuse were common, and there were even rumors of trafficking. Of weapons, drugs, and...I loathe to think about it, but of people. As hard as it was being a growing kid in the slums, I shudder to think about how some less fortunate than I ended up.

In short, well, it was a shithole. I really can’t describe it any other way.

Ironically, though, the only thing scarier than thugs or traffickers was the city guard. A lot of brutalizing bastards acting at the behest of the elite, or whoever might be able to pay them more or do them the right favors. They knew little mercy and had just as little patience. Claimed to be acting in our best interests to try and get us to cooperate, but they were all the bloody definition of dirty law enforcement. And I was one of the kids unfortunate enough to be born in this city’s walls, under their monitoring.

Yet I was fortunate enough to eventually be rescued, just as all hell was breaking loose upon the city from the invading united armies that made their ways to the city gates. Obviously, it’s nearly impossible for me to look back in positivity at those days. My family didn’t have much to its name, and avoiding trouble (and resisting the urge to get into trouble for a scrap of anything better) was a monumental task all its own. I had seen my hefty share of street fights, brutality, fear and strife before I was free from it all, and it’s a difficult thing to look back on.

Honestly, though, it’s not that I don’t ever look back. I try not to, but...unfortunately, I’m not certain I can say all ties with the place are completely cut. I did, of course, have family and friends there when I was extracted and eventually brought here to Trelynshire. I don’t know, but I like to think I still do have said friends and family. The thing is, I have no idea where they are, if they ever broke free from that place, or if they’re even alive. And this was ten years ago. I don’t know what happened to my mother after I was separated from her and put in that bloody stupid boarding school. I never learned what became of my father, who joined the city guard apparently in hopes of bringing us into a better life inside the upper-class walls. And my friends...not a day goes by when I don’t wonder about them, if they’re okay or not. This kind of distance from them...it’s a thing that I loathe about how things have turned out.

Don’t get me wrong. I could not be more fortunate than I am to have been taken care of these past ten years by the folk here in Trelynshire. Despite the difficulties I’m (often, but in jest) reminded I posed to them, I’ve always been cared for and looked after here. I have a place in the world here, and it seems I’m carving out a future of some kind. But do you know how tantalizing it is to be suddenly whisked away from your home, downtrodden and hellish as it was, never to know what became of everyone you knew?! It sticks with you. Indefinitely. You feel things like guilt, even regret, regret for not finding out on your own before it was too late. Regret for not bloody fighting for it, even if you know there was little you could do.

Forgive me. I need another moment to cool off. Emotion is getting the better of me here.

...

Apologies. I’m alright. Let me try and wrap this up for the time being.

To shed light on what I was just talking about, I have indeed tried, once or twice, to learn about the goings-on in Ireithett the past ten years. Unfortunately, even if someone makes it through the desert to the border, it’s hard to be granted passage into Akkacia as a whole right now. Apparently the conflict is still going on, and the Republic’s government isn’t exactly keen on letting very many details out. In light of all this, I frustratingly only have more questions instead of answers. Still, the captain of the guard here assured me that she would keep whatever line of information possible between here and there, and update me on any developments. There is at least that, and she has my deepest appreciation. Not that I’m really holding my breath for anything to come to light any time soon, but all the same it means a lot. I’ve thanked her, and in meantime, I’ve just tried to carry on and focus on where I’m going, not where I’ve been.

With that though, I’m getting a little too tired, emotionally and physically, to carry on with all this right now. It’s getting dark outside, and the post-nap drowsiness from earlier is really starting to weigh on me. There is more to tell, certainly, but at the moment, I don’t feel very up to the task. I do, however, have a few days of off-time left before my first official shift as a lieutenant, so maybe after a good night’s rest I can go into more detail tomorrow. For better or worse, there’s a lot left to unpack here, but I’ll try again perhaps in the morning. Hmm...mayhaps I’ll set up to write in the local cafe. I could use something strong to reset with, and the service there is always top-knotch. For now, if Hypnos would be so willing to give me an uninterrupted sleep, I’ll be up and going strong again in the morrow. Until then.

-Ivan

#DnD #dungeons and dragons #d&d #d&d character #aasimar #psi warrior #fighter #ivan stavros #journal #writing #fiction #5e #fictional characters

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enkelimagnus · 3 years

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Raised Jewish

Bucky Barnes Gen, 2709 words, rated M for Hydra shit

Jewish Bucky Barnes, pre TFATWS, post Endgame

Bucky's therapy session with Dr Raynor takes a turn for the worse when Raynor starts asking him about his identity.

TW: queer used as a slur, mention of Bucky's 1945 "death", Raynor being the worst therapist

Read on AO3

Part 5 of Making a Home - the Jewish Bucky series

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Dr Raynor isn’t nice.

She’s not kind, or sweet. She doesn’t speak the way Sam does when he’s trying to figure out if Bucky’s okay. She’s harsher, more commanding. She seems more used to orders than to niceties, and so is he.

Yet, he can’t stand it.

He can’t stand her. He can’t stand the way she looks at him, with her notebook and her pencil clicking. He can’t stand her questions, and the fact she knows everything he’s talking about. She has access to all his files, the Hydra ones, the Army ones, everything. She knows everything about him.

Why is she asking all these questions? Why is she even pretending to give a fuck? She’s here for a paycheck, and he’s here because he has to be. He suffers through this shit because he doesn’t want to go back to prison.

He spent one month in the Raft after Stark’s funeral. They put him in custody the day after Steve left, and he was there until his trial. It was hell. Claustrophobic and silent and… he has to breathe in deeply whenever he thinks about the absolute despair of that month.

The whole prison smelled like seawater and cleaning products, there was a heavy, unmistakably nefarious bracelet around his left wrist, and the cell was too small. Way too small.

Bucky closes his eyes and inhales deeply, trying to chase the phantom of the Raft’s smell from his nostrils. He gets drying flowers and washed out perfume instead, coming from the vase on the table by Dr Raynor’s chair and from the woman herself. It’s not unpleasant, as far as smells go.

He’s stopped paying attention for a moment, and when his eyes refocus, she’s staring at him with that pinched look that says she’s expecting him to explain what he was thinking about, what pulled him from the session and made him lose focus. She hates when he’s not focused.

He sets his jaw and shifts his fingers in his gloves, hearing leather creak over his left knuckles, and stares right back at her, silent. He doesn’t like talking to her about the things in his head. He’s fought for them too long and too hard to give them to the first person he’s told to give them to.

She’s the closest to a handler he’s had since Colonel Helmut Zemo in Berlin. Or, as he introduced himself back then, Doctor Theo Broussard. What is it with Bucky and shrinks?

“I see our usual conversation isn’t enough to keep your attention, James,” she says. It feels like a reprimand. She says ‘James’ the way handlers said ‘Soldier’. Like it’s a threat.

He stays stubbornly silent. He’s always been the stubborn kind. Hard to get through, hard to break. Much stronger people than Dr Christina Raynor have attempted to break their way into his mind. They had to torture him to do so.

“Let’s change subjects then,” she nods, and pulls her notebook out. Bucky wants to scream. It’s not red, but it feels red.

“I think it’s time we dive deeper into your identity.��

Alarm bells go off in his mind and he freezes. Your identity . What is she referring to? What does she know? There are things that Bucky prays aren’t in the files. Things he never wants anyone to ever find out, especially her. Old instinctual fears of teenagehood suddenly rise and the leather creaks harder, the sound mixing with the wiring noises of the arm. It’s a quiet threat wrapped in a sound, like a wolf’s warning growl.

“Please remember to control yourself, James.”

She’s so very good at reminding him he’s only free because she wants him to be. The second he shows any sort of aggression, he’ll be put back in that tiny cell, with that bracelet and won’t see the sun for the rest of his overly long life. He knows it. He can feel it.

His obedience is part of the deal he made with the government. He has to comply with their demands. And that includes humoring Dr Raynor.

“What do you want to dive into?” He asks, letting his irritation obviously show. She can’t take that from him. He will comply, but fuck them if they believe he’ll do it without attitude.

If she starts asking about his relationships and Steve, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. He can’t escape. He’s trapped in this room, with this woman, until she decides that their session is over. This is the price of his freedom.

He can’t tell her, or anyone, about Steve. He can’t do that to him, to his name, to his legacy. He just can’t stain him this way. It’s the kind of secret that has to die with him. Captain America can’t be a queer.

He forces himself to stay still, to not let nervous motions betray his emotional state, and he just waits to see what Dr Raynor knows. The other shoe will drop. He’s just trying to prepare for it.

She drums her pencil against the side of the horrible notebook and exhales through her nose, obviously irritated by his attitude. He just stares back at her.

“I’ve read your files, James,” Dr Raynor starts, the way she does so often. “And you’ve mentioned the word shul some time ago. I’m guessing you did not use it to mean school. You don’t have German ancestry.”

Bucky relaxes a little at that. Alright, it’s not about Steve. He silently thanks anyone who might be listening.

“My mother spoke a little German,” he replies conversationally. From what he remembers, it was only bits and pieces, picked up from growing up in a large city. It was probably mostly Yiddish.

“You were raised Jewish.”

Bucky can’t help the full body shift at that. He bristles. It feels like an attack, like an accusation. It feels ugly and menacing coming from that woman who knows too much. It feels disgusting in her mouth.

What does she want him to answer to that? What does she want from him?

He knows he’s not much of a Jew anymore. He knows what he’s done is too much, too ugly, too against everything he was ever taught. He was taught to save lives even if it breaks religious rules, to take care of people, to be kind and helpful and make sure to do good in the world and all he’ll ever be remembered for is ugly disgusting acts of horror.

He knows all of what he was raised to be is gone. He’s pretty sure it was gone the instant his hand slid on the train railing and he felt himself pulled down by gravity.

That moment where he saw the horror and anguish written all over Steve’s beautiful face. That moment where he knew he’d never see his mother again. His sisters. That moment he screamed in fear but tried to drink in Steve’s face for the last time. As if it could make it less terrifying and painful and lonely.

There was too much time during the fall. Too much time for him to think and feel. I’m going to die alone. He’d wanted to die old with his loved ones or the Chevra Kadisha with him. No one’s supposed to die alone.

The pain had been blinding. Some nights, he can hear his own wails again. Life and death have that in common. The screams.

“James.” Dr Raynor’s voice snaps him back to the present and she still looks pissed at him.

Bucky exhales and his breath is shaky. Panic curls into his bones. He can feel something inside of him tremble and he looks at the window. He could jump through it. Escape it that way. There are no bars on the window, it’s just glass, and it’s only two levels high. It’s doable, easy even. It won’t hurt that badly. He inhales, deep. Ayo taught him that one. Breathing. Focus on your body rather than on the storm in your mind, White Wolf.

He focuses on his body, but mostly on Ayo. The memory of her is strong and firm in his mind, in the same way she talks and walks. Ayo’s eyes always have weight. The kind of weight - smothering or comforting - depend on how he behaves. He’s trying to be good. He’s trying to be good for Wakanda, for Ayo, and for Princess Shuri and for King T’Challa.

Dr Raynor should be the one helping him, not the memory of Ayo.

He calms down, eventually, and sighs deeply, closing his eyes for a second. There’s a clock ticking loudly. It’s a wonderful sort of noise for him in this moment. It’s rhythmic and predictable.

“I was,” Bucky replies to Raynor’s earlier comment. He was raised Jewish.

In all truth, he was born Jewish more than he was raised Jewish. At least that’s what his father would say. That he was born into a legacy, born into a community. Born to sing songs in age-old tongues. Born with knowledge and strength in his soul.

He hasn’t thought about those words in years.

“You don’t talk about it.”

Why would he? There’s nothing to say. Words and experiences that he’s half-forgotten over the time, that he doesn’t have anyone to share with anymore. Community and family were such important parts of every ritual, and now he’s alone. Completely and utterly alone.

“There’s nothing to say,” he says out loud.

Raynor crosses her legs and leans back in her seat, watching him. “I would expect there’s a lot. You worked for an organisation that was born from Hitler’s government. You spent seventy years furthering nazi ideology and agenda.”

Bucky wants to scream. It’s salt in an open wound. It’s violent. He closes his eyes and tries to keep his cool. He can’t lose it here. He has work to do still, amends to make still, in the free world, and he is so desperate to stay out of prison.

“I know,” he replies. His voice is so tight it might break any second.

He knows. He’s very intimately aware of what he did, what it meant, who he was for seventy godforsaken years. He’s aware that it means he can’t possibly claim that part of his life back. He can’t be a Jew anymore. Not after being a Nazi agent for so long.

Even if he wasn’t actually one, even if he had no choice. He killed people and said ‘Hail Hydra’ and made the world a worse place every day of his existence. His actions are why fascism has such a prominent place in today’s political landscape. He’s responsible for it, for putting people in power, for killing good people. It’s on him. It isn’t his fault. It’s still on him.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he tells Dr Raynor, and now his voice is quiet. “Not to you. Not to anyone. Ever.”

How can this part of his life possibly be of interest to the government? Do they think his jewish upbringing means he’s less likely to go back to Hydra and their neo-nazi friends? Do they see him reclaiming that part of his identity one more reason to keep him free? Is it a ploy? Is this going to be used against him, again? Can’t he have one thing in his life that isn’t used by someone else for their gain?

“It could be a way for you to form connections.” As if she gives a flying fuck if he has friends and family. As long as he doesn’t start killing people, comes to his appointments and does whatever the government tells him like a good fucking dog, he can pretty much go fuck himself.

He doesn’t know if he’s ever felt this angry with her before.

How dare she touch this part of his life? How dare she prod him about it, let him know she knows? How dare she take that one thing that no one has been able to touch before?

Even Hydra didn’t know.

They never asked, his dog tags had P on them, and there are a lot of other Americans that were circumcised. They didn’t know.

But she does. The US government does. And he can’t have it be his secret anymore.

“Stop,” he asks, louder than he expected. “Stop, I said no.”

As if that has ever stopped anyone. As if those words have ever brought him anything but renewed suffering.

He doesn’t see her anymore. His eyes are open but he can’t see anything, and he’s panicking and he wants to run so far away. He wants to leave Brooklyn, and leave the US, and disappear and never come back. Fuck his pardon, fuck Sam, fuck everything and everyone, and he can go back to living in Romania and having no name and no handlers and no one.

He stands up suddenly and she flinches. She’s scared of him. Of course she is.

“The session’s not over,” Raynor tells him quietly, calmly, despite her earlier flinch. “Sit back down.”

“No,” he bites back.

He’s trapped, and he can’t actually leave because they’ll put him in prison for it, and he can’t do anything but stand there and shake with barely controlled emotion and try to wait it out. But he doesn’t have to take her orders, and he doesn’t have to be happy about it, all he has to do is be here and answer with more than a grunt.

He can say no. She can’t make him sit down. She’s not strong enough. Physically, anyway.

It takes on average three expertly-trained soldiers to take him down, and that’s when he’s half-starved and in pain. He’s been eating well, he’s clear of any sedative, and he’s not in physical pain. There is no way she can take him down, unless she has a gun. But in this room, if she makes a move for a gun; he’ll snap her wrist before she manages to touch it. She can’t do shit.

“Alright then,” she nods.

He narrows his eyes. She should be mad at him.

She looks down at her notebook and back at him. He stares at her, glares at her, trying to convey that if she starts writing in that fucking book, shit is going to happen. So she doesn’t.

“Why is this upsetting to you?” She asks him, back to her bullshit questions, and it makes Bucky want to punch something, anything. But he can’t.

Everything he has is devoted to controlling himself. His gloves creak again, with the exertion of containing his fists. The prosthetic is loud in the silence, threatening. At least it’s loud to him.

“I said no.”

“So it’s all off limits?”

He nods. “Yes.”

Boundaries, that’s what they’re called. And that part of his identity is behind the line. He thought he was ready to talk about everything that’s in the files, but he was wrong. Not that. Never that.

Dr Raynor sighs heavily, looking away from him. He can tell she’s only pretending, trying to make him feel a little more at ease.

“I need to know about these things, James.”

He huffs. “I’m doing the work you want me to do. I have a quiet life.”

“You’ve told me about the shul already,” Dr Raynor points out.

“Yeah. I did.” And it was a mistake.

He just wants to be left alone. He wants to do his job and be left alone. And she doesn’t get that. She scoffs when he tells her he wants peace and serenity, she needles him about the things he’s not ready to say. He’s pretty sure she’s not a good therapist, and he literally doesn’t have any other experience.

Dr Raynor sighs heavily again, parading her irritation out to him. He doesn’t move.

“Well. We won’t get anywhere today. You’ve won. The session’s over, you can go home.”

You’ve won. He tastes something sour.

He shoves his hands in his pockets and nods at her. There’s no use in dignifying her with much of anything. He mumbles ‘goodbye’ because he was raised right by his ma and calls it a fucking day.

He’s pretty sure he finishes his pack of cigarettes by the time he gets home.

#jewish bucky series #bucky barnes #dr christina raynor #jewish bucky barnes #mine #fic #marvel

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americanredragger · 3 years

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A Letter to My Mother (That I am too scared to send)

Okay. We’re having this talk now. I have been putting it off because there’s never been a way for me to keep my cool long enough to say it straight. I’ve been nice, I’ve been polite. I’ve walked away from conversations rather than address this directly because I don’t want to lose my mom.

Yesterday was unlike anything in American history. There is no both-sides-ism to be taken here. There is no even vaguely similar violence unleashed by the Left. This isn’t to say that NO violence has ever been unleashed by the left, it can and does happen. But nothing like this. This is unprecedented in both it's scope and audacity.

Unless you can point to an instance in which a Democrat president (or Senator, or Governor) whipped up a riot and unleashed those rioters on the Seat of Government of the United States of America, causing it to be breached and overrun by a hostile force for the first time in 207 years, the things don’t equate at all.

Unless you can point to a riot held by alt-right wingers in which the police cracked down on them HARD to the level of being condemned by the International Criminal Court as bordering on war crimes, the things don’t equate at all.

This was a direct assault on our government by a crowd whipped up by a sitting president. This has never happened before.

The Capitol Police removed the barricades and guided the insurrectionists in.

They chatted and took selfies with them. Exchanged fist bumps with them.

The seditionists were allowed to leave with few arrests, just… gently guided out once the barbarian hordes had their fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaPTjQZBLhQ

And yes, Trump (eventually) told them to go home, but refused to condemn what they'd done and finished his speech with "We love you. You're very special." and continued to refer to his political opponents as "evil".

This is quite literally unprecedented in American history. As in, nothing comes close. That's what "unprecedented" means.

If this had been BLM, the response would have been entirely different. DC would be on lockdown. The police would be bringing WAR to the streets. There would be helicopters, APCs, and beat cops dressed like the US Army rolling into Baghdad in 2003. The DC area hospitals would be overwhelmed with rioters suffering from horrific head and spine injuries from trigger-happy use of rubber bullets and night-sticks. Hell, Trump tear-gassed ACTUAL peaceful protesters last summer just so he could stage an awkward photo op in front of a church, which even the Clergy called him out on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzBhYhu7NYI

Don't you DARE equate the two.

I'm tired of the whataboutisms. I'm tired of ignoring the evidence right in front of you. Donald Trump is the single most corrupt, evil man America has ever elected to the presidency. He has worked hard to transform the Republican party into something that actual Holocaust survivors and experts have called "Neofascist" and even less flattering terms.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/5/17940610/trump-hitler-history-historian

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/07/16/its-not-wrong-to-compare-trumps-america-to-the-holocaust-heres-why/

https://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/2020/10/25/holocaust-survivor-fears-rising-tide-ugliness-blames-trump-opinion/3740781001/

https://forward.com/scribe/455507/100-year-old-holocaust-survivor-compares-trump-to-hitler/

https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article223718330.html

Historians and victims of fascism the world over point to what Trump and his transformed Republican party have been doing as president when asked how the Weimar Republic fell and the Nazi regime rose.

The overwhelming amount of terrorist attacks in the last five years have been Trump supporters (Well over half stemming from that singular cause, with the rest divvied among a MASSIVE swathe of motives), but none more so overwhelmingly so than yesterday's.

There is no left wing equivalent for this in America until you go all the way back to the Weather Underground bombings, and even they were not goaded on by the incumbent politicians of a party.

Your party has been STOLEN from you. The Party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan is no more. And now it’s stealing you from your children as we have watched you and dad drift further and further into the Hannity-Limbaugh-Carlson echo chamber.

88 years ago next month, right wing extremists set fire to the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic. Over the next few days, they seeded reports that it was actually the communists, maybe socialists, no, it was definitely anarchists… or was it trade unionists? Either way, it HAD to have been The Left who burned down the Reichstag.

This was used to expand and hold onto the power of the Chancellor, a man who need not be named. The next few years proved to be sorrowful for everyone.

That same blame-shifting is already happening again, but it's not in some far away country, it's happening here, where we all thought it couldn't.

This sort of event is unprecedented in the United States, or it was until yesterday. It is not so unprecedented elsewhere.

The only difference is that this attempt failed.

The attempt was made because Trump’s own administration found that this was the most secure election in American history, and Trump’s lawsuits to the contrary were laughed out of court by Trump-appointed judges, including his Supreme Court justices, and his exceedingly incompetent and well-documented attempts to get state officials to overturn a legitimate election all failed.

I still believe you and dad are good, honest people. Patriots who want America to do well in the world.

You can not-like Nancy Pelosi, or Obama, or Biden, or Hilary Clinton. That’s your prerogative, and we’ll agree on plenty in that regard. You’re well within your rights to believe that my preferred economics don’t work. We’ll disagree heartily, but that’s normal for families, especially between parents and their kids.

But your party has been hijacked by neofascists, malignant narcissists, and white supremacists.

I am on my knees BEGGING you to see what so many experts and victims have been warning you about for years.

The Left did not do this.

Trump did.

You have been led astray by an vain, selfish, greedy demagogue, a well documented honorless grifter who embodies everything Christ opposed, and uses people until they have nothing more to give him and discards them. He has cloaked this latest grift in the American flag and set a cross upon it, the only way Fascism ever COULD take root in America, as we saw with Joe McCarthy in the Second Red Scare.

It’s changing you. You can’t see it because it’s happening to you, but those around you can, and it’s scaring us.

Please, finally, truly see this. I want my parents back. You’re going down a path I can’t follow and it’s breaking my heart.

In 2016, I broke from the Republican Party because I saw calamity coming in the nomination of Donald Trump. Only 4 years later, and history has soberingly showed me that I was more right than I could have ever guessed, and my world view has never been the same since. I have looked back at the political opinions I wrote and posted then, and they were so selfish and hateful that it was physically painful for me to put myself through that review. I was a puppet. I couldn’t have seen it at the time because I was at the center of it, and I still live in dread of the monster I would have become if I’d kept to that path. I see that same kind of speech coming from you now - the jingoism, the recycled talking points, the Orwellian denials, and the near-unquestioning loyalty to the stars of the Republican Party and their mouthpieces at Fox, OAN, Newsmax, and the AM Radio circuit. I see the most selfish parts of who I used to be, and I know that deep down, you are not that person because I still see you constantly striving to be a good mother, a good Christian, and a model human being.

I’m imploring you to finally look at the evidence, the boundless clear and present evidence, and see what men like Gingrich, McConnell, and Trump have turned your party into. What they are turning you into, the same as they tried with me.

I know you wouldn’t be happy as a Democrat - I myself am only begrudgingly a Democrat because the system doesn’t allow for a viable alternative (and that’s a whole different issue that deserves it’s own library of articles). I’m not trying to convert you. I just need to know that you can look at the evidence with your own eyes like I did and see that you’ve been played for a sucker by men who cry wolf and distract you by having you chase shadows while they line their pockets with money and power. Please stop listening to these monsters, stop swallowing their poison. I know how easy it is to be in that world because I myself have lived in it for most of my life. I fully understand the appeal: there are easy answers for everything, you always know who the enemy is and who your supposed allies and benefactors are. But I also left that behind, and yes, it hurts. It hurts a lot, and frequently. But despite the pain, I know I am better off for having done it.

Yes, I have to question the people who claim to represent me more. I have to question EVERYTHING more because I now know that nothing is as clear cut as I thought it was - once removed from Plato’s Cave, I no longer had the luxury of a simple world. And yet I am still happier because I am so much more my own person now. Yes I falter, and worse still, some days I fall back into the old ways of thinking, but now I recognize that for what it is and it is easier to deal with.

You’ll always be a Conservative, Mom, but I see you on the path that I was on, a path that nearly robbed me of my critical thinking and objectivity, and one which would have weaponized my sense of patriotism to benefit people who are not me. You have kept that course far longer than I. Please put aside the whataboutisms, the both-sides-isms, and finally see the evil, ravenous monster that killed your party from the inside and now wears its skin to deceive you into feeding it further.

I don’t ask that you agree with my politics or economics. I AM begging you though to split from this political machine which is changing you into something I no longer recognize. I want the parents I used to have, the ones who could look at things objectively and form their own opinions instead of repeating talk show buzz lines.

Please, recognize the shadows on the wall of the cave that wicked men are showing you are NOT reality. Please, join me in the truth of the world outside.

#I very nearly sent it #but she's already having tremendous issues between her and my sister and I didn't want to compound those and split the family apart #more than it already has #at any rate #if she doesn't start cooling down by fall #well #at least I have it written down here for easy access #politics #family #trump #republicans #democrats #echo chamber #republican #mitch mcconnell #conservative #conservatives #family issues

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whiterosebrian · 3 years

Text

Q Shaman and Deeper Problems

I for one hoped that this year would get off to a nicer start than the previous year—but it certainly did not! By now you should have seen frightening videos of partisans of a wannabe strongman invading the Capitol in Washington DC. You might have even seen that one man wearing Nordic pagan symbols as tattoos along with a mock-Lakota headdress. I was unsure if I wanted to write about it. I wasn’t sure if I could add any meaningful commentary on top of what so many others have written or spoken. Maybe I should still at least attempt to add my voice in public.

I don’t want to center whiteness, but I do need to address it to some extent. It’s no secret that the wannabe strongman has appealed to whiteness as an ideology and an entire social structure. Whiteness might be considered a hivemind, one that largely flattened and assimilated European peoples before going on to outright colonize other peoples and lands. I’ve said before that I am a man of Northern European descent and have started reconnecting to the old Northern European spiritual heritage. I’ve even seen it suggested that such a spiritual walk might be part a project of decolonizing alternative spirituality. Just as many indigenous people of Turtle Island want to renew with their ancient heritages, settlers might also do the same for themselves. Perhaps there’s a truth that folkish and Nazi heathens grotesquely distort.

More and more I’ve seen a reckoning over systemic white privilege and conspiracist mentalities within alternative-spirituality circles. Anyone who pays attention to criticisms from certain communities might already be aware of the appropriation of precious spiritual traditions on the part of New-Agers. Furthermore, you may have heard the neologism “conspirituality” to describe how easily New-Agers can fall into the most dangerous conspiracy theories. You may have heard of David Icke’s notorious stories about alien reptilians (sometimes used as a code-word for Jewish people)—but that’s the tip of the iceberg. That “Q Shaman” character, the one with the tattoos and headdress, has promoted the now-infamous Q-Anon movement, hence the name. Many, many more people, including those with substantial online followings, have been seduced by a movement that seemingly champions children caught up in horrible crimes. There are plenty other people who will describe Q-Anon to you in depth.

Even as I oppose white supremacy and conspiratorial fascism, I need to remember why I do so. I have my share of privilege, however vulnerable I am in other respects. I need to keep in mind the goal of bending the arc towards justice for various marginalized people and the earth itself. I feel like I merely shout into the void (or, worse yet, I risk coming off as merely performative) because I’m an autistic warehouse worker who doesn’t always have energy for any creative, intellectual, or mystical endeavors, much less anything remotely resembling activism. Should I still say something in public?

What can neopaganism offer to the world? That’s a question that conscientious neopagans need to ask. As important as it is to oppose fascist and exclusionary appropriations, that can’t be the only thing that neopagans do in public. They need to show what neopaganism offers while they decenter whiteness.

As I’ve done research into the pre-Christian religions that neopagans do their best to rebuild, again and again I’ve come into animism. In case you need your memory refreshed, animism is a belief that elements of nature, human and nonhuman animals, special places, and special objects have spirits. Speaking of “the other side” is not wrong at all, but the “other side” intersects with our world all the time. They influence our world and our lives. Humans can (and should) have relationships with these spirits too, whether in terms of humble respect or close friendships. Some people who are specially called—or, for people such as me, feel a strong desire—might learn work directly with the very powers of life. There is, in fact, an entire web of life. Heathens and occultists such as Arith Harger and Freyia Norling have helped me learn all that.

Pagan gods have no pretenses to being omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omnipresent, or omniscient. Many neopagans will say that makes more philosophical sense. Norse myths are very notable for illustrating the limited nature of deities. Pagan gods are better seen as powerful intelligent forces who dwell invisibly among us. Many mythical creatures can also be seen that way. In fact, the gods themselves might be seen as personifications of aspects of nature and life. Thor might be seen as thunder and lightning and rain, obviously, but Odin can be seen as a howling, restless wind while Freya might be seen as anything fertile. The myths are, first and foremost, expressions of spiritual truths—anyone who seriously studies historical mythologies will tell you that.

What can neopaganism offer to the world? It can offer a new friendship with the entire web of life. Humans too are a part of life, and marginalized people deserve to be treated as fellow members of the web of life. To my understanding, the Druids of the British Isles and other Celtic lands were learned in the sciences of their day as much as religion and magic—there is most certainly a place for reason and science along with spiritualism and mysticism. They were also civil leaders. While today’s separation of church and state is necessary to prevent an ugly form of authoritarianism, spiritual practitioners need to take responsibility for their human and nonhuman siblings. Interestingly enough, the later Germanic settlers of the British Isles also had leaders who, depending on translation, might be called Druids.

I’ve pondered what more I can do to help more people, to build up an inclusive and compassionate neopagan faith, to assist in correcting the of colonization, hyper-capitalism, and authoritarianism. Throughout my webpages, I’ve made multiple references to a novel that I’ve been very slowly writing. Part of a druid or shaman’s duty is storytelling, and I do wish to have a similar role within our world, so I don’t intend to give up on fiction writing. I may also start brainstorming a sort of book of personal essays about spiritualism, environment, historical injustices, inclusion, and more. In fact, that is what ultimately prompted me to type up this journal entry. I already have a lot of things going on personally, though—and furthermore I may not be yet deeply educated enough to make a really effective collection of essays. I really wish I had more energy when I’m not at the mass-mailing warehouse—my hours may not be much (I only work part-time), but I’m not a hardy man.

Maybe I really did make a tiny contribution by composing and posting this journal entry. Do you suppose that I did? I’m only one man with a very meager online following. I hope to do much more for marginalized and vulnerable people along with the rest of the web of life.

#spirituality #paganism #politics #social justice #pagan

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birdlord · 4 years

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Every Book I Read in 2018

Again, better late than never??

01 On the Town; Marshall Berman - A freewheeling personal and general history of Times Square, which had some great historical tidbits I’d never read before. I think I would have got more out of it if I were interested in Broadway musicals...

02 Stephen Florida; Gabe Habash - A slim little book that follows a college wrestler. One of those books that is described as muscular, when what they mean is brutal.

03 Green Grass, Running Water; Thomas King - Four plot lines intertwine in a story blending mythology, creation, and modern First Nations people dealing with massive transformational change to their lands. I did sometimes feel like I would have enjoyed it more as an audio storytelling experience.

04 People who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman; Richard Lloyd Parry - I don’t often read books like this, but this is essentially a true-crime sort of story, about the murder of a British woman who works as a bar hostess in Japan. Parry covers not just her story, but the whole aftermath, which even pulls in Tony Blair, eventually.

05 My Brother’s Husband; Gengoroh Tagame - Weirdly, two Japan-related books in a row! Another culture-clash tale, when the Canadian husband visits his deceased husband Ryoji’s single-parent brother. The couple had never been to Japan while Ryoji was alive, and so the story of slow acceptance (helped along by little Kana’s openhearted curiosity) is suffused with sadness.

06 Ghosts of the Tsunami: Life & Death in Japan’s Disaster Zone; Richard Lloyd Parry - And, let’s make it three! When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011, I remember thinking that the reaction seemed so orderly, so...Japanese. But this examination puts you right in the various affected communities, following different people, including schoolchildren from Okawa primary. Like with the other Parry book above, we hear about all of the grief, ghosts and lawsuits that follow the disaster.

07 Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History; Rhonda K. Garelick - Once she became famous, Coco Chanel built a scaffolding of lies about her past, and the purpose of this biography is to attempt to see the truth behind them. Garelick concentrates heavily on Chanel’s collaboration with the Nazis, which must have been a challenge given that her company still exists, under her name.

08 Kubrick; Michael Herr - “They speak about the dumbing of America as a foregone thing, already completed, but, duh, it’s a process, and we haven’t seen anything yet. The contemplation of this culture isn’t for sissies, and speaking about it without becoming shrill is increasingly difficult, maybe impossible.” Whoa!

09 Call Me by Your Name; Andre Aciman - I did read this after seeing the film, so as usual it was hard to divorce it from the movie experience.

10 The Left Hand of Darkness; Ursula K LeGuin - A thought experiment about a genderless world, seen from the perspective of an off-planet envoy, who has a range of reactions to the world’s inhabitants. The most enduring section of the book involves a brutal 3-month expedition undertaken by the exiled envoy and a local, a trial by ice, wind and snow. A winter read.

11 Stamped from the Beginning; Ibram X. Kendi - I don’t think I’d really fully grokked the idea that southern white supremacy built itself in order to prevent an uprising of the black and white underclasses, together. The basic rubric of this book is separating American movements, parties and individuals’ thinking into one of three categories: assimilationist, segregationist or genuinely antiracist. Supporting results like abolitionism does NOT make one antiracist, since support could come those with less pure motivations. I highly recommend this one, though it was copy-edited in a pretty haphazard manner!

12 Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers; Barbara Ehrenreich & Dierdre English - A short book charting a couple of parallel stories, of women healers in Europe being dismissed as witches, and the masculinization of medicine (particularly midwifery and the medicine of birth) in the USA.

13 Her Body and Other Parties; Carmen Maria Machado - Short stories skirting the edge of a lot of genres; horror, science fiction, dark comedy. These are women’s stories, that refuse to be dismissed as chick lit. It didn’t connect with me as deeply as it has for some, but I see the appeal.

14 Look Alive Out There; Sloane Crosley - Largely comedic set of essays by a writer whose earlier work I read, about a decade back. It’s a strange experience, to return to someone who has written memoir that seemed to exemplify that late-2000s era and discover that she - and you - have grown.

15 Homesick for Another World; Otessa Moshfegh - Moshfegh’s choice of words (not to mention her characters themselves) remain utterly revolting. I often found myself looking up, shaking my head as if to say THIS BOOK. Considerably funnier than Eileen, which was the first of hers that I read.

16 My Year of Rest & Relaxation; Otessa Moshfegh - After reading this, I found out that Moshfegh basically set out to get her work noticed by populating it with these vile young women. Well, it worked! Your tolerance for unlikeable main characters will be tested by this rich Columbia grad who decides to prescribe herself into a virtual coma within her NY apartment, at the turn of the millennium. And yes, it ends where you think it does.

17 They Can’t Kill us Until They Kill Us; Hanif Abdurraquabi - This collection of music-related writing is wildly far-ranging, poetic and emotional. For myself, I did find I was more interested in those that were related to bands or musicians I had some experience with myself , which was not always the case.

18 The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully; Aaron Carroll and Nina Teicholtz - If you’re a reader of the food media, most of what’s in here will be familiar to you, debunking fears of meat, GMOs, gluten, MSG. The authors keep their own experience, taste and interests very much in the forefront, which ends up feeling smug and irritating.

19 The Mere Wife: A Novel; Maria Dahvana Headley - My knowledge of Beowulf is scant at best, but this retelling stood very much on its own two feet, set in a tony suburb and comparing the experience of two very different mothers of two very different sons.

20 How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays; Alexander Chee - I’m very much On The Record as being against writers writing about writing, but this might just be an exception.

21 Vancouver Special; Charles Demers - A sort of update on Douglas Coupland’s City of Glass, a book I loved and reread many times. This one has both a more historical bent, and an actual political viewpoint, contrasting with Coupland’s Gen X remoteness.

22 Crudo; Olivia Laing - A rushing frantic little novel, incorporating Trump tweets and Kathy Acker quotes throughout. A difficult read so close to the events described, but I can see this being an amazing window into this weird time, once a few years have passed.

23 Hits & Misses; Simon Rich - This might also be on the line of “writers writing about writing” but Rich manages to do so in a charmingly self-deprecating way.

24 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the US; Jeffrey Lewis - Speculative fiction written as a government report, responding, as we all have been doing, to the endlessly unprecedented Trump presidency. It all started with a tweet, of course...

25 A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; Rebecca Solnit - This book is intended to counter the idea that disasters (“natural” and otherwise) lead people to indulge their worst sides. Solnit looks at the aftermath of some 20th C disasters like the Halifax Explosion, 9/11 and various earthquakes to find examples of people banding together to help the wounded and homeless, even taking the opportunity to create new institutions when authorities fail to do so. A tonic for a world in which disasters are likely to become increasingly common.

26 How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them; Jason Stanley - When I lived in Scotland in 2010, I went to an anti-fascist rally in Edinburgh, and I remember feeling like those attitudes were closer to the surface over there, where at home in Canada they felt abstract. This book traces how fascist policies lurk within democratic frameworks, and can sometimes metastasize to take over the host. Suffice it to say I was probably wrong then, and I’m definitely wrong now.

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racefortheironthrone · 5 years

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Thoughts on Powers of X #2

We’re working on a deadline here, so let’s get to it!

Once Again, We Return...to Octopusheim (X^0):

In this section, Charles and Moira go to Octopusheim to share what they’ve learned with Magneto in order to gain his support for their whole mutant unity masterplan.

Thanks to the timeline infographic from last issue, we know exactly when this particular meeting at Octopusheim is happening - it’s Year 43, four years before the “Moira/Xavier/Magneto schism,” six years before the Genoshan genocide, and nine years before the present day. This timing is quite interesting, because it suggests a high degree of patience on their part. After all, it’s been twenty six years since Moira first introduced herself(herselves?) to Charles, which is a lot of time to not make moves. On the other hand, having a head start didn’t help in earlier lives, so there may be some other rationale.

There’s a really interesting echoing of Giant-Sized X-Men #1, with Xavier explicitly in the role of recruiter once again (we’ll see other pitches of his throughout the rest of HoX/PoX). The difference is that rather than relying on his normal posture of benevolent, almost wizardly, superior knowledge, Charles is using an admission of mutual fault to put them on an even level, which is necessary to gain Magneto’s trust for the psychic link to Moira.

Incidentally, when it comes to character voice, Hickman does an impressive job of nailing not just Magneto but the specific era of Magneto when Chris Claremont re-invented him as the Miltonian anti-villain holding the world to ransom in the name of enlightened despotism and mutant self-protection. “Who determines waht is truly good and truly evil?...I do. I decide.” is particularly well-observed, right down to his ironically Nietzschean self-conception.

At the same time, Moira’s query is clearly meant to shift the terms of discussion from the scientific (”you’re a specialist, specializing in the behavior of mutants”) to the religious. As her warning that “my truth is profound and life changing. It’s primal...” suggests, Moira is testifying in the Protestant sense of the word.

What follows is a series of psychic images of failure that bring the Satanically-proud Magneto to his knees, but remain really ambiguous: his death by Sentinel could be from pretty much any life other than 9, although 4 or 5 seem most likely; given his costume, the image of him in chains seems to be from the Trial of Magneto, which could be in Life 4 or 10; the central image of him with furious glowing eyes could be generic or perhaps a reference to the couple times he’s used artifical power-boosters; the image of him in a SHIELD tank being observed by Nick Fury is unclear; and him fighting the Shadow King is particularly singular, since the Shadow King has yet to show up in the narrative. Interestingly, we don’t see Moira showing him his death at Apocalypse’s hands in Life 9.

For his own part, Xavier is preaching a much more secular argument: mutant unity in order to not merely survive but thrive, which is very Adam Smithian. I’m not the expert that Nir Revel is when it comes to drawing parallels between Israeli history and HoX/PoX, but even with the one course I’ve taken in Israeli history, I could see the parallel between the bargain that Magneto strikes with Xavier (”I won’t acquiesce to sympathy or doubt...I won’t give an inch, I will check you at every moment of weakness”) reads a lot like the compromises made at the founding of the State of Israel between the leaders of the various political parties.

Then again, I think the allegory works for political leaders at the time of the founding of any number of nation-states, which is one of the things that makes the business of nation-building so very difficult. At every step, there are innumerable obstacles of the moment, yet the decisions made on how to overcome them will always have unforeseeable long-term consequences. Something to keep one’s eye on for the future.

Does It Need Doing? (X^1):

In a direct follow-up from Powers of X #1 and House of X #1, Cyclops gets briefed on the Mother Mold/Nimrod mission. Incidentally, I think this segment is a great counter-example to the somewhat overblown statements from some in the fandom that all of these characters are mindless pod-people who are acting out of character; throughout this briefing, Scott is consistently snarky in a very dry way that feels very in character to me.

Magneto’s pointed reference to Operation Paperclip with regards to Orchis I think further emphasizes an ongoing theme that Hickman’s working on with regards to nation-states, nation-building, and nationalism: no nation is free from sin. Even after fighting “the good war” against fascism, the U.S recruited Nazi scientists to give it a technological edge in the Cold War for the same stated reasons of necessity that drive both Krakoan and Orchis policy.

Following on from House of X #2, not only are humans a mere road-bump compared to Sentinels, but even Mother Mold itself is viewed as a secondary problem compared to the hostile AI singularity that is Nimrod.

And further showing how everything links to everything, this mission happens because of the information that Moira brought back from Life 9/X^2. More on this in a bit.

Machines Are Pure Information (X^2):

Speaking of which, we shift to another briefing on Krakoa, one life and a hundred years distant, in which Rasputin and Cardinal brief Apocalypse about the fruits of their own partially-successful clandestine mission.

While Apocalypse is very Apocalypsy in this segment, what with the idea that civilization is the fruit of war and that he’d happily sacrifice Rasputin and Cardinal both for the information he’s received, it is really interesting to see him talk about the powers and perils of information and the dangers of analysis paralysis; this last topic is particularly important as the series continues to explore the nature of these vast, universe-spanning consciousnesses. More on this in a bit.

Speaking of which, we see Nimrod the Lesser getting really distracted by trying to figure out what the mutants were up to, something that will arguably be his downfall. Incidentally, Nimrod’s casual execution of two humans for mouthing off to him not only suggests the lie at the heart of the Man-Machine Supremacy, but also that whatever kind of A.I he might be, he absolutely did not pass the “Heller-Faust line,” because he’s clearly a sociopath who lashes out violently due to emotional impulse.

Going back to Asteroid K, we go back to a discussion of how the machines’ problem is that they “archive every moment of everything,” which makes it impossible for them or anyone else to actually make use of the data. If we apply the same problem to the Phalanx and the other universe-spanning consciousnesses, which for all their vaunted intelligences seem to restrict themselves to consumption of resources and calculation of data without any higher purpose, I’m left wondering whether these singularities are actually idiot gods capering at the heart of the universe.

By contrast, the mutant resistance find their purpose in transcending the bare necessities of survival in the name of transcendant meaning.

Nimbus Infographic:

This infographic, read together with the one that ends the issue, is where we really start to see what X^3 is about, namely Hickman’s thinking on technological/mechanical transhumanism.

To begin with, we learn that the people I’ve been referring to as blutants describe themselves as “post-human,” which suggests that the “human-machine-mutant war” ultimately ended in some sort of synthesis between mutant and machine. Not only do the post-humans have “seer-selves,” but we see that Nimbus started as the “copying - and integration - of their minds into a single thinking machine.”

Moving on, it’s interesting to note that the language of X^3 is entirely focused on terms of assimilation between cultures - will it take place as a consensual “suitor-alliance” or forceful consumption of the lesser by the greater? Is there a difference, when we’re talking about the “ascension” of copied minds?

It’s not a good sign that Nimbus’ interaction with Niburu is all about using “force...to inject” a planet with consciousness, or that the Worldmind decides to take a detour to “consume multiple Saturinian and Jovian moons ino order to increase its...intellect.” Over and over again, intellect and consumption go hand in hand, but we never see intellect actually getting used for anything meaningful (transcendant or otherwise).

Universal Predators (X^3):

Speaking of which, we see in the next section that the whole project of the post-human Outreach project is to negotiate the terms of ascension so that their culture is “preserved” rather than “mined,” in a context in which civilizations interact seemingly only in terms of predator and prey.

It’s particularly ominous that the Phalanx’s opening words are that they “ate your worldmind,” in a process that involves a lost struggle for “sovereignty” - a term that should ring particularly ominously given Krakoa’s struggle to be recognized as a sovereign nation-state.

That the post-humans’ goal is ascension is likewise troubling, because of how closely it tracks the self-abnegating human religion of X^2 (which we’ll see in the next issue) and suggests that the post-humans have abandoned the biological transhumanism of the X^2 mutant resistance.

Types of Societies Infographic:

This infographic reads very differently in the wake of Powers of X #5, suggesting a trans-universe taxonomy of intelligences, with each rung on the ladder thinking it’s the biggest and baddest out there, only to become fodder for the next higher up.

As people have noted, Xavier’s backup of mutant minds through Cerebro potentially puts Krakoa on the ladder, since they’re potentially far above the SI:1 (Machine) level if they ever combine the backups.

At the same time, we’ll see in future issues a number of biomachines - the eight-person long-distance communications system we see in Powers of X , the Five-person (or six-person, given the integral role that Xavier/Cerebro plays) resurrection system, the six-person Krakoan systems (Interface, Transit/Monitoring, Defense/Observation, Secondary/External, Overwatch/Data Analysis), and possibly the five-part Cerebro system - that would seem to be a parallel to the SI:10 (HIve) level of machine consciousness.

Similarly, Cerebro’s database of mutant minds (or the population of Krakoa) could potentially go straight up the chain from Intelligence (SI:100-10,000) to Phalanx (SI:1,000,000)...if the database was turned into a consciousness of its own following the uncommon Kree model, although that would seem to run counter to Krakoan taboos.

Speaking of my skepticism about the intellect of these machine consciousnesses, the deception at the heart of the Technarch (SI:10,000) and Phalanx relationship suggests that, on a universe-wide scale, the Technarchs seem to be rather mindless drones whose only purpose is providing resources to their masters.

One thing that’s slightly odd about Hickman’s description of the Worldmind (SI:100,000) is that, based on its descriptions here, it really should be a Type I Kardashev civilization rather than a Type II, since the line between I and II is planetary vs. solar system-wide energy usage/control.

A final note on the ambiguity of the suitor-alliance vs. consumption relationship - while the post-humans view Ascension as an alternative, this infographic describes Ascension as “consuming” for the purpose of “adding to its intelligence needs.” Either way, you’re just food for thought.

#xmen #xmen meta #powers of x #hoxpox

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blorgon-schmorgon · 4 years

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Btvs rewatch 2k19/2k20 (1x08, I Robot, You Jane)

Continuing my not-so-weekly rewatch of buffy with my partner, we just watched I Robot, You Jane… we actually watched Never Kill A Boy On The First Date, The Pack, and Angel a while ago and I do indeed have Thoughts written out in note form on my iPhone…but I have yet to put them into any coherent form so I might return to them at some point.

For now, I’m going to try to make sense of what is supposedly another contender for the worst episode of BtVS.

On transmediation and digital fears:

If there is anything to take away from this episode, it is its commentary on media and transmediation, fitting for the genre-bending, postmodern pastiche the show would evolve into. From the start, the show has been riffing on horror tropes and movies, but this is the first episode that actually explores what media is, does, and can be – these ideas will be explored with much more finesse and deftness in later seasons, with episodes like Once More With Feeling, Storyteller, Buffy vs Dracula, Restless, Superstar and I’m sure many others that I can’t think of right now. In doing so, this is arguably the first episode to look at itself, a self-awareness that will continue to define and shape the series in years to come. This is after all, the episode with the line: “Besides, I can just tell something's wrong. My spider sense is tingling . . . Pop culture reference, sorry.” This is also one of the most widely reviled episodes – The Passion of the Nerd’s review only offers a drinking game for everything the show gets wrong about computers, it is widely critiqued for being a terrible Willow episode, morgue calls out its bizarre tonal shifts and boring monster, and criticallytouched comments on its absolute bungling of digital horror and its lack of subtlety with regards to those themes. Its last scene, however, is widely loved for the self-aware moment in which the Scooby gang commiserate over how they’ll never have a healthy relationship, which morgue refers to as a moment in which Buffy is placed firmly into the “post-modernist mode of self-aware 90s entertainment, and combined into one scene they come close to breaking the fourth wall and knowing they are characters in a TV show”.

This post-modern self-awareness pervades the episode though! The monster in this episode is essentially a transmedial monster, moving from interface to interface, attempting to become flesh again, moving from book to digital space to a robot body. It is a pity this episode is so clunky – this is a fascinating concept! A network monster! My partner called this proto-proto Black Mirror, and in today’s renewed moment of digital pessimism, it’s interesting how much this episode’s technophobia continues to resonate. Even the men controlled by Moloch seem to be the precursors to the Trio in season 6, who are now read as the precursors to contemporary incels.

The episode itself is intimately concerned with media – the thoroughline to this episode is the introduction of Jenny Calendar, a technopagan who spars with Giles over the promises and drawbacks of the digital age. Jenny argues that technology democratizes knowledge, evidentiated by her own participation in a technopagan online community, with magic no longer bound up in the musty books of a handful of white guys (her words!). Giles on the other hand, abhors the way this democratization loses the specific quality and texture of knowledge found in books, losing the unique “smell” books possess, stripped of sensory and material pleasure. The show takes a few potshots at itself as a TV show in the process – at one point, Jenny refers to TV as “the idiot box” as opposed to the “good box” that is computers; at another point, Jenny tells Giles he’s been watching too many movies.

The unbinding and democratization of knowledge is reflected in the actual unbinding of Moloch, and their inability to return him to a book, which today feels like a commentary on how the Internet unwittingly creates platforms for ancient evils to re-emerge and take new forms in a Hydra-like manner. As noted earlier, this calls to mind the creation of the incel ideology and newfound fascisms that have taken root in online spaces, recalling the fascisms of the 1920’s. Moloch himself, as a demon feeding on love, is an ideological monster, making him particularly apt for a digital monstrosity that creates cults and followers. While the intended metaphor was about the dangers of online dating, the contemporary resonance of this episode is far more about the dangers of online cults, which I find a far more interesting story to chew on. Another thing this episodes hints at is the emergence of fake news – throughout the episode, background characters are overheard noticing odd things about the digital sphere, like a nurse saying someone’s records had been changed. It’s not a particularly interesting development, but it is an interesting historical moment to think over. With the introduction of new information technologies, anxieties over fake information always emerge, which also happened with the introduction of the printing press in 1440. Amusingly, Moloch is binded before the printing press, during the time in which each book was actually individually printed and bound, speaking to Giles’ taste for the unique and specific.

The episode ends when Moloch is finally bound to a robot body, making him killable – the corollary is that if he had remained in the Internet, it would have been impossible for a Slayer to defeat him. True to form, the show will struggle to depict these kinds of networked monsters that exist beyond a specific form, and will only really return to this concept with The First Evil in season 7 (and arguably The First Slayer in Restless). These monsters, which cannot be fought in hand-to-hand combat, provoke a unique conundrum for the show to depict satisfyingly. Moloch is a far more deadly creature on the Internet than he is in a robot body.

Am I overthinking this episode? Probably! But it is an interesting historical artefact (more than it is an interesting Buffy episode), and in the context of a show concerned with media and postmodernism, it has a surprising amount of insights and leads to follow. It’s a pretty meh showing for the characters and dialogue, and definitely nowhere near as good as the show will get, but it’s not as terrible as people make it out to be!

A few other notes:

This is one of the only early episodes to play on surveillance themes – these themes will emerge again in season 4 and 6, as detailed in impalementation’s imagery series of the show.

Morgue’s review argues that one of the reasons this episode doesn’t work is that it ventures too far out beyond the high school scale – yet what I really like about this episode upon rewatch is how creepy it makes the computer lab and the girls’ locker room – these are very specific places to make scary, and goes beyond just the creepy classroom aesthetic that defines some of the more high school Buffy episodes! The specificity of making the computer room scary really appeals to me.

#btvs rewatch 2k19 #btvs rewatch 2k20 #buffy the vampire sla #buffy the vampire slayer rewatch #buffy the vampire slayer meta #btvs meta #i robot you jane #btvs 1x08 #btvs

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anomiezine-blog · 5 years

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The Cult of the Proletariat

“Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It’s that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.”

-Slavoj Zizek

‘But as in all cults, what’s central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you’re very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.’

– Alexei Sayle

I have found a way to tell apart Leninists (otherwise known as Communists or Bolsheviks in the common parlance) from what you might call the reasonable left. It is not the outfits, stained by take-away and Tippex, or their odour, because deodorant is a bourgeois affectation. Instead it is their answer to one rather simple question: ‘Do you trust people to make their own decisions?” I have never met a Leninist that didn’t say No. An addendum to that might be the question: “If you could have your revolution but it would make people poorer and less free, at least in the short term, would you still want it?” Once again I have never met one that didn’t answer in the affirmative. It is the same toxic combination of misanthrope and fanaticism that you can now see in Brexiteers in Britain, and amongst Fascists the world over. It is the belief that you and your tribe alone have received the revealed truth from on-high, and however you see fit to make that a reality is acceptable. It is the language of a cult.

It’s a word that is thrown around a lot and there are even multiple competing definitions, but it is essential to understand what a cult is if we are to understand the toxicity at the heart of Leninist parties of the past and present. What are the obvious signs of a cult? In my opinion, there are 10 unequivocal signs:

1. A small group of people united by a Utopian ideology (or religion) who stand outside normal society.

2. A dominant leader/s that hold complete power over the lives of its members.

3. An all-or-nothing worldview. “Either the Revolution comes or the world will end.”

4. A cadre or administrative class that directs the majority of members.

5. Gaslighting. The changing of facts and reality to suit the party.

6. Mental, physical or sexual abuses (see the SWP in the UK)

7. The policing of language, opinions and the effective creation of secular blasphemy.

8. The welding of the social and the political. The party becomes your only community, sometimes to the detriment to your family and older friends.

9. Those that leave the party become apostates and are to be shunned and demonised.

10. A uniform. In this case conformity of clothing is encouraged through bullying and mocking rather than an order from above.

It is hard to explain to those that have not experienced life in a cult why anyone would willingly join such a toxic entity. Left wing cults, like all cults, don’t look toxic from the outside. In fact, when you first join you are often showered with not only attention, but with a sense of purpose. You feel that finally you are with people that see the problems of the world as you do and are motivated by high ideals of humanism and solidarity. This is described by some psychologists as the lovebombing stage. It is a very powerful indoctrinating tool and often keeps individuals attached to the party long after the toxic nature of the party has become apparent.

In this I can at least speak from personal experience. I was a member of a Trotskyist party, that shall go unnamed, in my youth and I got a firsthand experience of cult tendencies within the left. All the cliches were there; the lovebombing; the close social circle; shadowy General Secretary; the strict hierarchy; the self-censorship of speech; the pandering to party leaders; the Gaslighting; the blasphemy; and the apostates. I have done a large amount of study of what are known as cluster B personality disorders (anti-social, narcissistic and Borderline) since, to try and understand what had happened to me, and I can attest to the presence of these toxic behaviours within all levels of the party structure. I am not the first to notice the cult tendencies within Leninist parties, in fact a cursory google search will present you with ample evidence of how commented upon this is. It really is one of the worst kept secrets on the left. Yet, these parties still persist and in the case of Ireland are the only real alternative to the parties of the Landlord class. As an Anarchist with a sense of history and responsibility this is exceedingly worrying.

This is not to suggest that Anarchist groups can’t become cult like. I spent time in a certain British anarchist group, that again shall not be named. In many ways it functioned along similar lines to the Leninist party I had formerly been part of . While there was a rotating leadership role, the same small group of people swapped the officer positions, and there was the same narrow mindedness to new ideas. Thankfully there is a great deal more individualism amongst Anarchists and this small toxic group were eventually expelled from the organisation. To some extent cult behaviour is a human failing. The legitimate and noble desire to make the world a better place can easily be perverted by disordered people for their own pleasures. You can see this in countless churches, sects, and organisations of every hue. In the case of political groupings, at least, anarchism has an answer and it is in our very DNA. A distrust of authority. Leninists parties can never be reformed from within given their very inspiration was taken from the mind of an authoritarian cult leader, Vladimir Lenin.

If you have the time or inclination to read about the father of 20th century Communism, you will learn many things, none particularly endearing, whether it be his: accepting German Imperial help in 1917; crushing the Soviets, snuffing out workers’ democracy; the invasion of Poland in 1920; the founding of the vile gulags; the rejection of a democratic vote in 1917 that the Bolsheviks lost; the creation of the brutal Checka, etc. The figures vary, but Lenin’s Red Terror is believed to have killed anywhere between 100,000 and 1.3 million people. The fanatic view of the Lenin towards any challenge to the new regime was published within the organs of the party: ‘anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to concentration camp”. By 1921 70,000 were imprisoned in the brutal gulag system. The authoritarian and genocidal views of the Leninists were apparent quite early with Grigory Zinoviev declaring in 1917: ‘To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated”. The fact that so many within the left still celebrate this man is stunning to behold, but then again he had the good fortune to die before the experiment of Leninism reached its apex under his protege Stalin. He would order the deaths of tens of millions of his own people, whether through the repression of the secret police or through man made famines, and after World War II enslave the population of Eastern Europe for half a century. And yet, the failure of the Left to ever really exorcise the ghost of the USSR and Leninism is one of our greatest failings. The supposed unique evil of Josef Stalin is a lazy way to avoid the truth, that the Bolsheviks were totalitarians in their very DNA, due to the teachings of Lenin. The USSR was in its origins a cult of Leninism extended to the entire Russian Empire. The Left need to except that the USSR is ours to own much like the right must accept Fascism as the logical extension of their own ideology. There is little to salvage in this experiment and the left should have long ago acknowledged Leninism as the twin evil of Fascism in the 20th Century. Unfortunately, it has not and we are left in a situation where anarchism remains at the fringes and the Leninist parties remain the only likely alternative to what must soon follow another violent collapse of Capitalism.

Any reasonable look at the enormous debt bubble forming around the world can not help, but lead you to the conclusion that a major global depression is looming. The conservative estimate is that there is 420 trillion dollars of debt worldwide. In Ireland we are one of the most indebted countries in the western world. Our debt to GDP ratio is 170% of GDP with some estimates as high as 210% of GDP. Each Irish citizen owes 42,000 Euro of debt. We will never be able to pay that off. This global debt can be combined with the huge wealth now centred in the hands of a very small cabal of oligarchs. Less than 100 persons now own over half the wealth of the entire globe. A vampiric ruling class long ago tore up the post-war social democratic settlement and could give a shit about the long term cost of their greed. As a result, the middle class’s spending power has shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. (Economics 101: the middle class buy the products of the ruling elite. If they have no money, and cannot borrow anymore, a crisis of capitalism ensues. It is that simple!) This makes a major depression almost inevitable, with some recent estimates saying it will arrive by as early as 2021. A collapse of capitalism will in rather short order unleash not only the demons of Fascism, but also the demons of Leninism. If, as I fear is likely, we are in the midst of another era of capitalist crisis similar to the 1920s and 30s, the corrupt parties of the centre across Europe will fall, and the masses will look for answers and alternatives to croney capitalism. At the moment the working class is bearing the brunt of neoliberalism and are looking to Trump, Brexit and the European Fascist right, the Orban’s and Le Pen’s. In the future there is no reason to suppose that some of remaining middle class will not make the same choice. In such a situation, it will seem wise to align ourselves with the Leninists in hopes of preventing another epoch of Fascist authoritarianism, but I would ask all anarchists to consider the old Bakunin quote: ‘When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People’s Stick’. We have been here before and we know what the Leninists will do if they get a whiff of power, therefore ‘What is to be done?’

Well, surprise, surprise, I recommend anarchism, but not in its current form. These days anarchists are a scattered and clicky sect within the left, rightly mocked for both the black block and its disinterested hipster membership alike. We must accept some of the blame for failing to take advantage of the post-Leninist era of the 90s-today. There were even some signs of anarchist ideas permeating the general left in the Seattle demonstrations of 1999, the occupy movement of 2011, the Arab Spring, and the yellow jackets, but these were to come to nothing. Clearly we have not learned from our own mistakes of the 20th century. Here I will perhaps lose some of my audience when I say that our principles held us back in the past. We were firm believers that ‘the Great is not enemy of the Good’. That ‘pragmatism was defeatism’. We, too, believed in an ‘all or nothing revolution’. Either it was complete eradication of the state and class system or it was not worth fighting for. This did us no favours in the past and it will do us little favours in the future. The world is not as we hope it to be, but rather as it is. Who will our allies be in the times to come? Unless we want to repeat our ancestors mistakes in Russia and Spain, it can’t be the Leninists. Rather I suggest the reasonable left I mentioned at the start of this article: Socialists, Left-Communists, Social Democrats, Republicans and even Liberals have all proved in the past to be determined enemies of the cults of Bolshevism and Fascism and capable of pluralism, though not always willing. It is possible to imagine a society of differing political structures coexisting, and of this being a truer reflection of the will of most people than any monolithic authoritarian Leftism can provide. These are our logical allies, some more than others, but to ensure history does not repeat itself we will have to find a way to both defend ourselves and inspire hope for a better future. For such a pluralist society of state socialists, anarchists, and even liberals, must not sap the hope and idealism of a genuinely Libertarian Socialist Revolution. We will have to walk a tightrope between reactionaries, both left wing and liberal. For without going down another rabbit hole, it was not just the Leninists that betrayed the Anarchists of Spain, it was also their republican and liberal allies. It will not be easy and much like our ancestors we will probably fail, but the difference between fighting for a society that allows differing political ideals the chance to bloom and the totalitarian cult of Leninism, seems a worthy trade off.

#anomie #anomiezine #anarchism #anarchy #article #proletariat

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thevividgreenmoss · 5 years

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...Anyone who knew Eqbal in conditions of struggle knew subliminally that his loyalty and solidarity were unquestionable. He was a genius at sympathy. When he used the pronoun "we," you knew that he spoke and acted as one of us, but never at the expense either of his honesty or of his critical faculties, which reigned supreme. This is why Eqbal came as close to being a really free man as anyone can be.

This isn't to say that he was indifferent to the problems of others, or blessed in that he didn't have problems of his own. This was very far from true. But he did give one the impression that he was always his own man, always able to think and act clearly for himself and, if asked, for others. His subcontinental origins in Bihar and Lahore steeped him both in the travails of empire and in the many wasteful tragedies of decolonization, of which sectarian hatred and violence, plus separatism and partition, are among the worst.

Yet retrospective bitterness at what the white man wrought and at what his fellow Indians and Pakistanis did were never part of Eqbal's response. He was always more interested in creativity than in vindictiveness, in originality of spirit and method than in mere radicalism, in generosity and complexity of analysis over the tight neatness of his fellow political scientists. The title of one of his most spirited essays, on Regis Debray, was entitled "Radical but Wrong."

When I dedicated my book Culture and Imperialism to him, it was because in his activity, life, and thinking Eqbal embodied not just the politics of empire but that whole fabric of experience expressed in human life itself, rather than in economic rules and reductive formulas. What Eqbal understood about the experience of empire was the domination of empire in all its forms, but also the creativity, originality, and vision created in resistance to it. Those words-" creativity, " "originality," "vision"-were central to his attitudes on politics and history.

Among Eqbal's earliest writings on Vietnam was a series of papers on revolutionary warfare which was intended as a refutation of standard American doctrine on the subject. U.S. counterinsurgency experts see in Vietnamese resistance a sort of conspiratorial, technically adept, communist and terrorist uprising, which can be defeated with superior weapons, clear-cut pragmatic doctrines, and the relentless deployment of overwhelming military force. What Eqbal suggested was a different paradigm: the revolutionary guerrilla as someone with a real commitment to justice who has the support of her or his people, and who is willing to sacrifice for the sake of a cause or ideology that has mobilized people. What counterinsurgency doctrine cannot admit is that the native elites whose interests are congruent not with their country's but with those of the United States are not the people to win a revolutionary war. In confronting the arch-theorist of this benighted view-none other than Samuel Huntington-Eqbal. Put it this way:

In underdeveloped countries the quiescence which followed independence is giving way to new disappointments and new demands which are unlikely to be satisfied by a politics of boundary management and selective cooptation-a fact which the United States, much like our ruling elites, is yet unable or unwilling to perceive. There is an increasingly perceptible gap between our need for social transformation and America's insistence on stability, between our impatience for change and America's obsession with order, our move toward revolution and America's belief in the plausibility of achieving reforms under the robber barons of the "third world," our longing for absolute national sovereignty and America's preference for pliable allies, our desire to see our national soil freed of foreign occupation and America's alleged need for military bases.... As the gap widens between our sorrow and America's contentment, so will, perhaps, these dichotomies of our perspectives and our priorities. Unless there is a fundamental redefinition of American interests and goals, our confrontations with the United States will be increasingly antagonistic. In the client states of Asia and Latin America it may even be tragic. In this sense Vietnam may not be so unique. It may be a warning of things to come.

What emerges in these writings is the opposition between conventional and unconventional thought and of course the even deeper opposition between justice and injustice. In his preference for what the unconventional and the just can bring peoples by way of liberation, invigorated culture, and well-being, Eqbal was firm and uncompromising. His distrust for standing armies, frozen bureaucracies, persistent oligarchies allowed no exceptions. Yet at the same time, as he showed in his great essay on Debray, it is not enough to be unconventional if that means having no regard for tradition, for the goods that women and men enjoy, for the great stabilities of human life. Eqbal was shrewd and illusionless enough to realize that overturning societies for the sake of revolution only, without sufficient attention to the fact that human beings also love and create and celebrate and commemorate, is a callous, merely destructive practice that may be radical but is profoundly wrong.

...No one has more trenchantly summarized the various pathologies of power in the third world than Eqbal in the three summary essays he wrote for Arab Studies Quarterly in 1980 and 1981.9 Once again, unlike many of the second-thoughters and post-Marxists who populate the academic and liberal journals today, Eqbal remained true to the ideals of revolution and truer yet to its unfulfilled promise. To have heard him lecture over the years, passionately and sternly, about militarism in the Arab world, in Pakistan, in Algeria and elsewhere, was to have known the high moral position he took on matters having to do with the sanctity and potential dignity of human life either squandered or abused by strutting dictators or co-opted intellectuals. Creativity, vision, and originality of the kind appreciated by Eqbal in his great friend the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz are the measure for political life, not the trappings of honor guards, fancy limousines, and enormously bloated and all-powerful bureaucracies.

The measure is the human being, not the abstract law or the amoral power.

I think it must have been difficult to hold on to such ideals and principles. Most of Eqbal's written work, and indeed his activism, took place in dark times. Not only did he take full stock of the devastations of imperialism and injustice all over the globe, but in particular he more eloquently than anyone else inventoried the particular sadness and low points reached by Islamic cultures and states. Yet even then he managed to remind us that what he mourned is no mere religious or cultural fanaticism, as it is usually misrepresented in the West, but a widespread ecumenical movement. Moreover, though not an Arab himself, Eqbal reminded Arabs that Arabism, far from being a narrow-based nationalism, is quite unique in the history of nationalisms because it tried to connect itself beyond boundaries. It came close to imagining a universal community linked by word and sentiment alone. Anyone who is an Arab in his feelings, in his language and his culture, is an Arab. So a Jew is an Arab. A Christian is an Arab. A Muslim is an Arab. A Kurd is an Arab. I know of no national movement which defined itself so broadly.

In such a situation and with such a heritage, Eqbal saw the degradation of ideas and values that grip Arabs and Muslims alike. Let me quote him again. This is in the aftermath of the Gulf Way in 1993:

We live in scoundrel times. This is the dark age of Muslim history, the age of surrender and collaboration, punctuated by madness. The decline of our civilization began in the eighteenth century when, in the intellectual embrace of orthodoxy, we skipped the age of enlightenment and the scientific revolution. In the second half of the twentieth century, it has fallen. I have been a lifelong witness to surrender, and imagined so many times-as a boy in 1948, a young man in 1967 ... and approaching middle age in 1982-that finally we have hit rock bottom, that the next time even if we go down we would manage to do so with a modicum of dignity. Fortunately, I did not entertain even so modest an illusion from Saddam Hussein's loudly proclaimed 'mother of battles."

This on the one hand and on the other the multiple degradations of what he once called the fascism and separatis clearly identifiable, seemingly hostile but symbiotically linked trends, in his Pakistan. Former Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his family, former president General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, and their coteries plundered the land, demoralized the population. They tried to subdue the country I s insurrectionary constituent cultures and failed, but at the price of more blood and treasure. And everywhere, as throughout the Muslim world, they provoked, if they did not actually cause, the rise of Islamism, which as a secularist Eqbal always deplored.

But ever the fighter and activist, he did not submit in resignation. He wrote more and more in earnest and in 1994 undertook his grand project of founding a new university in Pakistan-Khaldunia, aptly named after the great Arab historian and founder of sociology, Ibn Khaldun. In this project and his enthusiasm for it, Eqbal was no Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, but like Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, he took as his motto "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. This was part of the man's rareness, knowing how to rescue the' best available in a tradition without illusion or melodramatic self-dramatization. For him, Islam, Arabism, and American idealism were treasures to be tapped, despite tyrants like Zia ul-Haq and Henry Kissinger, whose manipulations and cold-blooded policies debase and bring down everything they touch.

Edward Said, Introduction to Eqbal Ahmad’s Confronting Empire

#*#eqbal ahmad #edward said #confronting empire

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ara-la · 6 years

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The Five Faces of Fascism (2005)

The Five Faces of Fascism

by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-LA/People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART)

From Turning The Tide, Volume 18, Number 5, November-December 2005

Like the weather, everybody talks about fascism, but nobody does anything about it. Just like the barrage of deadly hurricanes that continue in record numbers this season are being fed by global warming of ocean waters, the growth of fascism is being fed by a key underlying reality. The Empire is coming face to face with its own limits and with the catastrophic consequences of its own self-destructive contradictions.

The economic “race to the bottom” of corporate globalization has de-industrialized the U.S. Simultaneously it’s created a massive over-capacity of production using labor priced below the cost of human reproduction in China, south Asia, and elsewhere.

There’s a concurrent race towards disaster between Peak Oil and Global Warming. On track one, we have the runaway train of economic and social devastation because of the soaring demand for a shrinking supply of petroleum and natural gas. On track two is the runaway destruction of the climate and the seas, through pollution by the gaseous wastes of petroleum. The only question seems to be how rapidly the tracks intersect and how total the smash-up will be.

Meanwhile, the endless war that hid beneath the surface of the “Pax Americana” has come out into the open. Domestically we see the Empire trying to contain social upheaval by militarizing the schools, the border, the police, and disaster relief. We also see the ineffectiveness of that military approach. Internationally, the US war machine is bogged down and bloodied in two land wars in Asia, Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to figure out how to deal with its problems by expanding them regionally.

In the face of these growing and intersecting crises in the political, economic and environmental spheres, fascism is once again rearing its ugly head. But like the crisis, fascism presents itself in a multi-faceted way. There are five main forces competing, contending and colluding in building a fascist response and “solution” to the problems of the Empire. Anti-fascist forces committed to human liberation and planetary survival must simultaneously challenge the Empire itself, develop solutions for the problems fueling the fascist response, and disrupt the fascist forces.

To do so, we need to get a clearer picture of the fascist elements and the contradictions among them.

Self-proclaimed Nazis, though not the largest or most serious threat, are a place to start. This is the element with the most naked racist approach, based on open white supremacy. They incorporate traditional nazi/fascist symbolism, and classic scapegoating of Jews. Particular groups within this tendency suffer setbacks, and ego drives rivalries between various “leaders.” But this faction has an opportunist tactical flexibility. It benefits from effective use of the media to magnify its forces and appeal. Nazis seize on every sign of racial friction. It appeals to younger whites with a sense of grievance about lost entitlements. They often present themselves as anti-establishment or even anti-capitalist, yet usually seek protection by the cops. They use methods of physical intimidation, as bullies do. But like all bullies, they are highly susceptible to organized physical resistance.

Clerical fascism is a second major component, also connected to an element of traditional fascism. It is based in religious fundamentalism, and often incorporates well-established and well-funded religious organizations, whether churches or lay fraternal groups. They base their appeal on a sense of moral decay under the Empire, but they are otherwise more than happy to operate within the mainstream and existing political institutions. In the U.S., we are speaking mostly about Christian fascist groups, which focus on anti-woman and anti-gay organizing, opposing abortion and other reproductive rights, gay marriage and similar issues. But in a global context, Jewish fundamentalism linked to a more secular, but still religiously-justified, Zionism is an important element of this tendency, and in the U.S., Christian and Jewish Zionists make common cause. In the colonized and semi-colonized Muslim world, Muslim fascist fundamentalism plays a role more similar to that of western Nazism, presenting itself as the voice of grievance, with an anti-establishment, “anti-imperialist” politics.

Anti-immigrant border vigilantes have resurrected the worst components of the old militia movement. They’re most interested not in replacing but in supplementing the power of the state. Although some elements engage in anti-corporate or anti-politician rhetoric, this faction, like the Christian fascists, are generally content to seek entry into, and work with, mainstream political power. Thus the Minutemen and such vigilante projects work with the Border Patrol, or run for elective office. They sponsor propositions targeting immigrants, particularly Mexicans, and work closely with Republican and some Democratic office-holders. While professing not to be racist, they also provide a convenient conduit and nesting place for nazi and white supremacist forces. For example demonstrators at anti-immigrant protests in Orange County, CA, showed up waving swastika and Confederate flags.

This is a growth area for a mass base for fascist solutions. The state legitimizes the use of extra-governmental armed force in direct anti-immigrant action. Anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican hysteria, an outlet for white grievance, has enabled these groups to spread, along with Mexican and Central American migrants, into the southeast, northeast, mid-west and northwest, from the US “southwest,” occupied northern Mexico.

An element within uniformed and clandestine military, law enforcement, and state security forces, operating independently of the official chain of command, is a fourth component of a fascist movement. This aspect has been somewhat dormant in recent years, at least in the U.S. But the increasing use of mercenaries by the Empire, as well as concerns within the ranks and the brass about the inadequacy of current domestic and international counter-insurgency efforts, is resurrecting it.

Continuing setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan could increase this component dramatically, with a possible appeal among demobilized and disoriented veterans unable to find a productive niche in civilian life.

Fascist elements within the state, the governing party and the ruling economic and political elite are the fifth element, since fascism is built from above as well as below. The Bush forces have been willing to cement one-party rule through electoral fraud and coercion. They provide red meat and marching orders to the clerical and vigilante fascists, and reward or protect fascist elements within the military and law enforcement.

Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes of FOX News

This will grow as the disastrous consequences of Empire, and the inability of the rulers to “deliver the goods” to anybody but an increasingly narrow stratum of the wealthy, erode popular support. The Democrats offer at best token alternatives to, if not outright reinforcement of, these approaches. This shows the systemic nature of the crisis, and the limited options available to the rulers as the crises deepen.

Samuel Bush, WWI war profiteer, Prescott Bush, Hitler’s banker, 41 & 43

The strength of fascism in the U.S. in particular can only be understood when we recognize that the US political and economic system has always contained key elements of what later came to be called fascism. White supremacy, genocide, slave labor, and independent armed action outside the “authorized” use of force by the state, have always been key aspects of the US system.

The interpenetration of corporations and the state, and the incorporation of a mass base into repressive state organs, have always been found in the US because it is a settler colonial society. Colonized people have always existed domestically within the expanding borders of the U.S. Therefore such colonial methods of rule have always been present within the U.S.

Moreover, fascists understand, as the “left” in the U.S. mostly doesn’t, that the Empire has always been a cross-class project. The system allows for independent armed action by other classes and class fractions that support the imperial project, rather than a monopoly on armed action by the state or bourgeoisie.

The only effective resistance to fascism must be a thorough economic, political and social transformation. We can’t appeal to some democratic principle or institution to forestall fascism. Passing a law, winning an election, or even impeaching or removing a president won’t do it. This is a fight to the finish for human and planetary survival.

Let’s get organized, and build the solidarity and connectivity among people to withstand a fascist onslaught and also the underlying economic system and way of life that are causing the very dislocations the fascists claim to have a solution for. Individually and collectively, we must not merely abandon but actively overthrow an Empire that is destroying the planet. We need to develop a political jiu jitsu, use the force of opponents’ offensives against them.

We must take advantage of the elite’s growing inability to govern or rule in the old ways to begin to govern ourselves in self-determined ways, through solidarity, mutual aid and direct action.

In each sphere of fascist activity, we need to build alliances among the potential victims as well as counter-organize among potential supporters.

This is not about an electoral coalition based on a lowest common denominator effort to muster more votes and ‘throw the rascals out’ in favor of a new group of rascals. It’s about uniting all the exploited, disenfranchised, and oppressed people to build a new way of life.

The calamitous nature of the state response to Katrina on the Gulf Coast has been reinforced by their activities in the wake of Hurricane Wilma’s devastation in Florida. Extreme weather will only become more severe. Yet the ‘best’ we can expect from the state is military and police action to protect corporate property and enforce pre-existing privileges.

So we need on-going, pro-active efforts to build new forms of community, solidarity and environmental responsibility. We must create alliances among Mexican, Haitian, Asian and Muslim immigrants who are being targeted by the state and vigilantes; the women, lesbians, gay, bi, and transgendered people targeted by the Christian right; the Black/New Afrikan, Chicano/Mexicano, and Native people targeted by the cops, courts and prisons; and working people generally. Only decolonization and self-determination provide a basis for this.

We must create a culture of resistance uniting militant young people with older generations in alliances capable of learning from past errors in order to prevent their repetition. This will allow us to confront and topple the state and fascists.

With Christian and other clerical fascism, we must identify the fault lines within the base of the fascists, as well as connecting with believers who share the religious faith but not the fascist vision of the right.

Regarding open nazis, vigorous, overt opposition as well as covert intelligence gathering and network disruption must be combined with a pro-active organizing strategy for reaching disaffected young white people. In this regard, work against not only military recruitment but also the militarist and propagandistic nature of education is important. So is a defense of young people’s health, cultural expression, and rights, especially including those of young women.

Immigrants’ rights organizing must proceed on the basis of a vigorous anti-corporate strategy for labor, and include solidarity with workers world wide and across borders.

Our opposition to the Empire’s military aggression must reach women and men recruited as cannon fodder, because the struggle for a better world will require that they turn the guns around.

If we don’t act to topple the Empire here at its seat, the rest of the world’s people will pay a terrible price to do it for us.

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statetalks · 3 years

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Who’s Right Democrats Or Republicans

Views Of The Democratic And Republican Parties

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Just under half of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, while a slightly larger share have an unfavorable view.

The GOP is viewed more negatively 38% say they have a positive view of the Republican Party, while 60% rate it unfavorably. These views are modestly changed since last summer, with the share of Americans rating the GOP unfavorably slightly higher than it was in August and the share of Americans with a negative view of the Democratic Party down slightly .

About three-quarters of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents view the GOP favorably, while 81% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view the Democratic Party positively.

Nearly all Republicans who say they strongly identify with the Republican Party express a favorable opinion of the GOP. Among Republicans who say they not so strongly identify with the party, 77% say have a favorable view, while 56% of independents who lean toward the Republican Party say the same.

Democrats who very strongly identify with the Democratic Party nearly universally view their party favorably, as do 87% of Democrats who describe themselves as not-so-strong Democrats. About six-in-ten Democratic leaners have a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party.

Within both partisan groups, views of the opposing party are overwhelmingly unfavorable across-the-board, with more than eight-in-ten strong partisans, not so strong partisans and leaners alike saying this.

Why Are An Elephant And A Donkey The Party Symbols

The Democratic party is often associated with the colour blue and the donkey mascot.

That dates back to Democratic candidate Andrew Jackson’s 1828 presidential campaign, when opponents called him a “jackass” for his stubbornness.

Instead of taking the nickname as an insult, Jackson embraced it and used the donkey image on his election posters.

It was then quickly adopted by newspapers and political cartoonists.

The Republican’s elephant symbol came along years later.

Many believe it came about, in part, due to a widely used expression during the Civil War led by Republican president Abraham Lincoln.

Soldiers entering battle were said to be “seeing the elephant” a phrase that means learning a hard lesson, often with a profound cost.

The symbol was then popularised by political cartoonist Thomas Nast; an early rendition featured in the 1879 edition of Harper’s Weekly.

Both symbols are still largely used for political campaigns.

Democrats Tend To Have A Lot More Anger And Negativity In Their Rhetoric According To Them If You Support President Trump Well Then You Are A Racist And A Nazi

They generally seem to be out to get someone making things more personal. Why are they so afraid to use the facts to reinforce what they want to do? Its agenda first then find or make up facts to support the rhetoric.

If they cant beat you at the polling booth, they try and beat you in court and thats just a great example of something thats not a pleasant experience. And not quite working in the long run. They keep getting overturned.

Crime And Capital Punishment

Republicans generally believe in harsher penalties when someone has committed a crime, including for selling illegal drugs. They also generally favor capital punishment and back a system with many layers to ensure the proper punishment has been meted out. Democrats are more progressive in their views, believing that crimes do not involve violence, such as selling drugs, should have lighter penalties and rehabilitation. They are also against capital punishment in any form.

Conservative Endorsements Of Democratic Candidates

During the 2004 election, several high-profile conservative writers endorsed the Presidential campaign of John Kerry, arguing that the Bush administration was pursuing policies which were anything but conservative. Among the most notable of these endorsements came from Andrew Sullivan and Paul Craig Roberts, while a series of editorials in Pat Buchanan‘s The American Conservative magazine made a conservative case for several candidates, with Scott McConnell formally endorsing Kerry, and Justin Raimondo giving the nod to Ralph Nader.

In South Carolina in , the Democratic candidate for United States Senator was Bob Conley, a traditional Catholic, and a former activist for the presidential candidacy of Ron Paul. Conley failed in his bid to defeat Lindsey Graham, receiving 42.4 percent of the vote.

In his campaign for reelection, Walter Minnick, U.S. Representative for Idaho’s 1st congressional district, was endorsed by Tea Party Express, an extremely rare occurrence for a Democrat. Minnick was the only Democrat to receive a 100% rating from the Club for Growth, an organization that typically supports conservative Republicans. Minnick lost to RaÃºl Labrador, a conservative Republican, in the general election.

Think Republicans Are Disconnected From Reality It’s Even Worse Among Liberals

Arlie Hochschild

A new survey found Democrats live with less political diversity despite being more tolerant of it with startling results

In a surprising new national survey, members of each major American political party were what they imagined to be the beliefs held by members of the other. The survey asked Democrats: How many Republicans believe that racism is still a problem in America today? Democrats guessed 50%. Its actually 79%. The survey asked Republicans how many Democrats believe most police are bad people. Republicans estimated half; its really 15%.

The survey, published by the thinktank More in Common as part of its Hidden Tribes of America project, was based on a sample of more than 2,000 people. One of the studys findings: the wilder a persons guess as to what the other party is thinking, the more likely they are to also personally disparage members of the opposite party as mean, selfish or bad. Not only do the two parties diverge on a great many issues, they also disagree on what they disagree on.

This effect, the report says, is so strong that without a high school diploma are three times more accurate than those with a postgraduate degree. And the more politically engaged a person is, the greater the distortion.

Should the US participate in the Paris climate accord and reduce greenhouse gas emissions regardless of what other countries do? A majority of voters in both parties said yes.

Yes Dictators Sometimes Cloak Themselves In Socialism But Tyranny Here And Elsewhere Is Always Right

Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump

The meaning today of the Big Lie almost always refers to the false claim by Donald Trump and his right-wing cronies that the 2020 presidential election was somehow stolen by the left and Joe Biden, with the help of foreign agents.

Not only is this claim false, it is absurdly false.

This is hardly the first Big Lie from the right. Not even close. The right has been promulgating Big Lies for decades.

In fact, lying is the only way the right wing can win elections. After all, its policies are profoundly unpopular with ordinary people because the right-wing favors the 1% rich over the 99% working and middle classes.

How in the world could 1% of the population ever win elections over the 99%? Simple. The 1% bamboozles the 99%. To win elections, the right must conceal its true intentions from the voters and instead engage in manipulative tactics, like lying and fearmongering.

The lies are not just little lies.They are whoppers. They are the complete opposite of the truth. They are 180 degrees from the truth. They are the polar opposite of the truth, like from the North Pole all the way to the South Pole. Hence the term Big Lie.

Yet, shockingly, many of these egregious lies actually work. They take hold. They create a false impression in the mind of the public.

Once again, this is the exact opposite of the truth. Dictatorships and fascism are right-wing, not left-wing.

Shockingly, this nonsense actually works.

Who’s Right Democrats Or Republicans

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Neither, that is shy you discuss and debate and come to an agreement. It is time that the people make them sit back in their seats in the house and Senate, give the a bucket to go to the bathroom and PBJ’s for breakfast lunch and DinnerWhen the come to an agreement, then they can go home for a good night sleep and we will pick another issue and lock them in their chambers the next day and have them work that one out.Bet it would not take long for these idiots on both sides of the aisle to get the picture

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They are both wrong, but I think the Democrat senate is more wrong because they are trying to force an agreement using police stationed at national parks and monuments to make life hell for everyone. Also earlier last week the senate rejected a bill from house Republicans that would have delayed the shutdown for awhile./Edit:give the a bucket to go to the bathroom and PBJ’s for breakfast lunch and DinnerNo no no, PBJs are too tasty. Give them bread and butter.

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Liars are the worst kind of thieves-Only trust Hell No Kitty

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What Does Left Mean

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In politics, left refers to people and groups that have views. That generally means they support reforms, especially those seeking greater social and economic equality.

The farleft is often used for what is considered more extreme, views, such as and . Collectively, people and groups, as well as the positions they hold, are referred to as theLeft or the left wing.

Trump Supporters The Exception

Despite political rhetoric that places them at opposite ends of the spectrum, Republican and Democratic voters appear to be similarly compassionate.

Democrats view compassion as a political value while Republicans will integrate compassion into their politics when their leaders make it part of an explicit message.

There is a caveat to this: I asked these survey questions about personal feelings of compassion in a 2016 online survey that also asked about choice of president.

The survey was conducted a few days after Republican presidential primary candidates Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio had dropped out of the race, making Donald Trump the only viable Republican candidate for the nomination.

In their responses to the survey, a large percentage of Republican voters said they would rather vote for someone other than Trump, even though he was the unofficial nominee at that point.

The Republican voters who didnt support Trump were similar to Democrats on the survey with respect to their answers about compassion. Their average scores on the compassion items were the same. This is in line with the other survey data showing that liberals and conservatives, and Republicans and Democrats, are largely similar in these personality measures of compassion.

But Trump supporters answers were not in line with these findings.

The research indicates that appeals to compassion if made by trusted leaders should work for voters of both parties.

Republicans And Democrats After The Civil War

Its true that many of the first Ku Klux Klan members were Democrats. Its also true that the early Democratic Party opposed civil rights. But theres more to it.

The Civil War-era GOP wasnt that into civil rights. They were more interested in punishing the South for seceding, and monopolizing the new black vote.

In any event, by the 1890s, Republicans had begun to distance themselves from civil rights.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much. The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, i really am going to have a hard time doing this but then offered that Republicans are morally right as in values, going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, going to create jobs.

The Democratic Party General Policy And Political Values

The Democratic Party generally represents left-leaning, liberal and progressive ideological values, thus advocating for a strong government to regulate business and support for the citizens of the United States. Thus, one of the key values emphasized by Democrats is social responsibility. Overall, Democrats believe that a prominent and powerful government can ensure welfare and equality for all. Much like the Republican Party, political opinions within the Democratic Party stretch across a wide spectrum, as both parties are, to a large degree, decentralized. However, from a general point of view, Democrats tend to support heavy taxation of high-income households. In comparison to Denmark, where taxes are generally high, the Democratic taxation policy may not seem excessive, but on a U.S. taxation scale these tax percentages are in the heavy end.

Left Wing And Right Wing Politics

Politics is said to be split in half and you either have left or right political views. Left-wing politics is typically associated with progressive ideas and equality. Democrats are viewed as left-wingers. Right-wing politics values tradition, equity, and survival of the fittest. Republicans are viewed as right-wingers.

Left-Wing

Left-wing beliefs are liberal in that they believe society is best served with an expanded role of the government. Examples of an expanded role for the government include entitlement programs such as social security and Medicare, Medicaid, universal healthcare, food stamps, free public education, unemployment benefits, strong environmental laws, and other regulations on industries.

Right Wing

Right-wingers believe that the best outcome for society is achieved when individual rights and civil liberties are paramount and the role and especially the power of the government is minimized. Right-wing ideology would favor market-based solutions to the issues that these government programs aim to tackle. For example, encouraging a freer marketplace for healthcare, driven by consumer choice to drive down costs. Or privately held retirement accounts like 401 plans instead of government-guaranteed Social Security.

Democrats V Republicans On Jim Crow

Segregation and Jim Crow lasted for 100 years after the end of the Civil War.

During this time, African Americans were largely disenfranchised. There was no African-American voting bloc. Neither party pursued civil rights policies it wasnt worth their while.

Photo Credit

Democrats dominated Southern politics throughout the Jim Crow Era. Its fair to say that Democratic governors and legislatures are responsible for creating and upholding white supremacist policies.

Southern Democrats were truly awful.

Where Do Trump And Biden Stand On Key Issues

Reuters: Brian Snyder/AP: Julio Cortez

The key issues grappling the country can be broken down into five main categories: coronavirus, health care, foreign policy, immigration and criminal justice.

This year, a big focus of the election has been the coronavirus pandemic, which could be a deciding factor in how people vote, as the country’s contentious healthcare system struggles to cope.

The average healthcare costs for COVID-19 treatment is up to $US30,000 , an Americas Health Insurance Plans 2020 study has found.

Todays Republicans Really Hate Democrats And Democracy

youtube

1) Trumps supporters have embraced anti-democratic ideas

This chart shows results from a two-part survey, conducted in late 2020 and early 2021, of hardcore Trump supporters. The political scientists behind the survey, Rachel Blum and Christian Parker, identified so-called MAGA voters by their activity on pro-Trump Facebook pages. Their subjects are engaged and committed Republican partisans, disproportionately likely to influence conflicts within the party like primary elections.

These voters, according to Blum and Parker, are hostile to bedrock democratic principles.

Is God A Democrat Or A Republican

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party of the United States are political parties. God is so much bigger than any political party. He is bigger than the United States of America or any other country. He is bigger than the world we live in.

Psalm 8:3 says God created the stars with His fingers. Considering that our local star, the sun, is 70 times the size of the Earth, that would make God very big. Human issues are very small to Him but we will be judged by what we do.

We as believers need to keep our political party in check and be praying for the leadership of our nations. In the United States, historically parties or groups of organized political interests came later. The majority of the early settlers were true Christians fleeing persecution and the government trying to control them through a political church. The Democrats have been considered the party of the people or working class and the Republicans the party of business professionals for decades. In actuality, that is not true.

Abraham Lincoln was the US President who fought to hold the United States together when division arose about whether African slaves were people or just property of their owners. It was the Republican party that won the right of the slaves to have true freedom not the Democrats.

Vice Presidents Of The United States

John C. Breckinridge, 14th Vice President of the United States , United States Senator from Kentucky , Member, United States House of Representatives from Kentucky’s 8th District , Member, Kentucky House of Representatives from Fayette County . He was presidential nominee of the southern Democratic Party in 1860.

John C. Calhoun, 7th Vice President of the United States , United States Senator from South Carolina , 16th United States Secretary of State , 10th Secretary of War , Member, United States House of Representatives from South Carolina’s 6th District . He was a supporter of slavery, state sovereignty and a proponent of the theory of nullification.

John Nance Garner, 32nd Vice President of the United States , Member, United States House of Representatives from 15th District of Texas , 39th Speaker of the House of Representatives , House Minority Leader , Leader, House Democratic Caucus , Member, Texas House of Representatives from Texas 91st District , County Judge, Uvalde County Texas . He supported the poll tax. Although he served as vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt, he turned against Roosevelt during his second term, taking a more conservative stance on several issues.

Thomas A. Hendricks, 21st Vice President of the United States , 16th Governor of Indiana , United States Senator from , and member of the United States House of Representatives from Indiana’s 6th congressional district and Indiana’s 5th congressional district .

What Is Happening To The Republicans

In becoming the party of Trump, the G.O.P. confronts the kind of existential crisis that has destroyed American parties in the past.

Save this story for later.

Content

But, for all the anxiety among Republican leaders, Goldwater prevailed, securing the nomination at the Partys convention, in San Francisco. In his speech to the delegates, he made no pretense of his ideological intent. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, he said. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Goldwaters crusade failed in November of 1964, when the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, who had become President a year earlier, after Kennedys assassination, won in a landslide: four hundred and eighty-six to fifty-two votes in the Electoral College. Nevertheless, Goldwaters ascent was a harbinger of the future shape of the Republican Party. He represented an emerging nexus between white conservatives in the West and in the South, where five states voted for him over Johnson.

agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.

History Of The Republican Party

The Republican Party came into existence just prior to the Civil War due to their long-time stance in favor of abolition of slavery. They were a small third-party who nominated John C. Freemont for President in 1856. In 1860 they became an established political party when their nominee Abraham Lincoln was elected as President of the United States. Lincolns Presidency throughout the war, including his policies to end slavery for good helped solidify the Republican Party as a major force in American politics. The elephant was chosen as their symbol in 1874 based on a cartoon in Harpers Weekly that depicted the new party as an elephant.

Democratic Candidate Joe Biden

Reuters: Carlos Barria

The Democrats are the liberal political party and their candidate is Joe Biden, who has run for president twice before.

A former senator for Delaware who served six terms, Biden is best known as Barack Obama’s vice-president.

He held that role for eight years, and it has helped make him a major contender for many Democrat supporters.

Earlier this year, Biden chose California Senator Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate.

The 77-year-old has built his campaign on the Obama legacy, and tackling the country’s staggering health care issues.

He is known for his down-to-earth personality and his ability to connect with working-class voters. He would be the oldest first-term president in history if elected.

According to 2017 Pew Research Centre data, a vast majority of the African American population supports the Democratic party, with 88 per cent voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential elections.

The Philosophy Behind Republican Economic Policy

Republicans advocate supply-side economics that primarily benefits businesses and investors. This theory states that tax cuts on businesses allow them to hire more workers, in turn increasing demand and growth. In theory, the increased revenue from a stronger economy offsets the initial revenue loss over time.

Republicans advocate the right to pursue prosperity without government interference. They argue this is achieved by self-discipline, enterprise, saving, and investing.

Republicans business-friendly approach leads most people to believe that they are better for the economy. A closer look reveals that Democrats are, in many respects, actually better.

A Record Number Of Americans Say Democrats And Republicans Are Doing Such A Poor Job That A Third Party Is Needed Polling Shows

Dissatisfaction with two-party politics is at an all-time high, new Gallup polling shows, with 62 percent of Americans saying Democrats and Republicans are doing such a poor job of representing their constituents that a third party is needed.

But the zero-sum, winner-take-all dynamics of U.S. elections make it nearly impossible for third parties to gain electoral traction, despite survey data that shows fully half of Americans do not identify with any party and label themselves independents. This was underscored this past weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference, when former president Donald Trump ruled out creating a third political party to promote his brand of nationalist conservatism.

To hear those calling for change including many scholars and some lawmakers the inherent problem with our current system is that it shoehorns the into just two parties. Warnings that the nation has backslid toward autocracy driven in large part by the Republican Partys shift away from democratic norms bring added urgency, they say, and reversing that Trump-era trend will require something radical: breaking up the Democratic and Republican parties.

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/whos-right-democrats-or-republicans/

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troublewithcomics · 6 years

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ADD Reviews Avengers: Infinity War

[Note: Contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War.] "We live inside a dream," Special Agent Dale Cooper once said on Twin Peaks. And so it has been for millions of people during the decade of Marvel Studios films that launched in 2008 with Jon Favreau's Iron Man.

I felt we had dodged a bullet back then, in the casting of talented but troubled actor Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, after talk of Tom Cruise taking the role, and Marvel even publishing comic books with Stark drawn to resemble Cruise (a tactic which would actually work with Samuel L. Jackson, to the delight of just about everyone). Cruise was not right for the role. At that point I had been living with Tony Stark in my life for over thirty years, and I knew Downey would embody that part like no one else could. Thankfully Favreau knew it as well and convinced the studio to bet on Downey along with him.

But despite the unlimited potential in the characters owned by Marvel Comics, mostly borne out of the imagination and visual power of the late Jack Kirby, I wasn't expecting much from Iron Man and I doubt anyone in the movie industry was, either. Marvel's characters had been licensed time and time again to film and TV and even radio shows, and the one that gained the most traction was the TV series The Incredible Hulk, which took a few elements from Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's creation and then used them to retell The Fugitive. Similarly the less-well-regarded Spider-Man TV series used almost none of the essential aspects of that comic book's mythology, instead using the character's name and costume as a small part of a generic, episodic crime drama, not even bothering to steal the plot of a successful show, like The Incredible Hulk did.

The relative success of those shows hinged on a number of factors, among them the lack of alternatives -- you had three commercial TV networks plus PBS back then. (Which reminds me that Spider-Man also regularly appeared on The Electric Company, a show aimed at 8-10 year olds and which managed to present a more faithful wall-crawler than a primetime network series could, even allowing for the fact that on The Electric Company, Spider-Man never spoke a word.)

The 1980s and 1990s brought even more mediocre-to-terrible attempts to cash in on Marvel's characters. Dolph Lundgren as The Punisher. Reb Brown as Captain America. And a truly awful Fantastic Four movie made quickly and cheaply by cult film director Roger Corman in order to allow the rights holders to maintain their license. It resulted in a film so bad that it was never widely released and was only seen by most people through the wonders of bootleg VHS tapes sold at sketchy comicons. It should be noted that this Fantastic Four film is only marginally worse than the three later released by major studios, but with four films to their names, The Fantastic Four at this moment has more movies to its name than even The Avengers franchise, even if not a single one of them is worth watching.

Speaking of The Avengers, I went to see Avengers: Infinity War yesterday in the company of my wife Lora. I think we have seen most of the Marvel Studios films at the theater, although I have my doubts about the second Thor film. It's hard to keep track now that the Marvel Cinematic Universe (as it's called) is closing in on two-dozen full-length feature films, almost all of which are at least entertaining, and some of which have proven magical in both their mass appeal and their ability to generate revenue. Narratively, financially, and especially from the perspective of pre-2008, the continuing success of the Marvel movies is a dream that millions have been living within. It has changed the lives of many, from turning around the literal and metaphorical fortunes of actors like Downey, who no one thought would even live to see 2018 never mind be one of the most popular movie stars on the planet, and Chris Evans, whose depiction of Steve Rogers/Captain America has left far behind any memories of his participation in two of those lousy Fantastic Four movies. More interestingly this dream movie franchise has inspired and brought happiness to untold numbers of people, like that time Downey gave an Iron Man-like bionic arm to a seven-year-old boy. Or the millions of African-Americans and others who found in the recent Black Panther film an inspirational culture in which they could see themselves and their own history. These films haven't solved all the world's problems, but it's undeniable that they have brought joy and comfort and more in far greater proportion than one might have thought possible before this all began.

Which isn't to say they are perfect. I am not writing a love letter to Marvel Comics, Marvel Studios, or anyone else, really. Maybe Jack Kirby, because without him there would be none of this, but also Stan Lee, who wrote the words of so many of the comics these movies are based on. And Steve Ditko, whose imagination spawned the characters and worlds of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. And so many other comics creators I never thought would get their due, and yet who are credited in the long crawls at the end of these films and who, I hope, are being fairly compensated for the translation of their work into motion picture form.

Like Jim Starlin, a writer/artist whose work blew me away in 1977. That summer I was 11 years old, and Starlin wrote and illustrated a two-part crossover featuring The Avengers, Spider-Man and The Thing (from the Fantastic Four) in a galaxy-spanning battle royale against Starlin's most noted creation, the supervillain Thanos. The sprawling epic was made possible by the earlier work of Lee, Kirby, Ditko and others, but it felt like something entirely new. Recently going back and reading that story, I realized how direct an adaptation of that story Avengers: Infinity War is, and that realization made me even more eager to see how the film would play out.

It turns out that Infinity War is every bit as mind-blowing as those 1977 funnybooks that inspired it were to my 11-year-old self, and for much the same reason. It's not just the epic scale of the story, or the stunning visuals, or the huge cast of very different characters being remixed in new and interesting ways. Both the comics and the movie share all those elements. No, it's the combination of all those things, plus the charm, skill, talent and determination of the actors, writers and directors, the grand vision for these films from the producers, and other factors too numerous and mysterious to be easily tallied.

So yes, I loved it. My wife loved it. It wasn't perfect in the way Citizen Kane or Synecdoche, New York are perfect, timeless films, but that's not what the MCU movies are for. They are a commercially-produced dream, made for profit inside an increasingly dysfunctional capitalist system, and perhaps another essay could be written on the dangers of allowing such dreams to make one forget the injustices and dangers of the real world, but that's not the essay I am writing today. Today I want to just reflect on the wonder of seeing this film finally come to fruition, the bringing together of franchises-within-the-franchise, and I want to state with wonder and delight that it works.

Not just for me, lover of Spider-Man and the others since 1972. It works for my wife, who didn't know who most of these characters were before she met me, and who now loves Groot unconditionally and with profound delight. It works for millions of other people, some of whom have only the faintest idea who Jack Kirby is, although almost everyone knows who Stan Lee is. Not to diminish Lee's contribution to this mythology -- without him it almost certainly would not have existed nor endured this long -- but it cannot be said enough that Kirby gets the majority of the credit. Others took the baton and ran with it once Kirby left Marvel, but Captain America, Black Panther, Thor and many other of the most endearing and exciting characters in these movies are as popular and effective as they are precisely because of the elements Kirby baked into them: Black Panther's dignity, Thor's arrogance and innate decency, and perhaps most importantly, Captain America's dedication to people over politics, to good over greed. Let there be no doubt, these are exactly the heroes we need at this moment in history, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that many of the actors who inhabit these characters have used their popularity to give voice to those less fortunate than themselves, and to use their voices to critique the current wave of fascism and authoritarianism that threaten to destroy our culture. These movies are entertainment, yes, and they have made fortunes for many of the people involved, but some of those people see the responsibility their new prominence and success has given them, and they seem to take it seriously. I'm grateful for that.

And I'm grateful for the joy in so many of these films, which reaches an almost unreal level at various moments in Infinity War. Not just seeing Tony Stark bicker with Stephen Strange, or Groot heroically assist Thor in a way only he could at exactly the right moment. Not just seeing Mark Ruffalo's sublime Bruce Banner argue with The Hulk, and therefore himself, to hilarious effect at exactly the wrong moment, only to later see him delight in having all of the power but none of the horror such power usually brings him. It's all of these things and at least a thousand more.

Like I said, it's not perfect. How could it be? In a story this wide-ranging, I was never going to get enough of Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow to make me happy. But there'll be a movie for that soon enough. I was never going to get everything I came to this for, but then no one is, when you get really granular and start picking it apart. But that's missing the big picture, and in the larger sense, it's important to note I wasn't bored or unhappy for one nanosecond of this film, as I was for every never-ending moment of the grotesque, doomed-to-fail Justice League movie. I was uneasy and scared at the beginning of Infinity War, as intended. I was amused and laughing when Peter Parker asked for a distraction on a schoolbus to hilarious effect. I was chilled when Banner announced "Thanos is coming." As I said on Facebook, "So many moments."

I have seen some concern about plot holes, but I see none. The most specific concern centers on why Dr. Strange makes the choice he does near the end, with seemingly catastrophic results for the entire universe. Did the people voicing these criticisms forget that there's another movie coming? Did they not hear Strange tell his fellow heroes that he had seen millions of possible outcomes in which they all lose, but one, and one alone, in which they succeed in defeating Thanos? To be fair, that moment is couched in dread, no doubt to conceal the fact that it is foreshadowing the ultimate outcome of the as-yet unnamed sequel, said to be the end of the book all the MCU movies to date represent in the minds of those overseeing the franchise, before the start of the next book. But I have no doubt that Dr. Strange's decision, as agonizing as it was to see the consequences of, was the one that will somehow allow all those we lost to be returned to us in some form. Well, maybe not all.

I doubt it's a coincidence that Tony Stark was the one to see the ultimate defeat of their efforts to stop Thanos, and to watch in helpless horror as Peter Parker and others died before his eyes. Since the first Avengers movie, Tony Stark's bravado has masked his increasing trauma as one cosmic threat after another homicidal robot of his own design has taken chunks out of his soul. My guess is that by the end of 2019's Avengers movie, we'll have many if not most of the toys back in the toybox and ready to be played with another day. I watched the Falcon die, but I'm sure he'll be back. And Spider-Man, and The Vision, and Nick Fury, and everyone we watch blow away in the breeze, to our horror and despair. I'm guessing the price of their return will be Tony Stark's sacrifice in the next film, likely Downey's exit from the franchise. And that would be suitable. Downey was perfect for the role of Tony Stark because in so many ways he really already was Tony Stark. Arrogant, talented, addicted. He was, and is, our gateway into this world, the reason we have been able to feel the emotions these films create in us so viscerally and so immediately. Reversing the damage Thanos does at the end of Infinity War will require a huge payment to balance the books. I will be surprised if that isn't represented by the final end of Tony Stark's journey in these movies.

After all, the great throughline of these movies has been revelation and change, as the universe these characters live in has, in a decade, come to be as expansive and intriguing as it was after many decades of hard work and imagination from Stan and Jack and all the other writers and artists who are responsible for the comic books that launched this dream we are all now living inside. Who has had more revealed to him, and who has changed more than Tony Stark? How fitting would it be for the next film to end with him making the sacrifice, finally, that he narrowly escaped making at the end of the first Avengers film?

I could be wrong, though. And I don't care if I am. I’m just theorizing. How can you not? It's fun to speculate where this gigantic story will go next. And who could have guessed, before this all began in 2008, that so many millions of filmgoers would be so thrilled by one movie after another, a series of increasingly entertaining and even diverse films that give us worlds of wonder and delight, with shocks, horrors, laughs and even love?

No, no one could have seen this coming in 2008. No one except Jack Kirby, who, if he were still with us today, might be heard to say, "I knew it all along." -- Alan David Doane

#Posts by Alan David Doane #Movie Reviews #Avengers: Infinity War #Comics #Comic Books #Marvel #Marvel Comics #Jack Kirby #Jim Starlin #Stan Lee #Iron Man #captain america #Thor #Groot #Reviews

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impressivepress · 3 years

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The Great Dictator movie review (1940) | Roger Ebert

“The Great Dictator” was the last time Charlie Chaplin played a little man with a mustache.

In 1938, the world's most famous movie star began to prepare a film about the monster of the 20th century. Charlie Chaplin looked a little like Adolf Hitler, in part because Hitler had chosen the same toothbrush moustache as the Little Tramp. Exploiting that resemblance, Chaplin devised a satire in which the dictator and a Jewish barber from the ghetto would be mistaken for each other. The result, released in 1940, was "The Great Dictator," Chaplin's first talking picture and the highest-grossing of his career, although it would cause him great difficulties and indirectly lead to his long exile from the United States.

In 1938, Hitler was not yet recognized in all quarters as the embodiment of evil. Powerful isolationist forces in America preached a policy of nonintervention in the troubles of Europe, and rumors of Hitler's policy to exterminate the Jews were welcomed by anti-Semitic groups. Some of Hitler's earliest opponents, including anti-Franco American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, were later seen as "premature antifascists"; by fighting against fascism when Hitler was still considered an ally, they raised suspicion that they might be communists. "The Great Dictator" ended with a long speech denouncing dictatorships, and extolling democracy and individual freedoms. This sounded to the left like bedrock American values, but to some on the right, it sounded pinko.

If Chaplin had not been "premature," however, it is unlikely he would have made the film at all. Once the horrors of the Holocaust began to be known, Hitler was no longer funny, not at all. The Marx Brothers, ahead of the curve, made "Duck Soup" in 1933, with Groucho playing the dictator Rufus T. Firefly in a comedy that had ominous undertones about what was already under way in Europe. And as late as 1942, the German exile Ernst Lubitschmade "To Be or Not to Be," with Jack Benny as an actor who becomes embroiled in the Nazi occupation of Poland.

Chaplin's film, aimed obviously and scornfully at Hitler himself, could only have been funny, he says in his autobiography, if he had not yet known the full extent of the Nazi evil. As it was, the film's mockery of Hitler got it banned in Spain, Italy and neutral Ireland. But in America and elsewhere, it played with an impact that, today, may be hard to imagine. There had never been any fictional character as universally beloved as the Little Tramp, and although Chaplin was technically not playing the Tramp in "The Great Dictator," he looked just like him, this time not in a comic fable but a political satire.

The plot is one of those concoctions that makes the action barely possible. The hero, a barber-soldier in World War I, saves the life of a German pilot named Schultz and flies him to safety, all the time not even knowing he was the enemy. Their crash-landing gives the barber amnesia, and for 20 years he doesn't know who he is. Then he recovers and returns to his barber shop in the country of Tomania (say it aloud), only to discover that the dictator Hynkel has come to power, not under the swastika, but under the Double Cross. His storm troopers are moving through the ghetto, smashing windows and rounding up Jews (the term "concentration camp" is used early, matter-of-factly). But the barber's shop is spared by the intervention of Schultz, now an assistant minister, who recognizes him.

The barber (never named, just like the Tramp) is in love with the maid Hannah (Paulette Goddard, Chaplin's estranged wife at the time). And he is befriended by his former neighbors. But he and the disloyal Schultz are eventually put in a concentration camp, and then Hynkel has a boating mishap, is mistaken for the barber, and locked into the camp just as the barber and Schultz escape -- with Hynkel's uniform. Now the barber is assumed by everyone to be the dictator.

In the classic Chaplin tradition, the movie has a richness of gags and comic pantomime, including Hynkel's famous ballet with an inflated balloon that makes the globe his plaything. There is a sequence where five men bite into puddings after being told the one who finds a coin must give his life to assassinate Hynkel. None of them want to find the coin and there is cheating, but eventually -- see for yourself. And there is a long, funny episode when the dictator of neighboring Bacteria, Benzini Napaloni (Jack Oakie), pays a state visit. Napaloni, obviously modeled on Mussolini, eludes an attempt to make him sit in a low chair so the short Hynkel can loom over him. And when the two of them sit in adjacent barber chairs, they take turns pumping their chairs higher than the other. There is also a lot of confusion about saluting, and Chaplin intercuts shots of the two dictators with newsreels of enormous, cheering crowds.

In 1940, this would have played as very highly charged, because Chaplin was launching his comic persona against Hitler in an attempt, largely successful, to ridicule him as a clown. Audiences reacted strongly to the film's humor; it won five Oscar nominations, for picture, actor, supporting actor (Oakie), screenplay and music (Meredith Willson). But audiences at the time, and ever since, have felt that the film comes to a dead end when the barber, impersonating Hynkel, delivers a monologue of more than three minutes which represents Chaplin's own views.

Incredibly, no one tries to stop the fake "Hynkel." Chaplin talks straight into the camera, in his own voice, with no comic touches and only three cutaways, as the barber is presumably heard on radio all over the world. What he says is true enough, but it deflates the comedy and ends the picture as a lecture, followed by a shot of Goddard outlined against the sky, joyously facing the Hynkel-free future, as the music swells. It didn't work then, and it doesn't work now. It is fatal when Chaplin drops his comic persona, abruptly changes the tone of the film, and leaves us wondering how long he is going to talk (a question that should never arise during a comedy). The movie plays like a comedy followed by an editorial.

Chaplin (1889-1977) nevertheless was determined to keep the speech; it might have been his reason for making the film. He put the Little Tramp and $1.5 million of his own money on the line to ridicule Hitler (and was instrumental in directing more millions to Jewish refugee centers). He made his statement, it found a large audience, and in the stretches leading up to the final speech, he shows his innate comic genius. It is a funny film, which we expect from Chaplin, and a brave one. He never played a little man with a mustache again.

And now a memory. In 1972, the Venice Film Festival staged a retrospective of Chaplin's complete work, with prints from his own collection. On the closing night, his masterpiece, "City Lights" (1932), was shown outdoors in Piazza San Marco. The lights were off, the orchestras were silenced for the first time in more than a century, and the film played on a giant screen to standing room only.

When it was over, and the blind flower girl could see again, and she realized the Little Tramp was her savior, there was much snuffling and blowing of noses. Then a single spotlight sprung from the darkness and illuminated a balcony overlooking the square. A little man stepped out and waved. And we cheered and cheered.

Roger Ebert · September 27, 2007.

#film #Film Review #Charlie Chaplin #adolf hitler #the great dictator #roger ebert

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movieswithkevin27 · 6 years

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Keeper of the Flame

When Keeper of the Flame was released in 1943, it seemed as though everybody was lining up to hate the film. Even director George Cukor stated that the film’s ending was not that good with Katharine Hepburn embodying everything that made the general public hate her in the 1930s. The head of MGM was incensed that they had financed such a picture. Republicans decried it for its leftist politics, leading them to calling on the head of the Production Code to ban such a picture from being made for how it equates being rich with being fascist. Of course, Keeper of the Flame does nothing of the sort, Hepburn is brilliant, and the ending is what makes the film such a brilliant work from Cukor even if he does not know it. Portraying the death of a charismatic political leader, the aftermath, and then the mystery surrounding his death leading to the great reveal - that he was not all he was made up to be in the public eye - Keeper of the Flame shows the dangers the future held for America. In viewing Nazi Germany, many Americans thanked their lucky stars and said, “Good thing that could never happen here.” Portraying a war reporter returning to the United States, Spencer Tracy’s Steven O’Malley is even asked why he is back in the States, as there is no war there. Yet, as the film argues about a secret hand in politics made up of men who want nothing but power and will sow division and discord, amongst the unwitting public in an attempt to pit hatred against hatred, Keeper of the Flame shows there is a war to be fought. It is not a film preaching leftist ideals nor is it one that is anti-American. Instead, it is a film that warns about fascism draped in American flag. It is a warning we ignored as the film was roundly rejected by Republicans (the film never even calls the dead fascist a Republican, but I guess this one hit a little too close to home, eh?) and faced backlash even in the studio (again, a little too close to home for the Hollywood elite, eh?). Tell the truth and the guilty will take issue, apparently.

It is this ending in which the secrets behind Robert Forrest are revealed that Keeper of the Flame becomes so impactful and it is, in large part, because of Katharine Hepburn. As the sound all around her dies down, Forrest’s widow Christine (Hepburn) tells every secret he had to hard-nosed journalist Steven O’Malley. Revealing his plans to put elements of society against one another through “fake news” articles to be run in specifically targeted publications - examples such as an anti-semitic piece, an anti-urbanite piece to run in the Farmers Gazette, anti-black stories, or an anti-poor story - and the way in which this mountain of a man came to believe in his own god-like status bestowed upon him by the public, Hepburn’s monologue is achingly beautiful. It is heavy-handed, yes, but it is necessarily heavy-handed. These are not ideals that can be left to suggestion or thematic development and writer Donald Ogden Stewart wisely recognizes this fact. Instead, it must be said. It must be a rallying cry to “keep the flame” burning. The public is smart, but nothing can be left to chance. They must know there is a secret group of fascists within American borders who sell pro-American ideals as being that of hatred of others, animosity, and racial superiority. They must know there is a plot to install soulless men who want nothing but power and wealth into political office where they will sell themselves and their vote to the highest bidder. There is a plot to leave the public poorly educated, apathetic, build up beliefs in public officials as being god-like, and stoking our childish desire to blame others for our ills. It is a powerfully written call to action that, like all of the best speeches and monologues that hit too close to the mark, fell on deaf ears in 1943. Hepburn’s impassioned delivery of the monologue serves as the emotional climax of the film as she explains her hatred for what her beloved husband had become once he, too, came to believe himself worthy of being worshipped. It may be on-the-nose, but it is its power and delivery that makes it come off so authentically and emotionally. This is, largely, due to Hepburn who deserves great plaudits role in this film.

Until this moment, however, Keeper of the Flame is a mystery drama film. Portraying the death of Forrest, showing the national mourning that occurs, and then the efforts of journalists to interview Christine that are consistently met with a locked gate, Keeper of the Flame creates great mystery and intrigue. The only man capable of breaking through is Steven O’Malley, whose writing was greatly admired by Robert Forrest before his political swing that came to define his life at the end. In a classic role for Tracy - a man in a position to “right a wrong” in society or politics and crusading to create this impact - he is able to smooth talk his way into the estate of Forrest where he is able to win over Christine to gain the rights to pen the biography about Forrest. Once given access, however, he stumbles on some oddity. Christine acts quite weird around her male cousin, who is established as having hated Robert. The gatekeeper’s daughter became quite taken with Robert, only to be sent off to a sanitarium following a nervous breakdown. The gatekeeper’s young son cries daily and has made himself sick because he believes he could have saved Robert as he knew the bridge - which Robert’s car fell through - had collapsed by the phones were out due to a storm so he could not tell him. Robert’s elderly mother claims he was murdered. Christine’s story about her whereabouts that evening do line up either. All of this leads to a suspicion of murder, infidelity, sabotage, and the brutal back-stabbing of a great man. The painful reveal that, while some of these may have some mild truth, that none of what the world knew about Forrest was actually true hits Tracy’s righteous character like a ton of bricks. However, in building this suspense and mystery, Cukor does a fantastic job in giving the film just enough depth and time to reach a great climactic moment without beating around the bush for too long and causing the film to drag on endlessly. This is a succinct work that builds suspense and then gives a great pay-off without overstaying its welcome.

Technically, the film’s atmosphere often gives a very strong horror movie vibe. Starting off with a shot of Robert’s car careening through the gap in the bridge, the film includes heavy lightning in a storm during the middle of the night to set the scene. It feels quite ominous and frightening due to these sound effects, as well as the score from Bronislaw Kaper. Throughout the film, Kaper’s creepy score serves as the perfect undercurrent for the mystery that Cukor and Stewart seek to create throughout the film’s first two acts. However, what makes it all the more impactful is the cinematography from William H. Daniels. Often draping characters in full darkness - such as Steven when he first meets Christine and hides in the shadows of the room - or in absolute brightness - such as Christine’s eyes as she reveals the dark secrets about Robert - Daniels’ cinematography gives the film a great gothic and horror movie feeling. This matches the score, atmosphere, and general aesthetic perfectly, as Daniels’ reliance upon creepy shadows, low-angle shots of houses on big hills, lightning, and cramped spaces, creating a deeply sinister feeling that mirror the mystery and confusion that is unfolding in the script.

Keeper of the Flame has finally found its year. 2017 is the year for Keeper of the Flame and it should be required viewing for everybody given the rise of fascism, pushing of hatred and division, and the apathetic and under-educated populace that eats it all up with two spoons. It is a film that packs a punch with a powerful warning about this fascism wrapped in an American flag and sold as being patriotic, but it is one we ignored. At the time, those in power realized its power - whether it be the head of MGM or the Republicans in congress - so much so that they yelled and screamed about how dangerous the film was, how it was biased, and how it attacked them and their values without Keeper of the Flame even having to name the charismatic Robert Forrest as a Republican. Instead, he is just a wealthy man who everybody loves. It is those in power and the Republicans who assumed Keeper of the Flame was leftist for showing this man turn into a fascist and power hungry individual. Tragically, this may say everything it needs to about the world we have today. While Keeper of the Flame was so ahead of its time it was labeled as lunacy in 1943, it is tragically right at home in 2017 with its message ignored and the reality it presented having come into full view.

#1943 movies #1940s movies #keeper of the flame #george cukor #film analysis #film reviews #movie reviews #katharine hepburn #spencer tracy #donald meek #darryl hickman #forrest tucker

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