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dissonantdreamer · 3 years

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CHECK IN TAG

i was tagged by @silentsockfeet @mimixdinellie and @dinasknifewife hell yeah, thank you gang (i’m trying out gang, seeing if it fits)

why did you choose your url?

i am a nightmare of a human being

any side blogs? if you have them: name them and why you have them

if i say anything my main blog is going to want in on that action and i know those two will run off without me

how long have you been on tumblr?

i simultaneously have always been here and have never been here in my life

do you have a queue tag?

wouldn’t queue like to know. nosy bastard

why did you start your blog in the first place?

pretty sure someone one ao3 commented i should get one and because i was lonely and easily succumb to peer pressure i did. and this little corner of the net has become pretty aok

why did you choose your icon?

because if you take a piece of my soul boil it down to its essences then infuse paint with that essence paint a photo then take a digital scan and upload it to the web to use it for a profile picture then you’re looking at me in my rawest form

why did you choose your header?

changed it up for pride, my usual header is my favorite shitpost i’ve made. II Fast II Furious.

how many mutuals do you have?

so many and i am woefully bad at counting past ten. so at least ten

how many followers do you have?

595, toying with some kind of face reveal at 600

how many people do you follow?

between 69 and 420

have you ever made a shitpost?

have you met me?

how often do you use tumblr each day?

i don’t know how to exit the app, im terrible with technology

did you have a fight/argument with another blog once? who won?

nah, i’ve had some shitty people try me but, like it’s a video game lads, go outside get some air, eat a pussy, suck a dick, buy drugs. that’s what i’ve been doing and that’s why i don’t want to waste my time arguing online

how do you feel about “you need to reblog this” posts?

some people need to get reblogs through fear, those people are weak.

do you like tag games?

i fuckin’ suck at tag, everyone is like 10 and their lungs are pure plus when it’s my turn not to be it they make me it as soon as they can. one kid tagged me five years ago at a birthday party and i felt so guilty when i told him no and he cried that i’ve just been playing to make them happy ever since. i‘m exhausted, and my asthma is just how i breath forever all the time now i guess.

do you like ask games?

who’s askin’?

which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

tumblr famous is like being the february employee of the month at a hardees in a swamp

do you have a crush on a mutual?

of course how could i not. i have strong thighs i’m capable of crushing and if someone wants to challenge me i am up for a mutual crush.

uuuuuhhhhhh if you have not done this and want to, you should because i don’t know who has been tagged and at this point i’m too afraid to ask

#an ask in which I do not know how to not use humor to respond #thank you for that tags guys #needed the distraction tonigh

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bellboy905 · 4 years

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The story... is relatively simple. Congress approved military aid for Ukraine, but Trump withheld it as part of a sustained campaign to pressure Ukraine into launching an investigation of his political rival... There’s a record of him doing it. There are multiple credible witnesses to the phone call and larger campaign. Several Trump allies and administration officials have admitted to it on camera. Trump himself admitted to it on the White House lawn.

It’s... very obvious that he did it. It’s very obvious he and his associates don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. And it’s very obvious there is something wrong with it. Holding U.S. foreign policy hostage to personal political favors is straightforward abuse of power, precisely the sort of thing the founders had in mind when they wrote impeachment into the Constitution. It’s a clearly impeachable pattern of action, documented and attested to by... witnesses, confessed to multiple times, in violation of longstanding political precedent and a moral consensus that was, until 2016, universal.

[...]

The right’s messaging machine is sputtering a bit, cycling through defenses... that contradict one another from day to day. Can the machine successfully hold the right-wing base in an alternate reality and throw up enough fog to keep the general public at bay for long enough to get through the next election? It seems challenging, given the facts on record, but this is just the sort of challenge the machine was built for.

[...]

Tribal morality is what happens when tribal interests... subordinate moral principles.... Take, for instance... “it is wrong to torture.” Interpreted as a principle, it is meant to apply to everyone. Anyone, from any group or nation, who tortures anyone else, from any group or nation, is doing something wrong. But under tribal morality, principles are subsumed under tribal membership.... It is wrong for them to torture us... It is okay for us to torture them.

[...]

Tribal epistemology happens when tribal interests subsume transpartisan epistemological principles, like standards of evidence, internal coherence, and defeasibility. “Good for our tribe” becomes the primary determinant of what is true. “Part of our tribe” becomes the primary determinant of who to trust. A circular logic, which has become quite familiar in the impeachment affair, emerges. Anyone who says anything contrary to the tribe marks themselves as an enemy of the tribe... Enemies of the tribe cannot but trusted, so their testimony or evidence can be ignored. Thus, by definition, nothing that questions the tribal narrative can be trusted.

A decades-long effort on the right has resulted in a parallel set of institutions meant to encourage tribal epistemology. They mimic the form of mainstream media... but without the restraint of transpartisan principles. They are designed to advance the interests of the right, to tell stories and produce facts that support the tribe... steadily shaping the worldview of their white suburban audience around a forever war with The Libs, who are always just on the verge of destroying America.

[...]

The propaganda machine that the right built to keep its base outraged grew out of control and swallowed the GOP.... Now everyone with any power on the right is deep in the bubble, right up to the president himself... There are no more moderates or responsible Republicans behind the curtain, keeping an eye on the difference between tribal tall tales and reality.... Trump, the ultimate tribalist... doesn’t want to hear any of these half-ass stories about how he did something wrong but it’s not that bad. He demands ultimate loyalty, and to him loyalty means insisting that he did nothing wrong at all. Following Trump down that path requires ignoring or wishing away mountains of evidence and decades of precedent, opting instead to believe him when he says, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” This is tribal epistemology in its rawest form. It’s us or them, our story or theirs. If you are one of us, you believe our story.

[...]

On the downslope of a fading, unpopular coalition is not a great place for Republicans to be. It doesn’t augur well for their post-2020 health as a party. But it is enough to get them through the next election, which is about as far ahead as they look these days. All they need to do is to keep that close partisan split frozen in place. Above all, they need to ensure that nothing breaks through to the masses in the mushy middle, who are mostly disengaged from politics. They need to make sure no clear consensus forms.

[...]

What Republicans need more than anything on impeachment [is] for the general public to see it as just another round of partisan squabbling, another illustration of how “Washington” is broken. They need to prevent any hint of bipartisan consensus from emerging. Tribal epistemology is key to this. Republicans must render partisan not only judgments of right and wrong but judgments of what is and isn’t true or real. They must render facts themselves a matter of controversy that the media reports as a food fight and the public tunes out. That’s the main reason they are focusing their attacks so intently on process complaints. The investigation itself, the hearings, the whole process must come to be seen as partisan, which will serve as permission for the engaged... right to attack it, the engaged... left to embrace it, and the broader public to dismiss it.

Aiding in the effort is the propaganda machine... “89% of Republicans who get most of their impeachment news from Fox oppose the inquiry because they think the allegations aren’t true. 59% of other Republicans say the same.”

[...]

The right has an ability to convey a partisan message to its base that the left utterly lacks.... Democrats are still dependent on the mainstream press to convey their messages to the broad public. Many of their consultants and press officers still view their role as managing relationships with mainstream reporters. But the mainstream media, catering to low-information voters and reinforcing their worst prejudices in the process, persists in covering politics precisely through the most cynical lens, as a team sport, competing performances to be narrated like an announcer calling a game. Meanwhile, the right not only commands the highest rated cable news network and an army of supportive online media outlets, it is spending millions on Facebook... and God knows what other online swamps, targeting messages where their audiences are rather than futilely attempting to reach them through the Washington Post.

As Putin and other modern autocrats have realized... it is not necessary for a repressive regime to construct its own coherent account of events. There are no broadly respected, nonpartisan referees left to hold it to account for consistency or accuracy. All it needs, to get away with whatever it wants, is for the information environment to be so polluted that no one can figure out what’s true and what isn’t, or what’s really going on.

The recipe is always the same. Attack independent media outlets as partisan enemies of the regime and, by proxy, enemies of the people. At the same time, use the media under state control, along with an army of bots, trolls, and shitposters, to inject... lies and conspiracy theories into the public dialogue. In an information fog filled with vexed uncertainty, people will... tune out, revert to their tribal affiliations, or both. They will seek a strong leader who offers simple certainties and a clear account of who is to blame for the chaos. Confusion and fear, not deception, are the ultimate goal. That is precisely the kind of machine the U.S. conservative movement has built... one designed to produce confusion and fear. Trump is its natural leader, the first Republican president to reflect the party’s contemporary core and character, and his impeachment is its ultimate test.

Meanwhile, Democrats are attempting to... unite Americans in a clear understanding of a threat and a clear will to action, in a way that reaches across conventional partisan lines, at least to some extent. On their side, they have the products of America’s tattered remaining institutional processes and norms: clear evidence, painstakingly laid out in a constitutionally prescribed process, communicated through mainstream news outlets. The facts are clearer than ever, but those institutions are weaker and social trust, which the right has been concertedly attacking for decades, is at a low ebb.

In opposition is [a] large but stable minority united by unquestioned loyalty to a tribal leader, dedicated to guerrilla information warfare unconstrained by conventional norms of accuracy or consistency, and motivated by an almost eschatological will to power. If the latter triumphs, if it is able to muddy and distract enough to make impeachment just another Mueller, just more partisan white noise, we will cross a kind of rubicon... Consensus will have become impossible. It will show that no amount of evidence is capable of bridging the partisan gap. The epistemic crisis, and its attendant political crisis, will be fully upon us.

Ultimately, communication, and with it survival as a polity, depends on a shared body of facts and assumptions about the world. For decades, the right has been sawing away at the threads that still connect it to mainstream institutions... and norms of conduct, to the point that it has created a hermetically sealed and impenetrable world of its own. As congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned in 2012, the GOP [has] become “a resurgent outlier... ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, un-persuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science... dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” The machine was primed and waiting for someone like Trump. Now, with his erratic and indefensible conduct, he is accelerating the breach, pushing the right into ever-more cult-like behavior, principles laid aside one after another in service of power.

[...]

What a tribalist like Trump wants [is] for communication and compromise across tribal lines to become impossible, so that loyalty becomes the only measure and everything is reduced to pure struggle for dominance. If he makes it through impeachment unscathed, he and the right will have learned once and for all that facts and evidence have no hold on them. Both “sides” have free rein to choose the facts and evidence that suit them. Only power matters.

#trump #republicans #impeachment #truth #conservative media #liberal media #bias #1984

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iamcinema · 5 years

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IAC Reviews #004: Faces of Death (1978) [Retrospective #1]

Warning: The following film contains (real) graphic violence that might NSFL for some viewers; including that of autopsies, animal cruelty, air and road accidents, and simulated death media. If this seems like something that might offend or upset you, don’t seek it out. This retrospect, however, will discuss the film and these aspects without the usage of stills, and is marked safe. Read forward at your own discretion.

Let’s take things in a slightly different direction this time around, and discuss one of the most infamous pieces of shocking and controversial cinema of all time; John Alan Schwartz’s 1978 shockumentary Faces of Death.

While it doesn’t predate other films of a similar ilk like Mondo Cane (1962), Shocking Asia (1974), or even gory, road safety films like Signal 30 (1959) or Red Asphalt (1960), it could be considered to be the first film of its kind to become a household name - a pretty dark one, and bring the term “shockumentary” to the mainstream. Becoming a cult classic that out performed films like E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (1982) in sales in countries like Japan in the 1980s, the film gained traction for it’s proclamation that it was banned in at least “46 countries” for its raw, graphic depiction of death caught on film in the form of surgical procedures, autopsies, animal cruelty, and news footage or home videos of disasters and accidents caught on film.

Since this year marks the 41st anniversary of the film’s release, why not touch on it again?

Faces of Death in One Gif:

Okay, so shitposting aside, let’s get down to talking about this.

One of the big things that ultimately comes up about the film is a simple one word question.

Why?

What’s so special about this thing that has caused it to remain so relevant and influential that it continued to inspire its own sequels and dwell in the hearts of other mondo/shockumentary based films or series like Banned! in America (1998-2000), Traces of Death (1993 - 2000), or modern day mixtapes like The Most Disturbed Person on Planet Earth (2014-). The film’s connections page alone is impressive, with it being given a nod to in mainstream films and programs like Scream 2 (1997), House of 1000 Corpses (2003), The Houses October Built (2014) and Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988-). This becomes more apparent when the topic of the authenticity of the footage is brought into question, and it ends up being one of the focal discussions about both this film and the rest of the series as a whole - with roughly 40-70% of the footage being staged or recreated.

To some, they can spot the fakes from a mile away without any hesitation, and some end up being genuinely surprised when they find out certain shots were, in fact, staged. This includes the famous alligator attack, the police shoot-out, the electric chair execution that often graces the cover of posters, and the beheading execution sequence that takes place shortly there after. However, not all the scenes are staged. Well, sort of. Some are in fact, genuine, but have tacked on moments to build tension or to pad them out; such as that of footage of a suicide jumper - which included additional footage of firefighters rushing to the scene and close-ups of the aftermath.

Furthermore, due to the quality of some of the footage, it can often be hard to tell and scenes that look cheap and fake end up turning out to be genuine. The content that’s genuine is often quite brutal, and it can be very in your face about it - giving you a true face to face encounter with what your own death might be.

The most infamous of the more graphic content is the unflinching depiction of animal cruelty in a number of settings and situations; including slaughterhouses, family farms, or at the hands of hunters, and poachers. In documentaries and interviews about the experiences from the crew during the filming of such scenes, such as the slaughterhouses. In the Fact or Fiction special about the series, the director talked about how they were once up to their hips in blood and entrails while filming at one of these locations. To state that these sequences aren’t graphic or violent would be a bold faced lie, and this chapter isn’t for those who are faint of heart and can be hard to watch.

Two of the more notable sequences that contain real footage include that of unaired news footage from the famous PSA Flight 182 disaster, a deadly plane crash that took place in the North Park neighborhood of San Diego, which killed several people on the ground and destroyed several buildings and homes, as well as footage captured by the film crew by pure chance of a drowning victim that washed up on the beach after being reported missing for several days.

“Okay, so it’s not all bullshit. So what? But that still doesn’t answer the question of why it’s so popular though to begin with or why it still is.”

Well, I feel like the controversy speaks for itself and maybe people end up just answering their own question.

While it wasn’t the original mondo film, let alone the first to get international attention, it’s my understanding that it was targeted specifically with Western, theatrical audiences in mind. With the boasted reputation it garnered for being banned in nearly 50 countries and the in your face trailer with its depiction of corpses, religious cults, and general mayhem; it can be enticing to the morbidly curious, especially in the aftermath of the Vietnam war and the waves of anti-war footage and photography that had released in its wake. This inadvertently helped to fuel attention, controversy, and attention for the film, which Schwartz said banning it was the best kind of press it could have been given - proving the point that the more you tell people they can’t have something, the more they’re likely to seek it out . Like other mondo and shockumentary films that would follow in its footsteps, it’s also a time capsule of the period; such as with the aforementioned news footage from the PSA 182 crash that had happened barely two months prior to the theatrical release, and a chapter of the film dedicated to capital punishment, which had only been reinstated in the United States two years prior in 1976 following the Supreme Court’s ruling of the Gregg vs Georgia case.

Faces of Death was a product of its time, but did it age well? From a practical effects standpoint, I’d say not really.

As stated before, many moment come off as fake, and several of the ones that are clearly show to the point of it being almost laughable. The publicity fueled behind it resembles that of Snuff (1976) in some aspects, where the team behind it staged fake protests to get the film more attention and infamy for the iconic ending sequence. With that being said, I wouldn’t be surprised if the production team drew inspiration from that as a way to gain traction or beef it up for the masses. Just like with that film, the scene may have fooled some people back then, but by today’s standards, the effects are quite amateurish in nature and not something you’d get away with if you wanted to trick people. Even going by the level that’s being met for many horror films these days, there’s no competition; even for films in the independent and underground scenes from the last twenty years that had barely a fraction of the budget that went into Faces of Death.

From a cultural and influential standpoint, I’d say it has in a way.

Without Faces of Death, I don’t think we’d fully be where we are now extreme cinema, even for films that wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as such; like Death Scenes (1989), which is more of a historical piece and A Certain Kind of Death (2003) being just about the process of death and what goes into how it’s managed. It feels like traces of it can be found in a ton of films, unless that’s just a stretch. There’s also the ongoing debate about snuff films as well, as there had been rumors that people were killed to make Faces of Death, and thus, the legend of snuff continues to live on in films like Cannibal Holocaust, (1980), Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985), Man Bites Dog (1992), Niku Daruma (1998), August Underground (2001), and Be My Cat: A Film For Anne (2015).

However, with the advent of the Internet, you can easily find whatever you’re looking for with a quick search with little to no real effort. It’s no longer a serious challenge to find audio recordings from the last moments of mass suicide cults or plane crashes, gruesome crime scene photos, or graphic videos of murders, executions, or animal cruelty. So, why pay (or stream) to see something that’s partially or mostly fake, when you can see something real yourself? With sites that cater to the morbidly curious or the few and far between depraved like Ogrish, Rotten, BloodShows, and BestGore, shockumentaries, even the rawest and unflinching of their kind become outdated and sort of pointless. This also applies to the MDPOPE, which is barely turning five years old as of this being written, which at the end of the day, is a simple mixtape of content you could find online if you’re willing to look hard for it.

Closing Thoughts:

With all of that said, would I recommend watching Faces of Death? In short, yes I would.

To quote Killion over at HNN; “Is the movie entertaining? It isn’t entertaining; it’s a rite of passage.“

Faces of Death is an exploration into death, and since I’ve first seen it roughly 13 years ago, I still see people who come out of it saying that it gave them a new outlook on life or has helped them to cherish their own with whatever time they may have left; which is a similar response I’ve heard from people who gravitate towards sites like BestGore or LiveLeak. If you haven’t seen it or you’re particularly on the squeamish side, I’d say to still give it a fair shot and see how you feel coming out of it.

Rating: 5.7/10

“In a world with no sounds,

Their cries go unheard.

Reality of life becomes totally absurd.

The counting of time is considered a crime,

And the money one earned not worth a bold dime.

So here they will lie for the rest of the night,

Their bodies remain still in darkness and in light.

Don't be afraid for it'll happen to you,

When all stops as your body turns blue...“ - Luther Easton

Closing Theme:

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#faces of death #fod #film #horror #documentary #shockumentary #mondo #mondo film #iac reviews #horror review

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