#It is about the need to be seen as the victim to avoid culpability.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

None of our hands are clean

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[matchabelly]

So I literally just returned to this site last week to follow a person who shall not be named for GO3 updates (worst timing ever ik) and maybe what I'm about to say is a hot take and super long-winded but I need to get it off my chest here since no one in my personal life is as emotionally invested in this as I am. I have been an obsessed fan for almost two decades, but one thing I will not be doing is defending a powerful individual who by their own admission abused said power and is now trying to gaslight the victims. From what I've read these past few days, it seems their inappropriate behavior has been an open secret for some time now. I will no longer support their work. I am thoroughly disgusted and these allegations paint this person's every past word/action in a new, manipulative, and disturbing light for me. That being said, while I will actively be both avoiding any new content from this individual and trying to find ways to "read another book," I cannot overstate the profound effect their work has had on my life and identity. Humans are fallible and complicated. Art is transcendent. Once it is given to the universe it changes into something that is special and unique only to the beholder. It is OKAY to continue enjoying and identifying with art made by a problematic creator, as long as you are able to enjoy it with a critical eye and do not in any way support or promote the individual responsible. And for the love of Someone, do not blame the victims. Here is where things might get spicy but I'm gonna say it anyways. I hope Good Omens 3, The Sandman, and all this individual's other projects get cancelled. Or, at least the person in question is removed from them altogether, since the other artists who have worked tirelessly to bring these works to life should not have to be punished unless they were in some way culpable or privy to these incidents before the news broke. Victims getting justice and a sex offender facing the consequences of their actions is more important to me than getting another season of a TV show, even if it's one I'm obsessed with and adore. Sadly, I don't think the person who did this will be facing justice at all. They are financially and socially powerful enough for this to get swept under the rug. If the mixed responses I have seen across various platforms is anything to go by, their legions of impressionable fans are already prepared to defend them to the death. Wrong hill to die on, folks. All I can hope is that everyone does not let themselves be manipulated by this grown adult who made the wrong choice to violate consent when they clearly know better. Just remember that even though the news didn't come out until this week, this individual didn't try playing the neurodivergence card until after the most recently reported incident occurred. Whatever they are, it does not excuse them of responsibility for what they've done. They are a dangerous, narcissistic, manipulative person and that is their own fault. They do not need you to defend them, they need to recognize they are the problem, face justice, and get help, hopefully while fading into obscurity for the rest of time. I hope that all the hurting people in the fandom out there can find solace in whatever way they see fit, and if that includes continuing to enjoy the art (seriously, though, pirate it instead) that is okay. We are all deeply affected by these events and how you cope is up to you. But lastly, and most importantly, I hope the victims of these awful crimes can move forward from the trauma this has undoubtedly caused, and that the cruel, misogynistic hand of the internet can leave them alone so they can heal. Can't believe I have to say this in 2024, but blaming the victim is NEVER OKAY even if the perpetrator is someone you like.

[confusedlamp]

At the risk of potentially being misinterpreted, there are some misunderstandings in much of the tumblr discourse, from left leaning Americans, surrounding Israel and Palestine. While I am skeptical of how much tumblr discourse really matters in the grand scheme, I did want to make two two points that I keep seeing folks yelling about unnecessarily.

1. "It's complicated."/ "No, it's simple!"

I've seen often the misunderstanding that when people say the situation is complicated that they explicitly mean that there's somehow morally ambiguity about mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza. Yeah, no. That's fucked and you don't really need to know a ton about the history to know it's fucked and to call for an end to it.

There are however, things that are more complicated. If you actually want to understand the orgins of zionism and those who justify it, you can't necessarily just copy and paste how American colonialism worked/ works. There are similarities, to be certain. But things aren't 1:1. Furthermore, if you want to talk about what should eventually happen (beyond the immediate), you are dealing with a lot of traumatized people, a lot of propaganda, governments that aren't exactly democratic to say in the least, and some pretty intense geopolitics. Figuring out a solution that minimizes human suffering, repairs even a portion of harm done, and that actually has a shot in hell of happening is complicated. Acknowledging the complexity doesn't mean that you should stop there and cease to learn or discuss or advocate. Just know that actually working for a better future isn't simple.

2. The term "zionism"/ Israelis

I am not any form of zionist, but please know that everyone who says they are doesn't necessarily mean that they support the current Israeli government's actions. Some zionists definitely do, but I have also seen zionists argue against it, both from a humanitarian perspective and a "this is actually harmful to Israel's security." Zionism, by definition, does mean they think Israel should exist as a Jewish state, which I don't think is compatible with how an equitable country can exist and ignores what has been done to create that state. However somebody saying they're a zionist does not mean that they are pro Benjamin Netanyahu's war crimes. With at least American Jewish zionists, I often find they have a lot of misconceptions regarding Israel's orgins.

In that same vein, Israel isn't a monolith. There is a recent large swing towards nationalism after Hamas's attack (think about where the political atmosphere of the US was post 9/11), but even some survivors or family of the victims don't support the bombing of Gaza. The Israeli government is also currently actively surpessing voices calling for peace, even what are honestly fairly bland statements. It's also worth noting the amount of propaganda that's been put out to deny any wrong doing on the part of the Israeli government. I'm not saying we should assume all Israelis are innocent or people aren't culpable for their own actions. I just have seen some pretty extreme takes from American leftists that paint all Israeli citizens as deserving harm, which doesn't really help anyone.

(I am responding to rhetoric I have seen on mostly tumblr. Obviously, the US media has largely swung in the opposite direction. I've tried very hard to avoid drawing false moral equivalencies here, or even the appearance of such.)

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Yes! This is exactly how I felt when I first joined the fandom and saw this too! There’s literally nothing there, zero reason to consider her culpable for anything! It’s not something that, pre-fandom, ever occurred to me as a view that anyone would have! And then I come into fandom and the victim-blaming, implied or explicit, is woven through nearly every Sirion fic out there, and near’y every fic where Elwing appears post-canon - why didn’t she prevent this! As if that’s the crucial decision point, not (or in addition to) the Fëanoreans’ decision to slaughter everyone! And the handful of fics that actually take Elwing’s side get comments like “I just can’t sympathize with her” from people who have no problem sympathizing with the mass-murderers who decided, in a land being overrun by Morgoth, that the thing they wanted to do was not to fight against Morgoth and defend people, but to slaughter the last remaining Elven (and last remaining Edain) settlement in mainland Beleriand!

The Third Kinslaying is horrifying, gut-wrenching, up there with the Nirnaeth as one of the two saddest moments in the Silm for me, but it’s horrifying and miserable because it shows how utterly far the Fëanoreans have fallen, that they claimed to come to Middle-earth to fight Morgoth, but instead they’re doing his work by wiping out the last settlement that remains, the one that Morgoth couldn’t reach because it was protected by Ulmo’s waters at the mouths of Sirion (I think that is the reasonable conclusion from Ulmo telling Gondolin to evacuate to there).

And yet the blaming of Elwing is so pervasive in fanfic, including in some extremely popular ones, that it’s become communicated to a lot of people as a default belief/perspective. It’s not like that standard is held anywhere else - no one says “well, Morgoth wanted the Silmarils, so Fëanor should have just given them to him and prevented violence,” because “you should avoid violence by giving the bad guys what they want so they don’t kill you” is very much not the message of Tolkien’s works. I think it is because, while most people in fandom recognize that the Fëanoreans are guilty and to blame for the attack on Sirion, some Fëanorean fans can’t bear to hold them as solely responsible. The guilt needs to be divided to be bearable. (This is also done for the other kinslayings, but without the same level of blame focused on a specific character - gender likely plays a role in this.) I’ve seen it in other fandoms as well [for Stormlight Archive fans - Rathalas, natch], with nearly identical arguments - for example, speaking of the perpetrators almost as a force of nature (“of course they would do this, it was inevitable that they would do this, so the onus was on the victim to prevent it by giving them what they wanted”) as a way of deflecting blame - as if our faves were a natural disaster rather than a person with volition who made evil choices.

It, and all the other victim-blaming of people attacked or harmed by the Fëanoreans, is one of the ugliest things about this fandom; it’s created a sort of mirrorverse alternate reality that’s imposed on new entrants. Things that are nonexistent in canon are spoken of as if they’re just fact, to the point that people can absorb them as defaults.

Ok, my bio has had “Elwing defense squad” in it for a while now and my Elwing nauglamir post has been getting a lot of notes so I think it’s time I actually make a proper post defending my fave. And what I want to say is that I firmly do not believe that any significant number of third kinslaying victims who reembodied in Valinor would blame her for kinslaying, nor that she is any kind of pariah in Valinor. This is because the decision to hold on to the Silmaril is one that is, by and large, supported by the Sirionites:

“The Elwing and the people of Sirion would not yield the jewel…least of all not while Earendil their Lord was on the sea, for it seemed to them that in the Silmaril lay the healing and the blessing that had come upon their houses and their ships”. (Silmarillion, Of Earendil and the War of Wrath pp. 296).

Here we can see that in one short paragraph, it is made clear multiple times directly and through pronouns that the decision to keep the Silmaril is the majority one. We can argue till the cows come home about whether it was the right decision, but it was not simply hers.

In addition, the Sirionites are not the only people Elwing is connected with. When Earendil goes to make his plea, Elwing goes to seek the Teleri her kin, and they “befriended her” and “were filled with pity and wonder” at her stories of Beleriand (Silmarillion, Of Earendil and the War of Wrath, pp. 299). Furthermore, it’s because of her that they grant the use of their ships to the host of the Valar “they hearkened to Elwing, who was the daughter of Dior Eluchil and come of their own kindred” (Silmarillion, Of Earendil and the War of Wrath, pp. 301). (Incidentally, this is another reason I don’t think the Sirionites would hate her- it’s in a significant part thanks to her that the world was saved.)

Also, if Idril and Tuor reached Valinor, wouldn’t they want to see their daughter in law? Then there’s her dead and potentially returned kin- wouldn’t Finrod want to see and care for the last descendent of the House of Beor in Aman? If they come back, what about Turgon and Elenwe her grandparents, and Nimloth her mother? Yes, Elwing lives mostly alone, but it’s my conclusion that this is out of her own choice, because she is solitary by nature, and not because she is widely disliked.

[lucidasidera]

Can we talk about guilt? I’ve seen a lot of discourse that suggests that Bucky feeling guilty and atoning is a good thing, it’s him finding autonomy even if he isn’t ultimately responsible. It’s his decision and his feelings and it should be respected, even encouraged.

And that’s true, to a point. The guilt, primarily, signals that Bucky is a good person. Empathetic, trustworthy people experience guilt. But more than that, guilt is a protective emotion when it comes to trauma. It is much more terrifying, for the self, to acknowledge and internalize the lack of control and agency (and therefore the lack of responsibility) that accompanied the traumatic event.

The guilt allows the self to say “I was responsible because I was not powerless” since the greater terror comes from understanding that the trauma happened because of a lack of control, with the obvious implication that that control can again be removed at any time. It is safer to be guilty than to be vulnerable. It is safer to be culpable than to be at the mercy of an unjust universe. This is a very, very common feeling in survivors of rape or child abuse. It is the basis of survivor’s guilt.

Thing is, trauma-related guilt is an adaptive behavior in the short term (because it allows the victim to regain a sense of control) but a maladaptive behavior in the long term, because the level of self-deception involved starts affecting how one views both the world and the very concept of agency. It is, at its heart, an avoidant behavior. Trauma-related guilt eventually worsens PTSD symptoms. If it goes on too long, one starts to believe - sincerely and not as a defense mechanism - in one’s own culpability and therefore doubt one’s own moral worth.

And again, Bucky feeling guilt is legitimate. The audience being made to feel that Bucky ought to feel responsible is the problem. In TFATWS they neatly define Bucky’s trauma as guilt and then have him resolve the guilt with “acts of service,” as Sam says, which means avoiding recovery altogether. Bucky has internalized his shame and moved on, never acknowledging the actual trauma: powerlessness.

I will also come out and say that my BEST-CASE SCENARIO would have been for TFATWS to just ignore Bucky’s trauma recovery entirely and assume that he regained his sense of self-worth, agency, and trust in Wakanda. It could have happened off screen, much like most of his recovery of self between CA:TWS and CA:CW. I also have no problem with Bucky choosing to dedicate his life to being of service to others, that’s healthy and admirable, but not if it’s borne of a misplaced need for atonement because that undermines the foundations of Bucky’s own sense of self.  

(NB. I am not a therapist, just a survivor. The guilt is real.)

[dendrite-blues]

Fluff, and Why it Triggers Me

Odd start, isn’t it? I bet most people reading this are like “whaaat?”

Which....fair. I know it’s weird. I didn’t have an explanation either, for the longest time. Like 15 years. Seriously.

I just knew that fluff fics made me irrationally sad, angry, and lonely.

I avoided these stories so hard that I left whole discord servers just to get away from them. I developed aggression and frustration with the people who posted about it. I starting getting annoyed just by looking at the prompts channel because it was most often used by the fluff mongers. It’s super unhealthy.

But that begs a really obvious and hard to answer question:

How the fuck could fluff—a genre explicitly about heaping the reader in good feelings—be triggering?

Well that really gets to the heart of trauma and the ways it warps cognition, particularly childhood trauma. If you’d like to see me unpack that trauma, keep reading. Otherwise, have a nice day. :)

We learn to process the world through our parent’s eyes, so when our parents are not good blueprints we end up with some whack ass mental hallways and trapdoors to the haunted basement that healthy people just don’t have. 

For instance:

Fluff-->feelings of comfort, love, support, acceptance Angst-->feelings of hurt, sadness, fear, loneliness, depression

But when I read fluff the story doesn’t have that intended effect on me. I actually feel most of the words listed after angst when I read fluff. And vice versa, reading angst makes me feel seen, validated, comforted, and like I’m not alone.

Having given the matter lots and LOTS of thought, I can finally articulate why.

Because when I look back at my life and particularly my childhood I cannot remember a single specific incident in which I was given comfort or support when I needed it. (God and I’m tearing up just typing that out, fuck’s sake.)

My parents were not outright abusive. They were wealthy, they gave me the best clothes, food, toys, and education money can buy, but they were utterly oblivious to the emotional needs of a child. If I cried I was given a toy or food or told to stop complaining when I had it so good. 

Any negative emotions were treated as an aberration, and when someone broke down in our house it was seen as a display of that person’s weakness, or laziness, or lack of gratitude for the riches we had been blessed with.

To my parents happiness was the natural state of a person, and being unhappy meant you must have done something wrong, or you must be broken in some way. 

Receiving comfort or support required you to first prove that you were entirely the victim, because otherwise your pain and hurt would be answered with a lecture about how you deserve whatever happened because of X, Y, and Z.

The worst part is that my parents are exceptionally logical, orderly people and so most of the time they had very coherent, rational reasons behind their painting of you as a bad person who caused your own problem. It’s a very insidious kind of message that leads you to punishing yourself in their stead, since you leave totally convinced of your own culpability and badness.

My family has two children, me and my sister. I think it’s pretty telling how we turned out because we really are the two most natural responses to growing up in this kind of environment.

I am a hyper competent perfectionist who cannot handle even the slightest insinuation of critique. She is a pathological victim who seems allergic to success and accountability.

When negative emotions are a punishment for wrong doing there are only two ways you can respond. 

Either you eliminate failure and unhappiness from your life so that you do not need support—me.

Or you focus all of your energy on deflecting blame to others so that you can present yourself to your parent as a helpless victim and receive the emotional support that you need—my sister.

But this post is about fluff so let’s get back to that.

Why does fluff trigger me?

Because it confronts me with how healthy people respond to a loved one in pain, and in the course of witnessing that freely given love, I am subconsciously told/reminded of how my ‘loved ones’ failed to do that.

It’s not a conscious thing, as I said at the beginning I went 15 years without ever making this connection. I just knew that flew filled me to the brim with resentment, disgust, discomfort, and anger.

And all of these feelings happen because on some level, my soul is hurting. It’s hurting so bad because I know that I deserved that. 

I know that I deserved to be the protagonist of a fluff fic when I came out. I know I deserved that when my busted wrist killed my illustration career. I know I deserved that when I failed to finish my Masters degree. I know I deserved that when my film work dried up and I lost everything. I know I deserve that now, for no reason other than because I’m sad and doing nothing in particular with my life.

And I wasn’t.

Not because my parents didn’t offer me comfort, but because I learned to never offer myself comfort. I learned to regard my own pain as a weakness, and my desire for support as a character flaw. I learn to hate and resent that weakness inside me, and to project that hate bitterly onto other people who were capable of being comforted and were capable of enjoying soft, fluffy stories. 

Because we humans never want to think that we are the broken ones. It’s too scary. Too much cognitive dissonance. It’s easier to think that everyone else is just stupid or weak or shamefully self indulgent in their reading habits.

But that’s not true, and thinking in that way certainly isn’t healthy for me. In fact it works against my recovery to regard stories about healthy coping/relationships with distain and resentment.

So I’m making the effort from now on to retrain myself, and to unpack all of those emotions I denied myself. To—as some psychologists say—re-parent my inner child.

I might never be a fluff fanatic, and I certainly am not going to stop enjoying angst. I will always love hurt/comfort (or ‘earned comfort’ as I’ve started calling it, to remind myself of why I conveniently allowed myself to enjoy this genre even though it is basically the same as fluff). But from now on I’m not going to let myself look down my nose as fluff and fluff readers. 

I’m going to take those negative feelings and ask myself, “Why do I hate this?”

Is it because fluff is stupid, shallow, annoying, and pointless? Or is because I’ve been conditioned to see love and comfort as things I’m not allowed to want, and that I am weak for wanting?

I’m not sure if anyone else has this reaction to fluff. I know that it’s without a doubt the most popular genre in every single ship tag ever. I know that I have felt freakish and deformed for disliking it because it was so overwhelmingly popular and so universally regarded as harmless and pure and good.

I don’t know if I’m the only one, but if I’m not then I hope this helps the one other person with this problem. I hope it helps you in your recovery, and that it makes you feel seen.

Pull out your inner child, and give them a hug from me. Because we’ve both been deprived of things every single human being needs, and that’s a wound that nobody deserves to carry into adulthood.

[weirdcanucks]

For today's feature film, we look at Kevan Funk’s critically-acclaimed debut feature Hello Destroyer. The film swept Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle, winning 5 awards including Best Canadian Picture, Best BC Film, and Best Director. I've compiled a bunch of reviews and filmmaker interviews on the institutionalized violence, hockey culture, the craft of filmmaking and the Todd Bertuzzi case. 

Synopsis

A young junior hockey player Tyson Burr’s life is shattered when a routine hockey play goes bad. In an instant his life is abruptly turned upside down; torn from the fraternity of the team and the coinciding position of prominence, he is cast as a pariah and ostracized from the community. As he struggles with the repercussions of the event, desperate to find a means of reconciliation and a sense of identity, his personal journey ends up illuminating troubling systemic issues around violence.

Where to Stream

CBC Gem if you are in Canada

Keep Reading for

Directors Guild of Canada post screening Q&A: does the Todd Bertuzzi case inspired the film?

Aggressively Canadian: An interview with the director Kevan Funk

Hello Destroyer explores the thin line between hockey menace and model

Review from Josh Cabrita of VIFF

More filmmaker Q&As

Content Warning: Violence 

🎤 DGC Post screening Q&A

Audience: I grew up in BC. I remember in high school, the Todd Bertuzzi case was hung over the news of the city for a while. And I was just wondering if that's something that inspired this film at all?

Funk: Yeah. Todd Bertuzzi is my favourite hockey player of all time. So, yes definitely. I grew up in Banff, but I was a Canucks fan. The Todd Bertuzzi thing was something that I found remarkably frustrating at the time because I remember it really well too. I remember the hit on Steve Moore ahead of time when he hit Naslund, and I remember very well there was this intense bloodlust in Vancouver for retribution. And I don't mean just like among the fans. (There were) literally editorials about being like "we get pushed around too much, we need some identity. You can't let this happen, blah blah blah." And Todd was that guy. I still think Todd certainly deserves to be held responsible for what happened as an individual in that incident. But again, like that moment in terms of thinking about cultural culpability and how the idea of an act of violence extends beyond just a perpetrator of a crime and the victim and how a much broader group of people are implicated. I'm I really don't believe this idea of good and evil is something that really exists. There's like a select handful of people who we might be able to define as evil. But I think most violence that exists has a lot to do with social or cultural conditions around the people who are involved in that.

The Todd Bertuzzi thing was definitely something that informed it. I was hesitant to talk about it earlier before the film sort of got its own life and took out its own legs because I didn't want it to be "the Todd Bertuzzi story" because it informed it. But so did Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, a lot of these guys. And to be honest, the fundamental thing that started me on writing this film was Errol Morris's film Standard Operating Procedure. It's about the prison guards at Abu Ghraib who were busted for this despicable torture. He does this incredible thing of holding them morally responsible for what they did, but also showing that they're victims of a system that essentially asked them to do this and then throw them all under the bus to wipe its hands clean when it becomes public. So that came first. But certainly heavily informed by Todd Bertuzzi. I mean, his name is Tyson Burr. You know, there're some strong hockey knots in there.

🎤 Aggressively Canadian: An interview with the director Kevan Funk

NOTEBOOK: You’re a Canadian filmmaker making a film with hockey in it, so there’s an impression that the film is about hockey. But from watching the film there’s a sense that it’s not the game, necessarily, that interests you, that if you were working in a different setting, you’d have made the same film, but about, say, football or the military instead of hockey. Would you say that that’s an accurate assessment?

KEVAN FUNK: Yes. The inclusion of hockey has much more to do with its presence as a cultural institution, because the film is very much about institutionalized violence. I have this frustration with English[-language] Canadian cinema’s lack of boldness in terms of embracing our identity and placing ourselves in Canada. So I knew I wanted to make something that was very Canadian, and so hockey just sort of ended up being that. 

Hockey movies are super interesting in that they’re associated with being very Canadian, but most of them—the majority of them—are goofy comedies that say very little about either Canada or the sport of hockey itself. So again, even though Hello Destroyer wasn’t a film about hockey per se—certainly more the setting than the subject, having that locker room culture be reflective of an actual reality was very important to me, because I don't think that it’s represented properly in most work.

📄 Seventh Row: Hello Destroyer explores the thin line between hockey menace and model

In major junior hockey, players must walk a thin line between what their coaches deem acceptable and unacceptable violence. If players avoid violence, they risk being seen as “soft” by their teammates and employers. At a home game when the team is trailing, the coach, Dale Milbury (a name referencing two notorious champions of hockey violence, Dale Hunter and Mike Milbury), demands that the team “protect the house”. Eager to prove his worth, Tyson throws an illegal check that slams an opposing player face-first into the boards, leaving his opponent with broken vertebrae and a brain hemorrhage.

Televised hockey tends to glorify cheering for violence but provides no explicit reminder of any physical consequences. Hello Destroyer breaks this convention and does not sanitise the violence. In Funk’s hands, a fight is not heroic, gladiatorial combat, but sweaty, desperate grappling, conveyed through the thudding of fists, cries of pain, and, loudest of all, the cheering crowd. Funk frames the fights themselves in claustrophobic close-ups, frequently shifting focus, and never quite providing a clear view as the punches connect. The effect is alienating, and it forces an audience familiar with hockey fights to confront their brutality. Funk implicates fans for enabling violence by foregrounding the pleasure on their faces and the players’ pain through the physical ugliness of the fight.

✏️ Review from Josh Cabrita of VIFF

Kevan Funk’s debut feature, Hello Destroyer, is not only a perceptive exegesis of Canada’s colonial history and cinematic representations of hockey, but also about a myth that all children who play the game grow up with. Funk has stated in interviews that if the film was made in another country, it might’ve been set in the military or a different institution, but the fact that Hello Destroyer -- one of very few Canadian films to grapple with the sport’s hypocrisy -- takes place in the world of junior hockey makes it hard to deny the specifics for the allegory. The buzzing sounds of the overhead lights in a vacant rink, the dress code of having a black suit and tie for every game, the anger expelled at a hockey stick during a coach’s rant: these are all textures and details I’m firmly acquainted with. Yet it’s these same environmental observations that form the basis for a critique of hockey culture's contradictions and hypocrisy: contemplation and belligerence, civility and violence, alienation and ‘community’.

But, above all else, this is a film about culpability: the role complacency, the status quo and generational exchanges play in redirecting guilt to maintain a corrupt system of power. Tyson may not be the main perpetrator against the opposing team’s player (for guilt requires free will - something the film posits is out of his hands), but he’s most certainly guilty of contributing to a culture that normalizes the root causes of such an action: how he willingly shaves his own head after his teammates buzz it in a ritualistic hazing, how he remains silent when a lawyer fills in his voice, and how he stands by as a teammate is awarded the player of the game and parades a traditional indigenous headdress around the dressing room.

🎤 VIFF Post screening Q&A

[lonelier-version-of-you]

I’ve been thinking very in-depth about this, more in-depth than is probably reasonable really, and I think the best candidate for this would have been Fiona Fawcett (the first trial patient to die)’s mum.

- Fiona and her mum were local, IIRC, or at least local enough for Fiona to be treated at Holby, so her mum would have the easiest time getting to Holby to confront Henrik and the most reason to. We’d also already seen Fiona’s mum, so familiarity points!

- Hicham (and any potential other victims, because Holby kept hinting that there were more but never actually addressed it) was at a different hospital, so his/their relatives would have no reason to confront Henrik.

- Rox had no more living relatives according to Henrik.

- They could go for Lana’s mum, which would be really interesting and could be great. But I think that would end up being more about John's history. That would be a worthwhile episode in its own right, but it’s not really what I had in mind for this idea. Using Fiona’s mum would allow the focus to stay on Henrik and how he enabled John.

So yeah, I’d have picked Fiona’s mum for an episode like this. She could’ve turned up at Holby after the truth about John came out (this would be such an obvious way to carry on from Henrik’s promise to John that everything that had happened needed to come out into the open too - to show Henrik actually dealing with the consequences of John’s actions becoming public knowledge), seeking answers from Henrik. The man who brought John to Holby where he could operate on her daughter in the first place.

I’d have to rewatch the Fiona stuff to make absolute sure the details would line up for an episode like this, but yeah, I like this idea.

Of course, the most important part would be letting Fiona’s mum (or whoever it was) be angry. Letting the confrontation be ugly and Henrik be called out on his culpability for John’s actions. Avoiding the “awwh, poor little victim Henrik, you were manipulated by John, this isn’t your fault” narrative that clogged up the very, very little canon aftermath John got - because it’s not what happened, we as the viewers saw what happened and it was Henrik willingly sticking by John no matter what.

I love the thought of an episode where Henrik has to confront not only John’s actions, but his own, and has nowhere to hide. Where no matter how much he tries to do his ‘run away and pretend it’s not happening’ thing, it doesn’t work. Where he has to really, truly see the pain that has been caused by John’s trial... plus, it would tie in wonderfully to his whole “you have to face what you’ve done” speech to John at the lake. (And to some degree, even him saying nearly 2 years prior that exposing Fredrik’s own unethical trial, and potentially never seeing Fredrik again as a result, was “the price I have to pay for my humanity”. That would be another thing an episode like this could do - point out the difference in how he responded to Fredrik’s trial vs. John’s.) And seeing him struggle to find a way to live with what he and John have done... gah, it would be so interesting.

Anyway, if I ever finally write The Henrik Breakdown Storyline That Never Was as a fanfic, I’ll totally include something like this in there.

I’m now imagining if we’d had an episode with Henrik being confronted by a relative/spouse/friend of one of Gaskell’s victims.

I honestly didn’t realise until now that I wanted this, but I do. It would have been so good.

And it would’ve worked so well as a step on the way to Henrik having a breakdown, as well. Why didn’t we get this? (Or any kind of aftermath to Gaskell, but particularly this.)

[malachi-walker]

What character(s) from other fandoms that you're a part of remind you the most of Catra? Personally, I don't think I've seen too many, aside from maybe Vegeta from DBZ and maybe Jason Todd from DC comics but that's about it for me

Ok, anon, thanks for your patience. Let's go.

Firstly, I have two ladies that do give me a similar vibe to Catra (though they aren't 100% matches as you'll see.) And I want you to take particular note of that: it's very telling that the characters you mentioned are both dudes. This is something I have been thinking about for literally decades because it is a deeply entrenched stereotype in our culture: male abuse victims are angry, frustrated loners who lash out until they find that one (girl) person that gets through their facade, female abuse victims are portrayed as either anxious messes (more common in recent years) or as just... These smiling caricatures who continue to pretend to be happy because that's what our societies expect women to be. And this is something I took note of at a very early age, because as someone growing up with an abusive birth father I looked to the MALE characters as a guide book on how to act, because getting angry and lashing out was what made sense to me at the time and I resented the hell out of that unspoken implication that I was supposed to just suck it up and plaster on a smile when I wanted to rage against the injustice of what I was dealing with. In hindsight it wasn't great behavior, but it was what I needed to keep myself sane at the time. I'm not even exaggerating when I say I have waited my whole life for a character like Catra: someone who is reflective of my experiences as an ex-abuse victim, someone who is angry and wrathful and still allowed to be sympathetic. Now on to our two ladies.

First up: Vriska Serket from Homestuck. (I know, Homestuck is a huge fandom with a lot of assholes, but I do still enjoy the original comic. I just don't interact with the fandom.) Vriska and Catra both have similar vibes in the way they project their outward personas of being the badass bitch who takes no shit and is on top of things, but we all know that's a lie. And they both come from abusive backgrounds: Vriska was forced to become a killer at a very young age because her parental guardian (a literal giant spider) would eat her if Vriska didn't feed her other kids. Doesn't excuse her jerkass tendencies or her terrible actions, but that was how she started out. And Catra's deal with SW needs no explanation.

They both have developed very similar gadfly tendencies in order to maintain a sense of control around other people (though Vriska is a lot more mean spirited about it) and both have moments when the facade cracks and they show actual sincerity and frustration at themselves and other people. The main difference between them is that Vriska's actions are driven by a sense of grandiose self-importance that she has cultivated and fed into as a way to avoid looking at her own actions (because she's the best, so everything she does is awesome, right?) whereas Catra's primary driving motivation is pain: either making sure she doesn't have to hurt anymore or hurting those who hurt her. Plus Catra grapples with her sense of guilt a lot throughout Spop and maintains those sympathetic undertones while Vriska's moments of clarity are so rare that you basically have to keep a chart to locate them. But you could totally picture them both teaming up to make fun of their respective frenemies, assuming they didn't kill each other first for reminding themselves of their deep underlying self-loathing.

Second candidate: Anthy Himemiya from Revolutionary Girl Utena. And boy howdy, if anyone is interested in this show and wants to avoid spoilers, skip to the end now, because we're going on a deep and dark journey here.

At first glance, she and Catra don't have much in common. In fact, she seems to fit the stereotype I described above: the placid smiling doll who takes the abuse and keeps going. Key word: seems to. Anyone who actually watches the show knows exactly where I'm going here.

We're introduced to Anthy as the "Rose Bride": the prize in a series of sword fights between students at a very strange school, with the ultimate promise being that whoever owns the Rose Bride at the end of the duels will gain some nebulous ultimate power. And yeah, I said "own" for a reason: whoever possesses the Rose Bride effectively owns her and some of the most uncomfortable scenes in the show reinforce the fact that Anthy tailors her thoughts and actions to whoever currently controls her. And as you can expect, this leads to BUCKETS of abuse. Literally everyone in this show is culpable in some manner for this, no matter how well intentioned.

But remember that "seems to?" Because that's only one side of Anthy; the outward persona if you will. On the other side of the coin you have Anthy the Witch, and that's where the parallels with Catra come into play and why Anthy was my go-to abuse representation before Spop rocked my world. Because the big twist we find out at the end of the series is that Anthy and her older brother Akio (formerly Dios) are the former literal personifications of the fairytale damsel in distress princess and the noble prince on a white horse, respectively.

But the balance was upset: having to constantly go around saving people was literally killing Dios, because one of the major points of RGU is that you can assist people in saving themselves but doing it yourself strips them of agency and traps them in a cycle of needing to be saved again and again. The more people the noble prince saved, the more people needed saving. When it became clear that he couldn't keep going, Anthy took a stand and prevented the people coming for Dios (angry that he wasn't saving them anymore) from getting to him, and thus incurred the wrath of everyone and got skewered alive by an angry mob in the process. This isn't hyperbole: the role of the Rose Bride is to instinctively bring out the disdain and hatred of everyone on the planet. It's a punishment for stepping out of line, for not being the placid princess who needs to be rescued anymore.

Because we're operating on fairy tale logic, no longer being a princess means that Anthy became a witch, and no longer being the prince made Dios into satanic archetype Akio. So behind the scenes of the entire show, Anthy is the witch assisting her brother in orchestrating the duels, and their ultimate goal is to find someone pure of heart enough to embody those princely virtues Dios once possessed and to steal that power so Akio can return to being who he once was. All of the psychological torments and head games are designed to weed out the potential candidates to find that special someone... Except it's an impossible goal because no human being can live up to that standard. And with each atrocity they commit it becomes even more impossible to return to being that person.

Ok, tangent done, here's where it gets interesting: Anthy is a character with two sides to her, the suffering Rose Bride fated to endure the hatred of the entire world and the Wicked Witch who manipulates and orchestrates the torment of those around her. But here's the deal: she's a victim too. She's a victim of a system that won't let her be anything other than these two binaries; she's a victim of her brother who has all the power over her and has trapped her in a codependent incestuous relationship, and I don't care how awful the things she's done are: nobody deserves to go through the shit she does. So with all of that in mind, the actions that she goes through as the witch make perfect sense. Why shouldn't she torment these people who do nothing but abuse her and deny her of agency? Even the best hearted of the duellists (aka the ones who don't hit her or abuse her sexually) nonetheless fall into the trap of projecting their own biases and expectations onto her, biases that her role dictates she carry out. Her actions as the witch aren't right, but nothing about this situation is. That's the entire point.

And that's where she ties into being like Catra. Catra does some truly fucked up things, but it doesn't cancel out the fact that she's an abuse victim that has been literally tortured for most of her life for no good reason and has received zero acknowledgement of that abuse in universe. And much like Anthy, she can't begin to heal until the situation is acknowledged, because that's literally step one of breaking the cycle: confirming that this is not okay and that no one deserves the shit she's been through. Just knowing that herself isn't enough: it's acknowledgement from others that enables that process to begin, because no one can recover from abuse in a vacuum. You need outside people to be touchstones, because so much of recovering from abuse is confronting the way it warps your perception and thought processes. You need at the minimum one normal perspective to give you that, preferably more, but one minimum.

Hurting the people who care about her is definitely not okay and I'm not excusing her actions in that category, but it doesn't change the fact that she is justified in wanting to rage and lash out, because she is still trapped in that cycle. She can't heal or let go because the process hasn't even been started. She's not off the hook for the things she's done, but neither should she be automatically condemned without taking those factors into account (which is the entire reason why the distinction between an excuse and a justification exists.)

And if I can be a little pithy... The other similarity between Catra and Anthy is I can guarantee that in twenty years people will STILL be arguing over whether or not Catra "deserved" to be freed from her abusive situation.

Good God this turned into an essay. Hope this makes up for how long it took, anon. And anyone else who makes it this far, treat yourself. You earned it.

[nellie-elizabeth]

The Handmaid's Tale: Under His Eye (3x07)

This episode was... kind of all over the place. As is always true with this show, there was plenty to enjoy, but I felt myself very frustrated with the overall scope of this installment. Let's take a look.

Cons:

The problem with this episode is... well, it's June, isn't it? I've talked in previous reviews about her plot armor, and that comes out in full force here. She's so lucky that Mrs. Lawrence is docile and nonthreatening. She's so lucky that nobody figures out what she was up to at that school. She's so lucky that when it comes down to it, the Martha helping her is the one who gets punished, even though she was the one pushing.

And what are we meant to make of the ending of this episode? June participates (is forced to participate) in the execution of various subversives, including the Martha who was helping her with the chance to see Hannah. Is her look of disgust and vindication aimed at Lydia for forcing her to do this, or is she pissed off in that moment at the Martha, for failing her? And then she goes apeshit on Ofmatthew when she realizes that her companion is the one who turned on the Martha... which is just... I mean, again, the plot armor is unbelievable, and June's attitude is kind of abhorrent here. There's this moment when she's sympathizing with Ofmatthew over her complex feelings over being pregnant again. But when it comes down to it, June seems to have forgotten that anybody else in this society is suffering. She's not the only one who has been removed from her child, and yet she's acting like she's the sole victim in this scenario.

And there's the elephant in the room... race relations in Gilead. I read another review recently that talked about how we've all been giving this show the benefit of the doubt, waiting for them to start having nuance as related to race in this society. The show seems to have some crazy idea that they can get away with ignoring the issue entirely. Are we meant to believe that Gilead is a 100% color-blind non-racist society? That's some crap. You can't get away with that. In this episode you have the Martha that June is partially responsible for killing, and also Ofmatthew, both black women who are basically victims of June's personal crusade, and is the show grappling with the effects of that at all? Nope, of course not. I feel incredibly under-qualified to talk about this subject, and others have said it better than me, but the point is... they need to get some coherence in the way they regard race in Gilead. Ignoring it isn't working for them.

I really like Mrs. Lawrence and I want to talk about that in a second, but first I need to complain just a little bit more about June, because... what was her plan, here? She wanted to see Hannah at the school, so she drags poor Mrs. Lawrence into it? And then she screws it up and freaks everyone out and doesn't even get a glimpse of her daughter, so... what was the point of all of this? I can understand the desperation angle. June will do anything for her daughter. Okay, fair enough. But this didn't read like the actions of a desperate mother. This was a calculated move by someone who appears to be really bad at being a rebel.

Pros:

Mrs. Lawrence, though... she's interesting. We're not given a clear understanding of what exactly is going on in her head. She's clearly got some PTSD or mental illness, but we're not being given specifics. Unlike the way race is dealt with in Gilead, I do think there's some real thought and cleverness to the way neuro-divergent behavior is treated by the narrative. Because... Gilead ignores it. They push it under the rug and just keep pretending everyone can fit into their assigned roles. Janine is an example of this, and so is Mrs. Lawrence. As long as Commander Lawrence can keep her behind closed doors and keep her calm, nobody needs to be bothered about what's going on with her. The fact that June exploits what she sees as a weakness with this woman is troubling, but in a way I think the narrative is aware of. She's willing to manipulate her in order to get to Hannah, but she also feels a connection to her, and recognizes her as a fellow victim of this system, despite Mrs. Lawrence's privileges as a Wife. I continue to be intrigued by the Lawrences, and I want to see much more.

I debated about whether to put Serena and Fred in the "Pros" or "Cons" section, because it depends hugely on where this is going. If, in future weeks, we see that Serena finds out that Fred is keeping Nichole in Canada for political reasons, and that causes a final rift between them, and Serena becomes a full-on rebel... well, I don't think I'll be happy with this. I think it'll be a lazy excuse to avoid further examination of Serena's culpability. But if instead, we continue to see Serena being seduced by the possibility of life in D.C., if we see that she's okay with Handmaids being literally silenced... and then Fred betrays her, and she tries to have it both ways? Yes. That's the story I want to see. Serena is a villain. She's a villain played by an incredibly talented actress. She's a villain who really does long for a child and would probably be a very doting mother... but she's a Bad Guy. I have my fingers crossed that the show isn't going to forget that moving forward. The sight of the Commanders and their Wives having a lovely little party, of Serena giggling with the ladies and sharing a romantic dance with Fred... that's chilling, and I think it's meant to be. Serena is seduced by the privilege of her position. That's the person she really is.

The best thing about this episode was the stuff with Emily and Moira. I was just complaining about Moira not having enough to do this season, and while I still wish we could have even more, it was so fun to check in with her and see that she is adjusting pretty well to her life in Canada. Emily is also trying to adjust, but she's having to come to terms with her behavior while in Gilead. She killed people. Yes, in the context of her life there, she was doing what she needed to do to survive. But still...

And then there's Moira, who has also killed. These two women don't have a lot in common, which I thought was adorably demonstrated when Moira remarked in frustrated amusement that they're the only two lesbians ever to have nobody in common. They end up going to a protest, to try and hold Canadian officials accountable for negotiating with Gilead. Things get heated, and Moira and Emily are both arrested.

There's something so great about seeing this moment of resistance and response. Because of course it would be scary to be arrested, no matter the circumstances, but there's such a clear-cut difference between how Canada responds to this kind of behavior, vs. how Gilead does. Emily and Moira are chatting casually in their cells, waiting for Sylvia and Luke to come pick them up. And they're angry about what's happening in Canada, but they're allowed to be angry out loud. I love watching these two women bond. They have so many life experiences in common, but they are fundamentally different people. Watching them play off of one another teaches me so much about both of them as individuals. I particularly like the way Moira is putting in this extra effort to make sure Emily is adjusting.

And did anyone notice the heart-stopping plot moment that happened during that protest? Emily says, out loud in front of Canadian officials, that June gave Nichole to her. Obviously we the audience knew that, and Serena and Fred knew that, but the world at large technically doesn't know that June was in on the plan to smuggle Nichole out of Gilead. I'm not sure if they are going somewhere with this, but when Emily said that, I literally said "oh, shit" out loud to my TV screen. This is the kind of good plotting that has always excited me about this show. This season has been lacking in genuinely intriguing "oh shit" moments, because a lot of it is the same horrors we've seen before. But this one? Dang. I'll be keeping my eye out.

So that's that. This episode was definitely a weak point, but a weak point in this show is still definitely worth watching for so many reasons. I still have faith that we've got more good material ahead of us.

6.5/10

[yobaba30]

Brace yourself, dear reader, for today’s topic is rage. Not just any garden-variety rage, but its narcissistic kind, one of the darkest and most destructive manifestations of our Shadow.

A narcissist’s rage is always there, sometimes barely under the surface, sometimes hovering above it in the form of sadistic cruelties dispensed casually without specific reason, just because (that stupid dog was in my way, you are so fat and ugly, only idiots park their cars in this spot, and no one talks to me like that — any or no reason would do). There are, however, solid enough explanations of its existence.

You may have heard of Donald Trump’s very bad day the other Tuesday — or rather what would have been a very bad day for any normal person / presidential candidate confronted with his inaccuracies and lies. For Donald, however, it was just Tuesday as usual, complete with playing the Perpetual Victim™ of the Cruel and Unforgiving Press, and humiliating people who dared to question him about these pesky things known as facts.

The sordid as usual spectacle was instructive, as is everything else coming from the man, in the dynamics of narcissistic pathology.

First, the bombast. His over-the-top pronouncements about his huuuge charitable efforts are meant to shock and awe the audience into unquestioning submission.

Second, should any audience member retain his or her bearings and still manage to persist in their questioning, next comes the unloading of the massive victimhood complex designed to cow them into silence filled, presumably, with commiseration and appreciation for the Put Upon Donny and His Unique Suffering (and, oh, how he suffers! only a narcissist can suffer so — you mere mortals / losers cannot possibly comprehend it).

Third — since, remarkably enough, the first two options did not quite work, a sign perhaps that some of the press members are growing spines — there followed a predictable, but still shocking, dose of sadism in the form of insults, direct and less so, meant to shut everyone up for good.

It is instructive to watch The Donald, who epitomizes dishonesty and sleaze, rage at the reporters for being “dishonest” and call them sleazy — for trying to extract some honesty and truth from him. He shames them — or futilely attempts to, given that his moral standing is non-existent and reality is decidedly not on his side — with the ease and force that indicates the extent of his own fear of shame.

This sequelae, seen above, in response to shame is classic for any narcissist, especially one of this extreme caliber, for very obvious reasons:

The narcissist tends to be very sensitive to shame, which he perceives as humiliation: a blow to his ego (sense of self) and/or a threat to what he sees as his important status compared to others. This sensitivity is the reason why he tends to lash out at those who shame or appear to shame him in any way. His reactions to shame are grossly disproportionate to the “offense;” he will hold grudges and seek revenge sometimes till death, his own or his “offender’s,” whichever comes first. Hell hath no fury like a narcissist scorned.

Shame is so difficult for a narcissist to tolerate because it arises from an exposure of some flaw of his to others. He has many serious shortcomings; but in his own eyes he is perfect and surpasses everyone else, as he will let you know time and again, directly and not. He must retain this grandiose delusion of superiority and perfection at all costs because this is all he has. His bigger than life persona hides an empty inner core, devoid of meaningful values and attachments. A prick of shame exposing any flaws in the narcissist’s façade has a potential of deflating it and effectively destroying him since there is nothing of substance to fall back on within his inner world.

The rage with which a narcissist reacts to shame or humiliation thus deflects attention from his inner emptiness. That rage is often a predominant emotion, particularly in a narcissist who feels chronically deprived of the admiration and perks he believes he deserves (and as his need for admiration and perks is bottomless, so then is his sense of deprivation). It does not take much to provoke it: a simple, neutral observation or a request can suddenly unleash it on an unsuspecting victim.

The vehement defense against shame is also another reason why a narcissist never takes responsibility for his behavior. Why should he anyway, when he’s perfect and does no wrong? Nothing is ever his fault, no matter how great a mess he creates. Responsibility is always projected outwards, onto others, as blame. Admitting his culpability in anything could lead to shame and cracks in the false façade that defines his character — and his ego won’t allow that. It is a matter of life and death, ‘psychically’ speaking.

The flip side of his shame intolerance is his desire to humiliate others. It comes as naturally to him as breathing. He derives pleasure from inflicting on others the kind of pain he himself wants to avoid at all costs. Humiliating other people is almost as satisfying as winning. It helps that the two often go together in the narcissist’s life. In fact, humiliating others is itself a win. And he likes to win.

What we have seen in Donald’s behavior was a relatively mild version of narcissistic aggression in response to shame, but it gives us a glimpse of what’s beneath it. We are still in the wooing phase, and Donald is, believe it or not, on his best behavior.

He is still The Charming Donald (or what passes for charming in Trumpland), trying to curry our favor and votes. If he makes it into the White House, then we will get to know his true self, unhampered by all these frivolous niceties.

We must appreciate the often sadistic and always revealing quality of insults dished out by The Donald at the people who try to confront him with reality, because, in the Freudian-slippage way, they expose his shadow — take this one, directed at ABC’s Tom Llamas on Tuesday:

You’re a sleaze because you know the facts and you know the facts well.

In this breathtaking attack, The Donald conveyed more than he wished. While his intent was to imply that he was being unfairly (but of course) criticized by the reporter who should know better, he let us know, Freudian-slippage style, what we have observed time and again: that reality as we know it with its pesky facts is optional — and threatening — for him, because he lives in his own version of it, where we all should join him (if we knew what’s good for us).

This again ties in with his pathological defense against shame. A narcissist’s facts and facts as most of us know them are distinctly incompatible, and you bring it up at your own risk.

Should the truth — those inconvenient realities of his life and his character as the rest of us see them — be revealed, he would be emotionally annihilated, so he cannot allow that. Yes, a narcissist would kill, easily, to protect his fragile ego from this unforgivable, to him, insult of the truth.

That narcissistic rage attacks can be deadly we see in, for example, the tragic and seemingly incomprehensible instances of lethal domestic violence where a narcissistically injured spouse, usually a husband, lashes out at his wife who may have offended him “for the last time” by confronting him with some imperfection of his (as in, Would you take your shoes off the table, please?). We can also see it, brazenly displayed, in the lives of genocidal tyrants. Saddam Hussein, for instance, was known to invite his advisers to give him honest feedback, and then execute those who took the honest part seriously. Ditto Stalin.

The epidemic of gun violence in the US, particularly mass shootings — a persistent clamoring of our Shadow to pay attention to its presence, something we equally persistently refuse to do — is also driven largely by narcissistic rage. During a news conference several days ago about the UCLA shooter, the chief of LAPD said the following:

Everybody tries to look for a good reason for this. There is no good reason for this. This is a mental issue, mental derangement.

He was correct that there is no good reason for this and that “mental derangement” is the cause — but we should learn to identify and name this specific mental derangement, called aggrieved entitlement, which is a form of narcissistic rage, already. Our failure to do so, repeatedly and with the kind of stubbornness that suggests willful blindness, is deadly. Whatever other difficulties the UCLA shooter may have experienced, we can assume with a fair degree of certainty that narcissistic entitlement and rage were among them, as it is nearly always the case. For it takes a grand dose of faith in one’s specialness to believe that one has a right to take another’s life — or many — in revenge for whatever slights, real or imagined, one may have experienced.

Tom Llamas’ offense, like those unlucky honest Hussein’s advisers, was, in addition to confronting Trump with cold facts about his charitable inactivities, ignoring those central facts that comprise the narcissist’s reality:

It is not, however, as though his understanding of himself and the world is entirely fact-free. There are three major facts around which his whole reality is organized:

1. I am great.

2. People unfairly malign me.

3. I will show them (they will pay).

Those are not just beliefs — they are facts etched deep in his psyche, and they evoke corresponding emotional states of 1. grandiose pride, 2. sense of victimhood and resentment, 3. desire for revenge, all of which form the core of his sense of self and motivate his actions.

“You’re a sleaze because you know the facts and you know the facts well” — the real facts, about the narcissist’s unsurpassed and unquestioned greatness — and you choose to ignore them. You will pay.

Trump’s gratuitous putdowns hint at the reservoir of narcissistic rage within. If physical violence (or a lawsuit) is not an option, sadistic insults will do. We all remember his gleeful mockery of a disabled reporter; yesterday, he gave us another example when talking about John Kerry’s accident in France last year:

He goes into a bicycle race, and he breaks his leg, and he’s incapacitated. And you know what they’re saying to each other? ‘How dumb is this guy? How dumb?’

The crowd laughed, as WaPo reports.

Narcissistic rage is easily evoked by the weakness of others, which the narcissist finds contemptible and deserving punishment, sometimes giving us hints at his own early traumas he may have experienced as a weak and helpless child at mercy of his harsh and/or cruel caretakers.

It also gives us a close look at other aspects of his shadow. Here is what Trump said about Hillary Clinton this week:

She’s a total mess, she’s unstable, and she can’t be president.

And how he responded when asked why he engaged in Twitter wars with Elizabeth Warren:

Because she is a nasty person, a terrible senator, and it drives her crazy.

These grade-school level barbs, which, like everything else that comes from the man’s mouth, are based on projection, tell us most about his shadow, facts which he does not want to — cannot, at a risk of grave injury — acknowledge of himself: that he is a nasty person, a total mess, unstable, terrible at his job (whatever it really is), and easily driven crazy by petty insults and criticisms. Oh, and that he can’t be president. If only Donald listened to his shadow…

Narcissistic rage is one of the darkest and deadliest forces known to mankind. Before it erupts, it usually simmers and percolates for a long time, fueled by resentment, envy and entitlement, the latter always aggrieved as the narcissist’s need for adulation and glory is insatiable and he can see the world populated by the undeserving, inferior people who nevertheless dare to be happier and/or more successful than he is. It thus creates enemies out of the innocent and often weak who become vessels for the narcissist’s hateful and envious projections.

These sustained projections form a basis of an attitude called the narcissism of minor differences, first described by Freud, where we exaggerate small differences in people who are our neighbors — their dress, the shape of their noses, etc. — in order to feel superior to them and exclude them from our group. This attitude, like anything else based on fear and hatred, easily infects others, already narcissistically predisposed; and the sharing makes the hateful projections grow and spread. The co-existent phenomenon of collective narcissism, which intensifies the in-group ties (and which is unsurprisingly associated with authoritarianism) at the expense of excluding and demonizing those who do not belong to our group, strengthens this pathological, but common and predictable enough process.

Once established as a more or less legitimate shared worldview, the narcissism of minor differences leads to an easy dehumanization of The Other, entrenched in racism and other forms of prejudice. It culminates in mob actions, gang violence, terrorism, and endless internal conflicts and wars, which — because of their grand scale and the magnitude of destruction — are the ultimate expressions of narcissistic rage and the deadliest manifestations of our Shadow.

And we allow this to happen.

Much cyberink has been spilled on analyzing Trump’s enduring appeal to American voters, and lauding his purported political mastery. This predictable but misguided adulation that stems from widespread narcissistic collusion and denial it creates (and the other way around) is exactly what the narcissist desires and aims at extracting from others.

It is unforgivable that our media not only legitimize this destructive individual, but imbue him with all kinds of special skills, attributing to him, with admiration and awe, political genius and media savvy.

Not coincidentally, the same happened with other leaders in human history who shared this character defect: while they were ridiculed by some, they were lauded by the press, domestic and foreign, for their “eloquence” and “brilliant political skills” as they peddled their grandiose dreams of glory alongside contempt and hatred for their “enemies,” The Others.

“This is a marvelous demagogue who can really inspire loyalty.”

“This guy is a clown. He’s like a caricature of himself.”

That’s how the media both idealized and devalued another similar character from the past who set out to show the world how great he was and how much adulation he deserved, Adolf Hitler.

This happens every time with an extreme (psychopathic) narcissistic leader / public character, because his pathology evokes just that very kind of response in people, media people included: it makes us either laugh in disbelief and contempt, or idolize his hyped-up “skills” — which are really nothing more than expressions of his pathology — often both at the same time. And while the public is both amused and mesmerized by the future tyrant’s larger-than-life persona, he ever so persistently marches toward his ultimate goal unimpeded — because the number of those who fall for his narcissistic manipulations is always too large.

The predictable and co-occurring idealization and devaluation are two emotional states that generally define a narcissist’s attitude toward himself (idealization) and others (devaluation; see the insults discussed above). He projects them, primitively — i.e., without any self-reflection or inhibitions, as there is no functioning conscience to impose such “obstacles” on his mental processes and behavior — onto the world and constructs an entire ideology from them.

When dressed up in grandiose and empty sloganeering on patriotism, faith, national purity, and other perverted “ideals,” this pathological process is mistaken for “political brilliance” and other such dangerous nonsense, as it inspires too many people to follow the leader, even if straight into an abyss. His irresistible pull lies not in any specific policies he may be promising (and being blissfully unacquainted with reality, he is always short and/or vague on those), but in the feelings his words engender in his followers, specifically a narcissistic identification with the strongman, which compensates for his followers’ inadequacies; and narcissistic rage, which the strongman embodies and already unleashes on the nation through inciting chaos and violence. The only promises that matter are those which bring in a possibility of revenge for the real and imagined hurts of his followers. That, too, is our Shadow at work.

This phenomenon, part of narcissistic collusion that develops between narcissistic leaders and their followers in any human group and organization, is as common as it is dangerous. It should be obvious that any promises and “serious” pronouncements such a leader makes are not worth the air he wastes uttering them. The only “skills” that he possesses come from his emotional primitivism combined with his grandiosity and lack of conscience, which allow him to unleash the disordered contents of his psyche on the world without any inhibition or compunction.

This appeals to and “awes” people who are psychologically similar, but frightens and repulses, correctly, the rest who are not as primitive and/or disordered and who see where this dangerous process leads. Unfortunately, too many journalists, not to mention Trump’s admirers and supporters, apparently belong in the former camp, as their shadow dangerously colludes with his.

[queernuck]

The Tragedy of Humboldt and The Injustice of Tragedy

The tragedy of the Humboldt Broncos is one that is widely known in the hockey world, is a sort of moment that endures more than any other similar tragedy in part because of its magnitude, because of the way in which it is so singular, such an event beyond itself. Indeed, it appears as an event akin to Baudrillard’s concept of 9/11, one that all but excuses any sins on behalf of the Broncos and mythologizes the team, captures them eternally such that they have achieved a status unimaginable for a junior team in their position. A junior team revered by the pros, by the Hockey Hall of Fame, a hockey team out of time. There is little doubting that the story of the Broncos is tragic, but the sentencing of Jaskirat Sidhu is part of what magnifies exactly goes into the cultural baggage surrounding such a tragedy, and how it informs structures of carceral justice along with their ideological basis, along with the means by which hockey culture is structured, repeated, and spread.

The shock of the Broncos was magnified by the fact that they were travelling to a playoff game, that so many of the victims were so young, they looked like other hockey players, they had the same shade of bleach-blonde hair as part of a tradition many young hockey players follow where they bleach their hair during the playoffs. One of the most emblematic photos from the post-crash scene was a snapped DVD of Slap Shot, a movie that itself is emblematic of the culture of hockey. R-rated, with risqué and frankly dated humor, the comedic structure of the film still holds up rather well, especially when taken with the performance of actors like Paul Newman and the roughness of hockey culture more generally. When pictures of the victims began to come out, the sense of tragedy was only magnified by just how familiar they seemed, how it brought in that recognition of the hockey world as a whole, hockey families, ones who knew the experience of travelling state to state town to town province to province in order to have a shot at, one day, making the pros. The familiarity of this lead to an act of remembrance that was echoed across the hockey world, the leaving out of a hockey stick, to symbolize a stick left out in case any of the boys wanted to grab one and play some shinny.

To again refer to Baudrillard and his media analysis, as well as Deleuzian concepts of the event, this was a moment of automotive violence, of bodies colliding with one another in a new singularity, and this was one such arrangement. Sidhu recognized this as well, as part of the trial process he never asked for a plea bargain, levied no defense, and was willing to accept a maximum sentence because of his guilt over the accident, how he felt after killing 29 despite it being in no small part a fault beyond him, a fault that resulted from the situation he was in. As the editorial in the National Post that I refer to points out, he had merely five days of training and three weeks of driving, only one driving on his own, before the day of the crash. The same day, he had needed a farmer’s help to tow his rig out of soft mud he had been mired in while checking his GPS, having to rely on the farmer’s help after the trucking company he was working for ignored his calls. The tarp covering his load had come loose earlier in the day, requiring an adjustment that had come undone a second time, distracting him as he drove into the intersection where his truck crashed into the Broncos’ bus. The very same intersection has since been improved dramatically, in recognition of both this crash and a previous fatal accident at that very same intersection. A combination of lax regulations in Saskatchewan effectively combined such that an inexperienced driver could meet the Broncos’ bus in such a tragic fashion. 

The trial, which eventually gave Sidhu 8 years in prison as a punishment, was marked by 90 different victim statements, many of them scathing and directed at Sidhu on behalf of the Broncos. So much is captured by the tragedy of the Broncos, and this is yet another part of this: the ease of constructing narratives in the case of "victim impact" statements involves playing off of disparities between the prosecution and the convicted, the way in which structures of culpability and liability are conceived of, and the way in which the symbolic weight of a tragedy becomes something beyond itself, including the problems of ableism and white supremacy in the narratives of hockey as a sport. There is no accident that sled hockey is often considered lesser, is considered a secondary sport and moreover is dominated by narratives around the Team USA sled hockey team and the proliferations of veterans on the team: the way that disabled bodies are only acceptable, only considered worthwhile if they have been deployed in service of empire. Accomodations for disability are not seen as worthwhile specifically because bodies are understood as incomplete, and while that consideration is being extended in part to members of the team left disabled, the way that it is conditional, that it is in part reserving a kind of ability-to-appear, becoming-disabled being conditional on tragedy in some sense involves a pessimism that implies the very structure of hockey culture itself: the way it values keeping the appearance of an intact body, the way in which it values perseverance through injury above all else as part of dedication to the team.

In another sense, the way in which it represented an act of singular violence against not only a team, but a white team at that, lead to the impact of such an accident specifically as one interrelated with hockey. There was a sense where the sport itself suffered a loss with the Broncos, and this was in turn repeated through continuous invocation of the Broncos’ memory. The notion of the team has been used to talk about so many things directly in relation to hockey, a refusal to branch out beyond the sport, the way that hockey culture as a whole is seen as dominating certain hegemonies, Canadian identity, and how the means by which Sidhu could be understood as an “Other” rather than an unlucky indictment of a wider array of conditions placed onto a singular person. The punishment, effectively, is merely additive to what is already clear, that it must be placed on the individual in order to avoid recognizing the structure. 

The same has been more widely true in hockey culture recently, with the means by which the firing of Mike Babcock has revealed a wide range of racist, homophobic, and otherwise revolting harassment that extends down to Junior teams, that is pervasive through the sport, that shapes the ideology of teams like the Broncos and the teams that players will eventually go on to play in, at every single level. When looking to the idea of victim statements, as mentioned in the editorial, their steering of justice is fundamentally reactionary because of the way in which it is linked to “Victim Advocacy” not as a genuine framework of advocating for those most victimized by violence, but rather as a kind of enhancing of already-present violence in the legal system, as a kind extrajudicial recapture of attitudes around how victimization must be understood, and moreover how it must be punished. Carceral violence is the only means through which it can be doled out, is the only way that one can meaningfully affect a close in the disparity between the victimized and the victimizer. 

Of course, things are rarely that simple, and the means by which the judicial system uses structures of convenience in order to then decide exactly what kind of justice can be meted out by such a system. The focus of the editorial in question points to much more reckless acts receiving far less dramatic sentences, that far more intentionally violent acts have been given less violence in a judicial sense. However, the means by which this combined a specific series of evocations of certain values, certain ideological fetishes in order to create the kind of denied-individuality as well as the critical reversal into the individual necessary for the creation of the hockey player. 

The continuation of the tragedy into such an event, the way in which this tragedy is arguably continued by the heavy-handed response, the way that an entire apparatus of justice and carceral retention is symbolized (not to mention the close relationship of many hockey players to such apparatuses due to whiteness) through this tragedy makes it such that, when the lives of these players, the victims of the accident, the driver who was woefully unprepared but still pressed into driving by the demands of capital, and how these demands were enacted upon a busful of teenagers, how the dangers of travel were made clear through them, the way they were themselves victimized by a kind of cultural arrangement beyond themselves just as thousands upon thousands of hockey players are, with very few representatives ever made to answer for it, and those chosen often chosen out of convenience. 

[byblacks]

By: El Jones

Abdoul Abdi’s sister Fatuma once told me that the reason she and Abdoul do not speak Somali is because when they would speak to each other in their language, the workers would put them on time out and isolate them in their rooms, accusing them of plotting together to escape.

It was like being in solitary confinement, Fatuma told me.

For the last few days, the news is filled almost hourly it seems, with new outrages to migrant children emerging from the U.S-Mexico border. Last night, images of “tender age facilities” filled the news, with reports of crying toddlers traumatized by separation from their families.

Caving to the bad publicity from these shocking images, Trump signed an executive order claiming to end the family separation policy - while allowing for families to be detained indefinitely. The Canadian government, however, appears to feel no shame as they argue for the deportation of Abdi.

“How Canada Welcomes Refugees” says a meme circulating on social media, showing border guards hugging children, juxtaposed with images of children in cages in the U.S. In Canada’s habitual self-congratulation about what a kinder, more compassionate nation we are. There is no space for images of Fatuma and Abdoul as children, isolated in rooms by child welfare workers. Their tears are an inconvenience to a national narrative that insists, always insists, that “it’s not like that here.”

READ: Canada aims to avoid detaining migrant children, but it happens

On Tuesday there was a federal hearing challenging the referral of Abdoul Abdi to a deportation hearing — a hearing that can only end in one result, the decision to deport him to Somalia. Abdoul Abdi’s lawyer Benjamin Perryman argues that this deportation is a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and contrary to international law binding Canada to provide special protections to non-citizen youth in care.

Amid the global outrage of the U.S’s violation of the rights of migrant children, lawyers for the Canadian government argued that Abdoul’s human rights, and that more broadly the rights of children, are not relevant and should not be heard. As Perryman pointed out, not one sentence of the submissions for the Minister mention charter rights, or indicate that they were even considered. I keep returning to this: our government argues that the rights of children are so irrelevant that they should not even be spoken about.

Just getting to a hearing where arguments about the rights of refugee children and youth in care can be heard in court in front of a judge is a landmark. Benjamin Perryman along with intervenors Nasha Nijhawan for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Jane Stewart for Justice for Children and Youth are confronting injustices that remain largely hidden in Canada, and that the government has fought every step of the way to avoid considering. In a country where migrants can be indefinitely detained, where deaths of migrants in custody go unremarked and without inquiry, and where we pay human traffickers to deport people to countries too dangerous for officials to enter, perhaps it is no surprise that our government would prefer there to be no hearing at all.

The most bizarre part of yesterday’s argument was the lawyer for the minister opening her arguments by telling us that “the theme for today’s arguments is the letter P.” P is for privilege — citizenship is a right not a privilege. It is for public safety. It is also for policy and parliament, and people, because after all everyone in the system are just people doing their best.

Imagine arguing the rights of children are irrelevant as you try to deport to a danger zone a former child refugee denied his rights by the state, and using a Sesame Street format to make your points. A children’s show.

But P is also for Perryman, who opened his arguments by clearly naming anti-Black racism. “This is what anti-Black racism looks like in this country,” he emphasized.

One major way anti-Black racism is maintained in Canada is by simply ignoring the presence of Black people. If there are no Black people here, then it follows that anti-Black racism cannot exist in Canada.

As Robyn Maynard traces in her book Policing Black Lives:

"Ironically, whites-only migration policies were also seen as ways to avoid the racism found south of the border. A major justification for the functional ban on Black migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to avoid the “Negro problem” that existed in the United States. Racism, this suggests, was represented as an American problem that was foreign to Canada. In a similar vein, a historical analysis of media and public opinion at the time found that Canadians were staunchly opposed to Black migration, yet refused to think this racist. It was believed, in fact, that racism could be avoided to the extent that Black people were kept out of the country entirely."

Canada’s aversion to keeping race-based statistics similarly functions to maintain the fiction of race not being a problem in Canada. In yesterday’s hearing, lawyers for the government rejected research from the social sciences demonstrating that children in care are more vulnerable, that they are highly likely to face “crossover” into the criminal justice system, that they are marginalized in educational attainment and employment, that they face instability, and that the trauma they experience as children and in the system has life long effects. These effects, research shows, are compounded for migrant children and for racialized children. These studies were rejected by the Minister’s lawyers, in part, because they are not “statistics” and are therefore not “facts.” Racism and marginalization, in their argument, do not exist, and even if they did exist, are not relevant, and either way, we shouldn’t talk about it.

And if you dismiss any evidence of discrimination, then you can also claim that it is not possible to know about discrimination even if it is happening. There is a deep hypocrisy at work here. On the one hand, the system appeals to authority. Child welfare workers are the experts on what is best for Black families. Canadian Border Services officials are the authorities on who should be deported. These systems should not be questioned, and certainly not accused of bias. To even hold the hearing is “unfair.”

At the same time, there are simultaneous claims to innocence. How could the adults at Department of Community Services know how to obtain citizenship? The delegate for the minister isn’t a lawyer or a judge, how can they be expected to understand Charter rights or apply them?

Keep in mind that while the minister’s delegate cannot possibly be expected to comprehend human rights in Canada (but yet is qualified to make decisions), Abdoul is “culpable” as a child for not understanding citizenship law and not actively seeking a citizenship lawyer as a minor child in care and advocating for his own citizenship — despite minors being unable until last year to apply for citizenship on their own behalf.

The only person guilty in this scheme is the Black child.

Keep in mind as well that the lawyers for the minister rejected all the social science research showing the effects of childhood trauma of children in care. I say keep this in mind because the government went on to argue that Abdoul’s lack of memory or knowledge about his family isn’t a sign of trauma, but rather evidence of him willfully lying to agents. When Abdoul didn’t even have a lawyer, he submitted that his mother was dead and that his father was missing and he didn’t know where he was. Later, he told agents that both of his parents were murdered.

Perhaps a child who spent the first six years of his life in refugee camps, who fled to Canada at age 6, and grew up in care separated from his family might understandably not know about or remember what happened to his parents. If the lawyers had read the research, maybe they would know that trauma affects the memory. But instead, they again blamed the refugee for not knowing, all while arguing that adults not knowing crucial parts of their job such as the charter of rights or the need to obtain citizenship for refugee children is insignificant.

In the hearing, we also learned that prohibited youth records were obtained and used by CBSA in reaching their first referral decision. These records are protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, and it is illegal to access them, never mind to reproduce and use them in the decision about his admissibility to Canada. Even when the first referral decision was overturned, they continued to use the youth records unredacted. It was only when Perryman complained that the records were even redacted. Perryman pointed out that redacted passages from the prohibited records are still being used in the government’s submissions and were repeated unredacted in other places.

The minister’s delegate also questioned Abdoul’s closeness to his family, and whether or not he has a relationship with his daughter. I am reminded of how, during enslavement, when Black families were separated it was imagined that Black parents felt no more pain than “pups being taken from a bitch.”

While denying the existence of anti-Black racism during the hearing, it was the Black refugee child who was imagined as somehow oppressing all these powerful systems. He was the one being “unfair”: how terrible of Abdoul to suggest that he was mistreated in the child welfare system, or that the immigration system reveals anti-Black bias. Truly, these are the real victims in this case.

This article originally appeared in The Halifax Examiner.

[ncfan-1]

Gotham 04X16, ‘One of My Three Soups’

So, this is Ben McKenzie's second episode as a director. He didn't write this episode as well, so I don't anticipate it being as good as the episode he did write, but I'm interested to see what kind of visual style he has. This is Gotham.

And the dashboard is doing that thing where it doesn’t know what apostrophes are. What the hell.

- Okay, I am going to make three predictions for this episode. Here they are.

1) Jim Gordon is not going to express any meaningful remorse. By that, I mean he isn’t going to express any sort of remorse that I believe could actually lead somewhere.

2) Having been recast, Jonathan Crane will have a completely different personality and set of motivations, and there will be no continuity between Tahan!Jonathan and Thompson!Jonathan’s characters.

3) Selina will join Jerome because ‘Long Halloween’ reasons.

4) There will be horrible depictions of ableism in Arkham Asylum.

Now, I am going into this hoping that all of these predictions will be proven wrong. To be fair, #1 is low-hanging fruit and I’m not likely to be proven wrong there, but I always hope this show will be better than it has been, even though I know that’s unlikely.

- We open with one of the guards in Arkham reading a wrestling magazine.

- And I think we’ve found out what the protocol for going to deal with Jervis is. Listen to loud music so he can’t hypnotize you, and keep the man in solitary so he has less access to victims. And… I’m right. I know Jervis is a horrible person, but the effects of solitary confinement on inmates, especially when they aren’t allowed human contact, are well-documented.

- So it turns out Jervis and Jonathan are buddies. I know he’s been recast, but I’ll remind you that Jonathan is a teenage boy, no matter who’s playing him. Jervis… is the last person I want to be alone with a child.

- Seems Jerome and Jonathan don’t particularly get along.

- And, as with List!Ivy, in Thompson!Jonathan’s characterization it appears that the writers seem to believe that creepiness is a suitable substitute for character. It’s not. He sounds like a caricature of himself, but Thompson does seem like he’s trying his damnedest.

I will note one more thing. Since Jonathan is, at the oldest, eighteen years old, and he never finished high school, I don’t think he’s a good candidate to be making lock-melting acid in his cell’s toilet. Also, why do they let him wear that burlap sack over his head? The first time he rolls onto his stomach while he sleeps he’s in danger of suffocating. Though, it could be the staff is hoping for that to happen. They treated him like absolute shit, it sounds like, but if none of them acknowledge their own culpability in what Jonathan’s become, it’s likely none of them like him too much after the first time he raised hell in there.

- And apparently this is Jim’s first night out of the hospital.

- Oh, Jervis, I’ve missed you. You’re a horrible person and I’ve missed you. Benedict Samuel is a gift from God.

- We seem to have some interpersonal tension between Jim and Bullock.

- The two of them pull up to where Jervis is waiting. We have a hypnotized couple in wedding garb… standing beneath a wrecking ball. I know most of my readers have seen the promo. You know where this is going.

- Seriously, why doesn’t Jervis have a massive scar on his neck?

- And the mind of Jervis Tetch is as miserable and disturbing a place as ever, his memory as self-serving as ever.

- I don’t remember Jervis rhyming this much in Season 3.

- And when Jervis lifts his hold over the thugs, they start crowing like roosters.

- Bruce and Selina head to the GCPD so they can read Jerome’s file.

- Barbara, sweetheart, alcohol isn’t going to do anything for your migraine.

- Poor Barbara. She’s in a horrible position right now.

- “It hurts too much.” Barbara…

- Of course, Tabitha… I think she means well this time (I think). But Tabitha is not one of my favorites at the best of times, and she’s not endearing herself to me right now.

- Flashback time!

- I hate that this makes me ship Ra’s/Barbara a little more. But even if it’s only to manipulate her, he sounds like he’s the only person who’s ever bothered to really listen to her.

- Yeah, I’m pretty sure this is just manipulation. But I like ships with messed-up dynamics sometimes.

- So we’ve got Jerome, Jervis, Jonathan, Ivy, and the League of Shadows set to all be raising hell in Gotham at once. This show is about to get a bit narratively crowded.

- And we have rows upon rows of hypnotized people standing on rooftops, waiting to jump at the stroke of midnight. No, Jim, a net is not going to work. What you need is a lot of nets. And soon.

- Jerome’s uncle lives in Gotham. What? I suppose that’s where the twin might come into things. And apparently Bruce feels responsible for what Jerome does.

- As ever, I like Bruce and Selina’s interactions. It’s one of the emotional touchstones of the show, so it’s good that their dynamic is so… good.

- Jerome is, as ever, a bit boring. Here’s another character where the writers think creepiness is a suitable substitute for character.

- His uncle’s vile.

- A ton of extras snuck into the Sirens’ club.

- Harvey’s found the radio station Jervis was broadcasting from. And Jervis had a special signal for him.

- So, we’ve seen Jervis and Jerome. Where’s Jonathan, anyways? He doesn’t exactly come across as an equal partner in this little coalition the three of them have formed. I wonder if Jervis isn’t keeping him close at hand.

- Jim’s at the radio station.

- And we come back to Jerome, Jerome’s vile uncle, the strong man, and the “soup.” The literally boiling soup. Bruce walks in and is suitably horrified.

- Jerome came to his uncle for a reason. I wonder what it is he wants to know.

- And apparently no woman has ever led the League of Shadows. The sexist man who wanted to depose her promptly gets stabbed. And it turns out the rest of them want the top spot, too.

- Jervis needs to learn to lock doors so people can’t put guns to his head.

- Jim basically tells Jervis that he’ll torture him ‘till he does what he wants. And then he follows through. Our hero, everybody.

- What is it with this show and hand trauma?! It really is somebody’s fetish, isn’t it!

- Jim, why didn’t you get the nets? You could have avoided this, you asshole.

- Selina intervenes at the diner. She tries to kill Jerome, only for Bruce to stop her. What Selina wants, basically, is for Bruce to actually live his life and not be burdened with guilt.

- Barbara steps up as a brand-new evil overlord. This… is a good look for her. I hope you have a good story arc, Barbara!

- And Jim has a moment where he eats humble pie. Not sure he learned anything for the long-term, but he looks appropriately tired.

- So Jim and Harvey are calling it a day. Jim doesn’t think he belongs here; he thinks he belongs in jail. Harvey agrees, but he tries to give him some feel-good thing about saving the people on the ledge. It rings hollow.

- Jim… actually apologizes to Harvey for judging him. I’m shocked. In a good way, but I’m still shocked.

- Bruce calls up Jim to tell him he’s going to the school Jerome was looking for.

- We end with Jervis in a fucking muzzle (I have no words—it is equal parts amusing and appalling), when Jerome and Jonathan come to rescue him. Jervis looks genuinely happy to see them. I’m almost touched. They all seem to be genuinely fond of each other—well, Jerome and Jonathan don’t, but apparently they cooperated long enough to rescue Jervis without getting into a brawl, so that’s something.

Okay, so predictions.

1) Jim Gordon is not going to express any meaningful remorse. By that, I mean he isn’t going to express any sort of remorse that I believe could actually lead somewhere.

Not sure with this one. Yes, he did express some guilt, but I’m not sure that it’s going to go anywhere. Every time Jim says something about feeling guilty, Harvey says something to him trying to convince him not to follow through on his guilt and come clean about… everything, really.

2) Having been recast, Jonathan Crane will have a completely different personality and set of motivations, and there will be no continuity between Tahan!Jonathan and Thompson!Jonathan’s characters.

Looks like this one was true. I’ll save the rant about internal consistency for another episode, because honestly, it was hard to get a good read on him. Jonathan felt a lot less like a character this episode than he did a plot device. He was basically in it just to produce a lock-melting acid that it seems frankly implausible he would have known how to produce or had the materials to produce it with, given his education stopped at ninth grade, and that’s it. Much like Tahan!Jonathan, it felt like he only existed when the show needed him to exist, and when it didn’t, he got shoved back in the box of non-existence and everyone forgot he existed. Watsonianly, it adds to that sense I got, that Jonathan is not an equal partner with Jerome and Jervis. I’ll be interested to see if that actually goes somewhere.

As an aside, the idea that Jervis and Jonathan have interacted enough to know each other and be friendly is just… It makes my skin crawl, okay. Because I love Jervis, but he really does give off “I have candy in my van” vibes, and aside from Jim Gordon, every adult we’ve ever seen Jonathan Crane interact with has abused and exploited him in some way. And it’s not like Jervis isn’t an abuser. I’m looking to see where their apparent relationship goes, with much less eagerness.

And my personal suspicion about the “personality face lift” for Jonathan Crane here is that Tahan was perhaps just a bit too good at making him vulnerable and sympathetic for the higher-up’s liking. Like I said earlier, Thompson is clearly trying his damnedest���I rarely come across an actor in this show who seems to be sleepwalking through the part—but “sympathetic” and “vulnerable” is clearly not what the writing’s going for here. “Cartoonish, two-dimensional supervillain” is more like what the writing’s going for here. (Prove me wrong, Gotham. Prove me wrong, please.)

3) Selina will join Jerome because ‘Long Halloween’ reasons.

Didn’t happen. THANK GOD. This was the one I was the most afraid about. I suppose there’s still time for it to happen, but it makes even less sense now than before.

4) There will be horrible depictions of ableism in Arkham Asylum.

Happened. Ugh. I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. Oh, wait, I am mad.

Well, at least the dynamic between the villain triple-act was interesting.

[orbemnews]

Protesters gather at Brooklyn Center police station hours after ex-officer is charged in the death of Daunte Wright A firework was seen going off and police fired flash bombs Wednesday night as a curfew got closer. Officers declared the gathering an unlawful assembly late Wednesday, about an hour before curfew. The curfew in Brooklyn Center was from 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. CT, Mayor Mike Elliott said Wednesday during a news conference. Surrounding cities have also enacted curfews, but Minneapolis and St. Paul have not, according to their respective websites. Earlier this week, then-Police Chief Tim Gannon said Wright’s death appeared to be the result of Potter mistaking her gun for her Taser as Wright resisted arrest. But Imran Ali, a prosecutor in Orput’s office, has said prosecutors intend “to prove that Officer Potter abrogated her responsibility to protect the public when she used her firearm rather than her Taser.” “Her action caused the unlawful killing of Mr. Wright and she must be held accountable,” Ali said in a news release. Potter, who resigned as a Brooklyn Center police officer this week, was arrested and charged Wednesday with second-degree manslaughter, Washington County Attorney Pete Orput said. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office determined Wright died of a gunshot wound and that his death was a homicide. Potter was arrested late Wednesday morning by agents with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the bureau said. She was booked into the Hennepin County Jail, online records show. Potter posted bail and was released from custody, according to the Hennepin County Sheriff’s official website. She will make her first court appearance via Zoom on Thursday at 1:30 p.m. CT. In Minnesota, second-degree manslaughter applies when authorities allege a person causes someone’s death by “culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk, and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.” Someone convicted of this charge would face a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and/or a fine of up to $20,000. CNN has sought comment from Potter’s attorney, Earl Gray. Protests, some violent, have taken place each night after Wright’s death, in and around Brooklyn Center. OSN tweeted 79 people were arrested Tuesday night. Wright’s family had called for charges against the officer. Fencing and barricades are in place around Potter’s home, where two police officers and two police vehicles were seen in her driveway Wednesday. “I share our community’s anger and sadness and shock,” Elliott, the mayor, said. “My message to all who are demanding justice for (Daunte Wright) and for his family is this: Your voices have been heard, now the eyes of the world are watching Brooklyn Center and I urge you to protest peacefully and without violence.” Potter and police chief resign after shooting Developments in the investigation have unfolded daily, including the release of body camera footage and Gannon’s statement that the shooting appeared accidental on Monday, and the resignations of Potter and Gannon on Tuesday. Though Potter has submitted a resignation letter, Mayor Elliott said Tuesday he has not accepted it, adding “we’re doing our internal process to make sure that we are being accountable to the steps that we need to take.” Earlier, he told CBS he thought Potter should be fired. Potter is still entitled to benefits following her resignation, though it is not clear what those benefits are, Edwards said. Orput is the prosecutor in Washington County, near Hennepin County, where Brooklyn Center is. The case was given to Washington County prosecutors to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest in Hennepin County, officials have said. Sunday’s killing of Wright is at least the third high-profile death of a Black man during a police encounter in the Minneapolis area in the past five years, after the shooting of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights in 2016 and the death of George Floyd last year. Minneapolis police also were under scrutiny when an officer was convicted of third-degree murder and manslaughter for the 2017 fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk, a White woman. The trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer accused of killing Floyd, is taking place just 10 miles from Brooklyn Center. Gray, Potter’s attorney, also is the attorney for Thomas Lane, one of four officers involved in Floyd’s death, and one of the defense attorneys for Jeronimo Yanez, the former police officer who was found not guilty in Castile’s death. Reacting to the manslaughter charge, one of the Wright family’s attorneys, Benjamin Crump, released a statement saying “while we appreciate that the district attorney is pursuing justice for Daunte, no conviction can give the Wright family their loved one back.” “This (shooting) was no accident. This was an intentional, deliberate and unlawful use of force,” Crump’s statement reads. “Driving while Black continues to result in a death sentence. A 26-year veteran of the force knows the difference between a Taser and a firearm,” Crump wrote. He added that the Wright family would hold a news conference Thursday afternoon. As a result of unrest in the city, acting City Manager Reggie Edwards announced the formation of the Brooklyn Center Community Crisis Team. The team includes nine members representing the business, faith, education and nonprofit communities in the city as well as the city government. Two families come together in tragedy Floyd’s family left the courthouse during Chauvin’s trial Tuesday “because they thought it was important that they give comfort to Daunte Wright’s mother” and family, Crump said Tuesday at a news conference with the two families. “We will stand in support with you. … The world is traumatized, watching another African American man being slayed,” said Philonise Floyd, brother of George Floyd. “I woke up in the morning with this on my mind. I don’t want to see another victim.” The losses of both Wright and Floyd were acknowledged in Tuesday’s protests. Demonstrators knelt for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, to symbolize the amount of time authorities say Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck. And just as the Floyd family did last year, the Wright family is looking for more answers surrounding their loved one’s death. One of the family’s attorneys, Jeffrey Storms, told CNN that Gannon’s explanation — that the shooting appeared to be an accident — “is by no means proper or enough.” “There were a number of intentional events that led to (Daunte Wright) being dead, and we need to find out exactly why each one of those intentional events happened,” Storms said Tuesday. “Grabbing your sidearm that you’ve likely deployed thousands, if not tens of thousands, of times is an intentional act,” Storms said. “A sidearm feels different than a Taser. It looks different than a Taser. (It) requires different pressure in order to deploy it.” Wright’s father, Aubrey Wright, told ABC on Tuesday that he couldn’t accept Gannon’s explanation that Sunday’s shooting was accidental. “I can’t accept that — a mistake. That doesn’t even sound right,” he told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” He cited the officer’s length of service — authorities said she’d been with Brooklyn Center police for 26 years. Wright’s mother, Katie Wright, said she wanted to see the officer “held accountable for everything that she’s taken from us.” “It should have never, ever escalated the way it did,” Katie Wright told ABC. What happened in traffic stop that ended Wright’s life Wright was with his girlfriend Sunday afternoon, driving to the house of his older brother, Damik Bryant. Officers pulled him over in Brooklyn Center for an expired tag and learned he had an outstanding warrant, police said. The warrant was for a gross misdemeanor weapons charge, according to the news release from Orput’s office. Wright gave officers his name before calling his mother, Bryant said. His mother, Katie Wright, told reporters that Daunte Wright called her, and she heard a police officer ask him to put down his phone and get out of the car. Daunte told her he’d explain why he was pulled over after he exited, she said. She eventually heard police ask him to hang up, and then scuffling, before the call ended, she said. Body camera footage released Monday shows Wright standing outside his vehicle with his arms behind his back and an officer directly behind him, trying to handcuff him. An officer tells Wright “don’t,” before Wright twists away and gets back into the driver’s seat of the car. Orput’s office said Potter “pulled her Glock 9mm handgun with her right hand and pointed it at Wright.” The officer whose camera footage was released is heard warning the man she’s going to use her Taser on him, before repeatedly shouting, “Taser! Taser! Taser!” It’s at this point that Orput’s office says Potter “pulled the trigger on her handgun” and fired one round into the left side of Wright. “Wright immediately said, “ah, he shot me,” and the car sped away for a short distance before crashing into another vehicle and stopping,” the release said. Then, the officer is heard screaming, “Holy sh*t! I just shot him.” An ambulance was called and Wright was pronounced dead at the scene, Orput’s release states. Gannon said the portion of body-worn camera footage released Monday led him to believe the shooting was accidental and that the officer’s actions before the shooting were consistent with the department’s training on Tasers. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension examined Potter’s duty belt and found her handgun is holstered on the right side of her belt, while the Taser is on the left side, according to a news release from Orput’s office. Citing a criminal complaint, the release said the Taser is yellow with a black grip and is set in a straight-draw position, “meaning Potter would have to use her left hand to pull the Taser out of its holster.” CNN’s Carma Hassan, Adrienne Broaddus, Amir Vera, Keith Allen, Hollie Silverman, Peter Nickeas, Jessica Schneider, Jessica Jordan, Christina Carrega, Shawn Nottingham and contributed to this report. Source link Orbem News #Brooklyn #Center #charged #Daunte #Death #exofficer #gather #hours #Police #protesters #Station #Wright

[silvokrent]

This isn’t nearly as in-depth as I’d like it to be, but here’s my reaction to firearms legislation, mass shootings, who or what’s “to blame,” and what we should be doing about it.

At this point, honestly, I don’t care what your political stance is, whether or not you think gun legislation will or won’t stop “criminals” (whatever the fuck that actually means) from still getting access to firearms illegally. At this point, all that I care about is that we do something instead of debating every single hypothetical pro and con to any degree of restrictive firearms access. Yes, gun violence is a multifaceted issue, and the motives behind each individual instance of a shooting are going to vary. So if we’re not going to talk about making it more difficult for anyone to buy firearms, let’s talk about the sociopolitical motivations behind mass shootings, and what sort of solutions we as a society are willing to commit to.

The shooter was [insert minority here] that was motivated by [vague generalization of an aspect of their culture]. Okay. So if the attack was done by a perpetrator who had biased, bigoted beliefs that they inherited from their family/immediate cultural influence at home, then maybe we should implement more effective and comprehensive policies in schools that enforce ideological acceptance. Say, for example, that the shooter held misogynistic, antisemitic, anti-black, and anti-LGBT+ beliefs. Here’s a potential solution: legally mandate that schools — colleges, universities, and K-12 private, public, and charter schools — teach their students that women, Jews, non-white Americans, and LGBT+ people have the same human rights as anyone else, and that verbally/mentally/emotionally/physically abusing them in any social environment/setting (work, school, the gym, the bus stop, etc.) is unequivocally wrong. Start teaching children as young as pre-K that these toxic beliefs are not acceptable, no matter what that child’s parents are teaching them at home. Undermine hatred that the child is inheriting from their family. Teach children earlier about privilege and the centuries’ worth of oppression that marginalized groups have experienced and continue to experience, and teach them how to be allies to marginalized groups, like non-neurotypical individuals, or people that are physically disabled. Teach students comprehensive, scientifically-accurate sex ed, that illustrates the differences between biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity, and that these differences do not get to be treated as “abnormal” or “subhuman” just because they’re not as prevalent or as widely-represented as heteronormativity or cisgendered folks. We should also take the time to educate people that just because you meet a person of a certain demographic with a hateful belief, doesn’t mean they represent their entire group. If rampant Islamophobia has taught us anything, it’s that society likes to create “the great other” to have as a relevant foil for our own values, and as a readily-identifiable enemy, while ignoring the hypocrisies and flaws we deny are a part of our own cultures.

But teaching children/students to accept people of other walks of life goes against my personal beliefs! If the government meddles too much in education, they could easily co-opt learning in the future to push certain agendas. Besides, you don’t have the right to indoctrinate my children with your radical liberal ideas! I wasn’t aware that teaching children to not be dickheads to other people was a radical liberal notion, but fine. Have it your way. And yes, I agree, too much government intervention can have its own problems, in a sense of who’s watching the watchman and making sure they don’t overstep certain boundaries. But having no standardized code that teaches students to accept people from other cultural/religious/ethnic/genetic backgrounds isn’t a solution, either. And frankly, there should be no reason why anyone would argue against teaching our kids that diversity is worthy of acceptance and celebration, not shunning and discrimination. If you’re not willing to enact a solution to fix the motivation behind mass shootings, then we need to make it harder for people with radicalized hateful beliefs to acquire firearms. Either present another plausible solution to reduce mass shootings, or pick one of the aforementioned solutions.

The shooter was a [insert person with a mental illness]. Sane people don’t commit terrorist acts! Ah, yes. The old “let’s scapegoat people with mental illnesses as the perpetrators as these attacks, rather than as the overwhelming victims, in order to avoid talking about gun control.” Very well. If we’re going to continue assigning sole culpability to individuals with anxiety, depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and other psychopathologies, then that means we need to make medical treatment easier to acquire and less stigmatized. If you have a diagnosed mental illness, then you should be able to access free — or at the very least, cheap and affordable — healthcare to treat your condition long-term, through medication, one-on-one patient-psychologist/psychiatrist therapy, and accommodations in the workplace, school, and so on. People with mental illness should have greater access to resources that protect them from housing and workplace discrimination. We must, as a collective society, learn to not ridicule or make disparaging jokes at their expense, often to the effect of exacerbating their mental illness. We need to learn to not sneer at coping mechanisms, or ridicule someone that has a service animal for emotional and otherwise support. Because if mentally ill people are responsible for these attacks, then that means we should be treating their psychopathologies in order to prevent mass shootings, right?

But I don’t want my tax dollars to go toward the mentally ill! I shouldn’t have to pay to fix their problems. Skirting around the fact that people with mental illnesses didn’t ask to have those “problems” in the first place, what you’re saying is that “here’s a potential solution that could save human lives, but I’m not willing to spend money on it.” If allocating our government tax dollars means that people suffering from mental illnesses get help, and people aren’t as likely to die in mass shootings, then isn’t that worth the expenditure? Either present another plausible solution to reduce mass shootings, or pick one of the aforementioned solutions. 

Look. Lax gun laws are not the sole culprit behind mass shootings. The United States is a petri dish of centuries’ worth of culture clash, and the subsequent internalized hatred that comes with over-representation of privileged demographics, and erasure of marginalized people that’ve been stigmatized by the media. The problem is a combination of factors: compassion fatigue, apathy, complacency, a status quo that solely benefits certain groups at others’ expense, and an unwillingness to examine or relinquish our own biases because we don’t want to change. Radicalized violence and terrorism are multifaceted issues, influenced by factors I haven’t even touched on, because it’s late, I’m tired, and frankly I’m not the best person qualified to educate others on a complex topic I’ve only just begun to unravel myself. But I do know that we need to find a solution. We needed a solution yesterday. We needed a solution months ago. We needed a solution decades ago. Every time we are bombarded by senseless bloodshed and death, we go through the ritual of “sending our thoughts and prayers,” and then patting ourselves on the back and congratulating ourselves for doing what we think counts as the bare minimum.

It’s not enough. It’s never been enough.

Whenever someone tries to foster a discussion on gun violence and the underlying issues, the loudest voices in the room (typically our elected politicians) default to the cliché red herrings of “mental illness” and “[person of a certain minority group] committed the act, therefore [their demographic] as a whole is to blame.” And while there have been instances in the past of shootings being linked to specific groups, these generalizations are correlation, not causation. Clearly, pinning blame to any one group — a tactic we’ve been using for years — hasn’t fixed the issue, so we need to come up with a different answer. Revising our education and healthcare systems have the potential to fix so many issues in our country, but arguments are always made for why “it can’t be done.”

“Can’t” means “won’t.” Meaning that people have the capacity to try, but aren’t willing to.

Which brings us back to firearms. Because until we, as a country, are willing to sit down and find a solution for hate crimes and mental illness (the alleged culprits), then we need to make it harder for people to buy military-grade firearms and go on killing sprees at schools, nightclubs, and concerts. Our “right” to buy and stockpile thirty fucking assault rifles without a comprehensive system to account for the whereabouts of those weapons, and the identity of the wielder does not supersede a person’s right to not be shot and killed.

People are dying nearly every other day in our country at a rate not seen in other nations. At the very least, we should at least be willing to ask other countries for help, and try implementing their tactics just to find out whether or not they’d be a viable option for our country. Not wanting people dead as a result of gun violence isn’t a fucking political opinion. It’s not even a contentious ethical debate. It’s doing the right fucking thing. And if you don’t like any of the proposed solutions, then instead of telling me why mine are inherently wrong, offer up one of your own.