#I feel like anything to do with technology is so sensationalized that people see it as ''something difficult'' and leave it at that

[sevicia]

It makes me upset to see people calling AI stupid or just straight up saying "fuck AI" (even though it's in an art context) because it's like... I know and understand that the hate is directed at how it's being used currently and that people maybe just don't care like I do about this but it's upsetting because that's WORK. Not in a monetary sense at all but what everyone knows as AI didn't just sprout from the ground one day, it's decades of dedication and learning and development and collaboration to make a tool with the intention of making life better regardless of any one individual's intentions and it just makes me sad that there's so much panic around it, both from the whole "being replaced" thing that comes from waaay way back and also the very real concerns regarding generative AI. Like I can't just go up to someone and say "hey, isn't this cool?!" and expect them to understand I'm talking about AI as a tool and a product of passion and collaboration over time rather than a quick easy fix for when you want to see yourself as an anime character without having to learn to respect art first. I don't knowww it just makes me so so sad that something so beautiful is viewed in such a negative and strange light because the entire world refuses to slow down for a single second

[snifflesthemouse]

Why on earth do we care about what Chris Bouzy says?

Seriously? You all must realize by now that this man is only singling out people like Yankee Wally and Taz because they are strong women who wouldn’t take it sitting down.

He isn’t going after these bot farms that spread so much hate or nonsense. He isn’t going after the same accounts that threaten ill will and harm to other Royals, either. NO… that would damage his status with the Splenda babies.

Anyone can take someone’s words out of context and make it look or sound badly for the speaker. It doesn’t take courage or brains or anything special to give into sensationalism and manipulation. He does this for attention. To get his name out there. And guess what… he is succeeding.

Various sources have claimed over the last few years that over 60% of social media accounts are either fake or paid bot accounts. Yet, we never hear about what Mr. Bouzy plans to do over these bot farms. Instead, he dedicates all his attention and energy in social media wars and climbing off of people who did nothing other than voice their own opinions.

The most dangerous thing about Bouzy is the fact he is giving life to things that aren’t real. He is trying to get the world to join this crusade of ending “hate speech”, yet he does NOTHING to stop the real hate going on. One would argue he can’t because he needs it to get richer.

A strong person… even just a person somewhat comfortable in their own skin… wouldn’t look for validation from outside sources. Like the Princess Diaries says when quoting Eleanor Roosevelt: Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.

We cannot control others’ behaviors. We can only control our own, and we can control how we react to those behaviors of others.

Shouldn’t the real message be “Give no oxygen to Hate?”

Wouldn’t an even better message be one that says we are all powerful in how we choose what affects us?

One would think either of those would be better for the masses than the message being sent now. The only message coming from Bouzy is that anyone can make bank by flipping a coin. One side of the coin is the critic. The other side of the coin is the critic of the critic. But in this case, instead of seeing criticism as such… it get’s rebranded as hate speech and racism.

There is no doubt that racism is real. There are real, legitimate racists out there. Yet, even still, there is NOTHING BEING DONE REGARDING THE BOT FARMS. Some of those bot accounts spew the most vile, racist things about non-royal topics. Yet, they are still present and growing daily.

One wonders how Bouzy has so much time to dedicate to feuds with YouTubers. One would imagine he would be battling Congress or Tech GIants over their lax user agreements. How embarassing it must be to know that people only know who you are because you have keyboard wars with Welsh women and monarchists.

And the hate speech that Bouzy so diligently polices seems to only be regarding The Sussexes. Why is that? Why hasn’t he done a report for the rest of the Royal Family? Why is the focus just on the Sussex camp?

Because I’ve looked around on social media, and it’s a dumpster fire of hate aimed at the Royal Family. HRH Duchess Camilla is a prime example of this. But this isn’t a contest of who gets more hate speech. This isn’t about playing teams, either. It was a calculated risk in siding with one over the other. Had this man opened his mind and technology to the entire Royal Family… he would have gathered way more flies with that honey.

I’d love it for him to conduct another study, but aimed at the entire Royal Family. Unbiased, fair, and accurate. But that’ll never happen. The answers are already known.

This will be my only post regarding this man. He’s leeched enough attention off of too many as it is. I will not play this game of giving him more oxygen. As hard as it is, we all must turn the other cheek. He depends on replies and responses. It keeps him relevant.

Just like many depend on the Harkles for content, he depends on critics’ content for his own cannon fodder. Why not empty the cannon? Why keep giving him what he needs to keep revenues going?

We can’t be mad at someone flipping the coin trying to make a buck in the mix. Bouzy makes money off of the same hate he claims is made from YT channels that criticize MM. It’s the same formula. What he forgets, however, is the majority of accounts use the press for their information.

Most all accounts either pull their content from news articles or tumblr pages. ALL these people do are report on things they’ve seen and give their own take or commentary on it. And while some will call it inside information or say they heard this or that from so and so… the truth is… everything can be found on a public domain. SO AGAIN, The real culprit is invisible to the Bouzy crusaders.

If most all channels get their intel from public places, and all they do is add to the content by giving their own opinions on things… wouldn’t the news article be a major part of the problem, too?

So we have the press being regurgitated by content creators on YT. Then we have Bouzy regurgitating the content creators and rebranding opinion as hate speech. What a pain in the backside for YT… But hey, at least the YT channels use news articles that can be easily found. They report on facts from the news. Bouzy reports on opinions; he gets flustered on other people's views instead of real world issues.

That coupled with 2/3 of social media accounts being fake or bots… well… we just have a man seeing a business opportunity that hasn’t yet been tapped. If the real goal was stopping the bots or the real hate speech out there, Bouzy would care less about Yankee Wally or Taz. He’d see them for what they are. People giving their views and commentary on things they see in the media.

Maybe he needs to do a SWOT analysis. Because doing so would prove the real threats. If he’s so worried about what these people on YT say, they either must be a real threat (and I just can’t buy that) or Bouzy is short sided. He probably doesn’t understand the real meaning of hate speech, though. Most people don’t.

All I am saying is that we can only rise above things like this because all they do is drag one down. If we allow people to influence our self worth or how we see the world, it is on us to fix it. Not the Bouzys of the world.

Pointing out the problem never fixes the problem. It only acknowledges it. Fixing problems takes more action than accusations provide.

On a final note, I must say this. Our world is headed down a dangerous path if we continue giving into the narrative that we are owed anything from other people. Basic human decency included.

The world is a rough, cruel place with much bigger problems than hate accounts or Meghan Markle. We all may entertain ourselves via the gossip and news, and that makes us culpable for everything that comes from it. We signed up for this when we signed into the content.

If Bouzy wants to monetize that for the other end of the spectrum, let him. But you do have the choice to remove yourself from the drama.

We all have a choice on who we give headspace. And we have a choice in playing ball. Sometimes it takes a stronger person to stay silent and not give oxygen to the fire of feuding that it does to stand and fight. Your choice is yours alone.

[incorrect-ikevamp-quotes]

Do you think they would actually enjoy the modern world? Or would they want to stay in their current time period?

Hm, well, I think that may vary depending on each suitor if I’m honest! (I’ll be excluding Sebastian from this one, only because he is a modern man and I wager he would want to stay in the mansion in order to finish his thesis) 

Under a cut bc it’s a long boi:

I think for people like Arthur and Theo, for instance--who always seem to live in the fast lane--it might not really prove much of a problem. They would continue enjoying the night life and move with their busy schedules. Tl;dr: (For them? Same shit, different day)

Vincent would likely be doing just fine given how Theo often provides assistance in places where he struggles; to promote his art, to spark intrigue in the general public and benefactors. He might be a little overwhelmed by the influx of stimuli that comes with the modern era, constant noise and interaction and movement--perhaps worry that people are losing their ability to live in the moment. (Not to mention what’s being done to the environment...) There might be a learning curve/adjustment, but I think Theo would help him ease in. Plus, it would be a little easier to promote his art given the less stringent restrictions on public exhibitions. He’d still have to work for his fame, but at least the van Goghs wouldn’t have to live in constant unease in the proximity of the cutthroat academy.  Tl;dr: (Mixed feelings, but tries to stay positive about modern times)

Dazai is more familiar with this kind of life of quick turmoil and breakneck speed, if anything he falls back into his old coping mechanisms--hello writing, drinking, and smoking. An overwhelming influx of information and suffering would probably be hard for him to manage, despite how expertly he hides it. I think I would be worried he would lose himself in the dismal reality of diminished connection with other people. Yes I’m shoving him into therapy, I want him to start living for himself and taking care of himself ffs

That isn’t to say there aren’t happy possibilities for him, just that I think he really needs to heal first. I could see him very happy in a kind of writer’s circle with people he loves and trusts; less expending his energy in a desperate attempt to fill the void and please others, more cultivating his own happiness... Tl;dr: (Positive potential, but honestly part of me thinks the past quieter/simple/rural life suits him better...he still loves meme culture tho, he finds it so expansive and creative)

Isaac is in a similar boat as Dazai, I think! He has wonderful potential as a mentor and professor, and living in a world that has a little more patience and respect for genius might help encourage him to put himself out there. That being said, I think the pace of life would exhaust him though--he is very much the kind of person that prefers to keep to himself and just puzzle and tinker. Baby boy just wants to do equations, build little inventions, and read up on the recent discoveries in astrophysics (BRUH WHEN THE IMAGE OF THE BLACK HOLE CAME OUT HE FORGOT HOW TO B R E A T H E) Napoleon is the only reason he eats anything healthy or on any kind of regular schedule s m h. Tl;dr: (Not a lot changes, honestly? He was reclusive then, he still is now--he just has more toys/academic resources. If anything he might get a little too lost in his work because of it, somebody please make sure he’s eating/sleeping/socializing;;;)

Poor Jeanne is SUFFERING. Please release him from this nightmare he is begging. Jk jk, I don’t think it would be too bad for him--but I do think that he would have the aforementioned problem of too many stimuli and too much interaction. I think he would ease into it a little with Mozart’s help; he would just be awkward and wooden until he got the hang of it. Most people just find him quirky in an amusing way, and don’t think too hard about it. I’d wager he’d probably become literate at this point because of the abundance of resources and necessity to read/write (okay but imagine this baby with a little kid workbook iM GONNA CRY!!! TAKE ALL MY CRAYONS JEANNE). 

Can you imagine this mofo at a Starbucks??? Tall and stoic, dark and debonair (EVERYONE IS S W O O N I N G), and he just asks in a light tenor “can I have a mocha with eight shots of expresso” with a completely straight face. “Sir, that could kill you” “Don’t worry, I’ve been dead a long time” And he just moves to wait for his order. 11/10 cryptid I could watch an entire show just about his daily adventures

He works with Napoleon a lot given their similar skillsets. They coach kids at high schools that have fencing teams (it’s really REALLY cute bc if they’re on the younger side, Jeanne will very dramatically lose bc he wants to encourage them and the kids are delighted--but the parents are INCHES from laughing so hard they’re in tears). Otherwise, he mostly takes up gigs as a security worker/bodyguard, only really works for the money. He prefers to spend his time in ways that feel meaningful if he can, so don’t be surprised if you see him in foster homes and in social working spaces. He has an uncanny understanding about him, a kind of silence/patience that doesn’t stifle; it makes the kids/teens calm down in milliseconds. They really listen when he does talk, and he sets good and clear boundaries--he knows how to be firm when it’s required. He gives them the structure and placid grounding they’ve never had, and really pays attention to what’s important to them. Brings them little things he notices; brings flowers to the one that likes to draw, brings CDs (he is bad with technology, but they usually only have access to older/outdated stuff anyway) to the one the one that struggles to write with white noise in the house, brings little plushies to the ones that lose theirs. He’s simple but solid, and he finds a lot of meaning in helping kids overcome the similar kind of struggles he faced.  Tl;dr: (Steep learning curve, but he just sees it as all the same really--just more work to be done with the literacy requirement and adjustment to technology. Will be resistant at first, but when he gets accustomed and starts finding people who are important to him, he wouldn’t want to change anything/go back. But will admit there are some days he just wants to go to the most remote place he can access and just live there for a month with no human interaction whatsoever; people are inefficient and insufferable sometimes)

Mozart’s life honestly doesn’t change much? I feel like he would easily be able to keep composing and continue releasing his work as per usual. Given his quick capacity to schmooze and say what people want to hear when he must, he’d be more than able to network his way into success. I think the only thing he might struggle with now and again is inspiration, given the world operates on a very surface level in the modern era sometimes. Profound insight and depth are not quite as cultivated in many ways, and he can struggle to find something that just sparks motivation/novelty in his mind, makes him start composing at breakneck speed. He reads a lot and watches some TV shows/movies when he’s at really low inspiration levels, the kind of guy that sneers at Game of Thrones--but finds things like BBC’s Sherlock more passable (wants intrigue and complexity, doesn’t much enjoy the sensationalized drivel). When Arthur finds out he loves ATLA he about falls off his seat. “It’s a children’s show.” “Yes it is, with a remarkable level of depth and craftsmanship, what are you trying to say?” He begins to find a kind of rhythm in his composing, and Jeanne and Dazai often drop by with so many crazy stories he finds himself filled with music anyway LMAO Tl;dr: (Same as Isaac, really just keeps doing his thing without being impeded, and he enjoys the luxuries/conveniences of the modern era. Will be slightly resistant at first because of how alien some of the changes are, but will fall into the habits/customs slowly and surely. Fine with it, will whine a bit at the growing pains tho)

Leonardo actually canonically owns a bar, and does that really surprise anyone? He really enjoys the excitement of meeting new people and hearing about their myriad histories, the influx of cultures/languages/experiences. It’s a nice but lowkey place, people stop for a drink, listen to some good music--chat amiably and relax after a long day’s work--before heading out. There are regulars and people that just stop for that single day; tourists, vacationers, so on and so forth.

When asked, many people note a sleek black cat with sharp eyes that led them to the bar... Tl;dr: (Don’t Let the Existential Dread Set-in: The Prequel, adapts well to the modern era because of centuries of experience but also...he’s so tired...somebody please hold him I can’t watch him live like this, lord jesus)

Optimally, I see Comte filling his time with myriad pursuits; ranging from philanthropy, indulging in art/music/theatre (often a benefactor as well), and keeping track of his chirren (they may exist more independently now, but he still worries about them ;-;). Otherwise nothing much changes for him, still goes to galas and fancy gatherings, still enjoys fashion and spoiling people, still seeks to occupy himself with social interaction and care-taking--if he doesn’t have a family of his own. He’s basically just that meme that’s like DON’T LET THE EXISTENTIAL DREAD SET-IN. DON’T LET IT SET-IN!!!!!!!!! Tl;dr: (Not to repeat myself but also Don’t Let the Existential Dread Set-in: The Sequel, literally just desperately trying to fill the void please somebody help him he also just needs to be held fuck’s sake, I’m going to drag him kicking and screaming into happiness--but otherwise has no great trouble adjusting to the modern era. I feel like he would have a more minor form of what Dazai struggles with, maybe a lack of personable connection that he once had; fewer chances to be himself and relax. Also probably worried about the increasing unhappiness and turmoil building in the world in general...)

Napoleon is similar to Comte in that he often checks up on Isaac and Jeanne from time to time, and does the aforementioned fencing lessons with kids. He also takes a lot of basic security positions--for venues, concerts, museums--you name it. He dislikes the idea of sitting behind a desk a lot, so he prefers to do a lot of different things; he even cooks from time to time at the restaurants  that know him very well. One gig he particularly enjoys is battle choreography for movies/theatre! He tends to stay away from anything too historically close to his era of origin, but he has fun coming up with realistic (smaller scale) hand-to-hand combat scenarios and duels. Tl;dr: (This era doesn’t feel like too much of a change. It’s a little more intensive in terms of pace, but he manages to keep up pretty well, it just exhausts him from time to time--and he usually goes on trips or hikes to unwind when he needs to like Jeanne LOL they do not go to their happy place, they go to their high lonesome place).

Shakespeare also continues to do his drama thing, organizes troupes on tons of different levels--from community level to more intense, skilled groups that re-enact his own work. His life doesn’t change all that much beyond a new form of theatre logistics, and he adjusts to the technology fairly easily out of necessity. He’ll stop by Vincent’s place from time to time to show him recordings of his latest shows, but otherwise is almost always on the move. Tl;dr: (So long as he can keep following his greatest passion, he doesn’t really mind the changes in how theatre happens--he doesn’t have any sizable issues with the modern era.)

Ability with technology (phones mostly):

Arthur: more than capable, well-versed, loves to do everything on his phone no prob--maybe lives a little too much on his phone (Vine/TikTok/Youtube can kill his productivity RIP) also yes he has a fidget spinner on his desk, no I will not be taking any constructive criticism at this time

Theo: yes but with a lot of cursing at first, had to do it for work and now looks down on anyone that can’t keep up with him (except for Vincent)

Vincent: knows the basics, taking and sending pictures, writing things in notes for later, texting (tho sending emails is a little harder for him); he does his best but he can be slow. Really really enjoys the paint programs on his iPad for when he’s on public transit, but he starts setting alarms after he gets the hang of it (he’s missed his stops before because of it LMAO)

Leonardo: what kind of stupid question? Man knows how to pick them apart and put ‘em back together for crying out loud, uses it like a pro--comes to him naturally, and he’s the guy that keeps coming up with ways to jailbreak Apple products and thwart their money-grubbing tactics. Catch him playing Minish Cap on his emulator on the way to work, brah

Comte: just vibing, keeps up with the times easily since he’s been doing it for so long, much like Theo uses it to keep in touch with the people around him--he’s the “prefers to call instead of text” sorta guy though, he worries about losing emotional subtleties and he likes to hear people’s voices. Doesn’t do anything special on phones, more just a tool; will read/listen to podcasts/does have emulators (courtesy of Leo) and enjoys playing Pokemon when he’s bored

Jeanne: types one finger at a time, it will take a while--but he’ll get there (deleted all his contacts by accident once and Mozart was just. HOW.) He barely knows how to use a phone, and it’s a steep learning curve for him

Mozart: purely functional when it comes to his phone, refuses to rely on it beyond the necessities that only tech can do (for instance, sending emails or reading articles or uploading compositions) he still writes his music before making more polished digital copies. He will sometimes listen to pieces digitally, but prefers to play them in-person; he feels that a lot of the soul in a piece is lost despite the convenience

Dazai: you absolute fools. you baboons. why would you ever give him this kind of power. it is 3AM and he has been on a wikipedia trail spanning hours, started with Cleopatra being the seventh in her line with that name all the way to cotton candy being called “daddy’s beard” in French. please help him he hasn’t slept in years. Also probably binges anime and manga lbr. He’s the one making vine references every other second, always up to date on the memes^TM

Isaac: also mostly uses it as a tool for research and calculations; it’s a way to keep track of information. He also likes to play background music while he’s working, so he finds the device nice and convenient--plus less having to go around pestering people in-person. he does start to get interested in coding and tinkering with apps/programs eventually, too

Shakespeare: finds it a delightful little contraption, so useful because it lets him jot down ideas as they come to him quickly, and he can edit his texts much more easily with digital interfaces. also likes that performances can be recorded, because now he can analyze his staging more efficiently--it gives him a good sense of what needs to be adjusted, and encourages him to keep streamlining/try new concepts

Napoleon: likes it because he can keep in touch with people more easily, the kind of guy to drop a line before checking on a friend. he really likes to look up recipes and find out more about cooking techniques he’s never encountered before. Isaac starts making an Instagram account just to show Napoleon’s impeccable plating, and Napo gets quite the following without knowing for a while

[bigskydreaming]

Also, can I just say how fucking hysterical I find the phrase “wait, you actually expect people to police their thoughts” to be, no matter how often it springs up, without fail, at times like this?

Why yes. 

I actually DO expect people to police their thoughts.

Given, y’know, that its that thing we all do every single day, every single time we have a thought and follow up that thought by thinking to ourselves, hmmm. Should I act on this thought? Yay or nay.

What everyone seems to have so much trouble comprehending about the rape/incest/pedophilia fic content debate or whatever the fuck we’re calling it.....

Is that none of this is actually ABOUT peoples’ THOUGHTS or POLICING them.

Given that like, last I checked, none of us have spontaneously developed the power to read minds or invented a technology that literally shows what’s on the brain.

No, see.

Your thoughts are your own. Always have been, always will be.

Whatever they are, is entirely between you and yourself.

What you DO with those thoughts however, how you choose to MANIFEST those thoughts if you then proceed to move on to actualizing those thoughts in some form and making them exist in some way as a physical reality OUTSIDE your brain - where they would be between just you and yourself - versus outside your brain - where they would be between you and literally anyone else who shares the same space wherein you choose to set up this physical manifestation of your thoughts when literally PUTTING IT ON DISPLAY somewhere and ADVERTISING people come check it out and saying HERE YOU GO, HERE ARE MY THOUGHTS, COME BY AND TAKE A LOOK SEE AND LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK -

THAT, my friends,

Is not a THOUGHT.

THAT.

Is an ACTION.

In fact, that is many, MANY actions, from the point of origin that is THINKING THE THOUGHT alllllll the way through putting the thought into words on the page, shaping the thoughts into a single cohesive narrative, perhaps editing the thoughts, proofreading the thoughts, debating hmmm, where should I put the thoughts now, where would be the best place to drive the most traffic to my thoughts once I’ve set them out in public for open viewing in whatever format or arrangement I decide best showcases the full majesty of them and most capably conveys the fullness of my Thought, that initial, singular idea that was the kernel from which this whole fic eventually sprang after I spent time and effort cultivating that thought and nourishing it and guiding its growth through however many stages until it reached the endpoint I considered to be it in its most complete and final version.....

Yeah.

That’s actually a whole damn fuckload of thinking you did there, between Point A and Point Z, and there’s a buuuuuunch of possible places and times in all of that where you could have added a couple additional thoughts about hey how do I feel about the fact that its almost a certainty that some people are really going to not like this Thought and not be glad that I shared it, and like, they actually have a legitimate reason for feeling that way, should I maybe consider before I get too much further in investing in THIS particular Thought, like, hey, counterpoint.....what if I put this one down and rummage around in the old noggin a little while longer to see if there’s anything ELSE in here I can invest my time and energy into instead, something that might actually be even BETTER than this thought, and a lot more widely acclaimed and better received, not just by the inherently limited audience I was originally envisioning, but potentially by a much wider audience of people potentially more interested in this later Thought than my iniitial Thought.....hmm, decisions, decisions....

Now, just for funsies, let’s compare and contrast THAT Thought from Inception to Completion.....

With the Thoughts it might engender in say, someone like me, a survivor who objects to the initial Thought on the grounds that it sensationalizes an ingrained experience of trauma for the entertainment of the masses, any of whom is likely to be someone I have and/or will interact with in the future, possibly even knowing they were recently entertained by a particular Thought like this, given that like, nobody really feels a need to be SHY about being fans of Thoughts like this....

Anyway. Let’s take a little look-see at how those reactionary thoughts from a sample case like me would look.

Me, obliviously having Thought the First: Oh. Here’s a Thought in Fic form. Should I read it?

Me, in grips of Thought the Second: Oh, fuck no. According to the tags, its “hey remember that one time the worst thing ever happened to you? D’ya? Do you remember it? Starting to come back to you in vivid detail if you’re just a liiiiittle bit too slow in clicking the fuck away while your brain slinks from “processing sensory input” to “decoding sensory input as actual thought I can express awareness around? LOL well guess what, fuck-o, this Thought-Fic is just like that time, only there’s a lot more people enjoying this particular scene than were present that one time with you, so its like.....that but MORE! Supply and demand, bitch, y’know what that means, look at how high the kudos count is there beneath the summary real quick before you go skedaddle....woo-eee, that’s a LOT of demand for a scene just like the one that kinda fucked you up for life, huh? 

Me, in throes of Thought the Third: Ow.

Me, engaging Thought the Fourth: the Potential for Action: Say ‘ow’ out loud? Y/N.

Me, amid cynical laughter whilst having Thought the Fifth: lol when has that ever ended well for us, dumbass.

Me, sighing through the pain with Thought the Sixth: user hit ‘declines to vocalize ‘ow.’ Proceed to shutdown.

But sure.

Its the fic writers who are really being heavily policed by the Enemies of Free Expression.

[savage-rhi]

Can you do a really sad one with Higgs? Higgs x Gene. But Higgs saved her life but for a high cost? Thank you

Aight my beautiful bitch, you asked for it and you shall receive :D!

Gene watched the chiral printer finishing off the last touches of the project she had been working on for two weeks. It wasn’t easy getting all the necessary materials, but it was coming together after much hard work on her part. Besides her old occupation as a  porter, Gene very much enjoyed building things. Using her hands to create was always a part of her nature. Even with how sad the situation was that led her to this project, Gene felt she reached personal zen in her work. 

Once the printer was finished, Gene took the object out and began adding more pieces to it. Some things the printer couldn’t handle or read the codes properly, so things needed to be built by hand. It was a tedious task, and not a lot of people in the Far North had the patience for it, but she did. Even the doctors that treated Higgs’s condition were in awe she managed to scrape everything together given how limited resources were. The Far North, it wasn’t like America. They were behind on a lot of things, but Gene wasn’t one to quit when people told her ‘no’. 

Rubbing her tired eyes, Gene sighed as she looked over the object, soldering some wires and such so the electric parts would work. While she concentrated, Gene couldn’t help but get distracted from time to time. Higgs, the whole ordeal, it kept playing in the back of her head. 

MULEs had ventured into the North along with scavengers. Higgs and Gene had been on a supply run near an abandoned city, trying to get more material for their house they were building together when the two groups ended up in a brawl over a dispute. Higgs and Gene accidentally ended up in the crossfire. One thing led to another, and Gene found herself trying to get back to Higgs after they had been separated during the gun fight. 

Gene found shelter with some random passersbys, trying to survive the onslaught. Before any of them could move, a grenade landed right in front of them. There was no way forward and no way back for Gene and the other survivors. They only had less than twenty seconds to move. Most were frozen like deer meeting the headlights of an oncoming truck while Gene’s mind tried in vain to calculate a way out of the blast range. Higgs had shown up out of the blue, teleporting using the last of his DOOMs abilities and grabbed a hold of Gene, his back to the explosion as the grenade set off. The fire engulfed the unfortunate souls while Higgs and Gene were thrown away like ragdolls.

By the time the ringing, the debris, and bitter smoke died down, Gene found herself on the ground, Higgs on top of her as he gasped and winced. He didn’t look burnt, and after a few seconds, Gene felt something warm covering her legs. It was almost as if a faucet had been left on as the warm substance kept pouring out. Once Higgs tumbled off of her and coughed, whimpering, Gene looked down and saw Higgs was missing part of his leg. From the knee down on his right, there was nothing. His blood had coated her pants, seeping into it like paint to a canvas. It was so grisly that even a part of his bone was sticking out. 

In between screaming and frantically trying to stop the bleeding, the minutes and hours carrying Higgs to a doctor blurred. By the time they had done anything to help Higgs and came to report to Gene his prognosis, most of their words went through one ear and out the other. Her face was neutral, but the tears didn’t leave her eyes for days. She didn’t speak to anyone while Higgs recovered and was delivered the bad news: with the limited technology available, there was no way the doctors could replicate a replacement leg for him, bones and all. They’d have to go the traditional route, but even then, no one had full access to those patterns. 

As Gene finished up the last details on the prosthetic leg in the present, she moved it around. Making sure all the mechanics worked and flowed. It wouldn’t be like the real thing, but it would be able to read Higgs’s nerve patterns. Over time he could train the robotic limb to move flawlessly. 

It took her two days on foot to get to the doctor's residence near one of the communities, and she carried the leg in an old porter pack Higgs had gifted to her after they settled in the North. When she arrived in his room, Higgs’s eyes quickly went to Gene and his face lit up. 

“Hey honey,” He said quietly as Gene’s lip quivered, trying to suppress herself from crying as she ventured over and embraced the upper half of his body. Higgs chuckled tiredly, returning the hug as he pats her back a few times. 

“You feeling any better?” Gene asked as Higgs gave a shrug. He looked down at his remaining leg and the patched-up stub. He swallowed gravely, still trying to come to terms with what happened. Gene could see Higgs was trying to work things out. How he got from point A to point B in all the mess. 

“I feel like a lizard without its tail but I’ll be okay,” Higgs said suddenly, looking back up at Gene. There was a sincerity in his eyes that reassured Gene that he would be alright. Mentally at least, he’d get through it. That didn’t stop the guilt in her gut from forming. There were a lot of what-ifs that ran through Gene’s mind since the incident. 

Higgs didn’t have to say anything, for he knew her well enough to know when Gene thought something was her fault. He reached a hand up, cupping her cheek as his thumb stroked over her face, wiping away a few stray tears that fell from her eyes. 

“Really, Gene. I’m going to be fine.” He reassured her as he smiled. “Hey, better my leg gets blown up than all of you. There’s no way I could have survived that versus this bullshit.” 

The laugh that escaped him got Gene to perk up a little. She grinned, snorting a bit before remembering why she came to visit. 

“I have something for you. I was gonna wait until I could take you home, but I think the sooner you get it the better.” Gene said as Higgs’s curiosity piqued. He tilted his head as Gene took the porter pack off, and grabbed the robotic limb. Higgs’s eyes slowly began to widen as it emerged from the pack, his mouth gaping as Gene presented the limb. It was all black, save for the golden bits where ligaments should have been. 

“You like it?” Gene asked as Higgs nodded quick, his mouth forming into a grin after the sensationalism died down. 

“I don’t fucking believe it. Did you make this?” He asked, looking up at her as Gene nodded, smiling proudly as she watched Higgs examining the prosthetic. He played around with it before attaching the piece to the stump that was his leg, latching the wirings and such to his flesh. It was an old school model, meaning Higgs had to stick several needles into his leg in order for the nerves of his body to stimulate the mechanics. 

Higgs winced from time to time as Gene helped him with that part, but once settled, Higgs let out a deep breath and leaned up in the bed, shifting his weight to the leg he had left before looking down at his new limb. 

“Moment of truth,” Higgs said to Gene as he concentrated hard, Gene watching nervously to see if the leg would move if Higgs willed it too. About a minute passed, and Gene furrowed her brows. 

“Shit, I must’ve fucked up the mechanics--”

“Wait for it,” Higgs said as Gene looked at him in defeat. 

“Higgs I don’t think--”

“Gene, don’t doubt your work.” Higgs said with a wink, concentrating again. She didn’t have much of a choice to be cynical, not when Higgs was determined. 

By some miracle, the mechanical toes began to move as Higgs let out a celebratory holler. Gene jumped up and down a few times, letting out a few proud hoots of her own before engulfing Higgs’s upper body into her arms. He laughed against her skin, peppering with kisses when he could as he made the limb repeat the same actions. 

Between their laughter and affectionate pats, they ended up kissing each other longingly. Their mouths finding home on each other's lips. The two were so caught up in their passions that Gene and Higgs ignored the doctors, trying to get their attention. Nothing mattered but the two of them.

**A link to my ko-fi account. If you enjoy my content and want to support me getting my monthly medication for fibromyalgia and arthritis, I would be eternally grateful. It is NOT a requirement however! All my work is free to read!**

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Black Mirror Episode Impressions

So I got into watching the series a little before classes begun and here are some thoughts:

Warning: If you don’t like a non-rainbow image of people,then do not proceed.

THE NATIONAL ANTHEM

Fascination over other people’s misery

Aka social voyeurism, our tendency to find satisfaction in other people’s scandal. I feel like the sex with the pig wasn’t the voyeuristic act itself, it is  a stand-in for something far more insidious and cruel, our tendency to fascinate over the humiliation of other people. 

On how public opinion shapes political and personal events

Note how PM Callow was forced to fuck the pig not because of any apparent security reasons to save the princess but it was ultimately the social pressure, which changed overwhelmingly after the finger was cut, that drove him on. The social pressure which was misinformed since the netizens who clamored for it did not really understand the problem behind closed lines. They merely relied on media which was twisted to cater to sensationalism and people’s natural love for anything scandalous. In effect, PM Callow fucked the pig.

But it wasn’t only that event which was shaped by public opinion, I think the suicide of the artist/ kidnapper was also egged on by public opinion that is if we assume that he did all of that to prove a point, like a social experiment that people will forget about the kidnapping if they are presented with something as horrendous as fucking a pig. His point having been proven, his predictions were confirmed that people are truly fucking terrible.  And it depressed him so bad enough to kill himself. But this theory backfires if we assume that he planned everything out and knew what was going to happen down to the very last detail. The other reason for his suicide, for me, and which I think is more far fetched is that upon seeing the pig fucking on the telly, he actually participated in the hypocrisy of the masses which he dared to expose. The artist, if I remember correctly, actually sat and watched Callow as he fucked the pig, if he did know his plan was going to work anyway, why sit and revel in the disgusting horrowshow? Perhaps he found himself fascinated by the scandal as well? I don’t know but the artist’s suicide is the most baffling angle in the episode for me.

Public opinion causes movement both on a social and personal scale. 

Our words have an impact to shape reality, if Callow was not pressured to fuck the pig, he wouldn’t have had. But one cut finger later, and the tides of the masses changed.

But there is also an interesting angle about the performance art of the artist. If the whole pig fucking thing was meant to be taken as an art work, then the artist’s statement makes a lot of sense. Often in art, even in literature, art works with controversial value (think Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Egon Schiele’s artworks, Balthus with Therese, Dreaming) often become sensational because of the controversy they generate. The masses no longer see the whole point of the artwork. In Lolita for example, the people pounced on the pedophilia and incest plot of the book when all Nabokov really wanted to portray was something else entirely, that Humbert was a bad man and that he hopes readers should not be easily taken in by the poetic words of a madman and essentially an unreliable narrator. But the merit of Lolita as an artwork was reduced to its shock value, the entertainment which people consume.  

Similarly, in this episode, the artist wanted to send the message: Look beyond the entertainment to see something far more important (i.e look beyond Callow’s sex with a pig to see that the Princess was indeed freed). But of course, humanity being the disappointing lot that we are, glued our eyes to the pig fucking. I started to realize what a truly fantastic show BM is from this point on because it did not only criticque the people who watched the pig fucking and literally dropped everything they were doing to do just that. It also criticqued US, the audience that watched the episode itself. I admit that while the pig fucking was going on, I wasn’t even thinking about the princess and whether she was alive. I was only absorbed by the scandalous thing happening right before me. Who am I to criticize the citizens when I am just like them? This is the self-awareness that sets apart this episode from the others, I guess. It was like watching a microcosm of real life, the ultimate Black fucking Mirror – like looking at yourself in a mirror only to find that your image has been darkened by so much filth, our darkest tendencies being handed to us in one show. Great first episode, by the way, Brooker.

The fact that two months after the pig fucking, the whole thing was forgotten, people moved on with their lives which scares me tbh. This only goes to show that we have become desensitized with the sensationalism and violence that goes on in the real world as it is shown almost daily whether in newspapers or television. Reminds me of what Susan Sontag said in her work, “Regarding the Pain of Others” where she cites the influx of violence and brutality in television as having altered the way we empathize about real people and real world events. The word is desensitization. And it is true, when we reduce real events into mere forms of entertainment, we dilute their gravity as events with consequences on real people.

It was believed by the French Enlightenment thinkers that distance ( a child from UK may not empathize with an enslaved child in a Boko Haram situation  because of geographical constraints) and time (zeitgest, generational gap) delays our moral response. The distance in this episode and in real life as well is the technology. The screens in our televisions and computers, create a distance which delays and frustrates our ability to protest to morally objectionable acts and to truly connect with each other. Or we may protest, but it is fleeting or hollow – we may protest that there is child slavery in Nigeria but it stops there, we move on. Take the people at the pub for example, the ones holding their mugs of beer anticipating Callow’s humiliation, acting as if what was about to happen was the fucking Superbowl, they look as if Callow was not a person, like Callow was not even one of them. Nobody really thought about the humiliation Callow could be feeling at that very instant. They did, however manage to feel some form of sympathy for him midway but sympathy is not empathy much less compassion. Someone even said feeling sorry for somebody can be a mere recognition of the fact that you’re doing so much better than the other person.

WHITE CHRISTMAS

Does existence need to have a body? Or is it the mind that gives existence to a person?

Are the cookies an extension of the person or are they a different entity from the person himself herself? I find it odd because they can be given punishment although they do not cause any effect to the original as in Joe’s case. If the purpose was to punish then necessarily, the cookie should have been considered a different entity but still an extension of the original, forming part of the original, even if it feels like a simulation of the real us. 

Is it just the real person who can be punished? Who knows in the future, a simulation of us can also be punished. Akin to our social media selves, in a sense the persona we have in social media are mirrors, mere shadows of our real selves, just like cookies, they are a fragment of ourselves. Our online personas or cookies can be punished as well despite them just abstracts of us when we are subject to online humiliation, criticism, our online selves can be manipulated as well by companies who profit from it, like Smartintelligence.

In the very last scene, the people gave Joe’s cookie an existence enough to consider its confession as legally binding to convict a person. They did not treat it as mere evidence but something that could speak for itself, one woman even saying in the effect that Joe need not talk as the cookie already talked for him. Also the part where Joe’s cookie was subjected to repeated punishment. If it was considered as punishment, then necessarily, one must consider his cookie as existent in the first place? No one can punish a non existence after all.

Matt’s ending was fitting, like “a taste of his own medicine” kind of thing, pretty ironic in my opinion because in the first scene with the cookie of the woman, he controlled the cookie, forcing it to submit to whatever he wanted. But in the ending scene, he was deprived of his own existence, he was made invisible because he was basically a non-person, as if he does not really exist. It’s also kind of snarky how in the first few scenes, he said that people did not want to feel invisible and yet that was exactly what happened to him. In a sense, he is just like the cookie of the woman, he is deprived an existence of his own through the conditions imposed on his freedom by the prison authorities. Notice that in both cases, their existence are conditional, the woman’s cookie to the whims of Matt, Matt is totally blocked from anyone through the whims of the the prison officials or whatever they are called. Since they have no freedom on their own, we can say they are tools, they do not exist.

Which also reminds me of one idea which goes like this: a self cannot be created without others. Does Matt still exist when others are totally effaced in/from his life? How can he have a self(existence) when he could no longer jnteract with others? I feel like Matt’s punishment is even more cruel that that of Joe’s

Torture can also be of different forms

Will it be ethical if we create versions of ourselves in the future without giving them the same rights as we do have? Are copies of us considered as humans?

The similarity in White Bear where there was some sort of a cycle of punishment. I find it interesting, the repetitive nature of punishments to highlight their meaninglessness and banality.

WHITE BEAR

Public persecution through social media or the internet.

Our particular inclination to fascinate on other people’s misery.

“Are the sound waves making them behave like that?”

“Maybe they’ve always been that way, they just needed the rules to change.” 

Well, interesting to note because technology (the white bear radio waves) are mere enablers of our innate tendencies to enjoy other people’s misery, be it in social media or otherwise.

Using the excuse of serving justice as a veil for such tendencies, when in truth we become even more brutal than the people we condemn. Ironic that we condemn rapists, murderers, terrorists, people who dehumanize others but in our condemnation, we have dehumanized such people as well.

Social media to ventilate social outrage which becomes quite easily disproportionate. It becomes a place to condemn people.

Shockingly unfair that Victoria did not know what she was being accused of, yet people do not really point this out. Her lack of knowledge about her alleged crimes or the fact that she was an accused in the first place makes this episode almost Kafkaesque ala The Trial, although later on we do know what she is accused of. Is it ethical in the first place to condemn a woman who has no idea what she is being accused of? Is justice merely carrying out the punishment or does it also concern giving a fair trial to a person?

The performative nature of social media in expressing social outrage, in fact everything in this episode feels like a performance. The participation of the viewers, the whole structure of the show hinges on performance, the value of entertainment even to the detriment and humiliation of very real people. Our humiliation  becomes a commodity for people to consume.

On the punishment of Victoria It is cruel because she is made to relive the humiliation several times and yet her memory is erased every single time. If the point of the punishment is to reform Victoria (assuming it really is) then why not let her reform on her own and understand the consequences of her actions? This is where the intent of the punishment is revealed— the punishment means nothing, it is not meant to reform any criminal or prevent any form of future criminality, it is merely a performance after all. It is absolutely meaningless. I wonder if our criminal justice system operates on the same principle – the meaninglessness of punishment which is fundamentally cruel because it completely dehumanizes the accused.

FIFTEEN MILLION MERITS

The myth of meritocracy 

Notice how the bikers are basically given the false hope that they could escape their monotonous daily lives if they could only earn enough credits to buy a ticket to enter Hot Shot and have a chance to elevate their status in society. One finally gets the credits, buys a ticket to HotShot, however this is where the myth falls apart. Notice how Abi, basically within the first few minutes that she got in the rehearsal room was already asked to go on stage, on the ground, as we later learn that she was attractive. She did not even get to sing in the rehearsal room the judges barely considered her singing voice despite her having the best voice thus far in the competition or something like that according to one judge. One of the girls in the rehearsal room was practically complaining that dhe had been singing for a week yet Abi gets scouted first, the girl who just stepped inside the room like five minutes ago. Notice also that Bing was scouted on the basis that he looked “ethnic”. Both Abi and Bing’s talents, merits or what have yous flew off the window the moment their physical qualities became the basis for letting them go on stage. What happened to good old talent and skill?

On the “ethnic” comment, I find it quite racist, as it feels like it referenced how white people exoticize Black people.

Meritocracy is a lie because in this episode, one’s hardwork and talents did not become the reason for how Abi and Bing escaped the bike room. Abi got out because she was hot and perfect for porn, her singing was discarded. Bing on the other hand, got out because he sold out. It wasnt his talent that made him leave the biking room, it was the shock value of his dissent which appealed to the judges and the masses and not his prepared dance.

Bing is a tragic anti hero because unlike Abi who had compliance juice which coerced her to porn, Bing had none and consented fully to his own exploitation. He was adamant about the hypocrisy of consumerism, the endemic classism in that world, capitalism and so on. However, the moment he benefited from the system that actively exploits others including himself, he sold out. He took the benefit and forgot the cause. This is not very different from people who are fully aware how a system creates inequality to others, but because of the advantage they acquire from such system, they refuse to question the status quo. In Bing’s case, he pretends to criticque the system with his shard of glass, but it is a hollow dissent, it’s all just fashion, there is no conviction or real belief to it, at least no longer.

On the nature of exploitation

 The reason Bing went to the show was his rage against the exploitation that the system were committing against basically everyone. But he eventually played by the system which he used to critique.  Which brings the question, is Bing still exploited? He who has actively consented to the exploitation of the system just so he could live a better life? Will his consent erase the exploitative nature of the deal he got?

An example: are employees who are basically treated like slaves, no wages, no rights no nothing, any different from a class of employees who are given high bonuses, plenty of benefits but are not allowed to unionize or bargain with their employers although they willingly disregard such abuses because of the benefits they receive? I think they’re both exploited just on different levels. Just because one receives benefits from an exploitative system, does not mean they are no longer exploited, exploitation does not need to be total for it to be exploitation. Just because something is wrapped in something pretty, does not mean it is good.

Similarly, Bing’s participation in that very same system, makes him exploited despite his better life and richer status. He only got out of s smaller box to go to a bigger box, and yet the reality of the exploitation still remains, the system still fucks him over, he hasnt really gotten out. In fact, this time it’s worse, the system has profited from his outrage, the only thing which sustained him and which remained real and authentic to him. He laments during his performance that the system makes everything real into the artificial shit it sells to the masses. But that’s exactly what he became in the end, he was a COMMODITY, his individuality as a person was reduced to nothing but consumption for the audience. And this is why he is an anti hero. Imo

Which makes the ending even sadder. Bing looks out on a seemingly real landscape view, drinks a fresh juice from a jug very different from the vending machine crap he used to get before, and despite the debate on whether the view was real or simulated, one wonders still that Bing got his new, “authentic” lifestyle from reducing his individuality as a commodity, from bare exploitation of the system which he now participates, so are they real, afterall? One musician said, is something beautiful if it came from ugliness? Is something authentic if it came from exploitation?

Commentary on how capitalism exploits what is authentic and real to something  that can be consumed or basically, a product. Capitalism operates on taking advantage of other people as well as anything real and genuine in this world, making a product out of all of them. In this way, capitalism objectifies people ( as in the way Abi was reduced to her beauty and entertainment value for porn), it is a system that slowly dehumanizes the worth of a person. And yet, the masses love it,we love objectifying people for our benefit, to entertain us etcetera etcetera. I feel like the reference in the episode to reality talent shows was not very accurate but still a good one. I would have liked it if the producers used a more relevant kind of reality show which operates on other people’s drama (Keeping up with the Kardashians, Jersey Shore and basically other shows that thrive on scandal) because it much likely depicts our tendency to make entertainment of other people’s lives. Where does one draw the line? Reality tv has been such a part of us and though I don’t particularly enjoy them because of the sheer and blatant script behind their “real” interactions, but I also don’t know. Television and the internet has become such a ubiquitous media form that people can hardly be blamed for failing to assess the kind of entertainment they consume.  But just a quick snarky comment, the Kardashians are just like Bing, they play by the system,of course they have amassed an empire out of it, but still doesnt change the reality that they are a product of the system, the system that thrives on this exploitation.  

Again, what an interesting episode. I love episodes that analyze our relationship with media and the entertainment we consume because as much as we’d like to believe television and media are just for fun, they aren’t. In fact, I think media has the most insidious kind of influence on anyone, and also most subtle because some references and statements can be jacketed into harmless, good fun. Again this echoes, at least for me, the message in The National Anthem , that through media and television we create a distance between one another, delaying our moral response to things which may be otherwise exploitative.

SHUT UP AND DANCE

The hypocrisy of vigilante  justice. The people in Shut Up and Dance had their own brand of justice which involves taking the law into their own hands. But in doing so they resort to highly questionable methods such as coercing the criminals into various other crimes.  I feel like this kind of meting out a penalty in the name of “justice” is fatal for several reasons. One, this encourages a sort of moral superiority exercised without individual responsibility. Note that the hackers were the ones who can determine who were the criminals to be punished and for what punishment they should be given in relation to the seriousness of their crimes, what then was the basis for their standard of someone committing a wrong?  When justice is determined by a select few, it becomes no justice at all and opens the gates for abuses. The hackers could easily base the misdeeds of their victims on purely arbitrary grounds and subject anyone, even on the flimsiest misconducts into excessive punishments.

Conscience as the best judge The hackers code of justice seems not to be based on the law, the hackers did not after all say Kenny and the rest committed violations of the law, instead they operate by relying on the pressure created by personal conscience. Note that the hackers mainly blackmailed the victims to a release of the incriminating videos or whatever, however the victims were driven with fear knowing that what they did had moral consequences whether to their reputation or families.

The hackers were clever not because they laid out almost unexpected traps but because they force the victims to face their own conscience, to take individual responsibility for their actions, that which they believed they were protected from because all their crimes or misdeeds were done in anonymity, in secrecy. The conscience being a powerful motivator, the hackers were very subtle in their coercion,  as they did not even have to directly present the horrific effects in the even the videos or objects get leaked to the public.

Excessive punishments

This episode together with White Bear, White Christmas and Hated in a Nation all deal with how punishments are given and considered.  Note how the structure of the narrative are different for White Bear, White Christmas, Shut Up and Dance. In these episodes, the audience is hidden from the fact that the main protagonists are criminals convicted for some crimes ( Victoria with child murder, Kenny for child porn, Joe with murder???). In fact, the stories are told in a way as if to humanize the criminals as they were later on subjected to horrific punishment after the audience is made privy that they indeed committed some horrible thing. Unlike in Hated in a Nation, the narrative was pretty upfront that the targeted individuals were somehow already publicly condemned albeit for very slight misconducts and or misinterpreted, blown out of proportion statements.

I suspect there is one very good reason for doing so. In all these episodes, a very crucial theme presented was the question of whether excessive punishment even for the worst criminals (Victoria, Kenny) was ethical. Note that social punishment being one of the main premise, the writers of Black Mirror must have realized that for us to look at  punishment as immoral and inhuman, we need to look at it objectively without the crimes committed by Kenny and Victoria being factored in. Black Mirror seems to be saying this kind of excessive punishment is immoral and inhuman and cruel in all instances whether done upon a guilty or innocent person. Suppose in the very beginning of White Bear, we already learned that Victoria helped and watched on as a child was being murdered by her boyfriend, would that have changed the way we looked at how she was basically maltreated the entire time? Knowing our tendency to believe that the very worst criminals deserve the worse treatment, I bet many people would say Victoria being tortured in such manner was justified. In fact, there was a survey online about whether she deserved her lot and unsurprisingly, majority believed she truly had it coming (compare it if Victoria was perfectly innocent). For them, it was justified because she’s an absolute scum from the lowest depths of misery and so she must be horribly treated. But because the narrative was structured in a way that we see Victoria and Kenny as humans first before criminals, we were forced to reconsider the torture and social humiliation done upon their person. We think, “Wait up, was it really right, what they did to these two?”. If we knew them as criminals first, we would have responded differently, that Victoria and Kenny deserve even more beating and cruelty. But such thinking is deeply flawed. THIS KIND OF PUNISHMENT IS WRONG IN ALL INSTANCES WHETHER DONE UPON A GUILTY OR INNOCENT PERSON. Black Mirror is saying to judge the wrongness of an act, we must look at the act itself and not the person who committed the act. The wrongness of an act does not change just because it is being done upon a terrible person. To think otherwise, to believe that the wrongness of an act is relative to the person who did it means to have a partial idea of justice, that justice is kinder only to those who are infallible, those who have never done any mistake, those who possess no flaws. Criminals after all, have rights and in no way I am saying they should be exempt from the law. By all means, jail those menaces but give them their due.

See how narrative structure can be so powerful? In the beginning, we are fooled that Kenny and Victoria are perfectly fine individuals who were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Tabula rasas, no stains. Of course, the audience would have a deep sense of injustice, I dont know about anyone, but I did with Kenny, because I wrongfully believed he was a minor ( lol the actor looked so young) and looked utterly horrified for something so innocent such as jacking off in-front of a camera, like big fucking deal, right? It isn’t a crime, surely. And yet when the plot twist was subtly but beautifully delivered at the end, I was forced to face the moral ambiguity of the whole situation. Was it wrong to coerce Kenny to commit more crimes and kill another person? Was it wrong for the hackers to release the video and not have kept the end of the deal? Or was it perfectly justified because Kenny was a fucking pedophile and just imagine the children in those photos who are fucking jacked off by some person? And this is the true gift of Black Mirror, to place us at morally ambiguous points about our use of technology to justify our transgressions against other people. Moral ambiguity is the best way to present satire and commentary without the show becoming preachy about some moral code, Black Mirror allows for the audience to think for what they may but first consider the consequences.

I see this all the time especially with criminals of heinous crimes, social media outrage pours on, often wishing ill to such people. And though I understand and empathize with the outrage, and though social media outrage has no substantial effect to the meting out of the final punishment, we cannot deny that we are guilty to the thinking that cruel acts are justified when done to cruel persons. We have the tendency to view justice as some sort of a thing which can be deserved only by good people and not those who have failed morally or otherwise, in some way. That’s why we have right to due process, why we still give fair trial to an accused even if his case is so damning, precisely because we recognize that justice is for everyone.

Having said that, I think Kenny needs to go to jail and FAST however he did not deserve all the psychological torture and manipulation. Aside from those other acts he did unwillingly, his punishment should only concern that for the child porn however he was driven to commit robbery and even had to undergo having to kill someone. The punishment was severely disproportionate from the crime he was supposedly being judged for. We live in a society with such a flawed sense of justice.

Black Mirror as a whole

And yet the most persistent message so far by Black Mirror, is that try as we may to criticize the people in their universe, we are very much part of that world. The ridiculous people of the UK, the audience in Hot Shot, hell, by watching the show itself – which is in an entertainment form, we can become complicit to the exploitation in media. In fact, I noticed how many BM episodes, show the very performative side of the internet and essentially of humanity– everything is a performance, there is an actor, and there is the audience who benefits from the show.

Shut up and Dance for example reminds me of a puppeteer show, Kenny and Hector and several others, dance to the music of the hackers, their actions are controlled as if with strings in a puppet show. Also the title itself shut up and dance, maybe it’s a song, but we know someone else is shutting them up, making them mere puppets of the show. Also, the ending music which was truly haunting and disturbing, was one of-my favorite songs during high school. It is called Exit Music by Radiohead which was supposedly to be used in a Romeo and Juliette movie, the one with Leo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, a story based on a play.

In Nosedive, Lacie was unhealthily obsessed with putting up a show for everyone to give her the social approval and validation she needed to hike up her ratings. The technology in their world also exploits this need to feel seen, to feel important, to feel that one matters despite it being provisional, the rating system system presents a very classist way of categorizing people based on the social ratings given by just about anybody.

In White Bear, Victoria was subjected to a series of humiliations and brutal attacks only to realize that what she went through was a simulation of the kidnapping and murder to a child she committed with her boyfriend. She was revealed into an audience, who enjoyed each and every instance of her suffering and I believe they even paid for the show? Though she is a criminal, was it really justified, the performance derived from someone’s misery?

Some people said it was an amusement park, like a carnival. In fact, now that I think about it, Victoria does feel like a caged animal, the whole town is her whole cage. The people who take pictures of her down the road resemble onlookers in a carnival show where because of an attraction’s grotesque nature, they are fascinated to take pictures of it. She is subjected to multiple tricks, just like a lion in a carnival, where she expected to bring out a most pleasing experience for the crowd. The fact that she is a tamed animal made for performance is brought down by the fact that each day she has to forget the previous events, otherwise her horror, her suffering and her utter ignorance for the cause of it all which is the selling point of the show would be lost and the show would become uninteresting to the public.

White Bear is so interesting to me as a manifestation of the performative capacities of technology and of men because we already see it happening right now. In Twitter for example, a man who by sheer amount of fake news or misinformation can quite easily become the hunted in a public persecution. Granted Victoria is a whole different situation because she is actually a criminal, however, sometimes we mask our love for entertainment regardless of who suffers in a sense of social outrage, justice, horror to moral violations but the truth of it all is our hypocrisy. We don’t really want justice to be served, we just want a stage to present that we are morally superior than other people. And I deeply lament that. There is a thin line between expressing opinions on social injustices or crimes and enjoyment over other people’s misery. Regardless of whether the person is criminal or an innocent person, this kind of social performance and dark pleasure is unjustified.

This is really no different from public executions all through out history. I always wondered about the appeal of such events which bring hordes of onlookers as if putting a person in the guillotine was so entertaining. Some people say it was to deter crimes by showing a horrific picture of what can happen as a punishment. If it’s really about that that brought the audience, they why go to witness an execution, the knowledge itself that the guillotine is where criminals end is enough to scare some people. But I think it is more than that, maybe it’s also about social voyeurism, a dark fascinating picture of another person’s suffering, the “thank god it’s not me” mentality. The audience from the public executions in France is really no different from the people in Hated in A Nation or White Bear. We just look because something suffering can be entertaining especially if done on people we particularly dislike, we do nothing until we become the hunted and see how exactly that feels like. There’s a word psychology gives to it: SCHADENFREUDE, or the feeling of pleasure one gets from the misery of others.

and so on...

HATED IN THE NATION

The excess of call out culture — the plot revolved around personas who mysteriously die one by one until it was discovered that they were actually attacked online days prior for some unpopular remarks. The cause of death? Bees or ADIs supposedly made to function like real bees who can cross pollinate flowers. The episode, for me, examined the effects and ignorance of call out culture which can escalate from genuine offense at someone’s statement or action to a witch hunt of some sorts, sometimes even leading to death threats. The journalist, the rapper and the random lady all did something very minor and not even illegal to warrant them becoming the victims of the DeathTo hashtag. It’s also quite obvious why the producers used bees to represent as the attackers, hives of bees = hive mentality.

Individual responsibility — the hacker, upon his manifesto being found out, laments that the people who participated in the DeathTo hashtag were irresponsible, that they refused to consider the consequences of their actions or to take individual responsibility for their participation. I also wonder why the internet seems to dilute our understanding of individual responsibility.

Which reminds me, of one activity we did in Philo class in college, our professor asked what if we all had a cloak of invisibility like Harry Potter, what would be the first thing we’d do? A lot of us, unsurprisingly answered robbing a bank or retaliating on someone who had wronged us in the past. Either way, all the answers were more or less conventionally wrong. She asked us to participate in that activity either before or after she showed us the White Bear episode. It was only after a few years that I realized the crucial question she wanted us to explore: Why does anonymity (both in social media and in terms of hiding behind the cloak) increase our propensity to do wrong? The obvious answer is people are often only encouraged to do good because others are looking. That is not to say it is wrong but for me there is also another reason and which I wondered many times — anonymity shields us from personal responsibility. The internet, anonymity gives us a reprieve from the reality that our freedom goes in two ways, our actions have consequences

[insanechinaman]

To hell with Amber Alerts (because no one wants to fix it)

There are a lot of things in this hyper-modern world and day and age that gets shoved in your face and down your throat. Cell phone notifications. Personalized advertising. Donald Takeadump's tweets. And Amber Alerts.

It used to be that Amber Alerts are something you only hear about when you tune in the news, or maybe even on a highway digital sign (as if we need more driving distractions). Now with advancing mobile technology you can not just have a TV or radio broadcast interrupted with an obnoxious buzzing noise to alert the whole world of a missing child along with a horrible electronic voice reading the alert message, you get them shoved straight through your smartphone. Not everyone likes the latter idea when they see how terribly it is executed.

Whatever happened to missing child posters on milk cartons? (To be honest, I have never in my life encountered a missing child poster on a milk carton, this is something I only seen on TV.)

I don't know if Amber Alerts are something other countries besides Canada and the US have. And as a matter of fact, the "Amber" in Amber Alert is an acronym for "America's Missing: Emergency Response Transmission," although it is also named after a kid from Texas whose abduction and murder somehow inspired this idea of issuing emergency alerts in the event of a child abduction. Which makes me wonder why it's called Amber Alert in Canada, other than because we like to borrow and adopt so much from the Americans to match what they are doing—at least we do not capitalize all the letters ("AMBER Alert") like they do in the States.

I sure do not want to have something like this named after me.

But going back to the main point of this: having Amber Alerts pushed onto everyone's mobile devices not only means everyone is force-fed the messages with no opt-out as per government order, which comes with a very obnoxious buzzing noise, they get pushed at all sorts of times. Even in the middle of the night when many people are in a deep sleep and have their phones still on. Which meant a lot of people got pissed they were rudely awoken to the news of a missing child. Some of those folks called 911 to complain about it. The authorities then have to go on the news to defend the practice of push-notification Amber Alerts.

Ever since sometime in 2018 when Canada implemented the practice of mobile Amber Alerts, we've had at least 5 of these push-notification incidents in Ontario alone. One of these cases tragically the girl was found dead and her non-custodial father was charged with her murder. The rest I believe the child was found safe, including one where the father picked his daughter from school as usual and ends up being treated as a child abductor but released without charges, and most recently with two boys and their grandfather, as if the granddad is the abductor (turns out he was quite confused). Like, wonderful, right? Let's all pat ourselves in the back and masturbate to each successful Amber Alert, whoopie-fucking-do.

The implementation of these mass force-fed alerts in its current form begs a lot of questions to be asked about its nature. One of these Alerts concerned a missing child from Thunder Bay, where people as far away as Toronto got phone alerts for. Why are people in Toronto being force-fed an Amber Alert regarding a kid thousands of kilometres away? What do you expect the average person to do, head over to the airport with pitchforks waiting for a flight from Thunder Bay to land so we can save a child, capture the abductor and be the fucking hero? That is, even assuming they would be flying to Toronto, as if that's what an abductor would be doing.

Hell no. Let's be realistic here. If I was consciously abducting a kid, and wanting to fly far out of town, I'd get the hell out of the country quickly even if it meant leaving everything behind! I know what I am doing is wrong and I do not want to be caught by national authorities, am I right?

There are other questions that need to be asked about the mass force-fed approach to Ambert Alerts and the concept itself. Like, why in fuck's name are people receiving alerts in the early morning hours? Who is the fucking retard who think it is appropriate and effective to issue an push-notification Amber Alert at 3 in the morning? (Oh don't tell me an algorithm is behind that!) If these alerts are intended for a general public audience, why would anyone think 3AM is an okay time to send an alert out? Who is responsible for getting these alerts out and how it is done? Why are Amber Alerts (at least in Canada) being treated with the same level of "presidental level" alertness on your smartphone as something that is a big major apocalyptic national threat, like a nuclear bomb heading our way?

These incidents of direct-to-phone Amber Alert messages have quickly established a pattern of where news stories about people calling 911 to complain about being disturbed by the alerts quickly accompany the incident itself. It's to the point of a predictable cyclical script, just like how mass shooting incidents in the States have become a script. And it goes like this: an Amber Alert is issued, child is found (or not), endless news reports of people complaining to 911 makes the rounds as authorities justify the system and remind people not to clog 911 with complaints, wash rinse and repeat.

We can all agree we should not call 911 to bitch about an Amber Alert. Absolutely not in the middle of an active Ambert Alert when authorities want the 911 lines free to be able to collect tips on the fact. You want to fine people who take up valuable 911 time with their anger? Go ahead. But then where should we voice our frustrations? Facebook and Twitter? They're great for bitching about anything, terrible at being heard with the goal of getting something accomplished. Heck, if you read these articles about the complaints, you'll notice no one ever says anything about where more appropriate to leave a complaint. It's like they do not want to hear them, and that is probably the case, that the authorities behind the Amber Alert schema are content with the way they have it set up.

But the complainers do perhaps have a valid point. Why on fucking earth are people being awoken by an ill-timed Amber Alert on their phones? What do you expect people to be doing once awake, run out in their pyjamas and roam the neighbourhood looking for a missing child in a half-asleep stupor, going only on a vague text description of the child? "Amber, Amber, where are you?" Or why are we getting alerts about a kid who is so far away as to be of little concern?

I get that each missing child case needs to be evaluated by police before they resort to publicizing a missing child, or even issuing an Amber Alert. After someone first reports them missing, cops have to make sure the kid is truly unaccounted for, that they are not somewhere lost in school or at a friends or relative's place. They have to quickly investigate reports that someone else may be behind their disappearance. By that time, it's possible that several hours has passed, it's possible the child in question is far away from town. By the time an Amber Alert goes out, it is possible indeed, as with the case of Riya Rajkumar, the subject child is dead. Yet we still credit the Amber Alert a success because it brought in attention and tips that helped locate the deceased child. The system works again.

Gotta admire the blind optimism of the pro-Amber Alert folks.

Or why is EVERYONE being forced to receive these alerts? This is something I surely did not agree to nor signed up for. Why is this responsibility—a civic duty, perhaps?—being shoved and downloaded to us all? What do they expect us the general public to do in these cases? Seriously though, no one has ever explained to us what to do or equipped us with necessary skills in the event of an Amber Alert. What do you want me to do, seriously? You may think it's "obvious," that is to keep an eye out for the kid and report to police, but it's not that simple (will get to that later on).

It is pathetic on the part of S-ociety as a whole that no criticism of the current system will be entertained. In fact, critics and whiners are quickly villified by defenders of the Amber Alert as heartless horrible selfish narrow-minded assholes. They think it's sad and unfortunate many others feel differently about mass Amber Alerts than they do. News agencies entertain themselves much with such punditry and op-ed pieces in response to the 911 complaining phenomenon in support of our holy Amber Alert system. "Shame on you," writes one person in a half-assed column (as if anything in the world has ever gotten accomplished by screaming the statement, "shame on you"—the truth is: no). And apparently we need to "be more educated" about these force-fed alerts. One guy on the website of a New Jersey radio station even writes, "Suck it up."

Suck it up? FUCK YOU! How would you like it if you were rudely waken up in the middle of the night by an Amber Alert? Maybe I should have you locked up in a room and be tortured with that distinctive Ambert Alert buzzing noise (they really could not have chosen a less obnoxious tone?) over and over, see how you like it.

And that is the thing with authorities and supporters including the mass media (who always love a good missing child story to sensationalize): they are clearly incredulous and in denial of any problems with the way Amber Alerts are currently deployed. They beat the drums of the party line with their rhetoric, always congratulating themselves and proclaiming the Amber Alert a success because it works once again as expected, always pulling the "what if it was your child" card. They are so full of themselves, they do not see anything wrong with mass force-fed Amber Alerts in the middle of the night, refusing to see the absurdity and ineffectiveness of such a scenario from the perspective of the opposition. They are content with the status quo, everyone else be damned. Nobody wants to acknowledge a problem exists.

"Wake Me Up Everytime!," proclaims the title of one news opinion piece in support of late-night Amber Alerts. Such joy!! It really is as if the defenders and supporters have never ever been in the experience of being awoken by a 3am Amber Alert. It seriously makes me wonder what those people who don't see an issue with 3am Amber Alerts would really do when they themselves are rudely awoken by a 3am Amber Alert. Look at their phones and then fall back asleep? That would be ironic and just as useless as those who make angry 911 calls about this when a child is supposedly out there in danger. Of course there are people out there already awake at 0300h for whatever reason (graveyard shift jobs, travelling around, just left the bar after last call, etc.), but most people are like deep asleep, and expecting the sleeping majority to be able to act upon a late night Amber Alert is seriously retardedly delusional, let's be real here.

A conclusion can be made of all this: criticizing and suggesting improvements to the Amber Alert system is a new social taboo. Even in this so-called democracy of ours with freedom of speech and all that jazz, we are only allowed only one approved opinion of many issues, even something as petty as the way the Amber Alerts currently work. So much for freedom. And that is troubling. And unacceptable. And backwards. Taboos and stigmas are retarded social concepts/mechanisms anyhow and has no place in a modern sophisticated society that likes to regard itself as advanced and progressive.

I have no tolerance for mass stupidity. I have even less than zero tolerance for willful ignorance. It is sad that a topic like Amber Alerts manages to combine the two: the stupids who complain via 911, and the willfully arrogantly ignorant defenders of the system who themselves get angry over the idea that others don't want to be subjected to Amber Alerts. That combined with the emotionally driven irrational logics that informs the subject and how it is being shoved in our faces without consent, really makes it hard to accept being on-board the scheme.

It really should not be taboo to suggest that Canada's current mobile phone Amber Alert schema needs adjustment, nor should people feel ashamed to suggest they have the right to opt out of receiving direct Amber Alerts. The latter idea sadly is surely to invite much the same opinionated disgust from Amber Alert supporters who believe alerts MUST be pushed onto every single person on earth and that it will not be effective without that stipulation. Just another way S-ociety shoves itself into us all.

Let's face it: 99.99% of the world population, or even 99.99% of a city, are in NO position to be able to do anything about an Amber Alert. They are too far from anywhere, too busy to be allowed a chance to act, asleep(!), etc. Just receiving a message about a missing child and thus knowing there's a missing child out there somewhere is good to know, but it accomplishes nothing. There are those who do care enough to take the trouble to keep an eye out and report when they think they see something matching the alert description. Good for them. The rest of us however, we should be able to not be subjected to such alerts if we do not want them. Since when the fuck did Amber Alerts become a social obligation?

What evidence exists to suggest mass alerts are effective anyways? Besides, force-feeding Amber Alerts onto everyone's faces and ears is asking too much of us all, especially considering that much of S-ociety is full of stupid people. Much of us are too lazy to properly toss an empty soda can into the recycling bin instead of the trash pile, and yet we're expected to help find a missing child at a moment's call? (These are the same dumbasses who call 911 to bitch and whine about Amber Alerts, after all.) I know all this sounds heartless, especially to the pro-Amber Alert crowd, but that is the reality that perhaps they do not want to accept. Lest to join the Donald Takeadump parade and make up your own "alternative facts" on the matter, I guess.

People behind force-fed Amber Alerts are concerned that the public's annoyance to these alerts will nurture a dismissive "boy who cry wolf" situation where we all learn to ignore them. You damn bet that concern is real. It's like car alarms: they are most often false alarms triggered by mundane events like someone bumping onto a car and suddenly the whole neighbourhood is disturbed by an obnoxious blaring noise that won't shut up, such that we have learned to ignore them and do nothing because we all have figured no one is really trying to steal a vehicle (and car alarm makers have done nothing about improving their products). When you shove Amber Alerts onto the phones of literally everybody, with a disturbing loud blaring noise, and these alerts are of no concern to most of us, you damn shall bet we will learn to do nothing except be annoyed by yet another new modern society nuisance. Besides once again, what the hell can we do?

I can appreciate why the Amber Alert scheme exist, no really I do. If I had a child and my kid went missing one day, of course I would want all the resources available to have my child return home safely. But personally I would not want to subject literally everyone to the search effort. That honestly seems selfish to me. Pro-Amber Alert peoples like to argue that those bitching about unwanted Amber Alerts are selfish, but I like to spin that around. Frankly, why is one kid in one moment considered that much more valuable than everyone else? Why does that not sound selfish?

Which leads me to want to take this opportunity to discuss another thing about Amber Alerts and child abductions cases in general at a more deeper sociological kind of level, generating even more questions and thoughts no one else has the balls to openly present and discuss. Likewise, seems like nobody else in the world thinks and see the way I do on this topic in my typically socially cynical nature; I really do feel lonely about it.

S-ociety's preoccupation with missing children is a uniquely capital-W Western obsession. I don't think there are other societies in this planet that cares so much about missing children as does Western nations. I have a friend from another country who is perplexed with all these Amber Alerts, commenting that where he is from, missing children is a common occurance, that they wouldn't be able to have an Amber Alert system. Indeed, there are plenty of countries out there where kids go missing all the time, where child abductions happens more often than not, and the authorities do not have the resources to go after every case, or even care at all. So yes indeed Western society should really count its blessings and consider itself lucky in this regards that it has the resources to even obsess over missing children and come up with something like Amber Alerts. You may even want to think of this as a "first world problem."

And why obsess over missing children anyways? To me, Amber Alerts is a product of western society's child innocencism, which is what I refer to this idea or myth that children are inheriently innocent and thus must be protected at all costs from all harms of the world, real and perceived and ficticious. Innocentizing children contributes to their objectification in S-ociety. Children lack agency, for the inexplicable reason why they are referred to as minors and are treated as objects—chattel, essentially—in child custody cases, where usually the children have no say whatsoever on the matter, that someone else—the courts, lawyers—is making critical decisions on what's best for them on behalf of the children. We speak of children in objectifying terms, treat them as if they belong to someone like any other property. When missing children cases make the news, it's easy to feel like they are not persons, but rather characters in an ongoing story.

The mass media LOVES missing children cases, it's no wonder why they latch on quickly with Amber Alerts. Cases involving abductions and even murder at the hands of complete strangers—the Elizabeth Smarts, Tori Straffords, Jonbenet Ramseys, etc etc.—are very sellable and engaging to a very dumbass audience, and the press are happy to sensationalize these stories to death. (You think people who follow these stories closely are going to do anything about helping to solve the cases? Hell no!) It is to the point to dangerous exaggeration, of making people think stranger abductions are a common threat in western society, which in turn reinforces our mass preoccupation with missing children, justifies Amber Alerts and other such measures, and pumps up moral panics and fears that our precious innocent children are always in danger.

Stranger danger is overrated. In fact stranger abductions are very statistically rare. A kid in western society is much more likely to be abducted by someone within their own family, usually a non-custodial parent. It should not be a surprise that most, if not almost all Amber Alerts involve a parent or other relative of the subject child. Which now begs the question of whether a kid at the centre of an Amber Alert is truly literally always in danger. The recent Riya Rajkumar case was an exception (and if convicted, seriously the father should be given the death penalty, but we don't have that in Canada anymore). I mean, why would a parent kidnap their own child and then kill them? It is a very difficult question to answer as the motive is unique to every case. But statistically I would doubt that a kid is in any alarming danger. In most cases I bet the non-custodial parent snatches their own kid simply to have that kid to themselves. They care for the kid just as much but do not trust the other parent, don't care what the custody agreement says because it's not in their favour, let's get out of here. It's still kidnapping, but should we really be exaggerating the danger factor of the situation?

(Heck, it's pretty pathetic how exaggerated any fears concerning children is. We fear the stranger pedophiles and equally sensationalize sellable news stories of arrested pedophiles. However likewise, a child is more likely to be sexually abused by someone within their own family than by anyone else—or by R. Kelly for that matter. Sad but true, but we don't much about that in the news right?)

Child abduction/disappearance cases conditions the populace to fear the worst every time. Another thing I have a problem with regarding Amber Alerts and missing children cases: it lacks perspective. The topic is so irrational and emotionally driven, facts and data have no place when all you care about is the safe return of a child no matter what. Nobody wants to listen to anything else. The lack of perspective easily leads to why there is such a quickly developing institutionalized bias against naysayers of the current Amber Alert implementation—those in support are so full of themselves on the topic, so emotionally driven, that they shut out any facts and arguments, pulling guilt trips and drawing rebuttals that are only about visceral emotions. Amber Alerts have become a polarized topic, institutionally rooted in "think of the children!" mentalities.

I'd like to as well question who gets to be granted the Amber Alert treatment, because it is quite telling about the nature of our obsession with missing children, and also because no one else seems to be asking or seeing it my way. People like to say that missing children are in danger, thus why we need Amber Alerts. Okay then, why is it that only certain cases of people gone missing gets the Amber Alert treatment? If an old lady with advanced dementia wanders out of her house and doesn't find her way back, do I get awoken at night by an Amber Alert? NO. Should we? Is my example lost old lady not just as in danger as an abducted child? Or how about this: a young kid barely wearing much clothing, somehow wanders outside in the cold winter. Does this child get the Amber Alert treatment? NO as well. Even though this kid is just as much in danger—of possibly freezing to death, never mind being snatched by a stranger on the streets heaven forbid—the most we the public will hear about this kid is a breaking concerning local news story of plenty, but not an official Amber Alert. These two examples do not pass the main criteria of an Amber Alert, which is that they are not a child who is possibly abducted.

Or how about this: recently we had the case of Wanzhen Lu, some Chinese guy who was kidnapped by some thugs from the parking garage of his Markham condo, and found days later in the Muskoka region. That incident, perhaps because of the high level of unusualness and shock, generated a lot of media attention throughout Toronto and even the whole of Ontario, along with the usual appeal to the public to keep an eye out for him. But it surely didn't generate an Amber Alert. Why? Because Lu is a grown man, not a child. What if he got hurt and murdered by the disguised thugs? Sure was a real threat, but apparently he is not as worthy as an innocent child for a kind of Amber Alert treatment.

Why is it only certain kinds of missing people—kidnapped children—gets the Amber Alert treatment, even though we may as a society genuinely be concerned for all kinds of missing people? Why is it that we think all missing children are precious and at risk, and only a certain kind of them get the Amber Alert treatment? We may be absolutely concerned for the well-being and safety of a kid who wanders off in the dead of winter, but our phones do not go off making noises and receiving messages about such a kid. It is to me unfair, and honestly borders on hypocrisy, because it is as if we only value certain kinds of missing kids more than others, enough to warrant an Amber Alert. Why is one kid more deserving of our attention than others in this heightened, exaggerated manner? The social values we ascribe to missing children and Amber Alerts needs to be questioned.

Anyways, it frustrates me that S-ociety as a whole is in denial that the Amber Alert system we have now established in Canada is flawed and needs improvements. I can understand why you would want to have an Amber Alert scheme in place, but when you subject these alerts to literally the whole population at the most intimate level—ie. through their personal mobile devices—you better expect some backlash and critiques. If Alerts are getting pumped out in the middle of the night as if there is nothing wrong with that, you better stand back and evaluate the process and effectiveness thereof. It is NOT wrong to suggest we can make this system better.

Equally it should not be a taboo to insist we have the right to opt out of getting force-fed Amber Alerts. What is wrong with that? Did I or you consent to these types of "emergency" push alerts that we are told concerns us all even if it really doesn't? Amber Alert maniac defenders like to make you think you are heartless for wanting to not receive Alerts, that the system only works best if EVERYONE gets them. Bullshit. One theme that keeps coming up when reading these articles and columns on the Alert backlash, is that we should all know that there is a kidnapped child out there in immediate danger, even if we cannot do anything about it and it's 3 in the morning. What do you expect us all to do, fucking thoughts and prayers? What good will that do? Honestly, knowing there is a missing child out there is just as good as doing nothing, which of course both is not helping the situation at all. Knowing there is a kid out there doesn't mean much to many of us, any more than having to hear about traffic reports that do not affect us at all. Again, 99.99% of people are in no position to be able to assist in any way. It is counterproductive to cast a very wide net to catch a needle in a haystack, to evoke two Western cliches in one. I honestly cannot be bothered to keep an eye out for license plates or a kid that matches the vague description of the Alert, this is asking too much of us all. Those who do believe we all ought to make an effort to act on an Amber Alert even when it's late out as if it's an obligatory civic duty, I will place at an incredibly high standard, that is to say I expect those who believe we all ought to make an effort to act on an Amber Alert to themselves better be out there looking for the damned kid. You want to save on receiving angry 911 calls? Make it possible to opt out of Amber Alerts. Those who do care about Amber Alerts are free to preoccupy themselves and act accordingly, just don't force this onto everybody. There's nothing wrong with not having to give a shit about a situation that you cannot do anything about.

If there is one thing society/civilization/humanity likes to do, is impose itself onto everyone else and the world around it in whatever ways. And quite frankly it pisses me off when S-ociety forces everyone to concern themselves with matters that don't concern or affect them or may not be in their own interest (amongst other imposed upon social norms like being told how to eat, what to do, what to think, what goals to have, how to look like, etc., all of which pisses me off—S-ociety itself pisses me off), imposing upon everyone an expectation of being able to relate to the situation, especially in irrational ways where mass emotional tugging and guilt-tripping are exploited, to the point where I honestly don't give a shit about missing children. Besides, Amber Alerts is a mass Western anxiety/panic I can do without. It contributes to the exaggerated nature of how we irrationally interpret cases of missing people, and the disenfranchisement of children and youth in S-ociety due to its preoccupation with child innocence myths.

[blackwoolncrown]

If I ever could say I had a sort of ‘message’ I’d dedicate my life to* it’s making sure as many people as possible that ‘magic’ is real and it is entirely mundane. Consider mysticism and magic outdated terms for what we contemporarily would call some form of technology, or technique. We know now what people knew yesteryear only in a less animist, more granular, material terminology. 

Furthermore, even in the US, where things like breathwork and hypnosis for some reason continue to be considered ~out there~ methodologies despite countless scientific studies on their efficacy, you’ve got to remember that this country was formed by people who believed in magic and perhaps as a matter of controlling the population, the government over time has just convinced people that anything beyond the hard, quantitative, materialist realm doesn’t exist. And that doesn’t sound too unusual when you remember the role that religion plays today in government, and remember how it literally used to be ‘government’ in other places/times, and recall that every religion- yes, I’m specifically including Judeo-Christian religions, double specifically Christianity as a whole- has had within it some form of mysticism, rituals, magic etc, that is in various degrees simply kept behind initiation, or disciplines, or some other manner of private exclusivity that kept such knowledge from getting into the wrong (or unprepared) hands thus leading to the external social perception that such things don’t exist within that religion (to the eyes of common people or outsiders).

All sorts of things that seem ‘goofy’, ‘weird’ or irrelevant in regards to the body are literally just so simple that people these days, who have been convinced their body is a doomed meat prison that cannot be affected by anything other than maybe medicines and surgeries, have been made to so thoroughly doubt the simple elegance of the body in favor of thinking it foul, inconvenient and unsolvable.

Shit like going to sleep when the sun goes down because your body is indeed on a cycle affected by a force outside of your will, standing exercises like Qi Gong’s ‘shaking the tree’ being effective because your bones are piezoelectric and therefore impact/weight bearing-exercise has been shown to increase immune activity and bone density, the concept of ~energy~ being in other words motion, etc etc. If you look into this stuff and walk an even line avoiding sensationalism, desperation, outlandishness etc and on the other side cold materialism, over analytical mentalities, etc., You will find that there’s a lot more sense to ‘non traditional’ or ‘spiritual’ thought than the mainstream would have you believe. You can run a watch (and a radio) off a quartz crystal, things you can’t see can definitely exist bc our unique eyes see only a narrow spectrum of light (and thus by the way? The entire universe is aglow, we just can’t see it) and observation effects measurement on a quantum scale...Spiritual medicine that talks about all illness having a spiritual/emotional root? Makes sense when you remember that emotional states include both bodily postures and hormones. So being upset about your job> tension in the body>increased inflammatory chemicals in the blood> high blood pressure> decreased healing/impaired metabolism>you can see how disease starts with emotions. And so you can see how literally things like smiling can actually make you healthier. Only a lot of people won’t jsut do that because they think they need a reason and smiling as a home practice is ‘weird’. A lot of ‘out there’ stuff is actually much much more mundane and tied to our everyday existence than most people have been led to believe.

The human body is a wonderful creation and I’m grateful my curiosity about it was nurtured because it is why I have never once felt the desire to speak ill of it. What an incredible thing. We consider our food in terms of sandwiches and drinks, proteins, sugars, fiber, but it’s just as true that we need to consume metals to stay alive. Earth minerals, ocean salt water, sunlight, all of these things we must consume. We are the earth walking. We need the energy of touch, the presence of love, we are literally made to be particles of a larger organism- the community. 

I feel so much pity for people who don’t get this. I have always felt so grand inside, much bigger than a person and I think this fact was why no matter how bad things got for me I never felt defeated. Our society however, works tirelessly against the cultivation of that sense of inner being in people from childhood.

Believe me, on my soul, if you feel hopeless or horrible about yourself or the world (two sides of the same coin) you are simply mistaken. Dare to be wrong about that one core mistake and the world will be yours.

My twitter.

[sarastudiesstuff-blog]

Network: On How to be Subversive and Sexist

         "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore" (Chayefsky 1976.) is the angry cry, turned meaningless mantra, yelled by both an angry disparaged man, Howard Beale, and his masses of young fans fed up with the way the world works. This film is a sharp satire on television culture, infotainment, and reality tv. However, in spite of it’s subversion of other media texts it still manages to espouse the dominant ideologies of gender and age. Faye Dunaway's Diana Christensen is the leader of a television channel, but she's also a cold, stereotypical "Frigid Bitch", the sort of woman often demonized in media as an emotionless homewrecker (which she is). She also encapsulates the fear of the detached younger generation, so brainwashed by TV that they do not have feelings the same way the older generation still does. Howard Beale’s masses of fans also contribute to this narrative, as they are easily manipulated by the shows they consume. Media had a heavy influence on this films creation, as it is about media itself, as through the medium of film it is found easier to represent television in such a similar medium. As subversive as the film is to television, it is still a film, created to make money, which means many people control the production. The ratings board, the studio, and the director can all make executive decisions that can make or break a film. Though this film attempts to make audiences think critically about what they're watching and seeing, and think about how media giants manipulate us to their own ends, the film itself often fails to question the status quo in favor of a slightly less controversial piece.

    Network is a satirical film about the television industry. The characters, all television personalities, directors, or organizers must deal with a changing media landscape and attempt to up their ratings. When news anchor Howard Beale learns from longtime friend Max Sc that he will be fired, he goes on air and claims he will kill himself during the next broadcast, and goes on a tirade about what is wrong with the world, uttering the famous line “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore” (Chayefsky, 1976.). After his tirade gets some of the highest ratings in television history Diana Christensen, up and coming television programming director, decides to capitalize on it and create the Howard Beale show, featuring Beale as a “mad profit of the airwaves” to espouse his violent, but ultimate meaningless, complaints about the world (Chayefsky 1976). The Howard Beale Show is the most direct satire we have, as the show gets many other vague segments, and turns what was once a news anchor into a cultural icon, a symbol with no meaning behind it; “his ‘news’ show evolves into what we now call ‘infotainment’ ” (Trier 2006.) . Not only does the show satirize the infotainment style of news broadcasting that has now become so prominent online, but also the lengths to which one will go for ratings. Indeed, Diana’s other show project is a satire of the reality tv market getting more and more sensational and violent as she strikes up a deal with a terrorist group to make a reality show about their lives as terrorists, stating :“I want counter-culture, I want anti-establishment” (Chayefsky 1976). The two collide when The Howard Beale Show’s ratings dwindle, and Diana decides to let it go off with a bang by organizing for the terrorists to kill Howard on screen, ending the now less profitable Beale Show, and setting up a truly enticing second season of the now more popular terrorist reality tv. Hemmed amongst the satire is a portrait of characters Diana and Max, as they begin and end a relationship that ruins Max’s marriage, and heavily criticizes a so-called ‘television generation’ brought up on tv to have no real emotions, they play out the phases of their lives like television shows without any real connections. In these sections the film seems to uphold an older predominantly male generation as the last ‘good one’, and a younger generation, represented primarily by Dunaway, as emotionless or naive, with only the tv to guide them. That brings us to the dominant ideologies upheld in the film.

      While intending to criticize the media and it's often unethical, callous way of working, Network seem ignorant to the marginalized groups the media ignores, undermining the media, but not the status quo. It seeks to be a harsh criticism of tv culture, and of the 'infotainement' we still see today, sensationalizing news stories while offering no solutions for the problems they espouse. Yet the female characters are polarizing. Diana Christensen is a hard, cold woman, Max is “not sure she's capable of any real feelings” because “she's television generation” (Chayefsky 1976). There is a tension in her character that serves to uphold the existing power structure because in spite of her role as a sharp satire on the sort of people who make and write the films and media texts that exploit the world, as written her character plays as a stereotypical cold woman. In addition, the actress playing her was not well treated after the film came out, Krishner’s 2014 review of the book about the making of the film he describes how “Mad as Hell pauses on three separate occasions to elaborate fights over just how much (and which bits) of Dunaway’s breasts might appear on screen”. A definite detriment to the treatment of her character both on and off screen. Also damningly, she seems to serve the purpose of showing that audience that the older male generation is better than the younger, more diverse generation, though not in so many words. The only characters who question Diana’s morality are the older male characters, Max and Nelson Chaney, claiming “this violates every canon of respectable broadcasting”, upon keeping the now obviously mentally ill Beale on air, and later describing ‘The Howard Beale Show’ as  “gutter depravity” (Chayefsky 1976). Diana and the mindless hordes of youth who are angry at something they don’t understand are the only other young people we see. The other woman is Max’s wife, a put upon woman from an older generation who has lived through max’s infidenlity, suffering many a “convention weekend with [his] secretary” for reasons we are never privy to, because Louise Schumacher does not get to be a fully rounded character (Cheyefsky 1976). An audience member can read into her character and see her as a woman trapped by the society she grew up in, and stuck in her ways, even when they harm her, but with her whopping two minutes of screen time we only hear her lament about her husband. These women serve to paint a very madonna/whore picture within the film. The cold calculating bitch, and the kindly put upon wife are the two options shown to women. The cast of male characters is more nuanced and diverse, as usual, and serves to uphold the power structures they put in place as their portrayal is more sympathetic.

The film posits “television is not just dehumanizing;it establishes a divide between those who were brought up on it and those from an earlier era”, but in the view of this divide the perpetrate a negative bias towards a younger generation (Krishner 2014). The youth of the film are most shown as reactions to Beale’s famous ‘mad as hell’ speech, and are so easily influenced by the messages on their screens that they are convinced to angry, without any idea of what they’re really angry at. The manipulable youth flocking to Howard Beale, and watching his show en mass are certainly not upheld as the sort of people one should want to be. They, like Diana, are “television generation”, criticized for being “an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube” in one of Howard’s rousing speeches. While Max and Howard are flawed, they are beat down by the world around them, the picture of them as men with no generation left, seeking meaning and emotion in a world that seems to have shifted away from both is the most sympathetic in the film. Yet it blames the world, not the characters who made it. The ‘things were better the way they used to be’ narrative is never really challenged in the film, unless the audience to read into Max’s wife’s performance as a true vindication of him, and not simply another displaced person calling on the sins of a broken man. Max is in fact the most sympathetic character in the film, as his wife gives her one and only monogue, the camera often trains on his reaction instead of her, painting a clear picture of who we are really supposed to care about.

    This media text is a film about technology, something that would not have been created without the existence of film or television in the first place. The film explores the dangers of a medium that, according to Itzkoff (2011), the screen writer “described in another note as ‘an indestructible and terrifying giant that is stronger than the government’ ” , so the film would not exist without this supposed superpower. A film about the dangers of the television generation seems almost ironic as the two are so closely tied together it seems farcical for one to truly criticize the other. The media was instrumental to the creation and distribution of this work. Writer Paddy Chayefsky “made his early reputation in 1950s live television drama” (Kirshner 2014), giving him a direct pipeline to the world he intended to criticize. This film is about the influence that technology can have over the masses, and how that is used to pacify and distract them. Beale’s speeches are only about needing to “get angry”, because “The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them”, but at first never asks them to do anything (Cheyefsky 1976) . The influence of technology is the choice of medium, the fact that this is a film presumes a separation between the world of film and tv that in the current technical climate grows smaller every day. However, in the film television looms over the characters as a specter to be criticized. The characters understand the world through tv, and interesting thought as film is much more global medium.  Though Network isn’t concerned with appealing to a non-american audience, it seems only interested in an america-centric narrative. Globalization was, however, on the mind of this film. When Howard Beale does finally demand his audience “send a telegram to the White House”, ironically after exclaiming minutes of screen time earlier “I don't want you to write to your congressman”, he is lampooned for it by the network higher ups. In a meeting with the new head of the network he is told “There are no nations, there are no peoples”, and that instead  “the world is a college of corporations” (Chayefsky 1976). An apt description of a future controlled by TNC’s instead of governments that has already begun to take up. In this way the film criticizes that while tv shows themselves are often not global television corporations certainly are, and that these transnational corporations have the capacity to run everything.

    Structural powers that be are always limiting to any art that must turn a profit and Network is no exception. Any film is at the mercy of the studio distributing it, lest it never see the light of day, and so the film couldn’t be too offensive. In his book Mad As Hell: The Making of ‘Network’ and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in the Movies David Itzkoff (2014) “notes an important curiosity-at the urging of the studio, Chayefsky dropped a scene in which Diana(Faye Dunaway) picks up a bisexual hustler in a gay bar and has an emotionally complex sexual encounter with him” (Krishner 2014). This moment, that could have humanized the cold Diana, and provided some lgbt representation is taken away not by the artist, but by the powers that be that deem it too salacious for a film that needs to be sold to the masses. Instead we get a glossed over line about how Diana’s “husband ran off with his boyfriend”, which certainly does not count as representation. An interesting change, as one of director Sydney Lumet’s previous films, Dog Day Afternoon, features a man needing money to help his transgender girlfriend fully transition.  As much as the characters on screen are trying to sell their tv shows to the fictional masses, so too are the makers of the film trying to sell you their product. In that way it still had to be accessible and enjoyable to a large audience, so the masses of young people arise, and the older generation can be secure in their superiority. So it appeals to that market, and makes the studio feel secure in it’s distribution. Men fill most of the lead roles, so it will appeal to men, so it will secure in its final gross. Any art made under the sort of studio system film operates in is at the mercy of capitalism, no matter how artistic it may attempt to be, or even succeed in being. As much as the film criticizes the television industry, it is still a part of the film industry. In seeking capital any film is prevented from being too risky or critical, though this one manages to still get it’s message across.

    Though Network criticizes the excess and culture of television, it lacks the foresight to also subvert the existing status quo of gender, and age, and the all too common narrative that in the past things were better. It’s creation was heavily influenced by the tv industry, as that is what it is about, and of course the powers that be in the film industry put certain restrictions on the finished product. In the end it is a creative endeavor made under capitalism, and therefore still in search of profit. The tension between the existing status quo and the technology that Network works so hard to subvert create a very interesting work in which some facets of modern life are heavily satirized, and others stay in line with the dominating ideologies.

[hillaryisaboss]

Roseanne proves Russian propaganda worked: 7 reasons we can't allow Roseanne to normalize Trump

I hope Roseanne’s reboot is all one big satire. One big “bait-and-switch.”  

What do I mean by that, exactly? What I mean is… I hope what Roseanne is secretly doing is showing us how the working-class lost its way and ended up voting for Donald Trump. And that through Darlene moving home, and presenting Roseanne with a gender-fluid grandson, she slowly starts to realize her vote for the #1 bully of all-time was a mistake.

I hope the entire 10th season of Roseanne shows this evolution in Roseanne’s character – Trump supporter realizing the errors of their thinking when presented with modern America.  And who knows… maybe Roseanne herself is the only person able to reach these misguided working-class voters.

But if that’s not the case, and this isn’t one big ploy by Roseanne to change the hearts of Trump supporters, this is required reading for all Americans.

For better or worse, we all know Roseanne Barr is a bit of a bully like Trump.

Roseanne constantly fired people from her show (sound familiar?), viciously attacked critics (I can’t wait for her to read this), threatened to sue people, and thrived on constant controversy, celebrity feuds, and tabloid sensationalism. Roseanne and Donny are more similar than one might think.    

Is Roseanne the female version of Trump? 

Many on her show thought she was a tyrant, something Donald Trump wishes he could be in real life. Which is why all of these similarities between Roseanne and Trump make it all the more ironic and hypocritical when Roseanne attacks the bullies her grandson faces at school for wearing girls clothing.

Roseanne… you literally voted for a man that enabled the bullies that attacked your grandson. To ignore this glaring hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness is mind-boggling. Bullies across our nation were given the “green-light” to attack minorities when Trump won the Presidency. Roseanne should do some serious self-reflection and soul-searching on how her vote for Trump (the #1 bully of all-time) emboldened the very kids who bullied her grandson.

So all of this hypocrisy begs the question:

How did feminist hero Roseanne Barr go from supporting Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton during the 2008 Democratic primary (even writing a pro-Hillary article for the HuffingtonPost), to supporting Donald J. Trump (con-man and pussy-grabber) for President in 2016?

The answer is simple: Russian bots on Twitter.

After using Twitter to run for President in 2012, Roseanne submerged herself in political propaganda on Twitter (which she has since deleted).

There is no better proof than Roseanne herself that the Russians were successful with their online propaganda campaign. How else do you explain a feminist hero voting for a pussy-grabber over the most qualified woman to ever seek the Presidency?

Putin feared Hillary, and turning former supporters like Roseanne against Hillary was part of the mastermind. The ultimate con in American history to destabilize our nation in Putin’s favor.

Sadly, Roseanne is using her shows reboot to justify the unjustifiable: voting for a proud bigot who conned working-class people by scapegoating minorities and promising to return us to an America we will never be again.

So how will Roseanne go about justifying the unjustifiable?

By trying to say Hillary was an equally bad candidate – the “lesser of two evils” argument. Which was, after-all, Russia’s ultimate goal: muddy the waters so the American public thinks both candidates are equally bad.

“Neither Trump or Hillary will change anything, so why not give the finger to the establishment by voting for Trump? At least he gives the illusion of being on our side. He looks and sounds like us, right? Burn down the system!!”

This is a very petty and immature rationale from a group of people that have felt forgotten by the “establishment.” But it’s a rationale I fear far too many working-class people used to convince themselves that Trump (a 4-times bankrupt silver-spoon Daddy’s boy fraud) was somehow their guy.

Or maybe the working-class simply supported Trump in order to seek revenge against America for feeling ignored? But why is it always liberal America’s job to understand conservative America’s bigotry and ignorance? Didn’t 3 million more people vote for Hillary?

Given that blue America is the majority, don’t allow Roseanne to use her reboot to justify the unjustifiable. Never allow the minority support of bigot Trump be normalized or rationalized.

So in preparation of Roseanne’s reboot, I present to you 7 reasons why Roseanne is wrong about Hillary, Trump, and America:

1. Roseanne’s reboot tackles the skyrocketing cost of prescription medication.

Hillary Rodham Clinton fought for universal healthcare in the early 1990s, and eventually helped pass the Children’s Health Insurance Program – a program that covers 8 million children.

Hillary also secured healthcare for 9/11 first-responders as New York Senator, and President Bill Clinton passed the Family and Medical Leave Act.

I guess in addition to believing Russian propaganda, Roseanne doesn’t remember history, either.

The Clintons have been tackling the issue of healthcare for decades, and deserve credit for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Family and Medical Leave Act. Two achievements we take for granted now days but are actually a result of the pragmatic Clintons.

Heck, while Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas, the Clintons helped expand access to healthcare in poor, poverty stricken communities. Around the same time, Donald Trump was being sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination (doesn’t Roseanne have an African-American grandaughter in the reboot?).

The Clintons have a long record of achievements on healthcare. Why is this well-known history ignored by Roseanne? Did she forget?

2. Roseanne says Trump talked about “jobs.”

Hillary talked about jobs, too. But the media never covered it. Studies show that for the most part, the media only covered Hillary’s fake “e-mail scandal.”

Hillary had detailed policy plans to create jobs in 2016 America, such as clean-energy jobs. She even gave numerous speeches on her plans – speeches that weren’t covered by the media.

Meanwhile, con-man Trump promised to bring back coal jobs that will never come back to America. The original Roseanne Conner would have easily seen through Trump’s deception. Unfortunately, Roseanne Barr spent too much time on Twitter being subjected to Russian propaganda. I guess technology has unfortunate, unintended consequences?

Roseanne should have spent more time doing independent research regarding Hillary’s jobs plan rather than re-tweeting Russian bots on Twitter. Hillary promised green energy jobs of the future. Con-man Trump promised coal jobs that will never come back to America.

Oh and does Roseanne remember that President Bill Clinton created 22 million new jobs during the 1990s?

If you want to talk about jobs, let’s remember the prosperous and pragmatic Clinton Era. Meanwhile, con-man Trump shipped jobs overseas to China, stiffed American workers out of contracts, and hired immigrants rather than American workers to build his buildings.

Hillary’s jobs plan was crafted for the future. Trump’s jobs plan was crafted to con Americans into thinking we could transport back in time.

3. Roseanne says Hillary is a “liar, liar, pantsuit on fire.”

That’s only if you believe Russian propaganda and 40 years of manufactured “Clinton scandals.” Hillary was rated by fact-checking websites as the most honest politician running for President in 2016.

Furthermore – Hillary has never been found guilty of anything in over 40 years of “investigations.” I guess that would make Hillary the best liar of all-time, right? 40 years and not a single guilty verdict. Personally, I hope one day there is a book written debunking every single Clinton conspiracy theory.

Meanwhile, Trump has the all-time record for false and misleading statements. No President has ever lied at the rate Trump has lied. There is no distant second. Trump is in a league and category all on his own.

So making a joke about Hillary (who has never been found guilty of anything in 40 years) as being a liar rings hollow when you voted for a man who lies multiple times per-day (maybe even per-hour). I guess there was a true lack of self-awareness when this joke was written? Not only is it hypocritical, it proves Russian bots corrupted Roseanne’s mind.

Again – Hillary was rated by fact-checkers as the most honest 2016 candidate for President. Trump is the biggest liar of all-time. Hillary, unlike Trump, has never been found guilty of anything. Every single Hillary investigation has turned up nothing. No trial. No guilty verdict. The same can’t be said of Trump who has been found guilty or settled out of court hundreds of times.

This is yet another example of the Russians trying to muddy the waters and make Hillary seem like just as big of a liar as Trump is. Nothing could be further from the truth.

4. Roseanne says the Clintons are equally as corrupt as Trump.

Roseanne, just like Trump, consistently re-tweeted conspiracy theories about the Clinton Foundation, even though fact-checking websites debunked all of them.

Let us remember: the Clinton Foundation was given a higher charity rating than the Red Cross and provides 11.5 million people with HIV/AIDS medication – that’s more than half of all those affected by the virus worldwide.

Many of the Clinton Foundation conspiracy theories pushed on Twitter made it seem as though Hillary was just as bad as Trump. However, the Trump Foundation illegally paid off Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to hide Trump University fraud. Meanwhile, the Clinton Foundation helps treat millions of people affected by HIV/AIDS – treating more than half of all those affected by the virus worldwide.

Furthermore, the Clintons pay 35% in taxes (what do you pay, Roseanne?). We have yet to see all of Trump’s tax returns. Who truly is the corrupt one based on tax-rates?  

5. On Jimmy Kimmel, Roseanne said no American should want their President to fail.

So why did Roseanne support Trump, a man who led the racist birther movement against Barack Obama, the first African American President? And no, Hillary was not the “original” birther as Russian propaganda would have you believe.

Point is – why did Roseanne enable and spread the propaganda of those who made it their mission to make Obama a one-term President?

This is yet another example of Roseanne’s hypocrisy.

If Roseanne actually believes what she is saying, why did she enable and embolden those who wished for Obama to fail as President? The double standard is both maddening and terrifying all at once.

6. Roseanne hates Hillary’s foreign policy.

As Secretary of State, Hillary passed the first-ever U.N Resolution on gay rights (proclaiming: “human rights are gay rights and gay rights are human rights” on the world stage), and made it so trans Americans can legally change their gender on their passport. Hillary also rebuilt relations with every nation after the disastrous Bush Administration, traveling to 112 countries — more than any other Secretary of State. Our worldwide favorability rose 20% during Hillary’s tenure. Her primary focus was on women’s rights and health, bringing up issues such as forced abortion and maternal mortality rates. Hillary re-opened relations with Burma, enacted a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and killed Osama Bin Laden. She also was instrumental in putting together the Paris Climate Agreement, something Trump has since removed us from.

Roseanne supports Trump’s foreign policy because he enables Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians. Remember: Trump appealed to all prejudices – including prejudices against the Palestinian people. As a Jewish woman, Roseanne is a hardcore supporter of Israel.

Trump’s foreign policy consists of Twitter wars with dangerous dictators. How is that better than what Hillary accomplished as Secretary of State?

7. Roseanne hates the Clintons because of NAFTA.

George Bush Senior originally put NAFTA together. Bill Clinton oversaw the implementation of NAFTA due to denying Bush Senior a second term. NAFTA was originally Bush’s baby (not Clinton’s).

Instead of only remember the negatives of the Clinton Era, let us also remember the numerous positives:

—4-balanced budgets due to the superb compromising ability of Bill Clinton—Surplus —22 million new jobs —7 million fewer Americans living in poverty —Minimum wage up 20% —Assault Weapons Ban —Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act —Northern Ireland peace process —Campaign Against Teen Pregnancy: all-time low abortion rates —Office on Violence Against Women —Violence Against Women Act —Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP): 9 million children insured —Tax-credit for low-income Americans —Family and Medical Leave Act —Incomes rising at all income levels

Didn’t Roseanne also do well during the 1990s? And yes –  Roseanne’s show may have helped Clinton win in 1992. But Clinton resoundingly won re-election in 1996 due to producing results for the American people. 

Incomes were rising at all income levels, 22 million new jobs were created, minimum wage was up 20%, more children had healthcare (9 million covered under CHIP), and our country had a blanched-budget and a surplus. We also passed the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Plus, in-case you were wondering, Glass Steagall had nothing to do with the 2008 financial collapse according to fact-checking websites (try blaming Republican George Bush for a change). And sure… welfare reform sucked. But that’s because we had a GOP-dominated Congress and Bill Clinton was a true pragmatist (exactly what we need in a leader).

On balance, the Clinton Era was a great era for most Americans (including Roseanne). Just look at the long list of accomplishments! Hillary’s platform would have ushered in another pragmatic Clinton era, which would be going far better than the current Administration.

The worst thing that ever happened to Roseanne Barr was her Twitter account. She was constantly subjected to pro-Trump and anti-Hillary propaganda, causing her to support the pussy-grabber over the first-female nominee for President. In her Russian corrupted brain, Hillary was just as bad, if not worse, than Trump.

It’s truly sad that a former feminist icon didn’t support the first-female candidate for President due to Russian propaganda. This former feminist icon opted instead for a well-known misogynist. (And please don’t bring up Bill Clinton as your defense because he had consensual affairs and was then held accountable for his transgressions). Trump has yet to be held accountable for his abuse of women, and a true feminist would never support a man like Trump for President.

Unfortunately, Roseanne is going to attempt to use her shows reboot to legitimize Trump and justify her vote for the pussy-grabber. However, as much as Roseanne may try, Trump is not a legitimate President. Donald lost the popular vote by 3 million votes and was elected with Russian help (treason).

I don’t care how “forgotten” you feel by the establishment – it is never acceptable to support bigotry, discrimination, scapegoating, sexism, bullying, or hatred. I will never root for this “President” to succeed so long as he is a bigot filled with hate. Because if Trump succeeds, bigotry will be validated. That is something I will never support and something the original Roseanne Conner never would have supported, either. But the original Roseanne, unlike the Roseanne of the present, wasn’t corrupted by the Russians.  

Trump’s victory –aided by Roseanne/Russians on Twitter– legitimized bigotry and discrimination everywhere. Roseanne helped the very bullies she defends her grandson against. The embodiment of hypocrisy and irony.

Roseanne fell for the con-man fraud who promised to bring back obsolete coal jobs instead of researching Hillary’s jobs plan the media never covered – a plan that would have led to huge job growth, powered primarily by clean energy jobs of the future.

Roseanne is the ultimate example of the effectiveness that the Russian propaganda campaign had on Twitter. Roseanne was duped by Russian bots into thinking Hillary was as big of a liar as Trump (fact-checking websites confirm Hillary was the most honest 2016 Presidential candidate while Trump was rated the least honest). Luckily, even without Roseanne’s support, Hillary still won by 3 million votes. Roseanne will never be a member of the true American majority.

Roseanne is forever a member of the manipulated minority – manipulated by both Russian bots and a con-artist that was born with a silver-spoon in his mouth. A man who prides himself on bullying and sexism. A man who cheated working-class people out of contracts his entire life, shipped jobs to China, and hired immigrants over American workers to build his buildings. A man whose tax-plan only benefits people like himself.

The woman who always spoke truth to power and never fell for anyone’s manipulation finally did at the hands of Russian bots on Twitter. A true American tragedy.

Over 165 million Americans were subjected to Russian propaganda online saying both candidates were equally as bad. So for those that say Russia’s propaganda campaign had no impact on the election, look no further than Roseanne as “exhibit A” proof.

Roseanne preferred a “relatable” con-man over an overqualified “elitist” woman. Hillary was too “smug” for Roseanne’s taste. She preferred the pussy-grabber propaganda artist who looked and sounded like Dan Conner. A con-man who puts billionaires like himself above people like the Conners. A con-man who cheated drywallers like Dan Conner out of money his entire career.

I’m still holding out hope this is all satire and in the season finale of the 10th season, Roseanne will admit she was wrong about Trump and that she should have voted for Hillary (you know, the woman who worked for decades on healthcare and whose husband left us a booming economy and surplus). Because after 1 year of a Trump Presidency, can anyone really still say their vote was the right decision? I’d give anything to transport back to the Clinton years based on what we currently have now.

Roseanne Barr truly could do our country a great service by helping convince those who voted for Trump that they were wrong. Sadly, she’s still on Twitter submerging herself in Russian propaganda – believing that the Democrats are just as bad as Republicans. I guess that’s how Roseanne went from supporting Hillary in 2008 to now supporting Trump.

Thankfully, Hillary still won by 3 million votes despite Roseanne betraying women and supporting a sexist bigot. I’m proud to stand with the 66 million majority who voted for the slogan “Stronger Together.” Trump’s Electoral College victory will never represent me or the majority of Americans.  

Sadly, I guess false promises and scapegoating can even manipulate those you once viewed as idols. Maybe birds of the bullying feather truly do flock together?

So please defend Hillary and tweet @therealroseanne when she bashes Hillary with lies on her shows reboot.

Because we need to declare once and for all: Hillary is not nor has she ever been “just as bad as Trump.” Just ask the millions of people who receive HIV/AIDS medication from the Clinton Foundation – over half of all those affected by the virus worldwide. Or look at the hundreds of guilty Trump convictions vs. the zero guilty convictions for Hillary. Or the fact that the Clintons gave us 4-balanced-budgets while Trump had 4-bankruptcies. Or Hillary’s work at the Children’s Defense Fund investigating African American juveniles being placed in adult prisons. Or the Clintons working tirelessly on the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Face it Roseanne: you were duped by two abusive, sexist men (Putin and Trump) into hating Hillary, the first woman to run on a major party’s ticket for President, and who will become a bigger feminist icon than you could ever dream of becoming. Critics always said Roseanne hated other women who were more powerful than her. Did Hillary take your crown, Roseanne?

The old Roseanne Conner is a true feminist icon.

The new Roseanne Conner voted for the sexist pussy-grabber, which enabled bullies everywhere (ie: the kids who bullied her grandson).  

PS: Or maybe Roseanne simply wanted Trump to win so there would be a reason for her show to be given a reboot? 

Never normalize the con-man bigot silver-spoon fraud.

@roseanneonabc

[flydotnet]

Tears of Venus

VRAINS Rarepair Weeks 2018-2019 - Day 10: Soulmate AU/Hanahaki

Summary: The first time she heard about the disease of unrequited love was when she was browsing the Internet for some stories to read while waiting for a pirated movie to download on her laptop. It seemed to just be a legend, a trope used by fanfiction writers and mangakas to have some tension, death stakes and angst for their characters’ relations. It was a way to add weight to a situation that, otherwise, may not have had it. This trope, because of its widespread character, was referred to “Hanahaki”. It was merely something to make people’s imaginations work and to break hearts in anticipation and suspense. It was all fiction even if, would she pay attention to probably false witness accounts, some said it was an actual thing, albeit very rare, and whose only cure really was reciprocated love. Ah, as if.

(Or: Ema doesn't believe in urban legends, and it bites her back)

Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS Ships: Hireshipping (Ema/Akira), background platonic Ema & Aoi

Wordcount: 4.5K words

Notes: Realizing I'm writing these characters borderline OOC hurt more than it should have. (but hey at least it'll still be more accurate than most DSS-centric depictions of Yusaku and Ryoken amirite)

Y'all saw it coming, I saw it coming, everyone saw it coming, and I'm really proud of bring 4.5K words of Hire Hanahaki angst-H/C-whatever onto the table. This story is a weird mix but it was a blast to write, holy shit, I love angst and I love Hanahaki. But like I'm probably the one who proposed it in the first place for the event's prompt list so... Yeah. That has to be the longest oneshot I've ever written in one sitting.

Also, you'll quickly find out why this fic has a name that has nothing to do with flowers... at first glance.

Event hosted by @vrainsrarepairweeks

AO3 version available here.

The first time she heard about the disease of unrequited love was when she was browsing the Internet for some stories to read while waiting for a pirated movie to download on her laptop. It seemed to just be a legend, a trope used by fanfiction writers and mangakas to have some tension, death stakes and angst for their characters’ relations. It was a way to add weight to a situation that, otherwise, may not have had it.

This trope, because of its widespread character, was referred to “Hanahaki”. It was merely something to make people’s imaginations work and to break hearts in anticipation and suspense. It was all fiction even if, would she pay attention to probably false witness accounts, some said it was an actual thing, albeit very rare, and whose only cure really was reciprocated love.

Ah, as if.

 It’s when scrolling through the Internet again that Ema remembers about Hanahaki. She has heard rumours about someone in Den City being afflicted by the curse of flowers growing in their lungs because their beloved doesn’t love them back. It has this sensationalist character to it that makes people instantly intrigued: of course that’d reach her ears and that only sceptical and boring people would ignore it.

Thinking of overly-rational people who tend to see things the boring, practical and down-to-Earth way, she wonders what Akira would think about that. Aoi would be at least intrigued, considering her favourite Monsters are partially based on flowers (Lilybell, Holly Angel, Narkissus, Bella Madonna, Nightshade…), but her brother would most certainly dismiss it as yet another irrational legend. Oh well, it’s funnier to imagine his dismissive reactions to it rather than Aoi’s developing teenage curiosity.

 As such, she can’t help herself but mention these in a meeting they have for a new mission he’s giving her for, admittedly, a generous sum of money. If they were near her birthday, she’d see it as a gift: as it stands, it’s probably to be sure she doesn’t go to see if she can extort even more money from businessmen with little hacking knowledge (as it stands, Akira does have some and used to be better than her at it: his knowledge just caught all the dust around the place as soon as he could stop hacking to survive, or so she thinks at least). To be honest, when it comes to their personal relationship, she’s better off getting a bit less money but ensure she can tease her hirer about his awkward side.

“Have you heard about the person in the city who has flowers in their lungs?” she asks him as she thinks back to that story going across Link VRAINS and other social media outlets.

He doesn’t reply immediately, but when he does, it’s just as she expected him to do: “Hanahaki isn’t real, Ema. It’s just rumours going around.”

“I figured you’d respond that. You’re predictable, you know?”

He reddens at the insult before they part ways to go on their merry day and tasks.

 Still, it’s quite the heavy tip for what’s that job is worth. It’s simply making sure an AI chip doesn’t go rogue again in his boss’s back. It’s not risky, it’s not the worst he’s asked her to do, and yet he’s paying her extensively. Did he get a rise in his salary or something? Or is it Aoi’s way to thank her yet again for all her services? In both cases, it’s unnecessary and, for once, she doesn’t feel like accepting this big sum. Well, why does she find it so weird? Maybe Akira just overestimated what the job was worth because of all the “doing that in the back of the big boss of a gigantic company” gig.

When she gets paid for it, merely twenty-four hours later, the payment has even more of a tip joined to it, along with what seems to be a virtual present. Okay, that’s it, Akira is really overestimating his missions’ worth and wanting her to stay here. Fine. He better not make such a fuss about it anymore: that’s embarrassing to see him dig his grave even deeper all by himself. She accepts the tip anyway, thinks of what perfume or makeup set she could by herself with it because the ones she has already start to grow old, and settles on something glittery for once.

 The rumours precise themselves in the following days. The city now knows who the poor, poor sickie is: a man, presumably old enough to feel love but still young enough to worry himself over romance of all things. That’s all there is to it, but at least people have a precise noun or pronoun to use on that guy. Ema stays alert of it: it’s amusing to see all that speculation for something that has so many chances to turn out to be yet another urban legend spread through the streets and posts on social media. She never expected manga to have such an important cultural impact.

She starts to talk about it with Aoi over the net, the teenage girl being interested in what this is all about. Ema runs her through all she knows about it, from the little things she once read online to what is currently the consensus on today’s legends. A question then comes from Aoi who hesitates between believing in it for its Romanesque nature and doubting it because her brother taught her to be doubtful of everything she hears (even his opinions, but she has forgotten to do that for the most part), an interrogation that should have never interested Ema as much as it did: “Do we know what type of flowers it is? I’ve heard depending on the species that it can be a hint with flower symbolism”.

 Frankly, Ema doesn’t know anything about flower language or symbolism because she simply never buys flowers for anyone. The only times she does are when visiting her late father’s grave: she simply does like her mother does every time and put there a bouquet of forget-me-nots. Kengo has a slightly other idea of what to put on there, but she hasn’t taken the time to research it either. They have never discussed it yet: she gives him the time to recover from the idea that they are, indeed, brother and sister and should probably stick together even if he always wants to work alone.

The rumours come to her again when Aoi brings these up herself in their little conversation. According to a few, differing versions, this affected person has yellow carnation, anemones or daffodils growing inside their lungs. Quick searches on the Internet confirm Ema in her idea that this is all an urban legend spread among teenagers and people in need of sensationalism: really, flowers symbolizing unreciprocated love, deadly illness or rejection? Come on, this is too cliché to be real, too much like a poorly-written shojo manga to be happening in her plane of reality. She tells Aoi about that, how artificial it all sounds, how everything is way too much of a coincidence, but the girl still believes this may be happening near her while not giving much details aside from that.

 She takes another mission offer from Akira in a green-grassed parc in the city where cherry blossoms punctuate the floor and sky. He seems to not do so hot: if she isn’t mistaken, he’s usually not this pale and doesn’t have such dark rings under his eyes. Considering the recent crises at SOL Technologies which are, undeniably, partially caused by her doings, it wouldn’t be surprising for him to work overtime. He always manages to find a way to run himself to the ground anyway as if he was a fatigue addict. God, she’s glad she didn’t turn out to become a workaholic like him.

He coughs here and there, and that’s when he can’t keep it inside anymore, as he explains to her what it consists in this time. It’s eerily similar to last time, with too much money at the key again, and yet another element that shouldn’t be here: the way he slips in compliments on her capacity and resourcefulness, on how he’s grateful for her to always accept his mission offers. (That last part is wrong: she explicitly remembers turning down one or two offers in the past, and once of them recently on top of it). A sudden excess of gratitude coming from a man who never speaks about himself and his feelings simply gives off a wrong vibe on her? Does he want to seduce her or something? Because that won’t work. As it stands, Ghost Girl doesn’t do romance.

 The noise of the ever-going, omnipresent rumours soon inform her of even more details she isn’t asking for. The sick man is in his twenties, working for a company and, as they say, never revealed being infected with the disease to anyone. There is no clear evidence to support these claims, albeit she slowly starts to think about how this description fits Akira more and more. On the other hand, there are a ton of other men in their twenties working for big companies in this city who wouldn’t want anyone to know they’re coughing up flowers of everything a human being could cough out. That’s just unbelievable because of how ridiculous and impossible it sounds.  

There is still one picture that doesn’t live her mind. When she was leaving their meeting spot, she swore she could see him bent in half with a hand against a tree, coughing she guessed loudly. While this doesn’t exactly correlate to the rumour in its very details, the coincidence of this urban legend going around and a sudden striking coughing fit like that is still numbing at her mind from time to time during the day. Maybe she should wait for more information about the rumour’s sick man to confirm if this has any chance to be the case.

Well, she’s starting to believe it herself, and she finally understands for the first time was Aoi was willing to consider the possibility of the “Hanahaki Case of Den City” as it’s called to be real. The irony never stops.

 Soon enough, before she ever expected it to in fact, she learns of a new aspect of the rumour: the man affected by the case of Hanahaki works for SOL Technologies. Is linked to it a witness account by a secretary of the man who swore she had seen him cough more and more often, along with finding a tissue filled with wet and sometimes bloodied flower petals in his paper bin. That is one coincidence too much: that description would match Akira’s to the point she is certain he’s the basis for it. Maybe that secretary is the original source of the rumour’s more precise details. She has to be for such tiny precisions and descriptions anyway.

It starts to somewhat link inside her mind. He did look ill when they last saw each other, with how pale his skin was and how bad his coughing sounded at times. The more logical explanation – the one he’d take, in fact – is that he simply caught a bad chest infection somewhere, and it has around ninety percent chances to be the case. But then… He wouldn’t be afraid to not being able to thank her enough would it just be an infection like that, wouldn’t it? He sounded like he was going to go soon and never see her again. With how big her latest pay checks from him have been, she doubts it’s because he wants them to part ways.

 She gets a text message from “SOL Zaizen” on her phone right as she is about to ask Aoi if she has witnessed anything wrong with her brother. As soon as she opens it, she notices something has to be seriously wrong.

No matter what the offer is this time, she is going in-person to meet him and “discuss” the “matters”.

 When she arrives there, Ema gets her breathing stolen. Her footsteps are slow despite how much her mind is racing: he looks even worse than the last time, with a mask on the lower part of his face and deeper dark rings, a sickly red barely visible under the white of the mask, and her heart starts racing because he just seems to be doing terribly. She, however, cannot bring herself to run. How did he even get out of his house in that condition? The world may never know, after all.

“What the hell happened to you?!” is what manages to exit her throat as she walks up to him back against the wall.

“It’s complicated, really… I’ve also got a confession to make: I didn’t want to see you for an offer,” he replies with coughs interrupting his words every ten seconds or so, she isn’t sure, but it’s intense and almost frightening to see.

 Ema crosses her arms and waits in anxious anticipation for whatever he has to tell her.

“I’m… not sure of how I should go off about it,” he tells her in full honesty, hand in front of his mouth and the other arm around his chest, “so please excuse my abruptness.”

“You haven’t responded to my question, but go on, I guess.”

“I… I’m not sure how long I’ll last for, so… can you promise me to keep an eye on Aoi and Hayami for me?”

“Hayami is your secretary, right…? Wait, what the fuck are you going on about?!”

Akira gives her an excuse of a smile in return. There really is something wrong with this man.

“A… terminal illness of sorts, let’s put it that way… Which brings to something else I wanted to tell you…”

She cannot tell if his face actually is redder by the minute or if it’s just her noticing how ill he truly is.

“I… I may very well be in love with you, Ema…”

 Her world stops and shatters before her eyes. There isn’t a lot of people who truly matter to her in this little sphere of hers: her mother, her late father, her half-brother Kengo, Aoi, perhaps Playmaker for saving her life… and Akira. They have grown closer with the years and it’s only now that she realizes how much he does matter to her and how terribly she is receiving this. A terminal illness, so suddenly, for a man who isn’t even thirty yet? This is… this is awful.

And he’s revealing right here and now why he was being generous these past few days. He knew he was going to die and, perhaps, wanted to please her one last time. She can barely handle the first part of the news: the second is finishing her off. She wants to cry, to deny this as lies, but she knows better than this from Akira: he has never been as dramatic as her, down-to-Earth. For him to tell her all of this, it has to be true and urgent.

Her breathing gets caught in her throat and she cannot find the strength to answer.

 Ema externally freezes despite the storm taking place in her skull. Time has stopped and everyone else has disappeared from her consciousness as she helplessly stares, unable to move even a finger, at the man whose breathing suddenly gets worse and whose chest seems to squeeze before her widened eyes.

“I…” She attempts to respond. “I don’t know what to say…” She admits to him and herself all the same.

“It’s fine… I expected this to be sudden and shocking…”

Before he can finish speaking, another coughing fit takes a hold of him to the point of forcing him to uncover the bottom part of his face as to spit something.

 Everything shatters when Ema gets to see what’s coming out of his mouth or, to be exact, his lungs.

Flower petals.

Hanahaki is real.

An entire flower tainted in dark reds and smelling like spring and iron.

The Hanahaki Case of Den City isn’t just a legend, and he is the one they were speaking about.

 And it’s all because of her.

 She swallows a sob back as he puts back his mask and looks at her, eyes glassy and almost unfocused, tempted to look away in shame. This is tragically real, tragically close to home. Fuck this! Fuck this so much, from Hell and back!

“I… I’m sorry for this, very much so, Ema,” he tells her as he goes from supporting himself with an arm against the wall to doing so with his back leaning against it instead.

She timidly picks up the entire flower and tries to identify it.

“It’s an anemone,” he attempts to state very calmly, as if to ease her back into what she’s used to, but it’s all a failed façade.

Ema then remembers what she read online and what Aoi told her before: anemones are a symbol of death, illness and forsaken love depending on cultures. She can distinguish a faint blue hue to the one she has in her hand.

“I have to go,” he suddenly tells her in a faint and groggy voice, starting to lose his capacity to speak, “please take care, Ema…”

“I promise I’ll watch over Aoi for you, then,” she tries to look stoic when she just wants to cry. “Please… take care too, Akira,” she continues and ends her sentence as her legs finally move and take her away from the scene.

Another timid, sad smile.

 Her mind blanks during her trip back home on her bike, but as soon as she reaches her flat, all her tears fall from her eyes and trail on her cheeks. She pathetically lets her helmet go, takes off her shoes and lets herself fall onto her bed. She is causing another person’s death without ever meaning to, and one she cares about on top of it. Fuck. Akira deserved better than that kind of cruel and unusual death.

But there is nothing she can do about it, isn’t there? It’s uncurable and terminal unless feelings are returned, and there’s where it stings. She doesn’t love him the way he loves her: she has prevented herself from falling in love with anyone as to protect herself from heartbreak and ex-partner drama. She cannot respond back and that’s what is killing him.

This is all her fault, all her goddamn fault!

 She’s surprisingly dramatic and heartbroken about it, for someone who has already lost her father to an illness. She remembers being torn and extremely saddened for a few days following his demise, crying after him even, but she cannot for the life of her figure out why this is also such a tragedy with Akira. They’re friends, at best. Shady friends making unwritten contracts behind everyone’s backs, but friends and that’s it.

That’s surprisingly hurtful to hear herself think.

 She needs to calm down and think the situation through. Panicking and choking on her sobs isn’t going to make anything better. She gets up and paces in her flat, trying to piece together every fragment of her feelings she can decipher as to paint a global picture of her part of the situation. It’s a giant mess she’s facing with all the disdain she can have towards herself for never cleaning it up before today. Clean your room, they said.

There is no denial that she does care for Akira enough not to want to seem him go so early. Wait, early? That means she wants to spend more time with him, just like friends do. So, they’re friends, that’s for sure. Comparing to her other friends, she finds herself thinking more of what she felt towards now ex-partners… In a way, when she was surprised to hear him confess his love to her, a part of herself seemed to have rejoiced, or rather, to have been relived. That doesn’t make sense with all the sorrow she feels! Why would she be happy to be the reason why he’s dying young after spending so long trying to survive in the streets with a six-year-old under his wing?!

…Oh.

 Ema smashes her fist into a wall she finally, finally understands everything. Of course, of course that had to turn out to be denial all along! If she was so broken, so glitched out when learning of his upcoming death and how she was its cause, it was because she had, all along, wanted to be the cause of this. Well, not that way, but she was hiding her feelings to herself to avoid heartbreak again. If nobody could love her because she was shady and prone to backstabbing, when why should she allow herself to fall in love with others?

And then came in Akira, and everything fell apart because that illness, eventually, means nothing. It has no place to be because she has just learnt how things truly were: he’s in love with her, and she’s in love with him, and it’s all going to go down the sewer if she doesn’t do something soon. She has the power to change the tide, to prevent his early death. She needs to act, quickly.

She gets out her phone and gives him a last meeting time.

 The meeting happens the day right after, and she can guess by how he didn’t have any issue to respond “yes” to her pleas that he has been given an illness break by SOL Technologies (hah, surprising). To be fair, if Ema had made sure her motorcycle was all charged up, it was to ensure she could make it quickly to the hospital or the Zaizen flat in case everything would fall apart. As it turns out, she sees a familiar room and an even more familiar face come out of it.

Instead of waiting next to the tree where he asked her for the first time to do a mission for him and where he told her he loved her, she runs up to him in a worried hurry. Despite his bittersweet smile and his ever-so polite “Hello, Ema”, she feels how fragile he is in her arms, how she feels like she’s handling a crystal statue who matters so much to her, a statue she has fragilized by her own hands without meaning to. She has, after all, never truly wanted to destroy people, merely play with them and maybe be a bit mischievous. She wanted to be Aphrodite, to play with men and their desires and their capacity to spend money on her, not Death and her scythe reminding people of how feelings can suck.

But she’s no goddess.

Won over by the one naïve about love guy she’s met, that’s what she is.

 They sit down on a bench, his head on her shoulder because she’s afraid he won’t stand on his own in his spot of the bench if he doesn’t have some support, his unnatural body heat piercing through her clothes. That’s ironic to say the least. Despite how simplistic it seems to say three words to someone, she’s still hesitant and doesn’t know how Akira, the always-stiff man with zero skill in romance, has managed to pull this off. Her pride vanished the moment she knew she was killing him from the inside: she has nothing keeping her away from it, except maybe her guilt that doesn’t waver.

“How many days do you have left?” she asks instead, out of concern and morbid curiosity as to tell herself that, maybe, later, she’ll be able to be cocky about how narrow she saved someone from his death.

“They told me a week at most, probably less” he replies with his voice even weaker than yesterday’s, a petal exiting his lips. “I didn’t expect you to call me again so soon… My doctor will be mad to learn that I’ve come outside to meet up with you… Haha…”

Why does he everything he say or do break her heart, these days?

 Ema looks down, her sins facing her directly in the face.

“Akira, I’m not sure how I should tell you this knowing what’s going on with you,” she continues as earnest she could be. Her pride really ran away on her.

“It’s fine… I’m glad I didn’t scare you away yesterday… You seemed so shaken…”

“You’re not allowed to worry for me when you’re about to die, you… fool.”

Insulting the dying isn’t very cool either, Ema, you should know that.

“What I mean is that I have to tell you something too personal for it to be said on the network. It’d break its meaning.”

He sighs. She can just feel how weak his breathing has become over the past weeks through this single exhale and how barely audible it is. Declaring her love to a shadow hurts.

“It’s fine if you can’t do it anything about it… Just protect Aoi for me…”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

 Despite his heavily weakened condition, she can still see how surprised he is to hear her say that. He should know better than anyone else that Ghost Girl can do anything. She excuses it for today, forever even, and holds her hand in his.

“I wish I could have been more dramatic than this, like I usually am, but this is an urgent matter and I won’t let you slip away from me so easily when it’d be easy to win against the illness,” she starts rambling almost as a way to shield herself from her own words.

Funny enough how curing his Hanahaki case seems so easy all of a sudden. She glances at him to see his eyes desperately trying to focus on her.

“I love you too, Akira.”

 There is a single, then a couple tears exiting his eyes as she finishes to tell that, and he somehow finds the strength to grip her hand as he coughs out what she guesses to be the last anemone to ever reside in his lungs without rotting away. She doesn’t know how the flowers in his lungs are going to fade away, but that’s not what matters for now.

She enlaces him from his side and pulls her against her own body, feeling the fever disappear in moments, breathing starting to sound normal again. He looks exhausted from fighting the illness, she is herself tired from crying and panicking, the smothering anxiety and fear of death soon to come taking their toll on them both.

“Could you… stay over for the night?” He asks her as he’s falling asleep. “The driver must still be here…”

“My pleasure,” she answers. “Let’s get there before I have to carry you like my bride to bed.”

 As she carries him on her shoulder again, they leave behind a trail of pale blue petals smelling like copper and iron. The last one people will ever see, she hopes. The last ones she’ll see for sure.

End Notes

Writing about Akira almost dying is my new specialty.

[teacherintransition]

The Facebook Dilemma

... not just for the transitioning teacher, but for all of us...

...like most well intentioned possibilities on the internet, it can take a wrong turn.

In 2009, I was 43 and was intrigued by this new “product...service” you could find online called Facebook. There was a lot of buzz about it among friends I knew and my interest was piqued. For a Gen X’er, I had stayed more than just current on computer and internet advancements as I had written a curriculum and taught a course on “How to do Academic Research using the Internet.” A couple of college campuses had approached our school with a dilemma: many high graduates weren’t able to transfer what they knew about hard copy, old school, going through the stacks research to using online resources. I’d taught the class since 2003 and had already been exposed to the burgeoning world of “social media” from my students. Six Degrees, Are You (Hot of Not), Friendster, Xanga, MySpace and several others and all to a 40 something... they seemed too cheesy, too much for the teens and not comfortable for my generation. Then in 2009, I came across this new site called Facebook, silly me... it had loaded its platform and had been online since 2004. It seemed a bit more toned down than the others and I’d discovered that some of my high school classmates were already using it. “What the hell,” let’s give it a shot and I set up my Facebook account ... it seemed harmless.

At first, FB was a blast, I reconnected with friends I hadn’t seen in years, the groups on music and Art were addictive, there were fun games to play... it was an honest online, social media blast and it was user friendly, checking it became part of the daily routine. Like the ancient adage goes, “nothing good can last forever.” Soon, politics, biased news, divisive debate, spying, cheeky algorithms turned what had been a fun pastime into another area for the uniquely American “culture wars.” The same reconnected friendships became casualties on the battlefield, “gotcha” videos were everywhere, Fact-checking was a needed weapon... and it just wasn’t fun. Wishing Happy Birthday or sending sympathy for losses became a cold, mechanical process void of genuine feeling. A friend of ours had said while we were all having dinner that our generation was going to be the experiment subject for this. Generation X was the last one that grew up without wide spread computer usage or without the internet, but had adapted to it much, much better than Boomers. Millennials got exposed to internet and cell phones at the beginning of their teen years and the new guys, “Gen Z” are born with an IP address and a cellular plan. To all too many people I know, social media is more designed to develop angina than friendships.

Social media and a retiring “teacher in transition,” how does it fit during the daily routine of retirement? Well, like most things it’s as varied as the individual in question. My friend who astutely remarked that we were the experiment subjects of this trend had no doubt arrived at a conclusion for those of us who grew up tech free but quickly adopted for work and leisure... I know I have. Using Occam’s Razor in scientific evaluation, I’ve come to the conclusion that life, in general, was better without the pervasive use of technology in our lives. Life lacks a genuine quality and sense of independence during this age of internet everything. I’d rather call a person and wish them happy birthday that use an app; I’d rather spend my time just thinking to myself than have my thinking provided to me via algorithms, I’d rather be more self reliant than have to rely on Siri or Alexa telling when to turn left. C’est la vie... it is what it is, but I am able to put all of this to work for me in specialized ways since I’ve retired. Being able to easily share and post my writing allows me access to an audience that wouldn’t have existed before. These media platforms also grant me a web venue to share and market my Art to a vast online audience which would have been impossible to achieve in previous eras. The internet age also provides a magnificent way to satisfy my travel urges between trips, by being able to virtually visits cities and countries I long to visit and revisit in the interim. We human beings tend to jump into trends whole hog and then after the fact revisit the wise advice of “everything in moderation.” True, true, truer words were ne’er spoken. All this being said, O’ wise teacher in transition, how doth we interact with yon social media upon retirement?

As stated early in this column, this would be the ramblings of a mid fifty retiree finding his way through the challenges of adapting to a new way of living. Some of my “pearls of wisdom” some might find helpful; others, not so much. These observations are mine and not mandatory. I do hope some might find these helpful. Sigh... in regards to Facebook or internet usage in general for the newly retired, I’d suggest limiting it to the smallest degree possible. I envision legions of readers hearing my declaration standing up and crying, “huzzah, huzzah, huzzah” followed by cellphones and iPads being cast in to raging flames followed by the chanting of my name! Ahh, the blessings of a vivid imagination. I suggest this for several reasons, mind you I didn’t suggest total withdrawal, but a moderate to strong decrease in usage. One of the criticisms of Gen Z is their sedentary lifestyle while focusing on texting, gaming, trolling etc etc .... in other words, these young people spend so much time on line they are getting overweight instead of getting out and active IRL ( hipster, techie acronym for In Real Life). If it not a good idea for kids from the ages of 10-25 to sit on their asses all day, it certainly isn’t a good idea for those of us experiencing a mature quality of life (you like that huh? sounds a whole lot better than saying “getting old”). While being online... time can get lost ... and a day waisted and a waistline enlarged. Might I suggest limiting yourself to a few specific times where you check your email, peruse social media, play games ... what have you. I’ve remarked often that a structured day during retirement is a great way to chase your dreams and goals. That doesn’t usually happen sitting on a padded desk chair all day staring at a screen.

I strongly advise that you carefully research the most reliable news organizations based on accuracy and lack of bias and review them periodically during the day. The 24 hour news cycle, breaking reports, obscene bias in news reporting has become a scourge to all areas of society for the last twenty years. It has divided our nation to an unhealthy point amongst all demographics in our country. Inappropriate visuals, doctored photos, deep fake videos and out right deception can really shake up a peaceful mindset. I’m not suggesting abandoning online news at all, but be more discriminating of the sources that don’t sensationalize stories. You’re at a point in life to relax and enjoy peace of mind... make sure you do. Fill your time with what’s in front of you IRL .... not on a screen. Whether we are fifteen to 50 to 80, our time in this world is limited, don’t obsess over things you can’t control; “joie de vie” “la dolce vita” not doom and gloom.

In my mind, try to limit your online time to interests and hobbies that are personally yours. Give your time online a purpose: are you learning the guitar?...then pick some sites that develop that interest. While on Facebook limit your group memberships to interests that enrich you as a person with diverse pursuits. Goof off time is essential to having a peaceful retirement.... but to maintain an active lifestyle, make certain that most of your time has a purpose. No ... not like “working” but determined by the passions of your heart. While there are many ill advised sites on the internet, it was originally intended to enrich us and extend our knowledge. Do it!

“If there is nothing good about Facebook or social media, why do you still use it ...huh?” I’m not implying that it is totally without merit. AsI hoped I tried to state, moderation, the most un American of words is essential to anything we do. I’ll draw this examination to a close by sharing what I think is the most valuable aspect that I derive from Facebook: photographs and the memories option. The daily memories page offered is something I look forward to every morning. It’s is a personal journey through what was on my mind and of interest to me over the years. It takes me back to a moment in time to what I was thinking, feeling and gives me a chance to see how my life has changed over the years. You are afforded the opportunity to see if you’ve grown as a person and what events had enough of an impact for you to post it. It can make joys and sorrows live again momentarily and appreciate the life you have lived. Just remember... living online is not really living. Use these amazing advancements to enhance your life .... not be the direction of it. Just some random thoughts from a teacher in transition.

http://labibliotecacoffee.com/

Facebook Photo; https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7761-facebook-business-guide.html; 2021

[grendelmor]

Well here's a thing...

So, I’m thinking this morning about the tensions in our country and it occurs to me that everyone in the world is biased in one way or another. Everyone. And before I get into this, and so you don’t have to wonder, I’m a white male in my 50’s. I know, I know, some of you will stop reading right there, but hear me out…

As I said, we are all biased in one way or another. This will never change. We are genetically predisposed to be biased in one way or another, if not, why do we, for the most part, marry into our own race? I know there are exceptions, and I’ve had friends, yadda yadda yadda, but as a majority, this is true. Or why don’t we marry dogs, or horses for that matter? We are biased to be attracted to people of the same race as ourselves. Heterosexuals or LGBT are biased toward like minded people. I am hetero, and I’m married to a hetero woman. My gay friend is married to a gay man. Bias.

How about religion? Those who are religious in just about any way, choose to be in relations with those who believe the same things. Muslims don’t marry Christians, Christians don’t marry Hindi, you get the idea.

Social status? It is uncommon for poor people to marry into rich families. It it also uncommon for rich families to move into poorer neighborhoods. Bias comes in many forms.

Political bias seems to be the current hot issue. We all believe that we are more right than everyone else, and are willing to fight to prove it. We use extreme examples to prove it. The left will use the farthest right to prove that all conservatives are evil racist pigs, and the right will use the most extreme to prove that all liberals are deranged man hating, flag burning, LGBT terrorists.

We all have some bias that makes us feel in some way superior to everyone else, and this will never change. You can change laws, you can change leaders, you can change the form of government that you live under, you can try to erase history, but you can never change human nature. Yelling into a microphone about how much you hate someone’s belief system, sexual orientation, racial preference, heritage, or anything else will not change people. You may think you can stop racism by removing statues from public places, but think again. You may not see it, but it will always be there.

We are still the same tribal man that made our paintings on cave walls. The only thing that is different is the slow progression of technological advances. We want to fool ourselves into believing that we have advanced in our ideas and our mentality, but recent events show otherwise. We are all members of tribes that share our opinions and beliefs. Middle class Christians tend towards having close companions that are middle class Christians. Lesbians tend towards other lesbians. White supremacists rally together with other white supremacists. These are our tribes, and heaven help those who believe differently than we do.

We, none of us, truly want equality, unless we are all the same. Muslims want us all to be Muslim and abide by the teachings of Mohammad, Christians want everyone to be Christians, and live according to the ways of Jesus. If you don’t, it makes me just a little superior to you. Equality only works if everyone accepts everything about everyone else. This will never happen.

Sensationalizing every event that shows division doesn’t help, if anything, it enhances it. From my biased position, it lets me say “can you believe what that jack-ass did?” so I can feel a little better than them, and division grows inside of me a little more. In small increments we go from “wow, can you believe that” to “did you see that racist bigot” or “look at that nigger”. Harsh words and feelings become more harsh the wider the gap becomes.

We all need to back up, take a deep breath and realize that the perspective of other tribes matters. I can love you, I can value you, and we can still be different. We don’t have to be the same to carry mutual respect.

We all want to change everyone else to make them more like us, but we refuse to change ourselves. You may as well go and beat your head against a rock. The change you seek starts inside you, and as hard as you try, you can’t start it in someone else.

Burning flags, pulling down monuments, rioting in the streets, it only makes matters worse.

You can’t make them change.

You only have the power to change yourself.

[cryptonewsworldwide]

Like clockwork, the usual suspects have published their sensationalized stories about this week's security breach at Binance.  Back with the same recycled, predictable, click-bait we've become accustomed to.  So predictable, that late last night I tweeted in anticipation of these articles coming, and woke up today proven right. The summary of these stories go something like "TOLD YOU SO! Cryptocurrency is scary money made by hackers and used by criminals - so it shouldn't be a surprise when you hear $40 million was stolen from a cryptocurrency exchange."  They all claim repeatedly that cryptocurrency is an abnormally 'high priority target' for criminals to steal, and thus higher risk for the average person to own. Unfortunately, substantiating that claim involves a lot of picking choosing, so much so that anyone claiming it is either willfully manipulating their readers and choosing clicks over accuracy, or legitimately ignorant and completely unqualified to be reporting on the topic at all.  I'm not trying to be mean here, but I can't even 'play devil's advocate' and think of an innocent reason to be so wrong. For example, VOX's article, which is probably the worst of the worst. Writer Emily Stewart seems to think cryptocurrency is some pretty scary stuff, and tries to explain why you should be scared of it too. The headline "If bitcoin is so safe, why does it keep getting hacked?" first had me thinking - perhaps the article itself would explain that Bitcoin has never been hacked, that the encryption it uses has proven to be unbreakable, and even the world's top spy agencies would feel comfortable transmitting messages using it. Of course, I was wrong. The article continues with "...for a technology that’s supposed to be hyper secure, in practice, it’s often proven itself to be, well, not" and there's even a section titled "What makes bitcoin exchanges so hackable?". It quickly becomes crystal clear that the author has no hands-on experience with anything cryptocurrency related, and seems to think people literally hand over their private keys to an exchange. She even warns about the risk of giving your private key to a wallet. (What?!) BANKS HIDE THEIR SECURITY BREACHES, CREATING A MISCONCEPTION... My source on this isn't some conspiracy theory filled blog - both global intelligence firm IDC, and multi-billion dollar global advisory firm Gartner conducted studies that came to the same conclusion - approximately 80% of cyber-security breaches go unreported in the banking industry. Their reason - it could lead to loss of confidence from both customers and investors.  The studies say it's not just the public they hide it from, but in order to be sure the story never gets out, that means hiding incidents from law enforcement as well. Here we actually see another advantage of cryptocurrency - can't cover up funds moving on a public ledger! Companies in the cryptocurrency space never get the option, and have to tell their clients. CRYPTO NOT A 'BIGGER TARGET' FOR CRIMINALS... Remember that figure of 80% of incidents being covered up - the remaining 20% we know about makes it clear - cyber-criminals target any institution with a lot of money, and an internet connection. The cases we do know about include malware being put onto the massive nation-wide ATM STAR Network, which somehow criminals were able to exploit twice in an 8 month period. Networking giant Oracle experienced a breach after acquiring Micros, a POS credit card processing system used by Hilton Hotels, Adidas, Burger King to name a few - Oracle discovered malware had been 'slipped in' to the system. Uber recently paid out $148 million to settle claims after personal information of over 50 million users were stolen, covered-up, exposed, and they were sued for it. Just a few examples out of hundreds, if we really only hear about it 20% of the time - you could even make the case that cryptocurrency exchanges are actually a low priority target. FREQUENT MISUSE OF THE WORD 'HACKING' ... It's important people understand - just because you read the word 'hacked' that doesn't mean that's what happened. In fact, the cryptocurrency industry is full of digital security experts, and exchanges are known for putting a lot of time, effort, and funding into security. More often then not, when we learn the details of how a 'security breach' was pulled off  - it usually involves no actual hacking whatsoever. Instead, they use old tricks, such as fooling an employee into opening an e-mail that appears to be from their boss, but it isn't - it actually installs a backdoor into the system, or captures passwords as they're typed and sends them to the criminals. These tricks can be pulled off by someone with fairly average computer skills, actual hackers call them 'script kiddies' because all they do is use malicious code somebody else made, like actors following a script - but they're typically the root cause of breaches today. THE TRUTH IS: When it comes to cyber-crime, criminals do not "prefer cryptocurrency" - they just "include cryptocurrency" among the type of funds they're willing to go after. It doesn't make for an exciting headline - but it really is that simple. ------- Author: Ross Davis E-Mail: Ross@GlobalCryptoPress.com Twitter:@RossFM San Francisco News Desk // Subscribe to GCP in a reader from THE NEWSROOM - Global Crypto Press - Cryptocurrency News Headquarters... http://bit.ly/2H7BMiP

http://cryptonewsworldwide.blogspot.com/2019/05/media-in-meltdown-over-binance-incident.html

[abassi-okoro]

I’M NOT RACIST BUT . . .

I was speaking with a friend of mine who is a white female and considering the latest social unrest here in the states, we began the discussion about racism. The one thing I’ve learned being a black man involved in discussions with white people on racial disparity is that every white person has denied whole heartily being a racist or at the very least, being “prejudice.” Now let’s get technical for a moment. Racism is an industrial and institutionalized system of oppression based on the rules or illusions of power. It’s a system built upon one system which is build upon another that is governed and guarded by people in key positions to open and close certain doors of achievement for certain individuals. Not every white person has that power. In fact, your average white American is not privy to that type of power and wouldn’t know how to use it if they had it.

However, they do directly and indirectly benefit from other whites possessing and using that power. We call that today, ‘White Privilege.’ But this is not the same as prejudice. You do not need to have “power” to be prejudice because prejudice is nothing more than an opinion. It’s a bias. You can be biased towards anyone and anything. You may be a Republican and because you’re a Republican, you automatically hate Democrats. You don’t hate Democrats based on what they are, you hate Democrats because you’ve been conditioned to accept what you think YOU are (whether you truly understand it politically or not). That’s called “Biased Classification” or “Selective Class Bias.” You may be heterosexual and because you’re heterosexual, you automatically have homophobic feelings towards people who are homosexual. You may not know anything about that person only that he or she is a homosexual and that’s enough data for you to form a negative opinion of that person. That’s how prejudice works. It’s an opinion or bias not based on reason, logic or actual experience. So by definition, not all white people are racist but by definition, all white people do have prejudices because to not have a biased opinion (whether conscious or unconscious) is an impossibility.

When it comes how whites view blacks, there’s Racial Cognitive Dissonance. Racial Cognitive Dissonance is an uncomfortable sense of discord, disharmony, confusion, or conflict experienced by people in the midst of change in their cultural and racial environment. It’s usually due to holding two contradicting perceptions or beliefs. For example, when it comes to racism and race related issues, white people will say one thing and do another or will make grandiose claims of helping to end racism but will then turn around and debate the validity of racial claims made by black people. If a white person says, “It’s so sad that the black fella got killed by the police BUT  . . .“, that is racial cognitive dissonance or having a double conscience. It’s when people try to find excuses to not drop or give up their prejudices all together. All of this falls under the umbrella of White Privilege. White privilege can best be described as the epistemological solidification of white normalcy among and within the majority of the Western white populations. Peggy McIntosh, the first author to aptly define and articulate a definition of white privilege, states that:

Whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when [white people] work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow ‘[people of color]’ to be more like us.

This creates a model where white people will generally feel uncomfortable when their ideas about race conflict with their emotions like compassion and sympathy and so they will find a need to rationalize that inner conflict. A common example is when a white person is un-apologetically racist, but has friends who are black. This happens more often than you’d expect. White people learn to think of the black people they are friends with as “exceptions” to their prejudice beliefs, so then they can continue to stereotype every other black person who they don’t know. This is the white person who believes that all blacks are thugs and criminals and yet has that one black friend that he thinks he can trust. If you should ask him how his prejudice makes any kind of logical sense considering that he has a black friend, he would say something like this; “Oh, well my friend is a good black person” or “I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about all the other blacks.” I’ve even heard white people try to justify the use of the word ‘Nigger’ by redefining the term and claiming that “Nigger” means an “ignorant person” and that white people can be niggers also. Or my personal favorite . . .  “there’s black people and then there’s niggers. The black folks who are good, hard-working, honest people are the black people and the ones who are lazy and good-for-nothin’ are the niggers!”  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to listen to this crazy rhetoric from white people.

Perhaps the biggest and most obvious contradiction or dissonance is that of when you speak to the average white American – they claim that they’re not racist or even prejudice and they want to work towards racial solidarity yet, popular culture in the United States continues to be saturated by racial stereotypes and racial prejudice. Black men are still seen as criminals, black women are still seen as angry and over-sexual, Latinos are still seen as thieves, Asian men are still seen as technological but socially awkward, and Arabs are still seen as terrorist and everyone who isn’t white is seen as “minorities.” But let’s be fair, being biased is not a crime. In fact, being biased is somewhat natural but what’s not natural is being biased by the belief in stereotypes and especially with the wealth of information at our fingertips in today’s society. There’s no excuse to be racially ignorant believing any and every narrative that comes your way without personal investigation. At the very least . . . do a quick Google search. It would save you much embarrassment.

I was asked once, “why is so damn difficult to talk about race with white people? Must they debate everything?!”

A person will only debate a topic when he does not believe or agree or subscribe to the topic being discussed. If white people are debating race issues then it would occur to me that they do not believe that race is an issue or that certain components of the topic are less of an issue than others. Fair enough but many white people do not believe that racism is as big of a problem as black people and the media are reporting and so not only will they accuse the media of sensationalism but they will try to convince black people that it’s all a figment of our imagination. Consider this . . . If a Jehovah Witness knocks on my door and begins speaking about their beliefs and I feel compelled to debate those core beliefs then that must mean that I do not agree with their belief system or else I’d have no reason to debate. So it’s obvious that the white people who are busy arguing and debating with black people about racism are doing so because they do not truly believe it’s a problem. And THAT’S the problem! But how can you expect for white people to see racism and discrimination as a problem? If you do manage to convince whites that racism is a serious problem, they might see it as an exclusive problem to the black community but also believing the issues with race can be eradicated if black people would simply adjust their behavior. After all, racism is a false concept to them that they often try to explain away with as little accountability as possible. This is why they have a hard time “seeing” racism.

Wealthy people have a hard time seeing why a poor person is living in poverty and they will always have a complacent and condescending tone about their beliefs and while trying to explain their position on poverty. You’ll usually hear something from rich people along the lines of, “you have both your arms and both your legs. You’re just as capable as anyone else, you have just as much opportunity as anyone else. Look, I did it. You’re just being lazy.” Black people hear that same self-righteous arrogance from white people when we discuss racism. White folks will say something along the lines of, “Oh please. I work just as hard as you, I don’t get any handouts because I’m white, you have the same opportunities as I do, I don’t have white privilege, you’re just pulling the race-card. You have Affirmative Action, I didn’t have help. What about black-on-black crime?”

You can’t fix what you deny exist. Whites have a difficult time identifying prejudice or any of the types of racism, even subtle racism. There are four types of subtle racism that whites have a difficult time recognizing but practice more than they know;

Symbolic Racism: Symbolic racists - rejects old-style racism but still expresses prejudice indirectly (e.g., as opposition to policies that help racial minorities).

Ambivalent Racism: Ambivalent racists experience an emotional conflict between positive and negative feelings toward stigmatized racial groups.

Modern racism: Modern racists see racism as wrong but view racial minorities as making unfair demands or receiving too many resources.

Aversive Racism: Aversive racists believe in egalitarian principles such as racial equality but have a personal aversion toward racial minorities.

Most so-called “decent” white folks who feel strongly about equal rights may still practice one of these four forms of subtle racism. The most common of the four that I see with even my white friends is that of Symbolic Racism. I had a conversation not too long ago with a white male who rejected any type of racism but then insisted that Affirmative Action should be eliminated so that no one (black or white) benefits. His sentiments according to him represented “leveling the playing field.” However, he failed to understand that the you cannot level the playing field when one side doesn’t have an organized team. You can not balance a society (already dominated by one group) by stripping away certain programs that brings the downtrodden up to a level where they need to be in order to compete successfully on that field. He also failed to understand the reason for such government aided programs in the first place (to help compensate for 399 years of  the brutality of free slave labor that financed this country.) He also believed that if whites couldn’t use the “N-Word” then no one should. I tried to explain to him how privileged and narcissistic that was to think that if something is off-limits to whites then it should automatically be off-limits to everyone.

Another white friend of mine about a year ago seemed very compassionate towards how blacks were being treated and would often respond on social media with an array of, “Oh that’s so sad, it’s horrible what happened to that poor man, I’m so angry” and so on. She didn’t seem to have a problem with my race related discussions until one particular discussion had me pointing the finger of accountability at white people, in which most of the time, that’s necessary. Suddenly she didn’t agree with what was happening to blacks. Suddenly, I was called a “racist” for recognizing racism and suddenly I was at the receiving end of another white lecture on if black people would just stop discussing race so much then racism would just magically vanish. I alone was even accused of being the source in which racism is perpetuated in this society by not “giving it a rest!” I didn’t realize I had so much power. That’s Ambivalent Racism and that’s when a person is in constant conflict with themselves emotionally, bouncing back and forth between what’s right and their own self-identity and racial pride while still having racist undertones in their belief system and views.

A few years prior, a white blogger named Patrick K., stated to me that black people perhaps do experience “some” racism but a lot of it we “bring on ourselves.” He went on to state that it’s the way we dress and it’s the fact that we don’t have adequate black leadership and he even had the audacity to claim that “Black-on-Black crime” makes white people not want to give us the benefit of the doubt. However, there were three major problems with his perspective. 1. Black men in three-piece suits are also racially profiled and killed by white police officers. 2. There hasn’t been adequate white leadership in this country since John F. Kennedy, and 3. eighty-four percent (84%) of white people murdered are murdered by other whites. In fact, whites kill more whites each year than blacks kill each other, and white people commit more crimes than blacks (2 to 1 in arrest, forcible rape, larceny and homicide). Yet, he used popular stereotypes (not facts) to form his bias without reason or personal experience. That’s Modern Racism!

While recently speaking with a white woman, she made the statement, “I just wish everyone could stop this madness.” She seemed exhausted by the constant hammering of race and conflict in our society and especially after the latest incidents of police brutality towards black men. She’s not alone in her wishes however, shortly after exhibiting signs of compassion towards black men, she made the statement, “if black people would just not get so antsy when pulled over then we wouldn’t have so many dead black people.” I noticed that she placed the accountability of police brutality on the victim and not the perpetrator. It happens with rape victims as well. The accountability for action always seems to fall on the one who suffers. “Maybe if she had dressed more appropriately, maybe if she wasn’t behaving like a whore, maybe if she didn’t walk home alone.” 

We live in a world where we put more focus on telling women how NOT to get raped than telling rapist NOT to commit the act. Similarly, we tell blacks HOW to act when dealing with a racist system as opposed to dismantling the racist system. But what do you expect? We’re a nation that spends billions on modern medicine to get rid of the symptoms and not the illness. This white woman went on to present a laundry list that was reminiscent of the Jim Crow Rules of Engagement. Her list was not only ridiculous but it was painfully obvious that it was from the mindset of a white person with a mystical and animated perception of racism and discrimination. Perhaps she meant well but here’s the question,

Why should we have to navigate through the terrain of racism and prejudice by being “careful” not to do this and not to do that while white people with their privilege sit back comfortably dictating to others how to live within their deadly system that they would rather ask us to tolerate than to help destroy?

That is Aversive Racism! I have had white friends practice all four forms of subtle racism (right to my face) and most are completely unaware of it. They think they’re being helpful, they think they’re doing their part, and giving great advice. They do not believe that they are saying anything wrong and this is precisely why people will turn and say, “I don’t like talking about race with black people because I can never say the right things.” And because black people recognize subtle racism and sly remarks and passive aggressiveness – it doesn’t register to us that white people are actually trying to help. And we don’t fall for it. When white people become passive aggressive, we don’t fall for it. When they become arrogant in their comments or conceited, we don’t fall for it. When they adopt a “savior” mentality or parental attitude by lecturing black people, WE DON’T FALL FOR IT! And so when we don’t take white people’s sympathy, their response is to write us off as being, “too sensitive” or “too angry” to listen to their reason. It never occurs to them that they’re wrong. They just believe that they’re right and that black people are too delicate to listen to them tell us how to deal with the racism that they created in this country.

It’s white people’s inability to fully understand the dichotomy of racism and their inability to comprehend a basic racial and cultural concept that doesn’t include “white-thinking” and without an inflated sense of white self-importance.

In other words, white people have a hard time processing a reality that doesn’t center around them. They have been convinced that they are the center of the Universe. The quicker they realize that they are not, and the sooner they realize that even with good intent they are still biased and prejudice then the sooner we can sit down and discuss these topics without anyone feeling the need to “lecture” or debate or become arrogant and narcissistic. If you’re white and you really want to have a discussion about racism . . . first realize that you just may be racist yourself regardless of how much you deny it. We will still work with you if you have some prejudices. We can get over that because we have plenty of prejudices about you. We really don’t like you much either but we are tolerant of white nonsense. 

- Abassi Okoro

[vileart]

Feed Dramaturgy: Ailin Conant @ Edfringe 2018

What was the inspiration for this performance?

When we began working on Feed, it was in the wake of Brexit and Trump and we thought we were going to be doing a piece on echo chambers, fake news, and social division.  The more we researched, however, the more we realised that Feed was actually about capitalism. 

It’s a play about the attention economy and how our focus as consumers—our engagement, our emotional arousal, and the time we spend with our eyeballs drinking in content—is the greatest commodity on the current market. This means that anything that provokes emotion—humour, scandal, outrage, sensationalism—rises to the top while nuance and deep thinking are pushed out the picture. 

Fake news and social divisions are a part of that, but they are a tangential by-product of a much darker and more insidious thing and really only the tip of the iceberg.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas? 

I think in this age of highly personalised and curated content, live performance is one of the best spaces for public discussion because A) it’s shared and B) it’s live.  These are two things that are becoming increasingly rare in our hyper-connected-but-disconnected world.

How did you become interested in making performance?

I don’t actually remember because I was so young, but my mum tells me she used to take me to see a touring kid’s Shakespeare company that did cut-down versions of Shakespeare plays when I was in nursery, and that from about age five I started pestering her to let me be in the shows.  

I had to wait until I was eight to join the troupe,

after that I never looked back.

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

Every show invents its own new approach, doesn’t it?  With this show, we began with a series of workshops working with professional playwrights and young people to address this itching question about social media: how it was changing our relationship to ourselves and to other people.  

It’s such a vast subject so the real work of this play was about selecting and articulating the subject, something that took us months.  At one point we were working with the Tactical Technology Collective (creators of the sell-out pop-up The Glass Room) to create a joint foyer exhibition, and two days through the discussion and partnership we realised, ‘Ah wait, Feed is about the attention economy, whereas The Glass Room is about the data economy.’  

Don’t worry if that disambiguation goes over your head, we’re still getting our own heads around it after months of researching.  So the process of making this show has been very different to others in that the landscape is constantly shifting; the subject we’re trying to articulate is evolving so quickly and is such a popular discussion point in the current zeitgeist that a significant part of the process has been just trying to understand and keep up with the subject. 

We have to be on top of what is general knowledge, and what is specialist knowledge, all while figuring out how we can apply theatre to bridging the gap between the two in a poetic and engaging way.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

You might know from our past work, The Fantasist, Nobody’s Home, and The Marked, that we’re passionate about translating internal experiences… using visual theatre to flip the human mind inside-out and show a protagonist’s mental journey through the tangible world.  

In the past we’ve dealt with individualised subjects like bi-polar disorder and post-traumatic stress, but Feed feels like the first piece we’ve ever done that looks at a lived mental experience that almost all of us are grappling with in some way: the onslaught of stimulation from smartphones and social media, and how we are coping with and adapting to our new information landscape.  

What’s surprising is that Feed actually feels like the most neurotic show we’ve made to date.  There’s a certain logic to something like traumatic experience, where there may be a swirl of emotions to navigate but somewhere in there you can find the vulnerability, the humanity, the logic, the root.  The attention economy, on the other hand, is capitalism unleashed on the human mind; it’s addiction, it’s manipulation, it’s deception, and it’s completely devoid of any ethics or monitoring.  

It’s a world in which every human experience is a commodity.  Making this play has made us all feel a little bit less sane.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

With past shows, we always had a clear goal of increasing empathy for the protagonist (and by proxy, anyone with a similar story or background).  But Feed has been created in reaction to a moment in time when we were experience empathy burnout; when victim-driven news items were flooding our Facebook feeds and we felt ourselves shutting down to the plight of humans living the various crises of our time.  As storytellers, we needed to take a step back and look at the underlying dynamics of the stories of our times.  

We’ve learned a lot in the process about the way we tell our stories to ourselves as a species, and it’s really changed the way we see things, especially the way we take things in.  In a way, it’s been liberating…building Feed has given us just a tiny bit of reflective distance between ourselves and the media around us, and with that some relief from the whirlwind of guilt and rage and titillation and stimulation that it does its best to suck us into.  

I guess, we want people to laugh, we want people to be provoked and slightly uncomfortable, we want people to see familiar things from a new perspective, we want people to fully embrace and grieve the problems of our times…but mostly, in the space of digestion and reflection that follows, we want to share with our audiences that very small gift of a little bit of freedom from the all of the senseless chatter and noise, so that they have the space reconnect to what’s most real and important.

Feed

Pleasance Dome (King Dome), Potterow, Edinburgh, EH8 9AL

Friday 3rd – Monday 27th August 2018 (not 15th), 14:00

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