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heavencollins · 3 years

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Top 10 Films of 2020: Part One

2020 was a rough year for a lot of reasons, but even more rough due to the lack of an existent film industry for over half of the year. Sure, there are small productions happening and movies being released on VOD, as well as some in theatres, but so many great films were pushed back this year—movies I was excited to possibly have on my top ten. Minari, Promising Young Woman, Zola, The Green Knight, Saint Maud. Okay most of those are A24 releases but A24 literally released next to none of their slate for this year and it’s one of the most disappointing things to happen in the entertainment industry in my opinion.

Alas, I still found cinema through streaming, paying $20 for a VOD rental, and those amazing $1.80 rentals from Redbox (remember when they were only a dollar? because I do). And honestly? It was probably the hardest time curating a top ten that I’ve had in a long time; with so much just available through the internet and owning every single popular streaming service, it was both impossible to watch everything I wanted but also since I watched a lot of what i wanted, I ended up loving most of it. For a year that was so dismal in every other way possible, the films that were released ended up being a shining light more often than not. Of course, like every other year, a lot of hot garbage came out too, but that isn’t the focus of this—the great, amazing, can’t believe these are real films.

So let’s start from number ten. This was my first and only $20 rental this year, starring a man who I personally admire: Pete Davidson.

10. The King Of Staten Island, directed by Judd Apatow and written by Judd Apatow, Pete Davidson, and Dave Sirus.

Judd Apatow is one of the first directors who I watched religiously, and hearing that he was doing a film with Pete Davidson that was essentially based on Davidson’s life meant that I knew I’d have to watch it. Scott, played by Davidson, is a twenty-something with no direct path in life; he lives with his mother, his sister is going off to college—something he never attempted—and he has no real career. His father died in a large building structure fire, much like Davidson’s actual father, a firefighter who passed away while responding to the twin towers during 9/11. Scott is emotionally a wreck, plagued with depression and anxiety, a chronic weed smoker, and dreams of being a tattoo artist that he practices by tattooing his group of rag-tag friends, but none of the tattoos are very great.

The thing about an Apatow film is they border the line between comedy and drama very well, kind of a complicated little dance. But, King of Staten Island is very much a drama more than a comedy. Bill Burr plays Ray, the father of a kid that Scott tattoos earlier on in the film. Ray comes stomping up to Scott’s mother’s house, and Margie, played by Marissa Tomei, opens the door. It’s essentially love at first sight. She hasn’t dated since Scott’s father passed, and to make matters worse, Ray is also a firefighter. This complicates emotions for Scott, as he loves his mother but also doesn’t know how to deal with the feeling that his mother is finally moving on and may face heartbreak again.

Davidson puts it all on the table in this film. It’s poignant and realistic; at the start, Scott is driving down the highway and closes his eyes, way longer than you should. It sets the tone from the start that this man isn’t okay, but also he’s scared of dying because as soon as he opens his eyes again and sees he may be about to crash, he quickly panics and readjusts his wheel. This struck a chord with me as most people know that Davidson has struggled with suicidal thoughts in the past. It’s a beautiful film that memorializes both how much Davidson’s father meant to him, but also the cycles of grief and trauma that last throughout your life.

9: Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), directed by Cathy Yan and written by Christina Hodson.

Suicide Squad is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen period, fact. Birds of Prey is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen period, fact. I never, ever, ever thought I’d see a day where a DC movie was in my top ten, but this year anything is possible. Birds of Prey is a display of feminism, badassery, and all around perfection. You jump right into the story, hearing Margot Robbie’s classic Harley Quinn voice laid over an animation showing what we missed in her life so far, which means you don’t have to have any previous knowledge of the other films. Birds of Prey is meant to stand alone from any other movie preceding this one, and that’s just part of why it’s so great.

This film knows not to take itself too seriously. Margot Robbie is a dream as Harley Quinn, using just the right amount of playfulness to put a little edge on her, while also maintaining the manic-panic-pixie-dream-girl effect. Perhaps the best scene is when Harley goes and purchases the perfect egg breakfast sandwich, and then she drops it, causing a dramatic slow motion effect that proves she really does love that sandwich more than anything in the world. Or her realistic apartment, nothing truly fancy, just a little hole in the wall above a rundown Chinese restaurant. But then she has an amazing ensemble of other women actors around her, which are what really uplift her performance.

The funhouse fight scene at the end may be the best in superhero movie history. I mean, I guess, is Harley Quinn really a superhero? She’s kind of the anti-hero, which is what makes her so great. She’s somebody who isn’t even close to perfect but she still succeeds and tries to help and uplift the other women on her team. There’s just something special about this movie that made me smile and laugh the entire time. It’s a reminder that it’s okay to have fun every once in a while.

8: The Assistant, directed and written by Kitty Green.

For those who don’t know, I work as an assistant during the day for a small business here in Vermont. The work is mundane but it’s a job that’s giving me experience for the future. In The Assistant, Jane, played by Julia Garner, is an assistant to a “powerful entertainment mogul.” She gets lunch, answers phones, is the first one into the office, the last one out of the office, finds herself overshadowed by her male counterparts and getting the majority of the “grunt” work, and becomes more and more aware of what’s really going on at this office throughout a day in her life.

What’s interesting about this film is nothing is ever seen; everything Jane starts to feel is just based on intuition. Her boss is tricky, finding ways to keep his abuse of women out of the public eye, out of the eye of any female employees. This is obviously in response to #MeToo, Times Up, and the Harvey Weinstein news from the last few years, and it works surprisingly well as a film that just unnerves you and gets under your skin.

The reality of assault in the film industry is that until it’s widely public and known, nobody is going to know about it. You can report it to your company, to other women, to other men, to anybody, and nobody will take you seriously until they either experience it themselves or know somebody else who has. The Assistant hits the ball out of the park with the ending, even if it doesn’t give a vindictive satisfaction to viewers, because it’s simply the truth of the matter.

7: Tenet, directed and written by Christopher Nolan.

I really don’t know what to say about this one. It’s really controversial to like it but I absolutely LOVED this movie, it’s pure fucking vibes. A lot of people are cinema purists, which I am not, and will never claim to be, which was a huge deal with this film. Personally, this works way better at home than it ever would in a theater. It’s slightly long, the sound mixing makes it so it can be hard to hear dialogue over loud noises and the score, and it’s the type of movie you may have to rewind a few times.

My partner and I watched this in 4K Ultra HD with subtitles on, and let me tell you, it was amazing. Everything about the acting, the diversity in the film, the fact that Nolan literally has a character say “Don’t try to understand it, just experience it”???? VIBES. That’s all I can say about it. Plus, Elizabeth Debicki plays an actual badass who stands against her abuser and that enough is five stars. A tall queen standing up against her short joker—absolute feminism.

Sure, no character gets any development, but is that seriously necessary for every film? It’s an action flick about time and space and none of it makes sense and you can’t force it to. Why does everything need to make sense in a time where we are literally living through a pandemic? Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the experience of Tenet. It’s more fun when you don’t take it seriously.

6: The Devil All The Time, directed by Antonio Campos and written by Antonio Campos, Donald Ray Pollock, and Paulo Campos.

I never read the book this was based on, but this film made me want to. I love a film where multiple plot lines converge into one central story and this one did it so well, all with the same theme surrounding every single character: the guilt of sin and how no matter how much you think you can save yourself, you can’t truly save yourself. I’m not a huge fan of Tom Holland, but he shines as Arvin from beginning to end. Pattinson brings a creepy southern preacher to life with an accent that he will never be able to match again. Keough gives a performance you can only sympathize with as you know she’s being manipulated the entire time. Every character in this is corrupt in their own way but some in worse ways than others.

I don’t know how much to say about this one without spoiling it, either, because the core of this film is on the characters and what leads to their untimely ends, because pretty much everybody ends up dead. It’s grim and dark but it’s so beautiful and tells the story in a way that keeps you interested throughout the entire run time. It surprised me but there’s never truly been a Robert Pattinson starring movie that I’ve hated, so am I really surprised? I’m a TwiHard at heart even at age 22.

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julietandcinderellavocaloid · 4 years

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Determined Alice Chapter 5

The last time Meiko had been on a train, she was a little girl. Seven, perhaps eight. At the time, she thought they were just going on an adventure they would ultimately never return from. She didn't know till much later that she and her family were fleeing the district. The reason why they fled wouldn't be made known to her till much later.

It was all Meiko could initially think about as she and Big Al snuck onto an open compartment of a train just before it began to take off. By the time the sun rose, they would be in the Capital. From there, it would be a matter of figuring out where their legion was and how they were going to pull off their mission. Hopefully, Big Al had stated, they would try to break this special operative out of prison even without Big Al and Meiko with them.

"Who is this guy anyway, and why is he so important?" Meiko asked, eyes locked on the scenery passing them by in a blur of colors. Due to the six months of darkness, the only colors to be naturally scene were dark blue, deep purple, and black. The colors meshing together looked unimpressive, even with the stars and three moons trying to add some beauty to the rushing night sky.

"He spent months spying on the lady and gathering what could be crucial information," Big Al answered. "He might have the knowledge we need to plan the next best step."

"And you think the Benevolence has had contact with the lords and ladies of all the districts?"

"No, but nobody doubts they contacted everyone in charge in the Winter Continent. After all, we did side with them in the last war."

"The War That Didn't Make History Books," or so it was dubbed. It happened decades ago, when Meiko's father was a young man. Hardly anyone knew the truth about it. This war was one of the things the government tried really hard, and actually succeeded, to bury. If Meiko's family didn't have personal ties to it, she never would have known the true extent of "that failed Juliet rebellion." Very few people in Artemis knew about it, and it had been made very clear what the consequences of those even fewer who tried to publicize it would be.

This war had been an inside job from start to finish. The Winter Continent, being the least independent of the three continents and tired of being pushed around in trade deals by the other two continents, sided with the Benevolence. Only they didn't know there were more than plenty people on the inside who had no interest in helping the Winter Continent assist the Benevolence in achieving their world domination goal.

Yet all of Artemis believed this was nothing more than a civil war. Juliets didn't want to be Juliets anymore. They rebelled. They were eventually beaten back into place. Only those who were involved knew better.

There are others out there, Meiko recalled thinking the first time her father told her about the Benevolence and what they tried to do. There are others out there, and they want us under their thumb. Artemis isn't an empire; it's one small world surrounded by hundreds of more powerful ones.

Now the Benevolence were back. It was Meiko's generation's turn to rise up and fight. But first, she and others like her had to learn what they were going up against.

"If the Benevolence is so powerful," Meiko said into the night, not even turning around to see if Big Al was listening, "why not just conquer us in one swoop? They must be capable of it if they really are that big of a threat."

Meiko didn't realize how much she expected to be ignored until Big Al replied, "Nobody would want to be loyal to a conqueror who overcame them as swiftly as a thief in the night. If the Benevolence did just that, all of Artemis would ban together to fight against them. They don't want to deal with that. Instead, what the Benevolence wants to do is divide and conquer. Let us tear ourselves down first before they come in and finish the job."

"Sounds like a lot of work."

"In war, if you're the more powerful force, you don't want to win too well. That has worse consequences than taking your time and accepting the occasional defeat."

Meiko thought back to the Juliet versus Cinderella controversy the media had been dwelling on for over a week now. The Benevolence was already letting the dividing portion take root. The worst part was this was something that would have happened sooner or later without the Benevolence's interference.

"You remind me of my son."

This got Meiko to tear her eyes away from the nighttime scenery and turn her attention towards Big Al. The man leaned against the other side of the train, eyes closed as if asleep. His arms were crossed, and his legs were stretched out before him.

Meiko furrowed her brows, trying to make sense of the sudden comparison. "How so?"

"You both refuse to ask any questions, you're stubborn once you made your mind up about something, and you try a little too desperately to prove yourselves."

"I'm not desperate to prove anything," Meiko claimed.

Big Al snorted. "You don't fool me. Ever since you showed up, all you have been doing is trying to prove yourself to us. We were all surprised you're the one who came in the place of your father instead of the promised son, but nobody's disappointed. Or they weren't. I think a lot of initial opinions have changed now."

To that, Meiko had no response. She returned to staring at the passing scenery. Not sure why she let the words pass her lips, Meiko said, "I didn't know you had a son."

It wasn't exactly permission for Big Al to tell Meiko about his family life, but he took it as such. "His name's Oliver. Ann and I had him shortly after the war. He's roughly a few years older than you."

"Where is he now?"

"In the Equinox Continent, with his wife and daughter."

"Do we have a legion stationed there?"

"No. Oliver isn't a part of our little anti-Benevolence group. Until a couple of years ago, there was no need for anyone to band back together to stop the Benevolence from doing whatever it is they're trying now. He's a merchant, and a successful one at that. As much as he would like to contribute to the cause, he can't exactly walk away from the business. However, he does send financial support whenever he can. Situations don't make these donations frequent, but they are always generous."

"And his wife?"

"That's our man Opera Tonio's daughter. Avanna's well aware of what's going on, or at least Oliver insists she is. Tonio didn't want Avanna growing up knowing about others out there, so as far as I'm aware, he never told her."

"Father only told Meito and me while he was on his deathbed," Meiko muttered.

"Trust me, if we had it our way, nobody would have ever known about the war for Artemis we fought. Except now I'm afraid that not only will those battles and their consequences come to light for the public, but our desire to hide them for so long will make this upcoming one even worse than had we properly prepared everyone for what might have come again one day."

"I'm just surprised you all were able to hide a freaking galactic war from the general public."

"Oh, trust me, we had to memory wipe more than a few civilians. We weren't that sneaky. We were just that unethical."

Not having a response, Meiko returned to watching the world go past. While their father lay dying from a disease for which he refused treatment – only now did Meiko know it was because he didn't want anyone knowing where he and his family was and a trip to the doctor would risk that same information getting out there – he told his two children about what had happened before their birth. He then named Meito, the older child and son, his heir. Only Meito was no longer able to become the heir. Meiko, feeling a sense of duty for her father and brother, willingly went instead. It did help that getting away from the others as a consequence was a plus.

"You don't like to be touched," Big Al began moments later, causing Meiko to jump at the sound of his voice. He took an audible breath and tried again. "You don't like to be touched because one time somebody touched you, and it ended badly. Am I wrong?"

Seeing no point in hiding it, Meiko softly explained, "Not as badly as you might think, but badly enough for me to never want to be touched like that again."

"That's why you always have knives ready."

"Yeah."

"You learned to use them and to overcome injuring others just to protect yourself in case it ever happened again."

"Of course."

"Smart girl. I knew there was a fighter in you."

Unsure why, Meiko felt a little warm at the compliment. Most women Meiko had known who went through what she did, some less and others far worse, become avoidant from touch altogether. Very few, Meiko included, accepted what happened enough to make sure it never happened again. If it made Meiko a fighter, she would take it. She didn't get where she was by having no agency for herself, after all.

"You'd be a good soldier if you learned to follow orders," Big Al then said, and Meiko's warm feeling turned into an icy spear through her chest.

A response rose up, but Meiko bit it back down. She didn't want to think about this anymore. What she wanted was to sleep, let her dreams process the events of that day for her.

Pushing herself away from the edge of the doorway, Meiko settled herself in one of the train compartment corners and used her arm as a pillow. Her back faced the wall, and her eyes trained on Big Al. His eyes were still closed, but Meiko knew that didn't mean anything.

"I hope you don't take this the wrong way," Big Al said as the train chugged along, "but I have wanted to know since you stabbed me in the arm. Why did you come in the place of your brother? You said he wasn't coming, but what's keeping him?"

Since Big Al already told her something about his family, Meiko felt it was only fair to do the same. Someone else was going to find out sooner or later. Of everyone, Meiko was sure Big Al should be the first to know.

"Death," she whispered into the night, speaking just loud enough for Big Al to barely make out the words. She hoped he was listening, because she would not repeat herself. "Death is keeping him."

"I'm sorry. What happened?"

"He and the others were caught up in that minor Juliet rebellion a few years ago. Nobody in my family was trying to support or stop it; they were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm the only one of my family left."

Silence, and then, "You're a part of a new family now, Meiko. I know we can't replace the one you lost, but I hope you'll one day learn to love us just the same."

If I didn't screw it up so badly already that any of the others would even be willing to give me another chance, Meiko thought. As she fell asleep on the train, she tried to keep down all the rising anger. Of all the things and people her anger could have been directed, it was targeted only at herself.

#Vocaloid #Juliet and Cinderella #Determined Alice #Vocaloid Fanfic #Meiko #Sakine Meiko #Meiko Sakine #Big Al

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moviepower · 4 years

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Why do people criticize Jojo Rabbit?

We'd say that this is uncharted territory for distributor Disney, but the company did previously give us their futures face. Hmm. I saw Jojo Rabbit in the best place I could for movies, in my opinion.

For this list, we're looking at why Tyco ITTS 2019 black comedy has proven. So polarizing for critics just to clarify the critical reception thus far has been mostly positive and even watch mojo gave the film a rave review following its TIFF premiere.

Nevertheless, we can definitely see why a movie like this. Wouldn't win audiences over everywhere. Hey Joe, Joe, my old friend. Hi adults. Number 10, the controversial premise. I don't think I can do this last. Of course you can simply by reading it synopsis, you can tell why Jojo rabbit has stirred up so much controversy.

In the midst of world war II, a young German boy named Joe Joe dreams of becoming a Nazi upon learning that his mother has been harboring a Jewish girl in the attic though, Jo Jo begins to reevaluate his outlook on life. I tell them you will be in big trouble throughout this coming of age journey. Our titular character is guided by his imaginary friend.

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Is it worth to watch Jojo Rabbit full movie

Who just so happens to be a flamboyantly incompetent, Adolf Hitler, as inventive as the premises, it was guaranteed to ignite passionate feelings. Critics are unsurprisingly split as to whether the film's premise is inspired or irresponsible. I wish more of our young boys had your blind fanaticism. Okay.

Number nine, how it stacks up to other satires and this world is ruined for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way Jojo rabbit. Isn't the first film to satirize Hitler or Nazis 1940 twos to be, or not to be was criticized upon release for its farcical, spin of Nazi occupied Poland.

But today is viewed as a comedy classic. I know you're quite famous in London kernel. They call you concentration camp Earhart. Yes. Yes, we do the concentrating and the poles do the camping Hitler. Technically isn't the protagonist and the great dictator. It's obvious who Charlie Chaplin was parodying. We can learn more about actress playing mother Jojo on Wikipedia.

Arguably the most famous sendup of Nazi Germany is Mel Brooks. The producers. In which two con men put on an intentionally horrible musical entitled springtime for Hitler. Practically a love letter to this own run a week week. Are you kidding display? It's got the close on page four. Some critics are ready to place Jojo rabbit alongside these revolutionary respected comedy.

What do critics write in reviews about Jojo Rabbit?

Others, however, would claim that the film has more in common with the bridge sit-com Hile, honey I'm home, which was so misguided and tasteless that it only lasted one episode. Oh 10 night. You will make an schnitzel. What a joke. You must be real mad at me, honey. I'm a very, very bad Hitler. Number eight, what's going on in the real world right now?

Fuck man. The house, although world war II is in the past. The same, unfortunately can not be said about bigotry. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the 2017 unite the right rally in Charlottesville, which attracted several hate groups, including neo-Nazis. Since prejudice and discrimination remain prevalent in today's world.

It's obvious why various critics would object to a film that makes light of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, satire can reflect modern times as well as history in ways that straightforward drama can't. Some might argue that now isn't the right time for a Nazi satire, but others would debate that society needs a movie like Jojo rabbit. A great story about the Irishman is here.

Now more than ever, you're not to nuts. Jojo, tenue kids likes dressing up in front of you. If somebody wants to be part of a club. Number seven, the humor, the best weekend ever.

Soundtrack in the highest level of production

Wow. Your enjoyment of Jojo rabbit will hinder on how hard you laugh. Or of course, if you laugh, the film didn't tickle. Roger Freedman. Funnybone who wrote in his showbiz four one, one review Jojo rabbit is actually borderline antisemitic offensive on many levels and not even funny. Sam Adams of slate couldn't have disagreed more proclaiming for Jojo rabbit comedy.

Isn't a means to minimize, but to analyze wise, to pry at the way, hateful ideologies can be embraced as a comfort and how beneath their promise to. Blame how the world really works is an understanding no more sophisticated than a child's it's time to buy some books. Since humor is subjective, we guess there isn't always going to be a clear line between what's offensively funny and what's just plain offensive.

Oh God. Number six. Jewish jokes. Did you know, Jews can Z to each other's mind. So tell us, you know, who saw one? They could look just like us of Tyco. ITT satire is clearly the Nazis. However, the director who's of Jewish and Maori heritage also pokes fun at Judaism. Hi, well, the real Jordan Rumi was horrified by the audience's reception at the screening he attended.

Writing, you have no idea how it is to be surrounded by thousands of people laughing at jokes, specifically directed at Jews. That being said, Rumi seemed to be in the minority of a group that found the film. Hilarious. As with Borat and South park, many would argue that the humor and Jojo rabbit isn't intended to mock the Jewish faith, but to criticize how ignorant and Semites are a cute number five, the life is beautiful comparison, right?

Jojo Rabbit's reaction to mom's death

Yeah. Critics have stocked a Jojo rabbit up against numerous other films. But life is beautiful. Seems to be the one that's invited the most comparisons this 1997, Italian dromedy also presented world war II through a lighthearted lens, centering on a Jewish man who uses humor and imagination to shield his son from the horrors of the Holocaust. It's interesting what they write about this movie on Amazon.

Well, the film won an Academy award for best foreign language film, and even got nominated for best picture. There were those who found the movies comedic tone, inappropriate. Over two decades later, we will continue to debate if the movie is a life affirming fable or a dated misfire. It's actually eerie how much these two films have in common, especially since both one TIFs peoples choice award.

That is the strongest thing in the world. Number four, is it shocking enough? I was your age. I had an imaginary friend come in so much stuff even before the first trailer dropped Jojo rabbit was being built up as one of 20 nineteens most controversial movies. Weirdly enough though, some critics have expressed disappointment that the film isn't more shocking.

Well, audiences have arguably gotten more sensitive with time. There are still patrons who crave comedy that pushes the envelope to its limits. It's time to burn some books. Brian Talarico of the Chicago sun times felt Jojo rabbit played it too safe. Writing the final scenes of Jojo rabbit are too easy for a film that needs to be dangerous and daring.

Are the best scenes already included in the trailer?

Even if the film doesn't go all out with its edgy concept. Seeing Tyco, ITT dresses, Adolf Hitler will be more than enough to make a few jobs drop. What am I going to do? No idea. Going down the house in Glen Winston church one, negotiate number three. It's depiction of Nazis. The playlist Charles romesco took issue with the films, humanization of antisemites writing.

YTT concedes that a good percentage of Nazis really do hold hate in their heart. But maintains that at least some of them aren't you two seem to be getting on. Well, it doesn't seem like a bad cost. How much pain and suffering the Nazis caused many audiences will understandably struggle with this message.

However, if Ron Jones proved anything with his third wave social experiment in 1967, it's that even ordinary people can get swept up in the dangerous ideals of fascism. Likewise, Jojo rabbit poses, a challenging question. If we're not willing to acknowledge the bad and the good in people, how can we ever rid ourselves of prejudice?

Nothing makes sense anymore. Yeah, I know. It's definitely not a good time to be a Nazi. Number two it's message. And mother took me. She's kind me like a person, whatever your thoughts on Jojo rabbit, Tyco ITT clearly wanted to spread an anti hate message. YTT also claims that he started writing the screenplay before Nazis regained relevance in the media.

There's little doubt that why TTS intent was noble, whether or not the final product successfully gets his message across is where critics are split. A doubt of the a V club felt that making fun of Nazi Germany had been done before. Thus taking away from the movies, broader anti hate theme. Peter Howell begged to differ in his Toronto star review writing Taika YTT knocks it out of deer park with the meaningful lunacy of his anti hate satire, which is equal parts.

Adolf Hitler's thread in the movie

Mel Brooks, West Henderson, and own whimsical brilliance growing up too fast. Ten-year-olds and the celebrating war and talking politics. Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified a better latest videos. You'll have the option to be notified for occasional videos or all of them.

If you're on your phone, make sure you go into your settings and switch on notifications. Number one it's depiction of Hitler. Well, they call me a scared rabbits. Okay. Let's address the giant rabbit in the room. Tyco YTT spends most of his screen time prancing around in a Nazi uniform and toothbrush mustache. If you want, you can read here about preparations for making a movie and other curiosities.

Without a doubt, YTT, didn't set out to deliver a serious or dignified portrayal of Hitler. Rather YTT aspired to make the fewer look as goofy and idiotic as possible. Oh, . Just painting Hitler as a wacky, even likable buffoon desensitized us to the atrocities. He committed though. Some may say yes while others may argue that it leaves audiences more informed and open-minded.

At the end of the day, everyone is going to have a different opinion of Jojo. Let them say whatever they want. People used to say a lot of nasty things about me. Oh, this guy's a lunatic. Oh, look at that psycho. He's going to get us all killed. Do you agree with our picks, check out this other recent clip from watch mojo and be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to be notified about our latest videos.

#jojo rabbit #movie #movies #netflix #hbo

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7hyuns · 5 years

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ateez as doms or subs

warnings; lots of mentions of different kinks!!, Controversial Opinions ladies we’re going all out, we had to add that keep reading bc i went off again :/

a/n; i’m really not sure what the stance on writing nsfw for 00 liners is? i haven’t added jongho because i’m not sure but if uhh somebody could let me know if i’m supposed to add him that’d be nice !!

seonghwa;

overall;

wanna hear the hottest take?

he’s a dom!

he just radiates that kinda energy, first of all

but i don’t think he’d be super rough very often

by this i mean i think he’d be a pretty soft dom most of the time but he’d definitely have his moments

he’d probably not even be a dom because he’s super into all the different kinks that usually come with it

he just likes being in control and taking care of people so he sees it as a kinda natural thing for him to do

however! do i think he’d ever sub? no. not really

he’s just not into the idea of not being in charge oof

i also feel like a lot of ‘communication’ with seonghwa when he’s feelin like a Big Dom would be non-verbal

expect lots of sharp looks and glares if you’re doing something you’re not supposed to

hhhhh he’d probably raise his eyebrows at you in That Look that he does when you talk back to him goodbye

anyway, he doesn’t understand why you’re ever a brat with him

he’s just ?? he knows he’s good 2 u so what’s the reason

which is when the (✿╹◡╹) softdom!seonghwa (✿╹◡╹) persona just blows up in your face

seonghwa no longer knows what a soft dom is. he is now the Only rough dom to ever have existed

tbh he’d probably stay very stoic but lmao it’d probably be because he actually doesn’t know how to react to a lot of stuff at first

if you do something attractive on the inside he’s doing a keyboard smash but he doesn’t wanna embarrass himself so he’d have little to no reaction oof

kinks;

honestly? he’d probably develop more the longer he dated you but at first he wouldn’t really have very many

light choking (giving)

kissing!! smooching!!

hm if he was feeling extra soft he’d really like hand holding when he went down on you :)

light hair pulling (giving)

marking (giving)

tbh light biting bye (giving)

slight pain (giving) (he’d feel bad afterwards though whoops)

being a dom?? being caring?? is that a kink?? idk but seonghwa has it

punishments;

well, it’s been fun, i hope you rest in peace ://

like i said, [softdom!seonghwa has left the chat]

he’s mean!!

light degrading but he can only do degrading if he mixes it with praise

praises you during punishments anyway

i think he’d stick to spanking

if you apologise and/or thank him after each one he will a: have a heart attack and b: let you hold his hand because omg that’s his baby :o

would occasionally use orgasm denial but he’d really only do that if he wanted there to be a big pay off for you at the end lol

aftercare;

the sweetest boyfriend anyone could ever have

gets really soft if you get whiny

so much praise!!

“you’re always such a good girl/boy for me, always, you did so well.”

calls you his baby :( bye

would probably wanna try and get you to shower or have a bath before you went to sleep

he’d wash your hair for you if you were feeling extra sleepy

but if you really didn’t wanna shower he might let it pass,,

he just likes to make sure you aren’t gonna wake up in the morning and feel gross ://

takes him a little while to actually stop being in a dom mind-set

he goes from being all like: ( ￣＾￣) i’m big dom seonghwa!! i’m really tough and cool!! ( ￣＾￣)

to aftercare where’s like: ♡＾▽＾♡ who’s my favourite person in the whole world!! omg it’s you!! ♡＾▽＾♡

he’d make you have something to drink and eat before he let you sleep every single time

hongjoong;

overall;

ok here comes the opinion i’ll be murdered for

i think he’s a dom most of the time

but he’s got some sub tendencies too so i think very occasionally he’d switch

anyway! he’d probably get more confident as a dom the longer he was one

i feel like he’d be confused at first over whether or not he thought he was a dom or a switch

i just think he’d settle into being a dom easier so he’d feel more content with being like that :)

but if you went to dom him he’d literally never say no

as a dom ((once he got confident and comfortable enough)) he’d probably be pretty mean

he’d just overall really enjoy the dynamic?? idk i feel like hongjoong just likes having a thing to be giving more attention to than he really needs to lol

he loves being hyped up as a dom!! it just reaffirms him so much

can’t handle it if you do something he finds cute or attractive

even if he’s supposed to be a Cool Dom if you do something cute his uwus? on the floor

adores it when you get whiny!!

is probably up to try anything and everything at least once :) especially if it’s trying things for you because he really wants to make you feel good

as for his sub tendencies, i just mean if you went to dom him he’s gonna melt n let you do literally anything to him he won’t care

but if it was left up to him he’d prefer to be the dom

you’re not allowed to tease him in public whether he’s the dom or the sub

he just can’t handle it he’s so bad at keeping it lowkey whenever you even slightly touch his thigh in public

but the rule’s not the same for you :) he wouldn’t tease you in public very often, but oh boy when he did

kinks;

his list would just keep getting longer ?? how

choking (giving and occasionally receiving)

hair pulling (giving)

praise (receiving)

body worship (giving and receiving)

overstimulation (giving)

phone sex

semi-public sex (he’s too nervous to do it anywhere other than a studio he’s working in when you’re both desperate but you have to promise to be quiet)

light marking (giving and receiving)

restraining (giving)

punishments;

he’s mean :///

usually goes for orgasm denial or overstimulation

or both if he’s feeling extra mean adventurous

goes for spanking sometimes but if he knows you’ve got a pain kink no way is that happening lmao

he’d remind you of why you were being punished as he was punishing you and you’re just like ‘omg hongjoong shuT UP’ because he will not stop

tells you to apologise for it but is mostly just teasing

if you whine or pout he’d 100% tease you for that too

tbh his punishments blur with his usual teasing behaviour often so sometimes he’s like “and that was ur punishment” and you’re like ‘oh damn okay’

aftercare;

his new name is Concern and he’s very worried

always thinks he’s done too much and accidentally hurt you

asks you how you’re feeling a thousand times

gives you so many lil kisses!!!

would probably ask what you wanted to do rather than having a set routine

likes to take baths with you afterwards though he’s a sucker for Intimacy and Romance

has a drink and food ready for you! he is the most prepared man to ever exist

i think he’d find it a lil hard to come straight back down from the Big Dom Mood like seonghwa? so he’d need a couple minutes

either that or the mood drops immediately n he’s all giggly and cute as soon as you’re both done

yunho;

overall;

what a MAN

he’s a dom anyway let’s not get too caught up on this

is again mostly a soft dom

but he kinda just likes being really rough with you sometimes? and he’d be fine with it if you were in the mood for him to be rougher as well

honestly one of the best things about sex with yunho would be the build up and his energy u know

he would just radiate good trustworthy dom energy and it would be so attractive

that and you can just tell that he’s genuinely into making you feel good

which leads me onto my main point! yunho’s the type to get off by getting you off

he’s obsessed with being able to make you feel good in every way he can possibly think of

thigh riding? big yes from him, he loves making out with you as you do it and holding your hips with one hand and controlling the pace

going down on you? even bigger yes from him. i think he’s probably got an oral kink for both giving and receiving so it’s not really something he can explain

he’d go down on you sometimes just for fun and doesn’t expect anything in return because it’s good enough for him that you let him go down on you anyway :)

but just because he’s a giver doesn’t mean he isn’t definitely a dom

he doesn’t really have the same kind of general rules that seonghwa and hongjoong would have where it’s like specific things you know you’re not supposed to do

if you do something he doesn’t like, his ass would give you a warning

if you keep doing it after that, that’s on you and i hope you’ve enjoyed sweet boyfriend yunho because he’s ghostin

look ok he’s soft sometimes too though if you were getting punished and wanted to hold his hand, the answer is always yes !

he’d actually prefer you hold his hand when he’s doing punishments like orgasm denial or overstimulation because it makes him feel better because he knows you’re good the whole time

kinks;

make out sessions

hand holding!!!

also: choking (giving)

hair pulling (receiving)

he probably got a size kink we know 5’0 ladies u win this round

oral (giving and receiving)

overstimulation (giving)

praise (giving)

body worship (receiving)

eh very lowkey voyeurism (giving)

punishments;

not too harsh very often tbh

i feel like they’d be kinda fun and soft with him :)

especially spanking because he knows he’s a Big Boy and he worries about hurting you so he turns it into a big meme

but he takes orgasm denial very seriously

makes you count each time he denies an orgasm

look it feeds into his budding begging kink don’t question him

probably leaves marks on the inside of your thighs when he’s doing that bye-bye

he doesn’t see overstimulation as a punishment though

he does that because uh who wouldn’t want multiple orgasms is he right

aftercare;

my sweet boy my baby boy my favourite boy

gets you water and probably candy lol

so many forehead kisses it’s unnatural

honestly he looks at you with actual genuine cartoon-style heart eyes

“you’re so beautiful, did you know that? i love you so much, princess.”

aftercare really gets him in his soft hours

doesn’t wanna be apart from you for longer than two minutes tops during aftercare because he worries about how you’re feeling

so if you wanna shower :) you have a shower buddy now :)

cuddles!! loves having you sleep on his chest it’s a big yes from him

doesn’t really have a set routine and probably never will make one

he just goes with whatever you wanna do when you feel like doing it

you wanna eat? ok, he’ll attempt to cook something for you ((or he’ll just order in))

you wanna go straight to sleep? ok, he’s Ready 2 Cuddle

you wanna shower? ok, he does too

he’s just very laid back about it and it wouldn’t ever feel like it was a structured process

yeosang;

overall;

this man…..an enigma

is probably a switch

it’d be real fucking funny if he was just this immensely chaotic switch and we just have no idea

but no i think he’s a switch and i don’t really think he’d lean too much either way

he’d probably lean one way or another but that’d only change once every couple of months

for like three months, he’d be leaning more to being a dom

for the next couple months, he’d be leaning more to being a sub

he’s honestly just here to have a good time

sometimes he’s like :) i am a dom and no one can say anything different

and other times it’s just like. you look at him a certain way and he’s like :) i am such a sub i can’t even look at you without my brain doing a keyboard smash

as a dom i think he’d be into the same things he’d be into as a sub

i know a lot of people see yeosang as quite a tame boy but. i am going to disagree

the boy does skateboarding when he’s angry? he’s a Goth Boyfriend!!

i think once he gets over the initial embarrassment of trying out and talking about kinks he’d probably be verging on an experimentalist

loves trying out so many different things and he’s honestly super hyped that you two trust each other enough to do that together

i also think yeosang’s probably into angry sex?

might be scared about it at first because he’s convinced he’ll accidentally hurt you if he’s angry or in a bad mood

but as soon as you reassured him enough he’d be fine

also….as cool n tough as he likes to think he is….when he’s a sub….he likes you to hold his hands….and give him lil kisses…..

when he’s a dom tbh he doesn’t even really think about what he’s doing there’s no organised approach he just kinda. does stuff

kinks;

choking (giving and receiving)

hair pulling (giving and receiving)

hand holding

orgasm denial (receiving)

overstimulation (giving)

light pain (giving and receiving)

angry sex

praise (giving and receiving)

body worship (giving and receiving)

tbh he probably has making out as a kink

punishments;

hm i don’t think there’d be any for either of you really

yeosang wouldn’t be into the idea of being punished just because he doesn’t really understand the concept of it

but if you wanted to be spanked n stuff he’d be fine just doing that as it’s own thing lol

he can probably be a bit of a tease too but i don’t even think that’d be intentional or as a punishments that’s just him

aftercare;

a good boy!

neither of you would really need anything intense

he luvs cuddling though that’s written down and described as very nice in his book

kisses!! lots and lots of kisses

if you give him kisses though he’s gonna blush it’s too much he can’t handle it

would probably get a little giggly after sex

mainly just because he’s sleepy and probably ready to go straight to bed

if you wanted to stay up though he wouldn’t go to bed without you :(

would fall asleep with his head in your lap while you had a movie playing

lowkey if either of you had candy or lived near a store that did, he’s ready to go get some good ass food

san;

overall;

well look who it is

honestly he’s just chaos in its human form like does he have any kind of alignment? no

he has got a lot of kinks though

and most of them end up making him the dom so it’s semi-safe to assume that he’s a dom

idk can you ever be sure of anything with san

is the craziest man? he’s like wooyoung but if wooyoung was braver

everything wooyoung would do in private, san would most likely do in public without having any genuine worries

public teasing is a big yes from him. mostly when he’s teasing you because he finds so much amusement in watching you try not to react visibly

i don’t think he’d stop you from teasing him in public because he sees it as a challenge but he’s definitely the type to pull a “i’ll repay you for doing that when we get home it’s all good :)”

he’s just so excited to be doing stuff and trying out new kinks and new things

he might get a lil over-excited sometimes so he might get a little too rough with you but if he noticed he’d be really apologetic

would probably be quite cautious with you for a little while after that

brings kinks up to you in front of other people or over breakfast or while you’re about to fall asleep

his concept of shame is just. it’s a little broken

one of his members would make a joke about a kink and san’s headass would just be like “what do you think of that? wanna try it later?”

and the worst thing about san is he barely ever doesn’t end up really liking a kink that you two try out

so you’re like ‘oh well he won’t like this sub-section of this kink it’s way too specific lol’ and it would end up being his new favourite kink!

he’s such a tease anyway no matter whether or not you’re being punished or whether he’s just being a lil shit

the only time you get to have a whole day without being teased is on your birthday. that is it. that’s your only break

would probably go down on you as a hobby

you’d be sat there with him completely relaxed one day before he’d just go “can i eat you out?” with the most nonchalant expression

kinks;

oh my god how much time do you have

choking (giving)

hair pulling (giving and receiving)

threesomes (only with people he knows and trusts otherwise he gets jealous n just doesn’t like it, whether you’re inviting a girl or a guy into it)

public sex

sexting and phone sex

public teasing (mainly giving but receiving too)

voyeurism (mostly giving)

idk he’s probably got some out there ones he’d end up being into knife play or something (giving)

lingerie (on you)

worship (giving)

praise (receiving)

ice play (giving and receiving)

oral (giving and receiving)

wax play (giving and receiving)

punishments;

he’s rude

and kind of aggressive tbh

but he’d also only do punishments that he knows you really, really like

it’s not that he’s not into the whole dom/sub thing because he really is

and it’s not that he feels guilty because he’s a lil bit of a sadist

it’s just that he gets off on getting you off but he never ever wants you to know that

so him knowing you like something (for example: spanking) and being able to give it to you often under the guise of ‘not knowing that you like it that much’ is just an easier way for him to get things done

it’s like you’re getting exactly what you want but in a really intense way so your brain’s kinda like ‘:) wowie :O’

but san really does seem to have a magical sense to be able to know what you’re feeling??

when you’re kinda starting to think that ‘hmm this is a lil too much’ san just Knows and he’s slowing down so it feels all good again

and you’d be like ‘omg his mind!! so powerful ugh’

but really it’s just that he’s literally in love with you so much that he notices all the lil things you do (✿ヘᴥヘ)

aftercare;

hello!! he is the cutest boy

either gets a little quiet n mellowed;

he’d probably play with your hair a lil bit or want you to play with his hair

gives you long and really light kisses

watches tv with you or listens to music before he gets sleepy

or he’s very giggly and talkative;

laughs at everything and traces lil shapes onto your skin

only wears pyjamas

would probably end up falling asleep on you

or you’d fall asleep on him

probably has a specific blanket to use for when you cuddle like this :///

doesn’t like falling asleep properly anywhere except the actual bed though so if he does start to get really sleepy he makes you get up and go to bed with him

tells you that he loves about twenty times a minute

mingi;

overall;

hm i think i’d say another dom

with sub tendencies!

i see. you all really thought

no but i personally think he’d enjoy taking the lead and being in charge

but he’d also think it was really attractive and in a weird way sort of relaxing when he got to be the sub

as a sub i don’t think he’d be too into testing your patience or pushing back against whatever you wanted because he’s just really chilled out with it

as a dom i think he’d be a bit more intense?

he just really likes testing you, it’s his biggest hobby

thinks it’s cute when you get annoyed and whiny with him

but when you turned the tables and went to be the dom he’d be ‘!! shook’ but very intrigued because that was more sudden than he thought it was gonna be

but oh boy does he love teasing you in public when he’s in a proper dom mood

he honestly doesn’t even know what he likes so much about teasing you in public it’s not even that it gives him a rush because honestly it makes him really nervous sometimes

it’s just like when he’s seriously in the mood to be a dom, then he’s a Dom

but kinda like yeosang, he’s really just having fun most of the time

sure sometimes he’s into it being really intense and he wants things to be going very specifically and he can be really rough

but other times he just wants to sit with his back against the headboard while you ride him like, he has duality

so basically what i’m saying is either has energy, or he doesn’t

and when he doesn’t, if you weren’t particularly trying to be the dom, he’d be chill with still controlling your pace and being ‘in charge,’ in a sense but it wouldn’t really matter then

but yeah :) he likes to have two very different sides to things when he’s having sex and you honestly never know which it’ll be but he likes to keep you on your toes

kinks;

choking (giving)

orgasm denial (giving)

hand holding

probably biting he’s a weird one (giving and receiving)

hair pulling (receiving)

lowkey, very lowkey, he likes artsy nsfw pictures of you both

marking (giving)

oral (receiving)

ok probably a slight size kink too

punishments;

i mean he’s nicer than seonghwa

but when it comes to punishments uh everyone kind of is :/

tbh mingi would feel kinda worried about spanking or anything that involved levels of pain at first

he knows he’s a big boy so he worries sometimes that he’ll break you or something

but as soon as he realises that human bodies can’t actually break unless you seriously try, it’s over for us bitches

spanking is his go to, generally

unless he’s not feeling in the mood to go all out

so he’ll just use really specific and obscure ones?

like, he won’t touch you until he feels like you deserve it

or maybe mutual masturbation because that’s fun for him :)

on a real note though he’d probably use degradation but feel so bad for it later

aftercare;

a whole angel

probably babies you a whole lot

apologises for any degradation and reiterates that he didn’t mean it

offers to literally bathe you if you wanted to wash but you were too tired to

you know how he got big arms…..he’d love to uhm….cuddle you with them

tries to plait your hair to calm you but ends up getting it tangled so now he just very gently runs his fingers through it

likes to just kinda sit you on his lap when you’re both in big comfy clothes or with a blanket and just talk to you for a lil while

might tease you a little bit if you were particularly loud for him

but he’d also give you so much praise omg

“you looked so pretty like that. you look so pretty right now.”

in short, mingi is……..the man we all deserve

wooyoung;

overall;

the resident crackhead thot is here

anyway, wooyoung’s another one i see as a dom

i do believe he would sub for you relatively easily if you tried hard enough

but he’d probably prefer not to

as a dom, he’s probably about as teasing and rude as he is in every other aspect of his life

very rude, very mean, mocks you 24/7

teasing is just in personality,,, like it’s not a punishment because it’s his immediate reaction every time he gets to do anything with you to make you beg for it

like, he’s gonna go down on you? his brain just goes ‘omg it’d be so funny if i teased them so much they almost cried lol’ and he just doesn’t know how to say no to that

also you can’t correct but as much as wooyoung would be pretty intense and dominant a lot of the time

he would adore giggly sex!!!

he loves doing dumb stuff and making you laugh, giving you lil nose kisses and laughing into the crook of your neck at his own dumbass jokes

his ability to just go between doing that and then when he’s like “omg yeah kissing’s cute, my biggest kink is choking :)”

he really does adore sharing and trying out new kinks with you though

because as easy as he makes everything seem, he genuinely doesn’t know what he’s doing sometimes and he’s just winging it and hoping you don’t notice that eh maybe he’s a lil bit nervous

he just gets really stressed sometimes because he worries !! so !! much !! that he won’t be able to make you feel as good as you make him feel

but like. he’s also not stupid and overly insecure. he isn’t deaf and he can hear when you hype him up so he’s not massively worried about it very often

speaking of which, affection is his favourite thing so he loves adding lil bits of romance into literally any type of sex

giggly sex is still romantic bc he’s gonna be smooching you every two seconds

and even when he’s being all rough and hardcore it’s still lowkey soft because he angles his hand at a way where you can hold it whenever you want to

kinks;

ok so he has a list of kinks he wants to try, in a numbered list of the ones he most wants to try the soonest

and it just keeps getting longer every single day

but out of the ones you’d have currently tried/he’d have already known he was into, there’d be:

choking (giving)

marking (giving)

hair pulling (receiving)

ROMANCE

mutual masturbation

dirty talk (giving)

threesomes (look i know it’s a big joke but he’d be into it w san and that’s the tea)

praise, praise, praise (receiving)

body worship (giving and receiving)

literally any type of worship or compliments (receiving)

punishments;

anyway he is the worst person

would lowkey indulge you completely because hmm he’s a soft boy really

he would have a really weird affection to spanking? like sometimes he’d be sat there before he’d just go “hey can i spank you later or are you not in the mood tonight?”

also loves overstimulation because it makes him feel really hyped up

he just lives for the moment when you started coming down from a significant amount of orgasms because he’d be like “:) hey are you having fun?” and you’d be like ‘literally wooyoung i will be legally obligated to fight you’

but also! he’s not too into orgasm denial actually

mainly because he couldn’t hold out for very long because hearing you beg for him is too much for his fragile heart

aftercare;

MWAH

the sweetest boy

so clingy!!!

wants all the kisses you can possibly give him

praises you so much

would wrap you up in bubble-wrap and a blanket and then cuddle you in front of a big warm fireplace if he could

but he sticks to just giving you his clothes to wear and curling you up to him in a big comfy blanket

offers to cook but he already knows you’re not gonna want him to so he’d already be looking for something else as he actually asked lol

you are not allowed to sleep without being cuddled up to his chest it is now illegal in accordance to wooyoung’s laws

#anyway. come send me anon hate i deserve it #writing #ateez imagines #ateez reactions #ateez smut #ateez scenarios

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didanawisgi · 5 years

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Today, we begin with a new Full Measure poll on the national news media. As you might expect: the results aren’t very good. For the media. Whether it’s coverage of the Russia investigation or the Covington High School kids, news consumers on all sides of the political spectrum report declining trust — in us. We turn to two experts to analyze the current Media Madness.

Sharyl: One need only sample lowlights from a single month to get a sense of the problem.

In January, a Seattle Fox affiliate aired a doctored video of President Trump.

President Trump: Some have suggested a barrier is immoral.

Buzzfeed: The comparison which shows Trump with an altered face and a looped licking of his lips

The same month, Special Counsel Robert Mueller refuted a BuzzFeed bombshell that falsely claimed Trump directed his ex-lawyer to lie to Congress.

And a January article about Melania Trump in the Telegraph was followed by seven corrections an apologyand an undisclosed payment to Mrs. Trump. One-sided narratives presented virtually unchallenged. National news quoting anonymous sources that turn out to be wrong.

The headline contains the most devastating part: President Trump directed his attorney to lie to congress.

The same month, Special Counsel Robert Mueller refuted a Buzzfeed bombshell that falsely claimed Trump directed his ex-lawyer to lie to Congress.

The Washington Post took us “Inside theBattle Over Trump’s Immigration Order”— only to later admit the article misreported Trump’s actions, a reported meeting had not actually occurred, and a conference call hadn’t happened as described.

FBI Director James Comey debunked a New York Times article about supposed contacts between Trump campaign staff “senior Russian intelligence officials.”

And NBC News reported that Russian President Putin said he had compromising information about Trump. Actually, Putin said the opposite. It’s been a bad few years for media credibility.

A new Full Measure poll conducted for Full Measure by Scott Rasmussen finds: 42% of Americans believe national political news coverage is inaccurate and unreliable. Fewer— 38%—believe it’s accurate and reliable. And 52% say it’s worse compared to five years ago.

National political reporters also get poor scores. Only 26% of those polled say reporters carefully report the facts. 57% say reporters use news stories to promote their own ideological agenda.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen:

Rasmussen: We asked about national political reporters are, are they credible, are they reliable? And you know, a little more than one out of three people say yes. When we ask about Wikipedia, we get the exact same answer. So what's happening is we have a world where people look at journalists like they look at Wikipedia. “Gee, that's an interesting fact. I better check it myself.”

Sharyl: And what does that tell you?

Rasmussen: The media has a huge credibility problem and it's always had the problem. Oh, we talk about it differently today. Now we talk about it as a political bias. I think the issues have always been there. I mean, people were complaining about the bias of Walter Cronkite back in the 1960s.

Sharyl: People forget about that.

Walter Cronkite: For it seems now more certain then ever that the bloody experience in Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

Sharyl: It is often argued that Donald Trump created this media environment where everybody hates the media. And then others say he simply understood that environment, and capitalized on it. Which is it you see?

Rasmussen: Oh, people have hated the media for a very long time

Trump: Fake news folks, fake news. Typical New York Times fake stories.

Rasmussen: Donald Trump capitalized on it. He understood it, but he's not the first to do so. The first President Bush when he was campaigning, he actually got kind of aggressive with, I think it was Dan Rather, during an interview because a lot of Republicans weren't sure he had the fire to, to be president.

President Bush 1: It's not fair to judge my whole career by a re-hash on Iran. How would you like it if I judge your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York? Would you like that?

Rasmussen: So he capitalized on that. But all you're doing is tapping into a sentiment that's already there and Donald Trump is playing them but beautifully

Rasmussen says his polling found a good recent example of how many today have come to regard— or disregard— the national media. The Covington High School pro-life students’ confrontation with a Native American activist at a Washington DC protest.

Rasmussen: When the story broke, of the students from Covington high school, we went out and polled right away when the story first broke and ask people what they thought. And as you would expect, liberals and conservatives had different views of whether the high school students acted inappropriately or somebody else did.

Sharyl: So to summarize, liberals probably thought the high school students who were pro-life behaved inappropriately and aggressively.

Rasmussen: Yes.

Sharyl: And Conservatives thought the Native American was the one who is inappropriate.

Rasmussen: Yes. And by the way, conservatives also thought the media was inappropriate.

ABC news: A group of teenagers, some Catholic high school students, seen wearing Make America Great Again hats, appearing to face off with Nathan Phillips – a 65 year old Native American.

Rasmussen: And then we had a week's full of coverage. And as you recall, there was a lot more coverage that came out, uh, about the incident. A lot more videos and a lot more information. And a week later, nobody's opinion changed.

Sharyl: I’m surprised by that because some reporters and in media even apologized that they had been too hard on the children at first or the high school students without knowing the full story.

Whoopi Goldberg: So many people admitted they made snap judgements before all these other facts came in.

Sharyl: But you're saying the public at large, didn't change their mind?

Rasmussen: That's correct. The public at large made up their mind. They knew their sources

Sharyl: But the most overwhelming results came when we asked about the motivation of political reporters.

Rasmussen: 78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.

Sharyl: Most people also seem to think reporters cannot be fair when it comes to their chosen political candidate.

Rasmussen: if a reporter found out something that would hurt their favorite candidate, only 36% of voters think that they would report that.

Sharyl: So most people think the reporter would cover it up because they like the person?

Rasmussen: Right, exactly. So voters are looking at them as a political activist, not as a source of information.

Sesno: An actual report or professional reporter would yeah never do that.

Frank Sesno is a former CNN correspondent and bureau chief. As head of the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University, he routinely confronts declining public trust in the media.

Sesno: The public understands fundamentally what journalism should be. They don't understand how it's actually practiced. And that falls to news organizations in my view, to be more creative, more imaginative about how they're engaging with their publics, to both explain what they do to defend what they do when it's controversial and to be accountable for what they do if it's wrong.

Sharyl: After 2016 when so many of us got the election so wrong, we promised a period of self-reflection and correction, have we done it?

Sesno: No, not enough. If we had done the self-reflection and correction better and more deeply, there would be more reporters reporting from more places across the country talking to more diverse audiences. We would not be so in tiredly focused at least in certain media channels and places on the Trump administration and the outrage of the moment. That being said, there is so much news from this administration. It's kind of hard not to do that.

Trump: If we don’t get what we want, I will shut down the government.

Sharyl: In the era of the Trump presidency, can you point to a couple of things you think the media has done right

Sesno: I would start, actually, in the Trump era by calling out NPR. I think NPR has done an exceptional about getting outside of Washington and engaging other voices and people from different sides of the ideological divide to get their sense of what's happening. would call out the New York Times and the Washington Post for making remarkable use of multimedia. So there's a lot of good journalism and good media that's taking place also that, that extends beyond the Trump administration. There is such a thing as beyond the Trump administration.

It may not seem like it as we move quickly into campaign 2020.

Sharyl: I guess we should warn people, hang on to their seat belt with 2020 campaign coming. What do you foresee in terms of media?

Sesno: Yeah, so here's the next danger. The next is everybody for walks right off the cliff of coverage like they did last time. Obsessing over, you know, the, the candidate du jour, the moment, du jour. How will the media be able to arbitrate this mass of people who all want to be president so that the audience can follow it with some degree of clarity, and so that you neither fall into an oversimplified narrative, or a narrative that just revolves around the melodrama of who's up, who's down, and who's making the most noise or tweeting the most.

You can find my list of Media Mistakes in the era of Trump at SharylAttkisson.com

#Sharyl Attkisson #journalism #investigative journalism #investigative reporting

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greekprodigies · 6 years

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Why Shows Like Insatiable Are So Toxic, Despite Their Intentions

As a teenage girl who has only recently grown out of watching Disney Channel, it was safe to say I was intrigued when Netflix released the teaser trailer for their new 12-episode series Insatiable, starring Debbie Ryan, who played the title character of Disney’s Jessie for four seasons. It was a 30-second clip of Debbie Ryan in a hot pink dress, walking down a junk food aisle at a colorful grocery store, smashing everything on the shelves with a sledgehammer. Ryan’s voiceover says, “I’ve heard stories of girls who grew up happy and well-adjusted. This is not that story.” My first thoughts were, based solely on this teaser, that the main character seemed to be the villain, or at least a girl with a grudge. And, based off of this girl’s seemingly bad relationship with food, I also figured it would portray fat shaming in a way that most popular television shows don’t. I was hoping that Netflix would take their power over the teenage demographic and show a perspective that strayed away from the (respectable and still necessary) insecure overweight character still coming to terms with her own body (i.e. Kate from This Is Us or Rachel from My Mad Fat Diary). A perspective that I, an overweight high school senior who has already been through the ringer of despising my fatness, could relate to.

It’s obvious, in retrospect, that I was thinking way too deeply into a vague half-minute teaser video. I had gotten my hopes up. Those hopes were soon diminished when the official trailer was released

The video starts off with Debbie Ryan in a fat suit (I’ll get to why that is so grossly offensive later), introducing herself as Patty and showing her constant struggle as a victim of bullying and fat shaming at her high school. Her classmates (who seem to all be thin) call her “Fatty Patty”, and go so far as to spray paint it on her locker. Irene Choi, who plays Patty’s cruelest offender, is shown shouting “Porky! Butterball!” through a megaphone in the cafeteria, pointing to the main character. Then, after what seems to be a fight over a chocolate bar with a homeless man, Patty is punched in the face. Her voice-over tells us, “Having my jaw wired shut lost me more than just my summer vacation.”

Enter Patty 2.0. She’s the sparkling image of every chubby girl’s dream weight after she watches a show like this and vows to cut off carbs. No stretch marks, no cellulite, nothing that reflects what somebody’s body actually looks like after losing a large amount of weight in such a short period of time. The trailer escalates to a montage style of clips of Patty slapping, punching, and even pouring liquor onto some of her classmates before lighting a match.

It feels like a fantasy that’s trying to be relatable. That’s telling us that every bullied teenager, who’s frontal lobe isn’t developed enough to have a lot of perspective, craves revenge from their tormentors. And it’s easy for this narrative to be confused as a realistic depiction of the experience of being a teenage bullying victim. It’s even in the news, shown in the series of article published about domestic terrorist Nikolas Cruz revealing him being an orphan and being described as an “outcast” in interviews following the Parkland shooting. Sure, Insatiable’s revenge plot is meant to be satirical the same way Dexter (which Lauren Gussis, the writer and executive producer of this show, also worked on) is, but because it’s set in a high school during modern day, Patty (possibly, based on what’s shown in the trailer) killing her classmates hits a softer spot.

In the Teen Vogue article that was released with the trailer, Gussis explains how she “felt it was important to look at [bullying] head on and talk about it.” But it’s hard to look at bullying head-on when its changed so drastically over a span of 20 years. It’s past mean nicknames and cruel but clever comments said as two characters pass in a hallway. And more recently, it’s past cyberbullying. Or, at least, the way adults view cyberbullying based off of tone-deaf shows like Glee and dramatized TV movies like Cyberbully (which stars not one, but two former Disney Channel actresses). I’ve never met a high school student who got called a slut or gay 200 times in the comment section of a Facebook post. And, if I am completely wrong due to the fact that I’ve grown up during the social media transition from Facebook to Instagram and Snapchat, that form of bullying died when the Facebook phenomenon did. It is a subtler conversation than the beautiful cool kids versus the ugly losers.The solution is simple: If you’re going to make a show based off of your experiences of bullying in the 80’s, 90’s or even early 2000’s, make the show take place during those decades. Colliding old stereotypes to a character who exists in 2018 is unrealistic and humiliating.

Intention wise, Insatiable can be easily compared to another controversial Netflix original series, 13 Reasons Why. In the warning videos that are shown before watching, the stars of the show say, “By shedding a light on these difficult topics, we hope our show can help viewers start a conversation. But if you struggling with these issues yourself, this series may not be right for you, or you may want to watch it with a trusted adult,” And this message perfectly conveys a show that’s purpose seems heartfelt but is ultimately clueless. Here we have a television program that is produced by a bunch of 30 year olds, where people in their 20’s play high school students (yes, everyone who plays a teenager in 13RW are actually in their 20’s), pretending to understand what it’s like to be a teenager as if the dynamic between young people and mental illness hasn’t changed immensely in just the past couple of years. Just in five, the use of memes and irony has shifted from simply making fun of something, to helping us cope with the fact that our world is on fire. Everybody is laughing at the jokes about depression because, since the rise of social media and the quantification of how many people like us, we all feel depressed. Suicide, though tragic, has now been boiled down to kids saying they want to kill themselves when they have too much homework. We have an education system that teaches us about the anatomy of sex but never teaches us what questions need to be asked about consent during our sexual experiences. So making a show to start a conversation about depression, suicide, and sexual assault that warns it’s targeted audience (who are constantly surrounded by these topics) that the show might not be right for them is simply irresponsible.

But, if I can counteract what I just said, 13 Reasons Why horrifically also is the only show I’ve seen that has the most correct articulation of modern bullying. That’s not to say that anything else with the show is correct, because it’s not. Perhaps what is so wrong about 13RW is that, because they focus so much on the bullying aspect of high school, it provides a direct correlation between bullying and suicide. Well, that, and the graphic/triggering suicide and sexual assault scenes that were used for shock value. Nevertheless, Hannah Baker doesn’t go home and find a bunch of Instagram DMs of her classmates called her a whore. Any secrets that Hannah’s offenders had regarding what could have led her to kill herself were events that happened IRL. And they were just that: Secrets. Because the bullies were ashamed of what they had done. Even before Hannah committed suicide, Jessica Davis didn’t just go around telling people she slapped her ex-best friend because she thought she had betrayed her.

With Insatiable, it seems like everybody in this fictional high school (except for Patty’s best friend and maybe even a popular girl with a heart of gold) is insanely okay with harassing a girl just because of her appearance. It’s insulting, both as a fat girl and an observer of modern bullying. There isn’t one school in the country where 99% of its students just allow this sort of cruelty. Because we have perspectives and opinions that (surprise!) aren’t always swayed by whatever Instagram model is trending right now. Just because Emma Chamberlain is successful and skinny, doesn’t mean that we’re brainwashed to only make skinny people successful. I’m not saying that there isn’t an institutional privilege that skinny girls have, and have always had when it comes to social acceptance. Because they do. But there’s a gray area where most people stand when it comes to issues as new and contentious as body positivity, and Insatiable is ignoring it. You don’t have to be a body-posi activist to know that making somebody feel like shit because of their weight is wrong. And I hope this show can have a character that, without having any relation to Patty, recognizes that what these bullies are doing is outrageous.

After we recognize that the intention of these shows is ultimately flawed, we can then try to take a step forward and look at the impact. 13 Reasons Why, after being loudly criticized by suicide prevention experts, broke virtually every rule of portraying suicide. And as a result, a study shows that searches such as “how to commit suicide”, “suicide hotline number” and “teen suicide” were elevated after the show’s release. The time period for the search ended on April 18th of that year after NFL player Aaron Hernandez committed suicide, which could have influenced data. And any searches related to the movie Suicide Squad were discounted. Sure, the show had increased suicide awareness, but it also unintentionally increased suicide rationalization. And I fear that Insatiable may be on the same path. Regardless of the revenge plot or the bullying, there is still a skinny actress in a fat suit portraying a fat character who only eats, sits on the couch, and feels bad about herself. Then, after a summer of not being able to eat, returns to high school skinny and composed.

Firstly, the use of a fat suit is sickly but overall not surprising. In a world where blackface and yellowface in Hollywood has only just become unacceptable, fat suits seem more defendable for skinny people who don’t understand that there are a plethora of plus size actors who could have played Fatty Patty just as well (and most likely better) than Debby Ryan with pillows stuffed up her shirt. Perhaps the show could have avoided being so oblivious to its fat-shaming storyline if they had an actual fat person weighing in on it.

Secondly, there is the characterization of fat people as losers who do nothing but eat and watch TV. If there were a time and place for these characters to exist, it is definitely not now, where the call for diversity in Hollywood is louder than ever. Plus, we’ve already seen these people before. And it’s the same plot every time. They are only created to provide a funny prequel to a supposedly more stable version of the character. “Fat Monica” from Friends and “Fat Schmidt” from New Girl show a universe where plus size people can’t be taken seriously until they shed the pounds. When in reality, fat men and women are perfectly capable of being successful in their professional and romantic lives. Ironically enough, another New Girl character comes to mind when I think of plus size characters being accurately portrayed: Emily. She’s Schmidt’s ex-girlfriend from college, who dated him when he was her “Big Guy”. After Schmidt reminisces about losing his virginity to her, she resurfaces into his life as a confident woman who goes on dates and isn’t ashamed of who she is. There even seems to be a layer to her character showing that there had been a time where she was insecure about herself and her body but has overcome them. This is an example of a healthy goal for young girls and boys who are self-conscious of their body. Not Debby Ryan’s character, who only gains confidence after losing an obscene amount of weight.

It may actually be the casting of Debby Ryan that could cause a rise in body dysmorphia in young people from watching this show. Since her face is plastered on every poster, teaser and trailer for the show, Disney Channel fans, and former fans might watch simply because she’s cast as the lead role. It’s certainly what sparked my interest in the show. And since Disney Channel’s demographic has gotten younger and younger, there’s a generation that will watch this show and not see it as fat shaming, but a way to become the person they’ve always wanted to be. Skinny, beautiful and confident while simultaneously making all of their classmates' jaws drop as they walk down the hallway. But Patty doesn’t lose weight healthily, she literally could not eat solid food. Depending on how the show addresses this, it is a possible glorification of anorexia. Just like 13 Reasons Why glorified and romanticized depression. But two wrongs don’t make a right, and anorexia and depression can not make anybody beautifully broken.

To make things clear, I am not telling you to not watch this show. And based off of the 100,000 signatures (and counting) on a petition for the show’s cancellation, none of us may even get to. But speaking as a person who fits into all of these groups, Insatiable gets everything wrong about being a high schooler, a teenage girl, and a fat person.

#insatiable #netflix #debby ryan #op ed #fatphobia #fat shaming #body positive #body posititivity #anorexia #depression #13 reasons why #13rw #suicide

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trinit-b · 3 years

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Me too & Cancel Culture Interview.

Trinitie Tanis

Interviewer: Hello Mr…. Mookie? Is it alright if I call you Mookie?

Mookie: Of Course you can call me Mookie, that is my name.

Interviewer: Okay Mr. Mookie, thank you for coming here and accepting to participate in this interview.

Mookie: Uh huh thanks for having me..

Interviewer: Well before we start, tell me a little about yourself Mr. Mookie. Where are you from? What do you enjoy doing during these times?

Mookie: Well I am from Brooklyn Ny, I am a proud African American always have been always will be. I’m proud of the person I have become and during these times I like to spend time with my sister and my friends that i grew up with

Interviewer: Aw that's sweet, well we brought you here to answer a couple questions for us so let's get on with the questions shall we? Have you ever heard of the term “Cancel Culture”?

Mookie: Cancel Culture? What is something the young folks are doing now? What's that?

Interviewer: Well, Cancel Culture is when somebody says or does something in the media or in person that society does not agree with and “cancels” them like they are no longer relevant or can even be punished such as losing their job or career.

Mookie: Ahh I see hahahahaha well… I don't think I see a problem with it. It kind of reminds me of the kind of person i was back then

Interviewer: What do you mean by that?

Mookie: Well when i was younger you know growing up in Brooklyn New York i was kind of the “lets cancel this or finished this person” i guess you can say if i saw that things were not not going right. I wouldn't always resort to that thought it would have to take some pushin

Interviewer: So do you agree that people should be cancelled, kind of like facing a punishment for something they might say or do socially.

Mookie: I uh well that depends hahahaha

Interviewer: Hahahaha go on

Mookie: Well, yes I do think that people who do or say problematic things that can harm a community should face some type of punishment or consequence of course. Things like that should not be pushed to the side.

Interviewer: Right-

Mookie: But, I don't think that should be the only thing that we resort to as people. What I mean by that is what about teaching people? Educating them? Helping them to see why what they are doing is not right and is actually harmful. I don't think we should just end people for their mistakes. It reminds me of a time when I was growing up in Brooklyn. I used to work at this pizzeria with these Italian American people. You know now that i think about it i'm pretty sure they would be “cancelled” so fast hahaha

Interviewer: hahahahahaha

Mookie: But one of my friends had a problem with the wall in the pizzeria having no black folks on it. He resorted to trying to boycott the pizzeria. He failed at first but he actually had some people that time to help him go through it. That night was crazy *zones out*

Interviewer: Mookie?

Mookie: Right sorry, well isn't that kind of like a cancelled culture? My friend did not agree with the wall not having any black people so he took it upon himself to boycott the place, Cancel Culture to the tea huh?

Interviewer: Well, I guess boycotting in some cases can relate to cancelling culture if you look at it that way. Mr. Mookie now after hearing what cancel culture is do you think your past self if he was here today do you think that he would be cancelled

Mookie: Hmmm would lil ole Mookie be cancelled if he was still the same Mookie he was before

Mookie: Well possible? I guess I mean I'm pretty sure I was not perfect. I'm pretty sure I have said or done some things that were problematic or controversial based on who saw it but that's my thing. If you look at it this way, if me and you both have 2 different opinions on something and my opinion on the topic is the majority and your opinion is not wouldnt you get cancelled? Well atleast if you make it known that's your opinion?

Interviewer: Well-

Mookie: Yeah you would and that the thing, nobody in this world is perfect i'm pretty sure me and you can agree on that

Interviewer: That is correct

Mookie: So that people in their lives will get “cancelled” one way or another. I think instead of resorting automatically to cancelling someone how about we try educating? Talking to them? Sometimes it will work, sometimes it won't trust me. I had times I tried to talk some sense into one of those Italian Americans and it was like I was talking to a wall. Let's try different ways before we try to punish someone for not being the society's “perfect” person.

Interviewer: Thank you Mr. Mookie for that statement

Mookie: You are welcome

Interviewer: Now Mr. Mookie have you heard of the #MeToo movement?

Mookie: I actually think i have uhm in the media i think i have seen a couple of things regarding that

Interviewer: The me too movement is a movement started to raise awareness on sexual assault and harassment. Women in this movement speak up about the sexual harassment and assault that they have been through that often goes unlooked.

Mookie: Well I see where it's coming from and I think it's a really important thing that should be a very focused one. You know i have a little sister and i am very protective of her and i think bringing attention to sexual assault and harassment amount women is a very heavy topic that is not talked about enough. You know women are so strong and i think a lot of men still have the mentality that women are weak and can be used which is wrong so i'm very glad that something like this is happening right now.

Interviewer: Mr. Mookie, have you or anyone you know sexually assaulted somebody?

Mookie: Not that I know of. I didn't really have much interest into girls i did have a baby momma when i was younger

Interviewer: A babymomma?

Mookie: Yeah but i dont think sexual assault and harassment can happen to a partner right?

Interviewer: Well actually it can. If a partner does not want to do something such as a sexual act but is forced to or persuaded into doing that can fall into sexual assault and harassment

Mookie: Wow, the younger me did not really know that, the older me is very aware now watching the movements and everything that is going on now in the media. I now take this kind of thing more seriously of course. Let this be clear I have never sexually assaulted or harassed anybody hahaha got to make sure that's clear im not tryna get cancelled.

Interviewer: I see. Well that was all the questions that i had for you today

Mookie: They were lovely questions. I actually feel more informed on what goes on now you know this generation is moving so fast everything is on the media but it's hard to say on track sometimes.

Interviewer: Hahaha yeah i get it. Thank you for joining me here today Mr. Mookie I really appreciate you taking the time out to answer some of my questions.

Mookie: No, no thank you for having me it was a pleasure I hope you enjoy the rest of the day I gotta go make some money hahaha goodbye now

Interview: Haha goodbye Mr. Mookie.

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bluewatsons · 6 years

Text

Brian D. Earp, The unbearable asymmetry of bullshit, HealthWatch Newsletter (February 2016)

Introduction

Science and medicine have done a lot for the world. Diseases have been eradicated, rockets have been sent to the moon, and convincing, causal explanations have been given for a whole range of formerly inscrutable phenomena. Notwithstanding recent concerns about sloppy research, small sample sizes, and challenges in replicating major findings—concerns I share and which I have written about at length — I still believe that the scientific method is the best available tool for getting at empirical truth. Or to put it a slightly different way (if I may paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous remark about democracy): it is perhaps the worst tool, except for all the rest.

Scientists are people too

In other words, science is flawed. And scientists are people too. While it is true that most scientists — at least the ones I know and work with — are hell-bent on getting things right, they are not therefore immune from human foibles. If they want to keep their jobs, at least, they must contend with a perverse “publish or perish” incentive structure that tends to reward flashy findings and high-volume “productivity” over painstaking, reliable research. On top of that, they have reputations to defend, egos to protect, and grants to pursue. They get tired. They get overwhelmed. They don’t always check their references, or even read what they cite. They have cognitive and emotional limitations, not to mention biases, like everyone else.

At the same time, as the psychologist Gary Marcus has recently put it, “it is facile to dismiss science itself. The most careful scientists, and the best science journalists, realize that all science is provisional. There will always be things that we haven’t figured out yet, and even some that we get wrong.” But science is not just about conclusions, he argues, which are occasionally (or even frequently) incorrect. Instead, “It’s about a methodology for investigation, which includes, at its core, a relentless drive towards questioning that which came before.” You can both “love science,” he concludes, “and question it.”

I agree with Marcus. In fact, I agree with him so much that I would like to go a step further: if you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential.

And it is with that in mind that I bring up the subject of bullshit.

Bullshit in science

There is a veritable truckload of bullshit in science.¹ When I say bullshit, I mean arguments, data, publications, or even the official policies of scientific organizations that give every impression of being perfectly reasonable — of being well-supported by the highest quality of evidence, and so forth — but which don’t hold up when you scrutinize the details. Bullshit has the veneer of truth-like plausibility. It looks good. It sounds right. But when you get right down to it, it stinks.

There are many ways to produce scientific bullshit. One way is to assert that something has been “proven,” “shown,” or “found” and then cite, in support of this assertion, a study that has actually been heavily critiqued (fairly and in good faith, let us say, although that is not always the case, as we soon shall see) without acknowledging any of the published criticisms of the study or otherwise grappling with its inherent limitations.

Another way is to refer to evidence as being of “high quality” simply because it comes from an in-principle relatively strong study design, like a randomized control trial, without checking the specific materials that were used in the study to confirm that they were fit for purpose. There is also the problem of taking data that were generated in one environment and applying them to a completely different environment (without showing, or in some cases even attempting to show, that the two environments are analogous in the right way). There are other examples I have explored in other contexts, and many of them are fairly well-known.

An insidious tactic

But there is one example I have only recently come across, and of which I have not yet seen any serious discussion. I am referring to a certain sustained, long-term publication strategy, apparently deliberately carried out (although motivations can be hard to pin down), that results in a stupefying, and in my view dangerous, paper-pile of scientific bullshit. It can be hard to detect, at first, with an untrained eye—you have to know your specific area of research extremely well to begin to see it—but once you do catch on, it becomes impossible to un-see.

I don’t know what to call this insidious tactic (although I will describe it in just a moment). But I can identify its end result, which I suspect researchers of every stripe will be able to recognize from their own sub-disciplines: it is the hyper-partisan and polarized, but by all outward appearances, dispassionate and objective, “systematic review” of a controversial subject.

To explain how this tactic works, I am going make up a hypothetical researcher who engages in it, and walk you through his “process,” step by step. Let’s call this hypothetical researcher Lord Voldemort. While everything I am about to say is based on actual events, and on the real-life behavior of actual researchers, I will not be citing any specific cases (to avoid the drama). Moreover, we should be very careful not to confuse Lord Voldemort for any particular individual. He is an amalgam of researchers who do this; he is fictional.

Lord Voldemort’s “systematic review”

In this story, Lord Voldemort is a prolific proponent of a certain controversial medical procedure, call it X, which many have argued is both risky and unethical. It is unclear whether Lord Voldemort has a financial stake in X, or some other potential conflict of interest. But in any event he is free to press his own opinion. The problem is that Lord Voldemort doesn’t play fair. In fact, he is so intent on defending this hypothetical intervention that he will stop at nothing to flood the literature with arguments and data that appear to weigh decisively in its favor.

As the first step in his long-term strategy, he scans various scholarly databases. If he sees any report of an empirical study that does not put X in an unmitigatedly positive light, he dashes off a letter-to-the-editor attacking the report on whatever imaginable grounds. Sometimes he makes a fair point—after all, most studies do have limitations—but often what he raises is a quibble, couched in the language of an exposé.

These letters are not typically peer-reviewed (which is not to say that peer review is an especially effective quality control mechanism); instead, in most cases, they get a cursory once-over by an editor who is not a specialist in the area. Since journals tend to print the letters they receive unless they are clearly incoherent or in some way obviously out of line (and since Lord Voldemort has mastered the art of using “objective” sounding scientific rhetoric to mask objectively weak arguments and data), they end up becoming a part of the published record with every appearance of being legitimate critiques.

The subterfuge does not end there.

The next step is for our anti-hero to write a “systematic review” at the end of the year (or, really, whenever he gets around to it). In it, He Who Shall Not Be Named predictably rejects all of the studies that do not support his position as being “fatally flawed,” or as having been “refuted by experts”—namely, by himself and his close collaborators, typically citing their own contestable critiques—while at the same time he fails to find any flaws whatsoever in studies that make his pet procedure seem on balance beneficial.

The result of this artful exercise is a heavily skewed benefit-to-risk ratio in favor of X, which can now be cited by unsuspecting third-parties. Unless you know what Lord Voldemort is up to, that is, you won’t notice that the math has been rigged.

So why doesn’t somebody put a stop to all this? As a matter of fact, many have tried. More than once, the Lord Voldemorts of the world have been called out for their underhanded tactics, typically in the “author reply” pieces rebutting their initial attacks. But rarely are these ripostes — constrained as they are by conventionally miniscule word limits, and buried as they are in some corner of the Internet — noticed, much less cited in the wider literature. Certainly, they are far less visible than the “systematic reviews” churned out by Lord Voldemort and his ilk, which constitute a sort of “Gish Gallop” that can be hard to defeat.

Gish Gallop

The term “Gish Gallop” is a useful one to know. It was coined by the science educator Eugenie Scott in the 1990s to describe the debating strategy of one Duane Gish. Gish was an American biochemist turned Young Earth creationist, who often invited mainstream evolutionary scientists to spar with him in public venues. In its original context, it meantto “spew forth torrents of error that the evolutionist hasn’t a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate.” It also referred to Gish’s apparent tendency to simply ignore objections raised by his opponents.

A similar phenomenon can play out in debates in medicine. In the case of Lord Voldemort, the trick is to unleash so many fallacies, misrepresentations of evidence, and other misleading or erroneous statements — at such a pace, and with such little regard for the norms of careful scholarship and/or charitable academic discourse — that your opponents, who do, perhaps, feel bound by such norms, and who have better things to do with their time than to write rebuttals to each of your papers, face a dilemma. Either they can ignore you, or they can put their own research priorities on hold to try to combat the worst of your offenses.

It’s a lose-lose situation. Ignore you, and you win by default. Engage you, and you win like the pig in the proverb who enjoys hanging out in the mud.

Conclusion

As the programmer Alberto Brandolini is reputed to have said: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” This is the unbearable asymmetry of bullshit I mentioned in my title, and it poses a serious problem for research integrity. Developing a strategy for overcoming it, I suggest, should be a top priority for publication ethics.

Footnote

There is a lot of non-bullshit in science as well!

References

Ioannidis JP. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine 2005;2(8):e124

Button KS et al. Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2013;14(5):365-376

Open Science Collaboration. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science 2015;349(6251):aac4716

Earp BD, Trafimow D. Replication, falsification, and the crisis of confidence in social psychology. Frontiers in Psychology 2015;6(621):1-11

Earp BD et al. Out, damned spot: can the “Macbeth Effect” be replicated? Basic and Applied Social Psychology 2014;36(1):91-98

Earp BD. Psychology is not in crisis? Depends on what you mean by “crisis.” Huffington Post, 2 Sept 2015 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-earp/psychology-is-not-incrisis_b_8077522.html

Earp BD, Everett JAC. How to fix psychology’s replication crisis. Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 Oct 2015 http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Fix-Psychology-s/233857

Earp BD. Open review of the draft paper, “Replication initiatives will not salvage the trustworthiness of psychology” by James C Coyne. BMC Psychology, 2016 [in press] https://www.academia.edu/21711738/Open_review_of_the_draft_paper _entitled_Replication_initiatives_will_not_salvage_the_trustworthiness_of_psychology_by_James_C._Coyne

Everett JAC, Earp BD. A tragedy of the (academic) commons: interpreting the replication crisis in psychology as a social dilemma for earlycareer researchers. Frontiers in Psychology 2015;6(1152):1-4.

Trafimow D, Earp BD. Badly specified theories are not responsible for the replication crisis in psychology. Theory & Psychology 2016; [in press] https://www.academia.edu/18975122/Badly_specified_theories_are_not _responsible_for_the_replication_crisis_in_social_psychology

Earp BD. Can science tell us what’s objectively true? The New Collection 2011;6(1):1-9

Nosek BA et al. Scientific utopia II. Restructuring incentives and practices to promote truth over publishability. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2012;7(6):615-631

Rekdal OB. Academic urban legends. Social Studies of Science 2014;44(4):638-654

Peterson D. The baby factory: difficult research objects, disciplinary standards, and the production of statistical significance. Socius 2016 [in press] http://srd.sagepub.com/content/2/2378023115625071.full

Duarte JL et al. Political diversity will improve social psychological science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2015 [in press] http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Political-DiversityWill-Improve-Social-Psychological-Science-1.pdf

Ball P. The trouble with scientists. Nautilus, 14 May 2015 http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/the-trouble-with-scientists

Marcus G. Science and its skeptics. The New Yorker, 6 Nov 2013 http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/science-and-its-skeptics

Earp BD. Mental shortcuts [unabridged version]. The Hastings Center Report 2016 [in press] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/- 292148550_Mental_shortcuts_unabridged

Ioannidis JP. Limitations are not properly acknowledged in the scientific literature. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2007;60(4):324-329

Earp BD. Sex and circumcision. American Journal of Bioethics 2015;15(2):43-45

Bundick S. Promoting infant male circumcision to reduce transmission of HIV: A flawed policy for the US. Health and Human Rights Journal Blog, 31 Aug 2009 http://www.hhrjournal.org/2009/08/promoting-infant-malecircumcision-to-reduce-transmission-of-hiv-a-flawed-policy-for-the-us/

Ploug T, Holm S. Conflict of interest disclosure and the polarisation of scientific communities. Journal of Medical Ethics 2015;41(4):356-358.

Earp BD. Addressing polarisation in science. Journal of Medical Ethics 2015;41(9):782-784

Smith R. Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 2006;99(4):178-182

Smith R. Classical peer review: an empty gun. Breast Cancer Research 2010;12(S4):1-4

Roland MC. Publish and perish: hedging and fraud in scientific discourse. EMBO Reports 2007;8(5):424-428

Scott E. Debates and the globetrotters. The Talk Origins Archive. 1994 http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/debating/globetrotters.html

Brandolini A. The bullshit asymmetry principle. Lecture delivered at XP2014 in Rome and at ALE2014 in Krakow. 2014 http://www.slideshare.net/ziobrando/bulshit-asymmetry-principlelightning-talk.

#science #criticism #peer review #bullshit #validity #research

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chartreuse-gale · 6 years

Text

Executive functioning: skills & challenges often ignored

This is an area that seems to frequently intersect with other neurological differences (going based on people that I know first hand). I’ve found executive functioning challenges common in other people with Autism Spectrum Disorder or Non-Verbal Learning Disorder as well as learning disabilities in general (although I know fewer people with learning disabilities in general than with ASD or NVLD) I’ve also heard from people who work with students with a variety of learning disabilities that executive functioning challenges are common in people who experience learning disabilities. They’re sort of an interrelated category of skills that relate to decision making, adaptability, and the pursuit of goals. They’re generally believed to be housed in the frontal lobe. There’s a lot of controversy over how many executive functions there are, what these should be called, and whether or not there are general areas that determine ability within a cluster of more specific executive functioning skills.

In my experience, most teachers and healthcare professionals don’t usually know about (or at least not take into account) executive functions and tend to blame people for outcomes or behavior that doesn’t fit in the box without considering them. An example of this is when a student who struggles with time management and planning gets detention for not completing their homework done because this outcome is judged by the teacher to be the result of the students laziness and/or defiance.

I’ve done a lot of thinking on my own executive functions. Here I’ve rated my own ability with some of the more commonly affirmed executive functioning skills from 0 to 10 with 0 being incapacitating, 10 being flawless, and 5 being somewhere in the middle . . . (As mentioned above, there are a lot of conflicting terms, definitions, and lists of executive functions)

Time Management = varies between 4 & 6

I struggled a lot with time management. When I was in elementary and middle school I struggled an incredible amount with class homework and projects. Most of this had more to do with trouble with remembering things like bringing my homework home, doing my homework, and bringing it back to school as opposed to academic skills (I didn’t really have much trouble learning and doing work for school subjects, with the exception of math). I also had other things contributing to not getting homework done (various other executive functioning skills like initiating, social exhaustion, frustration with having to do more school after sitting in classrooms for 7 plus hours, etc), but my biggest issues related to making time for it, remembering to do it, and remembering to bring it with me. I was probably at a 1 or 2 in those days. I wasn’t at a point where I could even effectively use tools to help (e.g. a planner). I didn’t reach that point until my 2nd attempt at community college.

I’ve probably put more effort into working on my time management skills than any area of executive functioning. Using a planner, I can now effectively operate at about a 6, but I can’t keep it up indefinitely and I can’t do it without actively focusing on it. Like with social interaction I need to take executive functioning breaks, to recharge my capacity for effective time management. When I’m feeling burnt out, and/or don’t have my usual tools I appropriate closer to a 4. Today I probably have the most trouble with overloading myself with too many things to do as opposed to forgetting to do things at a particular time.

Task Initiation = 3

Task initiation is one of the two areas I struggle with the most. I have hard time getting things started unless I have external pressure breathing down my neck (e.g. work responsibilities, a promise to a friend). I feel like I’ve grown enough in this area that I can get started on things on my own initiative, and somewhat consistently get myself started on a daily basis to work on longer term tasks, but it’s often a long struggle for me and I often don’t succeed in getting started quickly, or even at all. Pushing myself to work through a long-term writing project for myself at a time when I didn’t have a lot of other demands (I wasn’t in work or school at the time) helped me to beef this up from what probably used to be a 1 or 2.

Transitioning (shifting from task to task) = 3

The other area I struggle with the most. I have a lot of trouble with setting something unfinished aside and moving onto something else. Put another way I’m a poor juggler, or, put yet another way, a poor multitasker. I like to work at something until it’s done, then move onto something else. I often get lost in recreational activities until it’s time for me to go to bed and while I try at times to practice pulling myself away from a book, show, or video game, when the shit hits the fan, I find it works best If I take care of all my responsibilities for the day before I turn to R&R. It also really pisses me off when something crops up for me when I’m doing something for fun (e.g. I hated being called in to work, both the going in and working part, but also the phone company from somebody I can’t relax around [manager or boss] coming at me when I’m in a more vulnerable and relaxed state). It’s one of the areas that I tend to struggle more with in regards to emotional regulation which we may as well go into next.

Emotional Regulation = 5

I feel like I’m pretty average at this compared to people I know in general. I’m not super great at it, but I can usually able to tolerate and moderate intense emotions when expressing them intensely could cause relational problems at work, etc. I tend to be better at holding back the signs than tolerating them on inside, probably partly due to growing up in the Man Box and partly due to trying to stonewall to level the playing field with people who can read faces and body language much better than I can (which is the majority of people I know). I tend to be particularly good at regulating anger and particularly bad at regulating anxiety. I’m working on the anxiety side of things.

Meta-cognition (thinking about your thinking) = 8-ish

This is maybe the trickiest one to put a number to, mainly because many people think they know themselves better than they actually do, and it’s much harder to get a read on this from external validation (how do you know if someone’s opinion of how much/how well you think about your own thinking is more accurate than your own?). It makes it hard to make a case for thinking that you understand your own thinking better than most other people understand theirs. But, I think I’m around an 8 at my best guess. I do a lot of introspection. I think a lot about how my biases, experiences, statuses, and standpoint impact how I perceive the world around and how the differences between others and myself in these areas lead to differences in beliefs, perspectives, opinions, needs, etc. I also think a lot about my own behavior, motivations, and patterns of thinking and use this to plan for and pursue adjustments in myself.

Working Memory = 4

I feel like I can hold fewer things in my head at once than most people, follow a shorter chain of logic, hold onto fewer pieces of information. I know people who can write down pages upon pages and keep it all in their head as their writing it, but I have to keep referring back to parts relating to the pieces that slip out of my head as I write. Speaking of writing, being able to record pieces of information and being able to read them later helps me when trying to express myself. That might contribute to my tendency to express myself more clearly through writing than speaking.

Inhibition (i.e. not being Impulsive) = 6

I tend to have good Inhibition overall. Usually I’m pretty good at holding back from starting something that could be dangerous or problematic (e.g. violating a social norm). This tends to get worse when I’m feeling rushed. Usually I seem to run into the opposite problems: people get impatient with me, or I miss an opportunity, because I spend a long time thinking about a decision over before acting.

Planning & Problem solving = 5

I tend to be pretty average at planning things out and finding solutions: organizing the steps in a project, looking at a challenge through different lenses, etc. Most of the trouble I run into in this area tends to stem from social anxiety (I can coordinate effectively with others, and often get pushed into a leading role, but I find it much less stressful to work things out on my own in most cases), or lack of time (due to overloading my plate). Often times I do miss things that are obvious to most people that would be good to take into account, but just as often I catch things that most people don’t notice that would also be good to take into account.

#executive functioning #executive functions #executive functioning skills #Asperger's #ASD #Autism Spectrum Disorder #NVLD #Non-Verbal Learning Disorder #Introspection #self reflection

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absynthe--minded · 6 years

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9, 4, and 3

3. Have you ever unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion?

I absolutely have. There have been several people (particularly back in 2012 Salmon Riot Hell Salad Days) who I just wasn’t on the same page with for many reasons. I had a hard time dealing with the drama put out by the Big Name Bloggers, especially when they had cults of personality and fans who would attack you for a controversial opinion, and I wound up removing myself from fandom circles after a long depressive episode largely to avoid more drama.

4. Do you have a NoTP in your fandom? Are they a popular OTP?

See I have a lot of “why the fuck is this so popular” pairings but no real NOTPs? Except for maybe Elr0nd/L1nd1r, and I apologize to anybody who likes them as a ship. I’ve always found that those fans in particular have very little grasp of who Elrond is and his relationship with Celebrían, and it baffles me as to why this is such a popular pairing in fic and in art. I mean, if all I’d ever been exposed to was movie!Elrond I guess I could see it? but if all I’d ever been exposed to was movie!Elrond I’d probably ship him with Thranduil instead. Just saying. It makes more sense, and regardless it makes no sense. But still more than shipping Elrond with Lindir. (to all the people on mobile who will see this after searching ‘Lindir’, I am sorry but also not sorry.)

9. Most disliked character(s)? Why?

I am going to ignore certain divisive figures in the Star Wars fandom and focus on somebody that a lot of fandom seems to like, sort of? for some reason? that person being Melkor. I mean I’ve talked a lot about how much I hate Eöl and how creepy I find Maeglin but I find very few people who actually seem to like or defend them as characters (side note: I’m aware there’s some racism in fandom treatments of Eöl and Maeglin and I’m not going to go into that right now? But I wanted to acknowledge its existence) whereas with Melkor people seem to genuinely like him. Or justify his actions when he like. Wanted to destroy the world and grind it into dust and then hate the dust because it had the audacity to not be created by him. Basically his motivations are clear and explicit and his actions are evil and I’ve never been able to grasp why people defend him.

Also I really cannot stand Damar or Dukat from Star Trek DS9. Dukat especially. I wish I’d gotten the chance to shoot him in the face in a video game because that would have been my favorite thing ever.

#replies #ask meme #anon replies

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tautittology · 6 years

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what if you answered ALL the iconic 80s song asks

well anon i’d say you are a life saver cause i am forcefully trying to Ocuppy My Treacherous Mind away from bad things so for that bless you and your pets and their descendants

billie jean: what do you notice more in a song - the drums or bassline?

the bassline i’m all bout that bass a slut for thick powerful and dirty basslines

sweet dreams (are made of this): what’s the best dream you’ve had?

i was climbing one of those impossibly shaped staircase thingies you know the kind that seemingly go on for ever with my best friend and when i realised we weren’t getting higher i just stopped and looked at him and we both started laughing so hard i woke up still laughing and couldn’t stop for like 10 mins

africa: favourite 80s music video?

i’m not big on music videos but david bowie and mick jagger’s vid of their cover of Dancing in the Street is Something Else

every breath you take: who’s the first person your mind goes to when you hear a love song?

uh i generally feel for / think of the inner characters of the song like it was a tiny story someone was telling me and i get to create who it’s talking about so yeah

should i stay or should i go: how many languages do you speak?

2 fluently 1 kinda ok 2 i got basics

uptown girl: what’s your favourite book trope?

non-linear narration where you finally manage to piece together the intrigue but there’s a Major Twist and everything makes much more sense when it’s upside-down

don’t stop believin’: what’s the longest journey you’ve been on?

this life i think the time i did a tour of europe with friends for 2-3 weeks but if you mean in hours to get there the time i went to Chile to see my family and the plane ride was something like 13h

i wanna dance with somebody (who loves me): who was the last person you danced with?

my best friend in the back of a car this morning while a friend drove us to Versailles

maneater: where did you spend your last friday night?

getting drunk at a bar and then ending up in a skeevy bar and then going home to put my roomate and friend to bed

jessie’s girl: what would you do if you found out your best friend was seeing your ex?

lmaoooooo my bff would rip her in 0.2 secs but ok i guess i’d be very very upset confront my best friend try to be comprehensive and kind but something would be broken because i’d feel betrayed and hurt and eventually we’d drift apart and i’d probably hope they’ll break up so i can get my best friend back cause i’m that petty and just hope for my sweet sweet friend to come back to me and it would be oh so horribly lonely and wow i made myself sad well done

born in the u.s.a.: what’s your home town like?

big n famous nd full of life and unexpected things and a bit too far from the sea but oh so gorgeous in the rain and under the sun go on take a wild guess what it is

wake me up before you go-go: how did your last date go?

good i guess he just came over it wasn’t much of a date really idk

girls just want to have fun: relationship with your parents?

with my mother things can get complicated in half a second but i know she loves me and i love her and sometimes she’s terrible sometimes she’s amazing and i deal with it aaaaaand with my father well it’s not bad but it’s almost nonexistent mostly by my fault so yeah it better be somewhat positive at least

beat it: opinions on the police force?

Not To Be Trusted

never gonna give you up: how old were you when you joined the internet?

14 or something i think? mostly through stuff my brother showed me

faith: when was your first kiss?

lmao at like 4 or 5 under the slides for just a lil peck on the lips and a real ass frenching at maybe 13

i’m so excited: where was your first kiss?

either under the slides or on my mother’s couch but the real important kiss here is my first gay kiss in my friend’s room and tbh i still think of this room next to the attic with a window on the roof where we went to smoke cigarettes on

take on me: could you reach the high note?

lol no but believe me i’ll try every fucking time

footloose: favourite musical?

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

9 to 5: do you like country music?

nah not really at all no

back in black: what makes a good rock song?

a badass rythm section that goes above and beyond a guitar solo that avoids the trap of cheesiness and an energy or passion rabid enough to tear out a whole stadium

material girl: are you sentimental?

i am so soft and ridiculous but i hide it well

walk this way: what was the most expensive thing you bought in the last six months?

a roger waters ticket for his show here in June IVE BEEN BROKE EVER SINCE BUT BITCH IM SEEING THE TALL LAD

you shook me all night long: are you seeing anyone at the moment?

yes but hahahahahaha i feel really shitty regarding this rn it might pass i hope it will nd im just overthinking it hahahahahahah fuck me

thriller: favourite film genre and why?

i guess slightly surreal ones like borderline psychologic/fantastic if that makes sense to you

i want candy: chocolate or sweets?

hhhhhhhhhhhhh i wanna say sweets but the ones covered in chocolate

ghostbusters: how far do you believe in the paranormal?

already answered 😎👉👉

the power of love: does true love exist?

how else would you explain the feeling in your chest when you see your pet peacefully dozing off on your stomach

hungry like the wolf: what’s your crush’s favourite music genre?

the One i Date is into really hardcore metal shit like Slipknot

walk like an egyptian: favourite song currently in the charts?

........i suck at keeping up with what’s in the charts and i hardly ever remember the names of songs i like on the radio srry

(i’ve had) the time of my life: if you could relive any ten minutes of your life, what would you relive?

the first time i ever saw Patti Smith at a festival i wasn’t that much into her at the time and i wish i had been more focused in hindsight

just can’t get enough: what’s your guilty pleasure?

i indulge too much to have guilty pleasures

i’m gonna be (500 miles): how far apart do you and your best friend live?

rn one is literally in the next room and the other roughly 1h by train/metro

you spin me round (like a record): favourite modern cover of an older song?

i genuinely can’t think of any rn

we built this city: if you were president, what would your first ruling be?

draft a new constitution with humans at the core of the preoccupations rather than international weight or money for starters

how will i know: do you believe everyone is deserving of love?

i think everyone have been loved at least once it’s not really something you deserve or control

nothing’s gonna stop us now: what’s been the biggest hurdle you’ve faced in your life so far?

the word hurdle a shitty health and people most close to me reacting badly to it and some family crap that took its toll on me for a few years

come on eileen: have you ever written a song? if so, what was the genre?

once or twice mostly ballads half inspired by the smiths half by pink floyd it was.....Not Good

living on a prayer: which was the song of your childhood?

Joe Dassin Siffler Sur la Colline

sweet child o’ mine: describe your perfect first date.

just lots of laughter and a good bottle of wine honestly it’s the person that makes a perfect date

don’t you (forget about me): is there anyone from your past that you regret cutting ties with?

yes but it wasn’t as much cutting ties as letting the relationship dies because i suck like that

eye of the tiger: favourite 80s movie?

The Blues Brothers

under pressure: give an example of a world event that occurred the year you were born.

Diana died

with or without you: what would you value most: a relationship or a job?

i really really really hope i’ll never have to ask myself this question (provided both are good healthy and fulfilling ofc)

another one bites the dust: where did you achieve your biggest accomplishment?

in England probably i mean i fucking survived there and then managed to have some of the best times of my life i find myself pretty badass there tbh

pour some sugar on me: turn ons?

hands neck plump lips nd a pretty smile and a touch of leather

in the air tonight: do you enjoy flying?

point me at the sky nd tell it flyyyyyyyyyyyy

tainted love: thoughts on synthesisers/electronic drum kits/technology based music?

why the fuck not it’s like most genres there are good things and bad things it’s not usually my jam tho

like a virgin: share a controversial opinion.

i think Oasis was Bad and a Mistake

karma chameleon: what do you like most about your appearance?

i can’t see it most of the time

thanks a lot anon u are a godsend may you have all your favourite foods all week long 🐰

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mysteryunfold · 7 years

Text

On the MC’s / Apprentice’s “agency”

This post comes from some the discussion that has been around the Julian breakup. One “issue” that came up that I did not talk about in my last post was that some Julian fans felt that Julian’s leaving took away the MC’s agency and choice. *takes a deep breath.* I really want to talk about this because that sort of reasoning was also present earlier in some’s earlier frustration with Asra.

Here is my main point: I do not think that Julian’s breakup or Asra’s actions violate the MC’s choice and agency.

The MC: Characterization

First of all, the MC’s agency and choice as a character in visual novels like The Arcana is a tricky thing because often times the character is a self-insert. Although visual novels tend to be “chose-your-own-adventure” there are still limitations that adventure. Although the player is controlling the MC, their choices are limited in what is written for them. Some visual novels have a lot of routes and endings (more work for the writers) and others have a mostly linear plot with the choices having very little effect.

Since many MCs of visual novels serve as self inserts (which the MC of The Arcana is most definitely that type, the gender, age, name and physical attributes of the MC are up to the player), the personality of the character often is what the player brings to it. To allow this to happen, the MC cannot have as big of influence on the plot as say a book MC can have because to those actions would point to a concrete personality.

However, VN writers have to walk a fine line... they cannot have a protagonist that has too much of influence of the plot because then the player does not have themselves invested as much (or if they play more passive character then nothing would happen), but they cannot have too much of a blank character because then they does not seem to be any agency in the situations that the MC finds themselves in.

Here are some ways that VNs work around it:

Have a blank character that is easily identifiable for the target audience (think Bella Swan. On another note, that is why VNs tend to be so gendered. The “Shall We Date” series I think does this.)

Have one or two traits of a character that are in your face and that are relatable... these traits either cause the movement of the story or are a force in the banter of the dialogue (The Sake Visual games that I have played use this, case in point Re: Alistair. I think that the Phoenix Wright games use this technique as well. Also, Layton Brother’s Mystery Room’s Lucy Baker has this quality. Also Miranda Namatgira from Nachtigal)

Have the story be about the Love Interests. (I think a lot of visual novels do this. But here are some free examples: (P)lanets and the parody-lite Asagao Academy)

Have the story be more a slice of life / the player is trying to build toward something (A good example of this is “Our Personal Space” from the app store.)

Have the main plot be about the MC trying to figure something out or discover what happened. (It is a good way to build character and world. A lot of mystery novels do this. I have seen fantasy VNs do this as well because it is a good way to build worlds. Serafina’s Saga does this by having the MC grow up away from the city of her ancestors. The Arcana and Frozen Essence, some of my favorites, employ the trope of memory loss for the audience to discover the MC and the world.)

In all of the examples I give, the agency and control of a VN’s main character is more limited than that of a movie or book. For better or for worse, that is the nature / climate of visual novels. The Arcana’s MC’s agency needs to be judged in the context of other visual novels. In my opinion, compared to other VNs, the MC has more agency than most (especially what tends to be available in the app store... I have been in circumstances before that I felt like I had no control over in a VN), even in Asra’s clearing the MC’s memory to protect them and Julian’s breakup.

Asra / MC

So let’s go back to the beginning of discourse of the fandom. This beginning discourse centered around resident floof boy, Asra. Many fans were upset about the paid coin scene in which Asra confesses his love for the apprentice and then wipes their memories of the incident.

That scene caused many fans to not like Asra, calling him “shady” and even some thought his actions were abusive. Asra is not abusive, and I am not going to go into that now. The reason for their mistrust was cited as being partly based on that Asra was taking away the MC’s agency.

However, the circumstances that the MC finds themselves in takes away their agency, not Asra.

The MC has memory that cannot be restored because if Asra tries to restore that memory, the MC will be put in a coma / deep sleep. The MC is in circumstances that strip them of their agency because they have to rely on others through a life they do not understand.

If the MC is dignified in their lack of agency depends on how it is written. I think in the Arcana’s case, the devs keep what little agency the character has in. For example, they could have romanticized the power imbalance between Asra and the MC, but they do not. But both the MC and Asra are portrayed as desiring an equal relationship. Asra regrets that he cannot bring the MC’s memories back, and when the MC does remember something (no matter how small), he rejoices. Also in the book “The Lovers,” he requests that the apprentice stop referring to him as “master” because calling him that title is beneath him. This implies that the MC before the memory loss was in the very least Asra’s equal, if not more skilled than him. It is that past that Asra longs for and wants to restore. He is not comfortable with the MC being a subordinate. Likewise, we also get a glimpse that MC desires this equality of agency and mutuality with Asra as well. In the “The Chariot,” when they are walking through the forest, the MC comments on the past (after the memory loss) and the present. They note that back before they could even fully speak, it was Asra leading them around. Now, the two are walking side by side, implying equality. The apprentice longs for and enjoys the present relationship more than the one right after they just woke up.

Although the MC’s circumstances strip them of agency, one of their love interest’s actively works with them to restore that agency.

Julian / MC

And now to the current controversy. Why Julian’s break up feels like it is denying the MC agency when it really is not.

First of all, the hard truth on breakups, anyone is allowed to breakup with anybody. Breaking up with somebody is not denying that person their agency.

Now there are humane ways to break up and even abusive ways to break up, but the break up itself is not what takes agency away.

This is a hard truth that I had wrestle with, having gone through a really bad breakup that took me years to get over. I had to move on from the fact that while the way my ex broke up with me was utter crap and really hurt, he has every right for not having me in his life. Forcing him back into my life or manipulating him back into my life is trying to wrestle him out his agency. Ouchie.

On the lighter subject, Julian did not deny the MC’s agency in the break up. He analyzed the situation and decided that while he has feelings for the apprentice, he cannot enter into a relationship with them.

I think why this seems like it agency-defying is because this usually does not happen in VN type games. Usually, if you pick the right choices, the game moves through a steady progression to the couple getting together. The Arcana does the opposite. It put the Julian / MC relationship on steroids (it moved super fast, you guys. It really did), and then had a fall out consequence for moving so fast. Often times, VNs do not give their LIs much agency and gift the player the of control the relationship with the LI. But, the Arcana, in this circumstance, the gave agency to the LI.

So, Julian’s break up is not robbing the MC of agency. Rather, in the break up scene, the devs assert his character and give him equal agency to the MC.

Conclusion

Whew, that was long. I should add a closing note /summary. So, in summary, we must look at the MC’s agency in the context of how VN protagonists are portrayed. What is love or high agency is different in VNs than it is in books or movies. I also do not believe that Asra or Julian took away the MC’s agency at any point, currently, in the game.

#The Arcana #Visual Novels #discussion #Asra #Julian #agency #MC #apprentice #long post #analysis

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karadin · 7 years

Text

How the Republicans became the party of Putin

Would somebody please help me out here: I’m confused,” read the email to me from a conservative Republican activist and donor. “The Russians are alleged to have interfered in the 2016 election by hacking into Dem party servers that were inadequately protected, some being kept in Hillary’s basement and finding emails that were actually written by members of the Clinton campaign and releasing those emails so that they could be read by the American people who what, didn’t have the right to read these emails? And this is bad? Shouldn’t we be thanking the Russians for making the election more transparent?”

Put aside the factual inaccuracies in this missive (it was not Hillary Clinton’s controversial private server the Russians are alleged to have hacked, despite Donald Trump’s explicit pleading with them to do so, but rather those of the Democratic National Committee and her campaign chairman, John Podesta). Here, laid bare, are the impulses of a large swathe of today’s Republican Party. In any other era, our political leaders would be aghast at the rank opportunism, moral flippancy and borderline treasonous instincts on display.

Instead, we get this from the president of the United States, explaining away his son’s encounter with Russian operatives who were advertised as working on behalf of the Kremlin: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!” And from elected Republicans, we get mostly silence—or embarrassing excuses.

Never mind that Trump Jr. initially said the meeting was about adoption, not a Russian offer of “ultra sensitive” dirt on Hillary Clinton. We’ve gone from the Trump team saying they never even met with Russians to the president himself now essentially saying: So what if we did?

What I never expected was that the Republican Party—which once stood for a muscular, moralistic approach to the world, and which helped bring down the Soviet Union—would become a willing accomplice of what the previous Republican presidential nominee rightly called our No. 1 geopolitical foe: Vladimir Putin’s Russia. My message for today’s GOP is to paraphrase Barack Obama when he mocked Romney for saying precisely that: 2012 called—it wants its foreign policy back.

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I should not have been surprised. I’ve been following Russia’s cultivation of the American right for years, long before it became a popular subject, and I have been amazed at just how deep and effective the campaign to shift conservative views on Russia has been. Four years ago, I began writing a series of articles about the growing sympathy for Russia among some American conservatives. Back then, the Putin fan club was limited to seemingly fringe figures like Pat Buchanan (“Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he asked, answering in the affirmative), a bunch of cranks organized around the Ron Paul Institute and some anti-gay marriage bitter-enders so resentful at their domestic political loss they would ally themselves with an authoritarian regime that not so long ago they would have condemned for exporting “godless communism.”

Today, these figures are no longer on the fringe of GOP politics. According to a Morning Consult-Politico poll from May, an astonishing 49 percent of Republicans consider Russia an ally. Favorable views of Putin – a career KGB officer who hates America – have nearly tripled among Republicans in the past two years, with 32 percent expressing a positive opinion.

It would be a mistake to attribute this shift solely to Trump and his odd solicitousness toward Moscow. Russia has been targeting the American right since at least 2013, the year Putin enacted a law targeting pro-gay rights organizing and delivered a state-of-the-nation address extolling Russia’s “traditional values” and assailing the West’s “genderless and infertile” liberalism. That same year, a Kremlin-connected think tank released a report entitled, “Putin: World Conservativism’s New Leader.” In 2015, Russia hosted a delegation from the National Rifle Association, one of America’s most influential conservative lobby groups, which included David Keene, then-president of the NRA and now editor of the Washington Times editorial page, which regularly features voices calling for a friendlier relationship with Moscow. (It should be noted here that Russia, a country run by its security services where the leader recently created a 400,000-strong praetorian guard, doesn’t exactly embrace the individual right to bear arms.) A recent investigation by Politico Magazine, meanwhile, revealed how Russian intelligence services have been using the internet and social networks to target another redoubt of American conservativism: the military community.

Today, it’s hard to judge this Russian effort as anything other than a smashing success. Turn on Fox News and you will come across the network’s most popular star, Sean Hannity, citing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as a reliable source of information or retailing Russian disinformation such as the conspiracy theory that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich—who police say was killed during a robbery attempt—was the source of last summer’s leaks, not Russian hackers. Fox’s rising star Tucker Carlson regularly uses his time slot to ridicule the entire Russian meddling scandal and portray Putin critics as bloodthirsty warmongers. On Monday night, he went so far as to give a platform to fringe leftist Max Blumenthal — author of a book comparing Israel to the Third Reich and a vocal supporter of the Assad regime in Syria — to assail the “bootlicking press” for reporting on Trump’s Russia ties. (When Blumenthal alleged that the entire Russia scandal was really just a militarist pretext for NATO enlargement, Carlson flippantly raised the prospect of his son having to fight a war against Russia, as he did in a contentious exchange earlier this year with Russian dissident Garry Kasparov. At the time, I asked Carlson if his son serves in the military. He didn’t respond).

Meanwhile the Heritage Foundation, one of Washington’s most influential conservative think tanks and a former bastion of Cold War hawkishness, has enlisted itself in the campaign against George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist whose work promoting democracy and good governance in the former Soviet space has made him one of the Kremlin’s main whipping boys.

And it’s not just conservative political operatives and media hacks who have come around on Russia. Pro-Putin feelings are now being elucidated by some conservative intellectuals as well. Echoing Kremlin complaints that Russia is a country which has been “frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled” – a self-pitying justification for Russian aggression throughout history – Weekly Standard senior editor Christopher Caldwell extolls Putin as “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.”

How did the party of Ronald Reagan’s moral clarity morph into that of Donald Trump’s moral vacuity? Russia’s intelligence operatives are among the world’s best. I believe they made a keen study of the American political scene and realized that, during the Obama years, the conservative movement had become ripe for manipulation. Long gone was its principled opposition to the “evil empire.” What was left was an intellectually and morally desiccated carcass populated by con artists, opportunists, entertainers and grifters operating massively profitable book publishers, radio empires, websites, and a TV network whose stock-in-trade are not ideas but resentments. If a political officer at the Russian Embassy in Washington visited the zoo that is the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, they’d see a “movement” that embraces a ludicrous performance artist like Milo Yiannopoulos as some sort of intellectual heavyweight. When conservative bloggers are willing to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars from Malaysia’s authoritarian government to launch a smear campaign against a democratic opposition leader they know nothing about, how much of a jump is it to line up and defend what at the very least was attempted collusion on the part of a brain-dead dauphin like Donald Trump Jr.?

Surveying this lamentable scene, why wouldn't Russia try to “turn” the American right, whose ethical rot necessarily precedes its rank unscrupulousness? It is this ethical rot that allows Dennis Prager, one of the right’s more unctuous professional moralists, to opine with a straight face that “The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.” Why wouldn’t a “religious right” that embraced a boastfully immoral charlatan like Donald Trump not turn a blind eye toward—or, in the case of Franklin Graham, embrace—an oppressive regime like that ruling Russia? American conservatism is no better encapsulated today than by the self-satisfied, smirking mug of Carlson, the living embodiment of what Lionel Trilling meant when he wrote that the “conservative impulse” is defined by “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

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The entire Trump-Russia saga strikes at a deeper issue which most Republicans have shown little care in examining: What is it about Donald Trump that attracted the Kremlin so?

Such an effort would be like staging an intervention for a drunk and abusive family member: painful but necessary. One would have thought a U.S. intelligence community assessment concluding that the Russians preferred their party’s nominee over Hillary Clinton would have introduced a bit of introspection on the right. Moments for such soul-searching had arrived much earlier, however, like when Trump hired a former advisor to the corrupt, pro-Russian president of Ukraine as his campaign manager last summer. Or when he praised Putin on “Morning Joe” in December of 2015. Republicans ought to have considered how an “America First” foreign policy, despite its promises to build up the military and “bomb the shit out of” ISIS, might actually be more attractive to Moscow than the warts-and-all liberal internationalism of the Democratic nominee, who, whatever her faults, has never called into question the very existence of institutions like the European Union and NATO, pillars of the transatlantic democratic alliance. Now that he’s president, Trump’s fitful behavior, alienating close allies like Britain and Germany, ought give Republicans pause about how closely the president’s actions accord with Russian objectives.

But alas there has been no such reckoning within the party of Reagan. Instead, the Russia scandal has incurred a wrathful defensiveness among conservatives, who are reaching for anything – paranoid attacks on the so-called American “deep state,” allegations of conspiracy among Obama administration holdovers – to distract attention from the very grave reality of Russian active measures. To be sure, the Republican Congress, at least on paper, remains hawkish on the Kremlin, as evidenced by the recent 98-2 Senate vote to increase sanctions against Russia for its election meddling and other offenses. But in no way can they be said anymore to represent the GOP party base, which has been led to believe by the president and his allies in the pro-Trump media that “the Russia story” is a giant hoax. It wasn’t long ago that the GOP used to mock Democratic presidential candidates for supposedly winning “endorsements” from foreign adversaries, like when a Hamas official said he “liked” Barack Obama in 2008. Today, most Republicans evince no shame in the fact that their candidate was the clearly expressed preference of a murderous thug like Vladimir Putin.

If Republicans put country before party, they would want to know what the Russians did, why they did it and how to prevent it from happening again. But that, of course, would raise questions implicating Donald Trump and all those who have enabled him, questions that most Republicans prefer to remain unanswered.

Politico

#russia #trump #republicans #trump fail #putin

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