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kiricade · 4 years ago

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Track #2

a playlist inspired by the documentary Thirteeenth

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JU$T - Run the Jewels

RTJ speaks to the spirit of Ava Duvernay’s documentary, Thirteenth, from the very beginning. Their lyrics sardonically recast the American Dream as dystopian reality. The language around academic and fiscal accomplishments are revealed to mask an underlying, contemporary system of slavery--slavery under capital, and slavery under consumption: “Master economics cuz you took yourself from squalor, mastered economics cuz your grade say you a scholar, mastered Instagram cuz you can instigate a follow,” are the opening lines, and while innocuous in themselves, are punctuated by the repetition of a righteous utterance of “slave”. This refrain serves as a subversive reminder that, “the Thirteenth Amendment say that slavery’s abolished, shit,” but, “look at all these slave masters posing on your dollar.” Similarly, Thirteenth acknowledges the continuity of slavery despite the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, illustrating modern slavery’s rapid, bipartisan-powered evolution under the Reagan, Nixon, and Clinton administrations.

The Guillotine - The Coup

“The Guillotine” is a reference to a major symbol of the French Revolution, which is generally viewed by historians as having been caused by the failure of France’s “Old Regimee” to pacify acute social and economic inequality. Transnational intellectual elites shifted the public sphere from Versailles (the home of the Court) to Paris, making the influence of the Court less effective. A financial crisis, further exacerbated by state debt, food shortages, and a population boom, led to the radicalization of the urban poor. If this is sounding familiar that’s because it is the dream imagined by The Coup, only this time for Black American liberation. The Old Regime, feudalism, and the privileges of nobility (including the exemption from taxes) were forcibly abolished under the Revolution. In “The Guillotine”, Boots incorporates this major French event to illustrate a radical solution to today’s unliveable serfdom. “Hey, you! We got your war, we’re at the gates, we’re at your door!” is a reference to the Bastille, a prison which was symbolically liberated by French revolutionaries. In a contemporary, American context, the Bastille can be construed as the mass industrial prison complex. But Boots further develops this analog: “It’s finna blow ‘cause they got the TV, we got the truth,” refers to the monopoly that capital has on American speech. Despite the stereotyping of the black urban male, and the continued disenfranchisement of felons in television, music, newscasting, and the mainstream, Boots’ message optimistically asserts that “the truth” will triumph over manufactured consent. Even though white supremacy controls all aspects of the justice system, people will ultimately triumph: “They [white elite] own the judges and we [the people] got the proof; we got hella people, they got hella ‘copters; they got the bombs but we got the--we got the--we got the Guillotine!”

Close Your Eyes (And Count to F**k) - Run the Jewels

Just as Thirteenth addresses the racial disparities of being on death row, “Close Your Eyes” challenges the machinery of solitary confinement, torture, and uses institutionalized religion as a metaphor for the disproportoinate burden placed on the young, black male. The story is told from the perspective of a prisoner in solitary, who has broken out and is leading a prison coup. The “conditions'' have created the narrator--the “villain”, who is “given vision, the vision becomes a vow to seek vengeance on all the vicious.” RTJ equivocates retributive justice with justified revenge, suggesting that victimized black men are righteous in wreaking vengeance on the justice system, and for seeking dues in an eye-for-an-eye-like fashion. Before they kill the wardens, the prisoners waterboard them--“We killin' 'em for freedom 'cause they tortured us for boredom. And even if some good ones die, fuck it, the Lord'll sort 'em.” This line is a reference to the Albigensian Massacre, during which the Papal Legate said, “Kill them; let God sort them,” justifying the slaughter of faithful Catholics along with Papal enemies. This old story translates to the modern day in the form of a justice system which treats black people in America as meaningless collateral in the pursuit of capital; the narrator encourages the prisoners to respond in kind. RTJ furthermore draws a comparison between enslavers and pedophilic members of the clergy, who strip “kids to the nude and tell them God’ll forgive them.” In this comparison, the clergy and enslavers use shame to keep their victims silent. By RTJ’s reasoning, if black children believe that they are sinful, then they will not feel justified to defend their basic human rights, or to bring vengeance on those who have wronged them.

No Rest for the Weary - Blue Scholars

Blue Scholars is composed of lead rapper Geologic, the son of Filipino immigrants, and jazz pianist Sabzi, an Iranian-American. Despite being an API crew, their music addresses the racial and socioeconomic issues plaguing marginalized groups in America more generally. “No Rest for the Weary” speaks to the colonial-imperialist legacy of American labor, and the mass industrial prison complex. “Diamonds ain’t enough to cover up a legacy of strange fruit,” is a tribute to Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit”, which was penned to challenge the lynching of Black people in the South. “No Rest” reminds us that lynchings never ended, through allusions to the ways in which the early and contemporary police state impact intersectional peoples:

Pages torn out of the memory of those who remain shackled in the chains of international capital gain.

Geologic explains that those who have been enslaved have had their histories stolen from them. It isn’t clear whether Geologic means to say Black diasporic peoples who were enslaved by white colonizers, or Black Americans who are enslaved today under the mass industrial complex. To Geologic, it doesn’t matter, since all forms of slavery are driven by capital gain. DuVernay’s documentary, Thirteenth, similarly breaks this down for us, and uses examples of corrupt capital, such as the ALEC coalition, to demonstrate the parallels between old and contemporary slavery.

Blood of the Fang - CLPPNG

CLPPNG’s “Blood of the Fang” is filled with vampiric imagery, and opens with a reference to the experimental horror film, Ganja & Hess. In the original film, vampirism serves proxy to the assimilation or submission of black people to white people and white society. “Blood of the Fang'' continues this theme. At its heart, the song is a critique of moderate modern politics:

Queen Angela done told y’all, ‘Grasp at the root,’ so what y’all talking about ‘hands up don’t shoot’? [...] Brother Malcolm done told y’all, ‘By any means,’ so what y’all talking about, ‘all on the same team’?

CLPPNG invokes powerful black leaders such as Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Geronimo Pratt, Ericka Huggins, Malcolm X, and others, and in particular targets of COINTELPRO. He provides a poetic history of COINTELPRO, a covert and illegal CIA program that sought to sabotage and surveille black, communist, and socialist organizations. While the origins of COINTELPRO preceded the modern mass industrial complex, its systematic dismantling of black leadership enabled the culture we see today. CLPPNG facilitates a revival of radical and revolutionary politics in the face of a racist police state and industrial prison industry. It is not enough, according to CLPPNG, to simply demand, “don’t shoot.” Meanwhile, ‘all on the same team’ refers to President Barack Obama’s speech following the 2016 election transition--and serves to highlight the bipartisan effort to disenfranchise Black Americans, and undermine efforts at abolition.

* this concludes Xing’s half of the project; part ii was posted by Cesaria

#hip hop sociology

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tlbodine · 5 years ago

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Why Isn’t “Mass Shooter” a Modern Horror Monster?

Horror reflects the anxieties of the culture that produces it. In the 1950s, we got monster movies about radiation-mutated creatures and invaders from beyond the stars, mirroring our Cold War Science fears.

In the 1970s, as “Women’s Liberation” and birth control went mainstream, we see an influx of horrors settled on childbirth and children and family dysfunction.

And as the 70s bled into the 80s, while real-world serial killers were leaving behind trails of victims, the masked psycho was dominating the field with countless slashers.

But now -- throughout the 2010s -- mass shootings loom large our our collective American consciousness. Hardly a week goes by without hearing of one somewhere, and they inspire fear and terror. Yet we haven’t seen them show up to dominate horror media in the way serial killers do -- what’s up with that?

Horror-media discussion about gun violence under the cut!

Before we get started, a caveat: There is media about school shootings. It’s just not usually horror. Most, as you can see from IMDB, is family drama: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls070532039/

And none of them are really particularly mainstream, not in the way we associate with slasher films.

So what’s the difference? Why is a killer with an axe more compelling as a film monster than a killer with a gun?

Some hypotheses:

Primacy: Because mass shootings are frequently in the news/public discussion, it’s always “too soon” - the real-life horror is too horrifying for entertainment. Sounds good on paper, but why isn’t that true for slashers? Those movies were popular when serial killers were at their most active.

Politics: Perhaps political motives are influencing the market. Since gun control is a contentious topic, maybe some powers are motivated toward censorship. But wouldn’t that also censor the family drama type movies? Why would it focus on horror especially?

Logistics: It’s just really hard to make a good horror movie about a mass shooting. Guns kill people pretty quickly and indiscriminately, so you lose the mounting suspense and intimacy of a killer with a knife and other similar horror/slasher conventions.

This last point, I think, bears some further consideration. The more I think on it, the more it seems that the things that make gun violence especially horrifying in real life are also things that make it very hard to put in a horror story:

Mass shootings happen, obviously, in mass. Most horror formulas require characters to be isolated and picked off one by one.

Guns kill people in ways that are impersonal and swift. If you’re killing a stadium of people with an automatic weapon, it’ll take just a few minutes. You can’t stretch that out into a long, lingering torture sequence or whatever.

Gun violence is indiscriminate. Wherever a crowd gathers, a shooter can start killing people. There’s no space for, say, the “horror rules” re: jock, slut, virgin, etc. because morality doesn’t play into it.

A killer methodically making his way through a sorority house, killing its members one by one lends itself more naturally to suspenseful storytelling than a gunman opening fire on a crowd. A killer leaving clues and taunting detectives lends its own narrative structure.

In that regard, it’s pretty obvious: We cannot make a slasher-style film or a torture-porn film about a gunman. It just won’t work.

But perhaps we’re looking at it all wrong. What if we viewed the mass shooter not as a serial killer, but as a force of nature? The disaster movie genre has ample cross-over with horror, and the general formula would work well for a mass shooter:

Introduction to a wide cast of characters as they maneuver into a vulnerable position

The disaster hits, and we move between individuals affected by the calamity, watching their initial reactions

In the ensuing chaos, characters attempt to escape further danger

The danger passed (for now?) some characters manage to survive, now irrevocably changed

Whether the disaster in question is an earthquake, a sharknado, or a school shooting, that formula should work. The key to success lies in the pacing and the large cast, allowing you to stretch out a relatively brief event into a detailed and tense narrative.

So why haven’t we seen that? Outside of, like, one made-for-TV movie I recall watching in the 90s, this presumably straightforward premise hasn’t gained much traction.

The Making of Monsters: Signs and Signifiers

Perhaps the real reason we haven’t seen a lot of horror stories about mass shootings is because there is already so much mythology and symbolism tied to these sorts of narratives, and that symbolism is at odds with the creation of movie monsters.

Guns carry a tremendous amount of cultural significance and baggage, at least in the United States. It’s why they’re so politically contentious. And when something is already heavily laden with symbolic meaning, it’s hard to turn that symbolism into something else in a way that will stick.

Point #1: Guns are a great equalizer. Unlike a knife or sword, skill doesn’t matter all that much when it comes to killing somebody with a gun. You don’t have to be strong or fast or have a ton of training. You just have to point it and pull the trigger -- if you do that enough times, and at a big enough target, you’ll probably hit something. This means that anyone can kill someone with a gun: a skinny nerd, a young child, a petite woman. Guns are the thing that give you, the underdog, a way to compete against them, the big strong enemy.

This leads to Point #2: Good Guys With Guns(tm). As absolutely anyone who has been on the internet for five minutes after Any Sort Of Bad Event will tell you, Bad Things can be stopped by Good Guys With Guns(tm). And while you can debate the merits of armed civilians protecting a group from harm against an active shooter, it’s impossible to deny that, historically, good guys have been armed. Police, military, armed militias, frontiersmen, etc. carry weapons. Which means that “guy with a gun” does not immediately translate, visually or thematically, as “threat” in the same way as wielding a butcher knife in a non-culinary context. A guy with a gun could, at a glance, be a good guy. A guy with a big knife is obviously a villain. Similarly, the Good Guys With Guns(tm) bleeds over into the horror genre. What would the zombie apocalypse be without headshots? How many horror franchises could have been cut short if someone had just shot the killer?

Finally, Point #3: Guns in media have special powers. Gun mythology in film and television is well-developed, with its own set of tropes and expectations. In movies, pointing a gun at someone will automatically make that person comply with whatever you ask them to do -- we even have vernacular about this, “nobody put a gun to your head” -- as if the gun were somehow more powerful than a simple threat and could in fact control behavior. Often, people who are shot in television politely fall over and die quietly; it’s a civilized end, without all of the screaming and thrashing (never mind where they’re shot or what that would would do in real life). And there are so many types of gun. We have a whole video game genre dedicated to it -- collecting guns, learning their various abilities, applying them situationally to achieve various goals. With so many established tropes, writing anything with new tropes and rules runs the risk of generating confusion, disbelief and even hostility in an audience.

So, with all of that in mind, it starts to become clear:

Writing a horror story about gun violence is difficult because guns carry so much mythic significance, and it’s impossible to write about them metaphorically while keeping it clear what that metaphor is.

If I write a story about an atomic-powered lizard who destroys a Japanese town with radiation, it’s easy enough to see that it’s a metaphor for nuclear warfare. But there is no similarly straightforward metaphor for gun violence readily apparent.

But it’s tougher even than that -- because guns themselves aren’t the only thing to have been mythologized.

The Myth of the Lone Gunman

Remember: Guns are the great equalizer.

This knowledge sits in the foundation of storytelling, not just in the fiction we make up but in the way we build narratives around mass shootings in the real world. There are certain tacit assumptions we make about gunmen that may or may not be accurate.

We have a certain narrative framework in place to explain school shootings, for example: The awkward, isolated young man who is bullied until he finally snaps and goes on a killing rampage.

Never mind that this narrative is not wholly supported by facts. It may be true in some cases, but certainly not all. And yet, go back up to that list of mass shooter movies on IMDB and look again at what the majority of them have in common.

This is problematic because, from a mythic perspective, people who are bullied and then stand up to their oppressors are heroes.

In Carrie, when Carrie White destroys the school after being humiliated on prom night, we’re on her side. It feels good to watch her kill all those people who were awful to her. It feels just and righteous and imminently satisfying.

When Spartacus leads a slave revolt, we cheer. When Daenerys Targaryen kills all the masters and uses their heads as mile-markers, we feel triumphant. When Arthur Fleck shoots the smug talk-show host on live television, we think, Well, he had it coming.

Oh, sure. We pay lip service to being horrified. And these dark heroes might die at the end, receiving some karmic retribution for the price of their revenge. But can you say, truthfully, that you have ever once watched a story about an underdog killing his bullies and felt sorriest for the bullies?

So: This is the problem with our cultural narrative about the school shooter. Purposely or not, it puts the shooter in the role of hero.

And not only is that irresponsible, it’s just downright inaccurate.

When Stephen Paddock opened fire on a concert and killed 58 people, he was not firing back at his oppressors.

When Omar Mateen shot up a night club in Florida, he wasn’t getting revenge against his bullies.

When Adam Lanza slaughtered 26 people at an elementary school -- 20 of them young children -- he obviously was not giving his victims what they deserved.

In the real world, mass shooters might be motivated by political ideology and a desire to promote fear -- ie, terrorism. They might be unhappy with some aspect of their lives and decide to “punch down” at a vulnerable group in the worst possible way. They might be looking to become the heroes of certain media narratives, to secure some kind of fame or notoriety. They might want to kill themselves in a way that hurts a lot of other people at the same time. There are lots of reasons why people might commit mass murder.

But the important thing is that the victims are, overwhelmingly, not bullies and oppressors. They are people. Just innocent people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because mass shootings aren’t really about personal vendettas; they’re about mowing down a bunch of strangers in a few minutes at an impersonal long range.

So here’s my final thought on the topic: We SHOULD tell horror stories about mass shootings.

It’s a topic that’s timely, and it’s a scenario that’s frightening. There’s no reason not to tell these stories. But to make it work -- on a logistic and socially responsible basis -- we need to change our treatment.

Going back to the “disaster movie” idea: It’s time to treat mass shooters in fiction as forces of nature, as oblivious and blindly destructive as a hurricane. It’s time to center the focus on the victims. Never mind the killer and what led him to this moment. Let’s take a minute to think about the people caught in that situation -- the people who fear for their lives, who try to help one another, who fight or flee or hide once the first shot is fired. Let’s write about the moments of humanity shared by two strangers crouched behind something while shots fire all around them. Let’s write about the horror of having your perfectly normal, mundane day suddenly and irrevocably shattered by a stranger with a gun.

There is horror there, real horror, that can be mined and cultivated and turned to art. And it seems to me that embracing that, and shifting the cultural narrative away from valorizing the lone gunman, would be good for art and society.

Are you ready to tell that story?

I am.

#horror #horror media #horror movies #how to write horror #horror stories #gun violence #mass shootings #trigger warnings #long post #Deep dive #horror analysis

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makeste · 5 years ago

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more discussion about BnHA 237, and the “bystander effect”

Makeste, it’s been hinted for a long time now that Tomura had personally experienced the bystander effect when he was younger. When he had his little therapy talk with Midoriya at the mall he was pissed at how the people around him were just going about their lives and ignoring other people’s problems, thinking only about themselves. And when Midoriya pointed out that a hero would arrest him, he brought up that although anybody’s quirks could let them fight back and perhaps stop him, no-one would do so if he went on a rampage- their complacency and trust in hero society meant that they couldn’t conceive of such a thing happening to them, and so they would default back to letting heroes or the authorities arrive and save them, rather than saving themselves. Like sheep to a slaughter, they just couldn’t bring themselves to act, because they would rather support a peaceful society that protects them than willingly fully endanger themselves.

I actually liked that Horikoshi made it clear that some people were willing to help Tenko, so it wasn’t that Tenko coincidentally wandered into a street full of uncaring assholes, but his ghoulish appearance was a major factor in driving off the help he so desperately wanted. Just, looking at him, you can see the kid’s gone through something horrible, and if they got involved, they might have risked whatever caused it to happen to them next. They were scared of him, and didn’t want to risk getting involved in something they weren’t equipped to handle. Better to leave it to police, or authorities who have trained for similar situations and can protect themselves. Whereas the ‘defenceless’ citizen could tell at a glance that Tenko was something beyond their ordinary lifestyles, an unspoken threat to their peace and safety. Maybe some did call the police and authorities and Tenko had wandered off. But you can see why, for a society that, because of the whole ‘restrict your quirk and don’t perform heroic actions without a licence’ stuff, has been taught that they’re supposed to act normal and not get involved in dangerous situations or criminal activity, helping Tenko was too personally involving for those citizens.

You also got a hint of that when Tomura was restrained at the bar- the flashback’s words even spell out that “before long a hero will…everyone said things like that, but they all ignored you, didn’t they?” Maybe AFO had a hand in helping Tenko get isolated here. He could have had a subtle quirk that manipulated their emotions and fears to drive them to ignore Tenko, or he could have simply just used his connections to stifle any calls or reports of Tenko’s appearance to the proper authorities, and left him in the ‘care’ of the nearby public. Personally, my money’s on the latter. Either way, his appearance here definitely rings too good to be true- he was probably shadowing Tenko whilst he walked through the streets- but I get the impression that he honestly didn’t do much to make the general public act the way they did towards Tenko. He just let the boy experience the isolation and apathy of a society focused on ignoring danger unless there’s someone authorised to handle it.

It’s actually something that’s pretty common in some Japanese media. There’s a great example of this in the Anime ‘Psycho Pass’, set in a futuristic society that’s kinda a mashup of Minority Report and Mega-City One, wherein a city-wide monitoring system called the ‘Sybil System’ constantly monitors people’s emotional and mental states. Should they exceed an accepted threshold that denotes how likely the person is to committing a crime even in advance of them committing any crimes, that person is pursued by law enforcement and either arrested or executed, so they don’t spread undue stress and emotional instability to people around them and cause more people to become ‘crime co-efficient’.

(interrupting here to add a *spoiler warning* for season one of Psycho-Pass, just in case anyone is planning on watching it at any point, which I would recommend actually; it’s a pretty good show.)

The main Villain of Season 1 is a psychopath that, due to his unique mental mind-set and view of people, doesn’t register as9)crime co-efficient when thinking about or committing crimes, rendering him effectively invisible to the system and incapable of being judged or sentenced under it, which is a problem since it’s illegal to hurt others unless authorised by the system. Despite this advantage, much like Shigaraki, the villain can tell how screwed up the world he lives in is, and seeks to awaken others from their blind dependence on the Sybil system, to think and act for themselves. In ep 14, he starts distributing helmets that shield the wearer from the Sybil System’s monitoring, allowing others to commit crimes to their heart’s content. This leads to a harrowing scene where a helmet-wearing stalker, in the middle of a busy, crowded street in public, walks up to his target and beats her to death with a hammer, in full view of everyone. No-one does a thing to stop him, their dependence and complacency making them think it’s some kind of performance art piece, incapable of thinking that it’s anything sinister or a problem for them to take action against. Even as the woman screams for help, they don’t lift a finger, and the Sybil monitoring robots actually start cornering the victim as she bleeds out, confronting her on how her emotional stability has exceeded the acceptable threshold, and she’s now crime co-efficient, even as she dies.

This isn’t the last time the Villain performs social experiments to demonstrate the inherent flaws of humanity in a society that lets a system control and define their actions. He lures the protagonist to an isolated room with a chasm in the middle, no way for them to cross to him, but no obstacles on his side to hide behind. Thanks to his invisibility, even as he speaks of killing more people, admits to his guilt, and tells the protagonist that he will keep hurting more people to prove his point, the Government-issued gun keyed to the Sybil system won’t fire on him. The villain has located and loaded an ordinary gun and left it on the protagonist’s side, challenging them to use it to shoot him dead. The system is incapable of judging him, so the only way for the protagonist to save lives is to take action without it, to act on their own initiative and do the right thing, even if it’s illegal in the eyes of society. The villain is fully willing to risk his own life if It means he can wake one person up for their society-wide bystander syndrome and make them act and think for themselves.

(END PSYCHO-PASS SPOILERS)

Honestly, I’d love it if, going forward, Shigaraki took similar steps to underline the inherent flaws in a hero-worshiping society, running social experiments that force heroes to avoid participating and ordinary civilians to make the heroic actions and save the day, just like the twin ferry scene from ‘The Dark Knight’, perhaps closely monitoring everything so he can publicize how they made the correct decisions if the government tries to condemn them for taking illegal actions to save themselves. It would be a great way of causing an indirect attack on ordered society. And freeing up people to use their quirks more freely would also tie into the MLA’s vision of society, so that could be a case for what’s left of the army to work with Tomura for now, rather than get steamrolled by Giganto again and their cause forgotten.

If that’s what ends up happening, then that could be the main cause for Deku and Shigaraki to clash time and again against each other, as Midoriya keeps interfering in these experiments and performing heroic deeds to save those in need. Because the one thing that’s always been consentient about Deku- powerless or not, legal or not, he will step in to save someone regardless of the reasons not to get involved. It’s a shame, really, that Tenko and Midoriya didn’t meet when they were kids- you know Deku would have helped him because he needed it, regardless of the potential danger.

---

first off, I just want to clarify that I do understand this scene, and I understand that the series has been clearly hinting at a scenario like this almost from the start. I can also understand and accept the logic behind it. it’s just that I dislike it. I understand the point it’s trying to make; I just disagree with it. I think it’s cynical and dystopian. I think the world is better than that, and I think people are better than that. I’m not gonna go into a whole rant, but there’s this psychological phenomenon called negativity bias that basically means that negative things tend to leave more of a psychological impact in general than positive things. put that together with the constant bombardment of negative shit in the media and online and basically everywhere, and over time that tends to lead toward people perceiving the world as being worse than it actually is. this is something that really bothers me about modern online culture, actually, because the overall effect it has on a lot of people (myself included) is to leave them feeling overwhelmed and depressed, and depression in turn drains your energy and makes it more difficult for people to actually do anything about the bad shit. which, I suspect, is intentional on the part of the institutions responsible for most of said media. let’s energize the far right, and dishearten and discourage the left.

but anyways, that’s getting off track and veering towards territory I don’t have the spoons to discuss further lol. okay, so back on topic. a lot of people pointed out that we don’t actually know whether anyone called the police or not, and it’s very possible that they did. this is a fair point. as for AFO subtly having a hand in influencing the passerby’s emotions as well, I’m all for that too. that was always my original theory. because it’s always been clear that, at least from Tomura’s perspective, this is exactly what went down -- something bad happened, and no one tried to help him. we’ve always known that was the case. I just hoped that it wouldn’t prove to actually be the case, and that we would learn that Tomura had misunderstood, or that AFO had intervened. I didn’t hope for this because I thought it had canon support and was logical; I hoped it because I, personally, disagree with the supposition that the average person, when faced with a situation in which a child is in trouble and needs help, would not help, regardless of the potential danger to them. my own personal belief, supported by my admittedly limited personal experience, is that they would.

lastly, I have seen Psycho-Pass (the first season, anyway; I need to check out season 2 one of these days) and enjoyed it a lot, actually. but it’s one of those things I enjoy simply as a what-if, kind of like The Hunger Games. it’s great entertainment if you’re in the mood for some dark and gritty stuff. but it’s a very 1984 type of worst-case scenario government-controls-your-thoughts type of story, and not something I personally would go “oh yeah, I could see this happening in real life” while watching it. it’s more of a fun cautionary tale warning people about the potential consequences of taking extremes too far, even in the name of the greater good. plus it has these really awesome guns that transform and look really cool and splatter the shit out of people. and Amano did the character designs, so if you liked the character designs in KHR it’s definitely worth a watch for that alone, just putting that out there.

anyway. I’ve completely run out of time, so I’ll just post this and I apologize for not wrapping up my argument neatly. or, you know, at all sob.

#bnha #bnha 237 #shigaraki tomura #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #makeste reads bnha #bnha meta #asks #thequietmanno1

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artificialqueens · 5 years ago

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In Retrograde : Chapter One (branjie) - ephemerals

Author’s Note: Really excited to share my first fic for this fandom. Loosely inspired by Sharp Objects by Gillan Flynn. You can follow me @missvanjies !!

Synopsis: After spending months uninspired, Vanessa, a local reporter, becomes infatuated with writing a story surrounding the downfall of a police officer discharged after killing an innocent man.

When Brooke Lynn returns to her hometown after her life begins to fall apart, she doesn’t expect to find solace in the charismatic brunette who seems just a little too invested in uncovering all the secrets of her past.

chapter one

Friday, March 23rd, 2018

Innocent Teenager Mistaken for Ruthless Criminal, Killed by Police.

At approximately 9:37 pm on Wednesday, March 21st, police units were called to a domestic dispute at Wexford as shots were overheard by neighbours. When emergency units arrived at the scene, a young woman, later identified as 23 year-old Eva Talbott, was pronounced dead after obtaining a gunshot to the head. Her fiancé, 25 year-old Damon Carmichael was witnessed fleeing the scene by multiple onlookers. Carmichael had been known by police for many years due to an extensive history of domestic violence with past partners.

Backup units were called to search for the suspect who headed north, described by witnesses as 6’2, Caucasian, slim with short dark hair, wearing a burgundy sweatshirt. The murder weapon was not found at the scene. Two local officers Sergeant Brooke Lynn Hytes and Constable Yvie Oddly were patrolling Warden Avenue at this time and responded to the backup call. At 10:03 pm, Sergeant Hytes reported that they had found the suspect near Wexford Heights United Church, and received orders to approach him carefully assuming he was armed. After resisting arrest and becoming agitated, Sergeant Hytes followed orders and fired two shots, both in the victim’s chest. Paramedics attending the crime identified the body as 19 year old Thomas Price, a Biology student at the University of Toronto.

Police authorities described the incident “as a truly shocking tragedy for the Toronto community” but refused to comment on the current status of Ms Hytes’ job. While no further action has been taken yet, it is highly unlikely that she will remain in the force after this tragedy. Constable Oddly has taken leave following this accident. There is a public outcry for Ms Hytes to receive criminal charges, with the community starting various online petitions that have had viral success worldwide. It is likely the police commissioner will call an enquiry if this public pressure continues.

Damon Carmichael has since been taken into police custody and charged with first degree murder, alongside various other outstanding charges. We reached out to the victims families and Ms Hytes, however they declined to comment. We will keep you up to date with the all the news on this ongoing story.

…

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2018.

Brooke presses her head against the cold glass of the window, eyes drawn to the picturesque countryside. Green against green blurring together. It’s a big change from the concrete jungle she had become accustomed to over the last few years. Suburbia had never suited her. However, there was always something peaceful about coming back to her hometown, regardless of how unwelcome she may be.

It had been quite some time since she had been home. While she loved her parents dearly, dealing with them could only be described as difficult at the best of times. Her mother was overbearing. Brooke knew she had outlandish expectations of what she expected from her only child. Her father never said very much about it all. So, when she broke the news to her parents that she had been dismissed from her job after she killed an innocent kid, they were far from impressed. And then a few days later, she told them her fiancé had called off the engagement. It was this rotten cycle that every few years Brooke would hit rock bottom and return, crying for their help.

In the seat beside her, her best friend Nina had been unusually quiet the entire journey. Nina was everything Brooke wasn’t. On the surface, it may have seemed like Brooke had everything together, but those close to her knew she was far from it. Between anxiously tapping away at the wheel and humming alone to the radio, Nina hadn’t been able to speak a word. Some things were better left unsaid. But she was aware there was a tension looming, full of unanswered questions and uncertainty. And Nina had never been one to stay silent for long.

“Brooke-“ Nina’s concentration diverts from the road momentarily, first to Brooke, then to the rear view mirror. Gravel crunches under the wheels. Music plays softly from the radio. Brooke interjects, her voice low and soft.

“Don’t start.”

“I’m not going to, baby,” Nina drawls, “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

There’s a kind smile on Nina’s face, Brooke can see it in the reflection of the windscreen. She rolls her eyes like a brooding teenager, quietly scoffs at Nina’s words. Brooke is the furthest from okay that perhaps she had ever been. It was hard to keep things from Nina, she always had an inkling of what was bubbling under the surface.

Gravel crunches, music plays, they sit in silence.

Brooke reaches over to turn up the radio but Nina swats her hand away. She needs a fucking cigarette, a drink, maybe even something else if she could get her hands on it.

“I took the day off from work to pick your ass up,” Nina forces a laugh. Brooke knows she’s trying way too hard to lighten the mood, “I just want you to know that I’m here for you. You can talk to me.”

It’s times like this where Brooke is reminded that Nina is too compassionate for her own good. In the days after the shooting, Nina was the first (and only) person to reassure her things will end up alright. When she found out she had lost her job, when her fiancé left her, Nina was there. Took vacation leave from work to visit Toronto for a couple of days. Nina was that ride-or-die friend.

For the majority of her life, Nina has been the only person to really care.

“Thank you,” is all that Brooke can muster up the courage to say. It comes in a whisper, so muffled she swears Nina won’t hear it. She knows at some point she has to talk to Nina about the mess she has made for herself, but now was not the time.

…

“You could stay with me,” Nina had offered, right after finding out Luke had called off the engagement. It was a shame, Nina thought, he was a decent guy. Far from who she expected Brooke to end up with. Brooke had been surprisingly calm on the phone, recalling word for word what Luke had said.

“ Fuck up after fuck up. I stood by you every single time Brooke and this is how you fucking repay me? You made me look like a fool being with you .”

Brooke had seen this coming from a mile away. They didn’t really love each other, it was a relationship out of convenience. The kind that comes along when you don’t believe you deserve any better. To him, Brooke was just a trophy. She made his friends drool and his parents proud. All he wanted was the visuals. Brooke knew he didn’t give a shit about her feelings. For the longest time, Luke ignored all the baggage Brooke came with. When things slowly unravelled, he tried his hardest to keep things in his control. This time was just so far out of his control it was the final straw.

“I’m sure Justin would be thrilled with me staying,” Brooke knew that would be a stupid decision on Nina’s part. Her husband had never been fond of Brooke and vice versa. In his mind, Brooke was a bad influence, shitty friend, unloyal partner, an addict, emotionally unstable. Now, a fucking murder. Nina adored him and that was enough for Brooke to try and be civil. Luckily, her husband’s many opinions didn’t make Nina love Brooke any less.

“It isn’t a bad idea though,” Nina’s voice crackled over the phone, “Come back home for a while, baby. Wait until it blows over. Stay with us.”

“This thing isn’t going to blow over,” It was two in the morning and she’s leaning up against the exterior of some nightclub, smoking a cigarette. She was alone, six, maybe seven vodka sodas deep, “I killed someone. People don’t usually forget about something like that.”

“You were doing your job.”

“My job was to protect people, Nina. I think people are rightfully angry. I’m fucking angry with myself.”

Brooke pressed the lit end of the cigarette into the skin of her thigh. She winced at the sensation and hoped that Nina couldn’t recognise the sound through the phone.

“I know, baby,” Nina cooed soothingly through the speakers. Brooke flicked the ash from her skin, circling the damage with her finger. A bullet hole of her own. Tender, red, swollen, burnt. Her fingers trace another, and another, and another. One for a dead teenager, one for a broken marriage, one for a stint in rehab. A timeline of events in aging scars scattered sporadically across her legs. One for losing her job, one for every time she disappointed her parents, one for every time she disappointed Nina.

Fuck up after fuck up .

She is silent and she is spiralling on the streets of Toronto in the early hours of the morning. What was even worse for Brooke is Nina knows. Nina always knows.

“ Come home . I’ll come and get you. I’ve got some sick days I can use, I’ll drive to Toronto, help you pack some stuff up. You shouldn’t be alone right now, Brooke. You know what happens.”

It could be because she was drunk, or depressed, or tired, but surprisingly, Brooke said yes.

…

As they pull into town, Brooke almost asks Nina to drive her back. Almost . She reminds herself that unfortunately she doesn’t have a home anymore. Her apartment occupied by someone else now, her things split with her ex-boyfriend. She wishes she felt some remorse about her breakup but Brooke was completely numb. The anger had settled through the drinking and the chaos. Now, Brooke was detached from this mess. Repression wasn’t the best coping mechanism, but it would do for now.

The streets of the suburbs slowly became more familiar as they edged closer to her parents house. They were on the nicer side of town, with picket fences, green lawns and manicured gardens. Upper-middle class. They drive past Nina’s house, two stories with pastel sliding. Somehow exactly what she envisioned Nina living in. They brought it about a year ago, a little worse for wear. Every time she would ring, Nina would have an anecdote about something stupid Justin had done that day. It was the simple, domestic life Brooke had always longed for but would never have.

“Last chance, you don’t have to stay with your parents,” Nina grins as they turned the final corner towards Brooke’s family home. She’s joking and happy and for a second, Brooke cracks the slightest smile.

“Justin wouldn’t even let me through the front door.”

Nina couldn’t argue with that.

As the car pulls to a halt, Nina speaks again, “Promise me you’ll behave yourself, Brooke. I can’t be running after you while you self destruct again.”

Bemused, Brooke raises an eyebrow. It was a strange thing to come from Nina’s mouth, usually selfless, kind. Her folded arms unravel to reach for the seat belt buckle, as an air of silence lay between them. Reaching for the door handle, Brooke reassures her, “Yeah, Nina. I’ll be good.”

It’s far from genuine; Brooke knows this, Nina knows this. She’s seconds away from coming apart at the seams. Brooke steps out into the spring air and Nina follows suit. She opens up the trunk of the car and pulls out the remnants of her life in Toronto. A few boxes of sentimental items, two suitcases of clothes, nothing substantial. It’s hard to believe her entire belongings had comfortably fit inside the back of Nina’s car.

The wheels of the suitcases catch momentarily on the gravel pathway on the way to the house. Brooke drags both cases behind her haphazardly. In her arms, Nina has piled as many boxes as possible, surpassing the height of her head. They both struggle up the stairs and before she knew it, Brooke is faced with ringing the doorbell. She straightens her posture, sighs, and presses her fingertip to the doorbell.

Her mother greets her with a frenzied hug, incoherently mumbling to Nina about how she promised to visit months ago and hasn’t. Her father watches from behind the doorway, arms folded and face emotionless. Somewhere in the midst her mother acknowledges Brooke, mentions something about gaining weight or losing weight, maybe she should take some more pride in her appearance, especially now that she’s single. It’s a whirlwind she’s swept up in, as her mother pulls away from the hug and tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear.

Her father grabs the boxes from Nina. Brooke follows him in silence, her suitcases in tow. Downstairs, her mother and Nina remain carried away in conversation, the sound polite laughs echoing through the house. They set her things down at the foot of her childhood bed. Brooke’s father shyly smiles and opens his arms, “I’m glad you’re home, kiddo.”

Brooke falls into his embrace, “How much convincing did it take this time?” After the sequence of events that usually occur once Brooke returns home, her mother was quite apprehensive of letting her back into the house. An understandably fear, but Brooke’s father would never let his daughter be left without a home to come back to.

“Eh,” he playfully muses, “I had to get on my knees and beg.”

The smile on Brooke’s face is authentic for the first time in weeks. They pull away from each other slowly and maybe, Brooke is just a little happy to be home.

“Now, lets go downstairs kiddo, before your mother talks Nina’s ear off.”

…

It was a typical Tuesday night for Vanessa and her girls, having been dragged along to the local bar by an already tipsy Silky. To her left, A’keria sips politely on the glass of wine Silky had gifted her, claiming that unlike the rest of them, she can’t rock up to work hungover the next morning. Unlike Silky, Vanessa always had thought this was sensible; A’keria taught at the local high school and she knew that teenagers could be the worst people on the planet sometimes. Vanessa had no qualms about drinking on a weeknight, especially with how slow work was at the moment. She knew that tomorrow, once again, she would be writing about the local football team losing their sixth consecutive game or an upcoming fundraiser on the weekend. It wasn’t exactly how she envisioned using her journalism degree, but a job was a job.

On her right, Silky had been complaining about a rude customer for so unbelievably long, Vanessa had zoned out. She didn’t miss the days of working in retail at all. Silky had some horror stories from the years of running her bakery. She might just be writing for the local newspaper, but Vanessa was grateful she didn’t have to deal with unsatisfied customers and hormonal teenagers on a daily basis.

“So, I overheard somthin’ interesting today,” Vanessa’s ears perk up as Silky changes the subject. She takes a swig from her beer as Silky continues, “Miss Brooke Lynn’s back in town.”

Perplexed, Vanessa remains silent. That name sounds familiar, but Vanessa can’t seem to figure out why. Both Silky and A’keria grew up together in town, so quite often Vanessa had no clue who they were talking about. Local legends, bitches from high school, the usual offenders. It pricks an interest in her as A’keria scoffs, “Damn, that bitch can’t stay away for long. That’s why Nina’s taken so much time off work lately, probably cleanin’ up that girl’s latest bullshit.”

Vanessa had interviewed Nina a few times now regarding the productions she ran at the high school. She was a colleague of A’keria’s, so over time they had become acquainted at several functions and events. From what she knew, they all went to school together as teenagers and she was one of the few people they spoke fondly of. Vanessa quickly recalls various anecdotes and stories the girls have told her, trying to put her finger on how she knows this name.

“Nina needs to stop pandering to that bitch and let her reap what she sows,” Silky retorts before knocking back the rest of her drink, “Miss Hytes’ can’t keep running back from Toronto every time somethin’ goes wrong.”

Brooke Lynn Hytes. Toronto. Oh .

“Wait, Brooke Lynn Hytes as in Sergeant Hytes ?” Both Silky and A’keria sharply turn to face Vanessa, “As in the officer who killed that innocent kid? The one all over the internet?”

A’keria nods, “That’s her.”

“Fuck,” it comes out as a gentle hiss, Vanessa stunned by the realisation, “She lived here? You knew her?”

“Don’t get any ideas,” A’keria interjects, “We know how you like those bad white girls.”

“There’s a story there-“ Vanessa starts before being cut off by A’keria.

“Don’t get any ideas, that girls a bad omen.”

A bad omen maybe, a good story definitely. Writing a story about a fall from grace, a golden girl gone wild, something interesting would definitely get her out of this slump she has fallen into. It’s an exciting prospect. An article to finally showcase her talent.

Both A’keria and Silky watched as the cogs in her mind ran into overdrive. Hometown Hero, National Disgrace ; Vanessa could see the headline now.

#rpdr fanfiction #brooke lynn hytes #vanessa vanjie mateo #lesbian au #angst #in retrograde #ephemerals #tw self harm #tw addiction #submission

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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I Felt Safe in America. Until El Paso. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/opinion/sunday/el-paso-shooting-immigrants.html

Below are two editorial pieces written by Hispanic AMERICANS and their thoughts on America after the El Paso shooting. We CANNOT LET HATE WIN. WE MUST STAND WITH OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS.

I Felt Safe in America. Until El Paso.

It is because of people like me and my daughter that a gunman did what he did.

By Fernanda Santos, Ms. Santos, a former national correspondent for The Times, teaches journalism at Arizona State University. | Published Aug. 10, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 10, 2019 |

PHOENIX — A good friend who is moving to Chicago had a going-away party at a downtown brewery recently and I stopped by to say goodbye. He is an artist from Iraq who escaped to the United States in 2013 to save his life. In Iraq, Mahdi Army loyalists had chased, beaten and threatened him because he had dared to sketch nude pictures — practice for his entrance exam at Baghdad University’s College of Fine Arts. Here, he is free.

I wasn’t running from anyone when I settled in the United States 21 years ago, but I understand the idea of being free in America: For me, it has meant being free from the senseless violence of everyday life in Rio de Janeiro, from where I came. Since moving to the United States, I’ve married a white man, given birth to our daughter and moved to Arizona, where I’ve written about immigrants and the border and gotten to know both well.

I blend in seamlessly in Arizona, where about one in three residents is Latino. As a naturalized citizen, I felt safe here even when a campaign against illegal immigrants led by the infamous former sheriff, Joe Arpaio, targeted Latinos. One day after Donald Trump’s election, a man approached me while I spoke Spanish on the phone outside a coffee shop and screamed, “Speak English.” The experience rattled me, but still I felt safe. I did, however, start carrying my passport card in my wallet, just in case.

That sense of safety changed when a young white man opened fire in a Walmart in El Paso last Saturday, making targets out of brown-skinned people. I read the suspect’s manifesto Sunday morning and, for the first time, I did not feel just like an immigrant. I felt like a target. I looked at my 10-year-old daughter eating the chocolate-chip pancakes I’d made and realized that she could be a target too. Citizenship, it turns out, is an illusory shield. In the eyes of that gunman, I am not American but an invader, an instigator. It is because of people like me that he did what he did.

Segregation was codified in this country in the days after Emancipation, when Southern states enacted laws that clamped down on African-Americans’ newly found freedom to vote, own property or attend public schools. But Jim Crow extended beyond the South: It took the Supreme Court to force Arizona to stop requiring voters to take English literacy tests, and that was years after the Voting Rights Act had already banned such tests.

But if legal segregation has largely fallen before court rulings, anti-minority and anti-immigrant attitudes have not. Last month, at a Republican event in Phoenix, State Senator Sylvia Allen, who is white, said, “We’re going to look like South American countries very quickly.” Ms. Allen, who later apologized, blamed it on the fact that white women are not reproducing fast enough and on the immigrants who are “flooding us and flooding us and flooding us and overwhelming us so we don’t have time to teach them the principles of our country.”

Last week, a fund-raising email by the Arizona Republican Party called the arrival of Central Americans at the border to assert their legal right for asylum “an invasion,” echoing language commonly employed by President Trump.

This is the language of white supremacy today: that we must stop immigration because Latinos will distort American culture and replace “real Americans.” But by “American culture” they really mean white culture, a definition that, to them, doesn’t apply to people like me. Or to black people, Muslims, Asian-Americans and many others, including mixed-race Americans like my daughter.

In his manifesto, the El Paso suspect employs this narrow definition to justify the unjustifiable. He says much more in that screed, most of it vile. Some, though, reminded me, in a good way, of the young undocumented immigrants I’ve met in Arizona. “Inaction is not a choice,” he wrote, reminding me that before elections, many young immigrants, including so-called Dreamers, knock on doors and share their stories, hoping to persuade their neighbors to do what they cannot, which is to vote. For those Dreamers, inaction is indeed not a choice.

There are Walmart stores all along the southern border. If you visit one of them on a weekend, you’ll see a parking lot full of cars with Mexican license plates. In Douglas, Ariz., a city whose mayor was born in the Dominican Republic, Mexicans who cross into the United States on foot to buy discounted clothing and housewares leave their Walmart shopping carts at the border crossing.

While I was at a Walmart in Phoenix shopping for school supplies the other day, I could see the kinds of people who make up this state. There were mothers speaking Spanish to children who spoke to one another in English, Muslim refugees from Africa in brightly colored hijabs, black families and white families too.

When school starts later this month in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, one school will be missing its principal, Elsa Mendoza Marquez. She was among the 22 people killed in the El Paso Walmart, just across the Rio Grande from Juarez. A dual Mexican-American citizen, she too was shopping and was gunned down while her husband waited for her outside, in the parking lot.

What the El Paso gunman failed to realize is that the immigrants he so hates are, like him, struggling to make sense of a changing country and claim their rightful place in it. He chose a rifle to claim his place. My Iraqi friend, who is off to pursue a master’s degree in art in Chicago, chose a brush.

The Dreamers I’ve met have chosen the power of civic engagement to fight their fight. And that, to me, makes them better citizens than plenty of the people who call themselves “real Americans” these days.

El Paso Was a Massacre Foretold

Those who are set on killing minorities are aided by the fact that they can easily obtain assault weapons in this country.

By Jorge Ramos, Mr. Ramos is a contributing Opinion writer. | Published Aug. 10, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 10, 2019 |

Leer en español

EL PASO — “I don’t know why he took my boy’s life,” Dora Lizarde said. Her grandson Javier, 15, was the youngest victim of last weekend’s massacre, killed by a bullet to the head. “Fifteen years old; he still had so much time to live,” Ms. Lizarde told me in an interview this week. “I don’t know why he took him away, I don’t understand. He is young, too.”

Patrick Crusius is young, too.

Police have charged Mr. Crusius, 21, in the mass shooting that killed 22 people at a crowded Walmart here on Aug. 3. Nineteen of the victims had Spanish surnames, making this the worst attack on Latinos in modern American history. The Mexican government has labeled the killings a terrorist act, given that eight Mexican citizens were among the dead. And, yes, it is a hate crime.

The massacre of Latinos in El Paso is the latest and most brutal reaction by a young, white American against a future that might be dominated by minorities. The fact that this attack happened is unsurprising: What else can we expect when racism and hatred of others is promoted from the top down in a country where there are more guns than people?

Authorities have said that Mr. Crusius posted a 2,300-word manifesto online minutes before the attack. In it, he said the attack was in response to a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” “It makes no sense to keep letting millions of illegal or legal immigrants flood into the United States,” Mr. Crusius supposedly wrote, “and to keep the tens of millions that are already here.” Those words startled me — not only because they were so hateful, but because they could seamlessly fit into speeches given by President Trump, by some members of his cabinet and by many right-wing politicians.

While Mr. Trump insists that he does not have “a racist bone” in his body, his history of making racist remarks says otherwise. After years of suggesting that President Barack Obama had not been born in the United States, Mr. Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015 by likening Mexican immigrants to criminals and rapists. He recently said that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to the countries from which they came. The list goes on. When the most powerful man in the world uses such toxic rhetoric, we should not be surprised when others mimic him.

Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman from El Paso and a Democratic presidential candidate, recently told me that he is convinced Mr. Trump influenced the attack. Mr. O’Rourke — who along with Senator Elizabeth Warren, another Democratic candidate for the presidency, has said in recent days that Mr. Trump is a “white supremacist” — responded to a tweet from the president by writing: “22 people in my hometown are dead after an act of terror inspired by your racism.” Other leaders and politicians, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have also lost their patience with Mr. Trump. “I don’t want to hear the question ‘Is this president racist?’ anymore. He is,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said recently.

The president’s xenophobia, and that of many of his supporters and enablers, is rooted in a dread that the day is soon coming when they will be a minority in their country. While non-Hispanic whites remain a majority of the population in the United States, in less than 30 years that may no longer be the case, according to projections. This sort of demographic revolution is putting Americans’ tolerance to the test. Most of us welcome an increasingly diverse country, but many, like Mr. Trump, resist the country’s multiethnic, multicultural future. Some react by walking into a store and murdering innocent people.

The most racist Americans who are set on killing minorities are aided by the fact that they can easily obtain assault weapons in this country. I’ve lost count of all the massacres I’ve covered as a journalist. After each shooting — Columbine, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Parkland — I thought we might have reached the limit of Americans’ tolerance for such horror. But it wasn’t so. I fear that the killings in El Paso won’t change anything, and that I soon will be back on another flight headed to cover the next massacre. And then another. And another after that.

I have lost hope that the United States will ever pass laws that limit access to firearms. Like many parents around the country, I’ve had difficult conversations with my children in case they find themselves in a situation where someone is shooting at them. “Try to escape, hide or fight,” I tell them. “But don’t stay still. Gunmen have a lot of bullets, but not patience.”

Still, even if we could somehow solve our gun problem in America, our racism problem would be far more difficult to eradicate. Hate-group activity is on the rise, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. And anti-immigrant rhetoric has already appeared in slogans shouted during the 2020 presidential campaign.

I crossed the border from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, one morning this week. For many years, Juárez was considered one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico because of the presence of drug cartels. Yet on this visit some people I spoke with told me that they didn’t dare cross into El Paso with their families. When I asked why, some said that they feared being hunted for being Mexican, and all said that racism was a factor.

Nobody should live in fear because they are Mexican nationals in the United States or members of the Latino community. But that’s where we are now in this United States of Trump. The abundance of weapons of war on the streets and Mr. Trump’s unending racist rhetoric are indisputably connected to the massacre in El Paso. What happened in this city was a massacre foretold. Words matter. When they are filled with hate, they cause great damage.

Mr. Ramos is an anchor for the Univision network and the author of “Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era.”

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kindabraveandlittlestupid · 6 years ago

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Try not to get caught up with the labels: Feminist, Equalist, or Humanist. The tag matters less than the larger goal society should set out to achieve. Equality for all and sometimes Equity to make small tips to the scale where needed. I am not afraid of embracing the concept of being a Male Feminist because my world is saturated by politics and I understand the players. I know the villains who wish to pit Feminist against Equalist or Humanist are doing so not because they believe any of the labels but because they benefit from the distraction between like-minded individuals who seek the same goals. Most men are not in the social position to be “The Patriarchy” but those men of wealth and power through industry, politics, or religion are the Patriarchy. An so long as they can make Men believe Women are a threat to them, that Black Lives Matter is a danger to White Americans or that Immigrants are taking the wealth of the country, these powerful men do very well so long as we keep fighting with the person next to us instead of realizing the real villains are often above us.

This is one reason why I like the idea of the Rise of Matriarchs in American Society. We can rattle these men’s cages and make them aware their power is suspect to change by a greater majority of society. This is not to say women cannot be corrupted by wealth and power as well but societies that have a more representative/diverse governments tend to be LESS corrupt and that is a step towards progress everyone benefits (except the extremely wealthy men who clutch power).

This post (despite the starter above) is not a political breakdown post though I plan to write on these subjects more in the future. Instead, it's more of clarification of my views and where I stand on various topics related to feminism. I realize there are topics that I might not touch base on and if you want me to add one you can shoot me a note. I also might hold opinions that do not take an absolutist view towards a topic and in today's politics that can be dangerous on the left and right because anyone who isn't falling in line 100% can be labeled a traitor to the cause or party.

Access to Birth Control and Planned Parenthood

I am always bewildered how nonsensical conservatives are in regards to these topics. The very best means of avoiding abortions is education, family planning, and birth control which prevent young women from having to make a difficult choice. Despite this, they believe in abstinence and try to remove birth control basically pushing more young women into the realm of motherhood because of a few minutes of passion that will ultimately decide the next 18+ years of their lives!

I believe Planned Parenthood should be available and welcome in each community to ensure that young women and men are protected, educated, and equipped with the proper means of avoiding unwanted pregnancies. I also believe condoms, IUDs, Birth Control Pills and Plan B’s should be available on the cheap and discreet to further protection. Lastly, Birth Control should be covered by insurance, even business insurance regardless of the employers personal/religious views. In other words, I am pretty damn liberal on this.

Abortion Rights (Link)

There are fewer choices a woman might face more difficult then deciding if she should or should not get an Abortion. I wrote in detail about this topic before so I will give you the short version. I believe NO ONE likes the idea of a abortion but those of us who understand the issue also know that forcing any woman regardless of age, race or social position to give birth also not ok. We in society should make this choice informative and safe. We do that by having comprehensive sexual education and birth control to be the ‘front line’ of avoiding this difficult choice. If she decides to take the next step or explore her options it shouldn't be done by bullshit church clinics attempting to use shame, guilt or false information to change her views but institutions that provide her all the options and information she could need to make the choice that's best for her. Everything should be her choice without influence from the community, the church, her parents or even the male involved. Aftercare programs should also be there to help her no matter what choice she chooses.

I think we should aim for the 20 weeks (Recent science article suggests this is possible when the babies consciousness kicks in. Open to changing if the article ends up being false) and under as the optimal time to make the choice. However, I am open to learning more on this topic and discussing if the “when” should be pushed further back. Lastly, if it comes down the choice between saving the mother or unborn fetus, I believe the mother's life is more important unless she deems otherwise. There are few political topics where I think men should shut up and let women decide... this is one of them.

Paid Family Leave

This isn't just a woman's issue but also a men's issue as well. I would actually argue this is a progressive issue as both the father and mother both deserve to take part in raising a child in those early stages. We need to consider this as a long-standing social program to allow career-oriented adults (both male and female) to continue their careers but also to support their family. We also need to ensure employers don't attempt to punish these women (and men) by skipping over them for promotions or refusing raises because they decided to have a child.

There is no argument from me that women deserve a longer leave of absence being the one who gave birth and breastfeeds the baby. I think both parents could benefit from this sort of social net and it's important we build it in such a way that it also covers two mothers or two fathers and even adoption.

Girls Education

With a better education for girls in the United States (and for the matter the world) has proven to improve economies, lower crime and even slow overpopulation because academic opportunity provides new options instead of simply being a wife/mother (nothing wrong with those if you choose that as part of your lifestyle). This is still a major issue as there are still countries that place girls education as secondary to boys education. Even if they are far away it is still our responsibility to ensure girls rights to an education is provided for them. Its pretty clear I believe in this topic wholeheartedly, however if you know me then you know there is more often then not a but around the corner.

The only caveat I can think to note is Female only education programs. An example of this is Girls Who Code that teaches programming to young girls. I love this program and I think its great they are trying to narrow the tech industry gap by pushing for more female coders. However, as someone who worked in a non-profit industry for a few years and created co-ed athletic leagues, there is value in having boys work with girls. These young women won't be working with only females forever, eventually, they will have to work with male coders and gender segregation robs them of that early experience. On a second point (and the real thing the operators of this program are missing out on) it is the fact if they have males in their class/program they can catch/alter/adjust the problematic behavior of male students to make them the new gold standard of how a male coder should act with their female coworkers. I suppose this is all just perception but I always believed its better to have both genders work together so they might view each other as equals rather embrace a gender segregation to achieve some corporate goal of having a bigger female workforce without address the issue of toxic male work environments.

MeToo Movement

I admit I am of mixed feelings about the MeToo Movement. I hesitate to support ANY movement that relies heavily on the court of public opinion. I worry about the history we all have and how sharp this social edge is at cutting down men (and women) who stand accused of any transgression. At the same time, I understand this is the reaction when sexual assault (verbal or physical) is simply swept under the rug for decades.

It scares me a little making me wonder if I ever pushed something too far. I think of jobs were I work with men and we goof off telling stories but having female coworkers nearby. They participated in the tales but I feel a dreadful concern that one or more of them simply played along trying not to make a fuss. Perhaps I made someone feel uncomfortable online at some point in the past.

Lord knows I was a victim myself to a young stalker who drove past my work taking pics and texting the line “LOL. I know where you work”. I was only able to make her stop harassment when she texted things like she was gonna lie to the police and send me to jail and I replied back with the screenshots of the whole conversation making her think how they (the police) might react when I share the text logs (clearly she didn't think her grand plan thru). I also endured a few indecent encounters with drunk women (usually on Saint Patricks Day) when I wear my kilt to the bar and they lift the edge to get a peek. I politely laughed it off and brush their hand away trying to ignore the fact they were we attempting to see if I was wearing the kilt authentically.

When you’re the victim of something like this you know it in your core that people were mistreating you. I know I never groped a woman, physically assaulted anyone or flashed myself but have I made improper jokes and I hope I never made anyone feel uncomfortable.

In the end, the MeTooMovement is a good thing. It needs to evolve into the next stage taking on a political form where it becomes not just a hashtag and social media post but evolve into real-world policy and social change that adjusts how men treat women in society (and the occasional female on male transgression). We can all do a little better and MeToo has the momentum to perhaps create a lasting social change by creating consent and decency program that could be taught both in schools and also in adult careers.

Women in Politics (Link)

I touched base with this topic before and I am pretty comfortable in my position. We don’t need more women in politics, we need more Smart Women in politics (and for that matter, we could do with some smarter men as well). Women make roughly between 20 to 30% of the leadership positions in government. Champions like Lee, Clinton, Warren, and Collins make up some of the smartest women in politics and bring a character with them that makes not only Washington better but the whole country better.

The reason why I make the distinction between “More Smart Women in Politics” and just “More Women in Politics” because of women like DeVos, Palin, Bachmann, and Sanders exist. Really just stupid stupid people who don’t know nor care about the long-term effect of their policies and their divisive rhetoric. We could do better than the likes of them and I hope this 2018 election brings a wave of strong/smart women who will balance out this government to something more representing of the country... 50/50.

NOTE: Preferably a BLUE wave of strong women.

Conclusion

I handpicked these topics because they relate to women's issues. By no means are these topics the only thing women care about but they connect deeply with feminism. As I said above if there is something you care for me to add to the list and hear my personal views/beliefs then shoot me a note. If we do not agree 100% on a topic I ask you to reflect on what I write before writing a hot worded post. If you have an opposing or slightly different view on a subject and think I could benefit from hearing a feminine take on a topic, by all means, share your post (and links to information). I am always evolving in my opinions and alternative views with thoughtful insight commonly shift my views. As always thanks for reading.

Regards Michael California

#Male Feminist #Supporting Women #Progressive #Liberal #Politics #GirlsWhoCode #Women in Politics #MeToo #Me Too Movement #Abortion #Abortion Rights #Pro Choice #Planned Parenthood #Paid Family Leave #Girls Education #Equality #Equity

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thenamelessbaroness · 7 years ago

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Strange Magic Week 2017 - Friday: Modern Fantasy

When the Y2K bug hit (look it up if you’re under the age of 25) a lot of so-called specialists predicted a lot of awful things happening. Something that HAD NOT been foreseen was that the NA35 experiment at the Super Proton Synchrotron would go haywire, (in a way that should have been impossible, protested the scientists involved) and simply delete the barrier between two alternate universes.

One second, fireworks and champagne and Auld Lang Syne. The next, a complete overlay of one world onto another. Across the globe, trees suddenly appeared inside houses, waterfalls tumbled down the sides of skyscrapers, briar hedges blocked off roads, giant flowers popped up in the middle of sidewalks, and everyone started screaming.

It took most people a good two minutes before they figured out that some of the screams were coming from “people” who had not been standing with them two minutes and one second ago. And these people had wings. Or fangs. Or claws. Or were simply all-over furry.

And then there was some more screaming.

All in all, 12:01am, January 1st, 2000 had been really exciting. And loud.

By the time the “authorities” had figured out, at least a semblance, of what had happened (which took months), most of the populations of both worlds had come to an easy understanding with each other. Most of the humans thought the natural additions to their cities and homes, seamlessly blended into the very structure of the materials, (which scientists also protested should be impossible) were charming. Who hadn’t dreamed of having a tree in their bedroom when they were a child? Plus, the hole in the Ozone layer had healed over, and the air was fresher than it had been in centuries. So what if all that came with a few flying people.

And the Fae found the world that had suddenly appeared over their own fascinating. How these creatures like them, yet not, had overcome challenges without the use of wings, or fangs, or claws, or conveniently sized flora. And they REALLY liked human fashion. Elves were particularly enthusiastic early adopters of roller blades.

By New Year’s Day, 2001 humans and Fae were celebrating their brave new world, side-by-side, as friends.

But, of course, not all is peace and love, no matter how cool the house trees are.

Travelling in a car, Marianne had asked a human friend about the giant blinking sign to the side of the highway. Instead of displaying the travel time to the next major intersection, as usual, it was flashing a car description and a series of numbers.

“Oh, sad. That’s an Amber Alert.”

“What’s that?”

“Someone kidnapped some kid. They know the car that took them, so the police post up the description and the license plate in hope that someone will spot them and call the cops.”

“Kidnapped…?” Marianne murmured. She couldn’t help but flash back to the feeling of helplessness and horror she’d felt when Bog had flown away with her baby sister in a bag. Sure, that all worked out in the end, but the fact that kidnappings happened often enough in this world that there was a procedure for them? It made her blood run cold. And then, it boiled.

“So that’s the color of the car, and the numbers on its butt?” Marianne demanded, unclipping her seatbelt.

Her friend giggled at the description of a license plate. “Yeah, Marianne, those are the numbers on its butt. Hey, wait--!”

But Marianne had already thrown open the passenger door and thrown herself into the air.

“Shit.”

Marianne scoured the traffic jammed highway, closely examining every silver car she came across. Finally, she spotted the right one. She knew it before she even checked the numbers. A little tear-streaked face was pressed to the window, occasionally pounding on it before being hauled roughly back out of sight.

Marianne saw red. She dove and landed as heavily as she could on the hood of the car, spreading her wings to block the driver’s view. He swerved wildly, trying to shake her. She had way too much practice keeping her feet on swooping, diving leaves to let mere two-dimensional movement budge her. She laughed into the windshield and held on.

The horn blared, and streams of profanity issues from behind the glass, but eventually the driver slowed to a stop before he hit something. Then he leapt out of the car and grabbed for her wrist. Which is exactly what she’d been hoping for. She let herself be hauled off the hood, but then continued to fall, pulling on her “captor,” until he stumbled and fell over her. A good shove with her legs flipped him neatly over her head, and she followed. Once she was on top of him, Marianne punched him soundly in the face until he conked out. And then twice more, just for good measure.

Then she turned to the open door, and realized she had absolutely no idea how to deal with a human child.

“So…” she said, as the quite little human creature peeked out the door. “Are you okay? Do you want to get out of there?” Marianne reached out, but the child backed away into the shadows of the car, letting out a miserable wail. Marianne gritted her teeth.

“You idiot.” A flutter of wings heralded the arrival of her sister. “You’re scaring her.”

“Dawn, what are you doing here?”

“Your friend pulled into a McDonald’s and called me about the stunt you were pulling. I figured you’d need help.” Dawn turned toward the car, crouched down and held out her hand, beaming her best feel-better smile.

“It’s okay. Marianne is tough, and kind of scary, but she’s a good guy, I promise.” The little child slowly put the hand it didn’t have stuffed in its mouth into Dawn’s, and let herself be pulled out of the car. She latched onto Dawn’s leg and buried her face in her thigh.

“What in tha blazes?” came a guttural shout from on high.

“Hi, Bog,” Marianne called back, cheerfully. “Just getting some exercise!”

Bog landed next to the unconscious man, who wasn’t quite as unconscious as before, and crossed his arms. “He doesn’t look like much exercise ta me.”

When the man began to sit up, Bog planted a foot on his chest. “I doan think so,” he said, his long, pointy face a trifle too close to the human’s, who blanched, laid back down, and appeared to be trying to play dead.

Just then several police cruisers, lights blazing, roared down the shoulder and pulled to a stop. Before any of the officers could so much as open their doors, one flung open and a tearful woman raced the rest of the way toward their little group.

“SUSIE!” she shrieked.

The little human turned her face a few degrees out of Dawn’s skirts to peer at the approaching woman. “MAMA!” she cried, and pushed off from Dawn, her little legs pumping away as she ran up the concrete.

Marianne, Dawn, and Bog smiled as the pair was reunited. Marianne and Bog smiled even wider when the woman, holding her child close, marched up to their group and began screaming at, and kicking, the prone man. Bog backed carefully way, not wanting to get caught in the crossfire.

Marianne drew them a little further from the commotion and took Bog’s and Dawn’s hands.

“Bog, Dawn… Did you guys know that this happens all the time? So often that there are procedures for dealing with kidnappings?” To her gratification, her love and her sister both seemed as horrified as she did.

And so, their little vigilante career began. And in the many years since that first incident, they grew well into their roles.

If there was a kidnapped child, or any child in danger, a woman trying to flee her abuser, someone trying to get out of a gang, anyone who was up against a force more powerful than themselves, and the police couldn’t, or wouldn’t help them, they might find themselves surrounded by a quartet of mad Fae.

Bog was the Monster. He was big, and scary, and intimidating, and could back it all up with that staff of his. He was frequently a blind for Marianne to hide behind, just before she leapt out and really laid into the bad guys. And for some of the kids, he was complete safety. A Monster bigger, and badder, and scarier than the one they were escaping, and who was 100% on their side. Nothing could be safer.

Marianne was the Brawler. Her slight form and feminine look encouraged overconfidence and stupidity from some of the worst baddies, making them far easier to take down. And she was relentless when it came to chasing down, or chasing away, kidnappers or abusers. For some of the little girls, and older women for that matter, she was a role model of strength, and that made them feel safe.

Sunny was the Hacker. He LOVED the human’s new and ever changing technologies. He could set up a security or surveillance system in an hour, track down people by their e-mail, intercept police radio chatter, and quite a few other things he wouldn’t talk about that were, perhaps, a smidge on the wrong side of legality. His small form, big smile, and generally stationary position at his computers had prompted many a shy child to curl up, trustingly in his lap.

And Dawn was the Angel. She learned everything she could about the law, and about social services available to victims. She smoothed over ruffled feathers with police and other authorities. She was the sweet smile and soft voice that could soothe almost any fear. And she worked tirelessly to strengthen her wings. If push came to shove, her job was to scoop up the vulnerable and shoot straight into the heavens with them, and she had better be fast.

Dawn actually came around to thinking of all four of them as Angels. She even went so far as to call Bog one, as he was carrying around the tiny form of a sleeping girl who had become particularly attached to him. She learned a couple new, naughty words that night.

As revenge she tried to get Sunny to see if he could influence the “internet” to call them all Angels, but Sunny told her it was a no-go.

“Apparently, we’re already known as Superheroes,” he said.

“Ooooo, what’s a Superhero?” she asked.

#strange magic #strange magic week #modern fantasy #the bog king #marianne #dawn #sunny

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fapangel · 7 years ago

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Left-Wing Violence and False Equivalencies

After the attempted murder of several Republican Congressmen last month, I skipped any big blogpost on it because I'd already posted it months before - a simple "I told you so" sufficed. The bloodletting was everything I - and countless others - had said would be the inevitable consequence of the tide of pathological hatred and thuggery currently ruling the left wing. The shock of the event should have spoken for itself.

Imagine my surprise, then, to hear people I respect glibly equating the unceasing, obsessive hatred and calls for violence from the left wing to "right-wing rhetoric," implicitly suggesting some sort of parity. Apparently, this needs saying: left-wing violence, and calls for violence, are qualitatively and quantitatively far more evident, excessive, effective and dangerous on the left. This owes to three main reasons:

Left-wing violence and violent rhetoric is openly promoted and legitimized by people in positions to influence the ideology of the masses, especially Hollywood stars, university professors and famous national “comedians.”

Left-wing violence and violent rhetoric is organized, political, and international in scope.

Left-wing violence and violent rhetoric is unashamed, unapologetic, and accepted in their own cultural circles.

These are not opinions, or arguments. As I will document, these are facts. Let's start with the first point.

Grasping for Straws - Media Accusations

Let's compare some reactions - reactions - to the Scalise shooting, after conservatives dire predictions of bloodshed had been borne out. Trinity College professor Johnny Eric Williams published an article on Medium.com charmingly titled "Let Them Fucking Die," openly wishing that the attempted murderer had been successful. It opened with this disclaimer:

[NOTE: This essay is in the context of bigotry and is speaking about bigots. If you aren’t a bigot, then it doesn’t apply to you. But, if you happen to feel hit, then holler, dog.]

One rubber-stamp label later, and murder - outright murder - is justified. Then there was Chelsey Gentry-Tipton, a Nebraska Democratic Party official and chairwoman of Nebraska's Black Caucus openly mocked the shock of the shooting victims on social media. She also posted “The very people that push pro NRA legislation in efforts to pad their pockets with complete disregard for human life. Yeah, having a hard time feeling bad for them.”

But even that pales in comparison to Phil Montag, another Nebraskan Democratic Party official, who came to Gentry-Tipton's defense and was caught on tape saying that he was glad Scalise got shot and that he wished Scalise was dead. Click that link - it must be heard to be believed, especially Montag combatively arguing with his fellow Party officials who released the tape.

And let's not forget James Devine, a New Jersey Democratic campaign strategist for 35 years who tweeted “We are in a war with selfish, foolish & narcissistic rich people. Why is it a shock when things turn violent?#HuntRepublicanCongressmen.” (The original tweet is still up. Look for yourself.)

Again, this is after theory has become fact, after blood has been spilled, and after people have been gravely wounded and almost killed. The reaction of tenured professors Democratic Party officials and career Democratic campaign staffers wasn't just approval, but combative, nasty, in-your-face avowal; the conviction of people convinced they're right and not afraid to say so.

Now turn the tables and time-warp to 2011, after Gabrielle Giffords was shot and the left-wing media overwhelmingly and immediately blamed it on "right-wing rhetoric" - such as a campaign map with "cross-hair graphics" placed over crucial districts - to explain the actions of an insane man. Initial diagnosis of mental illness mean little, since these perpetrators are unstable and violence-prone by definition - defining it as root cause or aggravating factor requires investigation. I was going to say that no such ambiguity existed in the Giffords shooting, trusting to Fig. A., the shooter's mugshot, to carry the argument -

- but the media happily spared me the trouble when the New York Times, the pinnacle of journalistic standards and so-called "newspaper of record", repeated the election-map claim six years after Loughner's gibbering insanity had been firmly established. The editorial board of the New York Times missed this, which implies something about their remembered narratives. Incidentally, that editorial was itself a reaction to the Scalise shooting, and claimed that there was "no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack." With the blood of Scalise and two police officers still soaking the ground, the Times rushed to defend the left and blame the right with an outright lie.

This was going to be my key example, but once again the media preempted me. It's been drowned out by the overwhelming backlash against CNN's thuggish threatening and intimidation of some random Reddit user, but the media's desperately been arguing that Trump re-tweeting a meme gif of him fake-wrestling a CNN logo to the mat is promoting violence against the media. CNN, of course, is in the throes of high dudgeon. This is what the major mainstream media outlets - with their massive, unquestionably powerful platforms and reporter/researcher apparatus - find and hold up as examples of violent right-wing rhetoric: crosshairs on campaign maps and fake wrestling meme .gifs from reddit. Given the power, influence, and dominant platform of these organizations, it strains credulity to claim that there's significant instances of right-wing violence promotion that they somehow haven't made headline news.

A Non-Stop Litany of Hatred

Barely two weeks after the mass shooting at the Republican baseball practice, Johnny Depp, famous Hollywood actor, stood up in front of a crowd in England and “joked” about assassinating President Trump. “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president? I want to clarify, I am not an actor. I lie for a living. However, it has been a while and maybe it is time.” Back in May, Professor John Griffin, of the Art Institute of Washington, called for GOP Representatives to be “lined up and shot.”

Then there's the Otto Warmbier tale. Soon after the 22 year old was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for “stealing a political poster,” the Huffington Post was openly gloating about how that filthy white male had it coming for thinking his white privilege would let him get away with his “crime,” apparently happy to take North Korea's word on the young man's “guilt.”And they weren't the only ones, with comedians, Salon.com and Affinity magazine piling on also. After Otto Warmbier was murdered by the North Koreans, Fox News wondered if those leftists were still laughing. Turns out they were - or at least Kathy Dettwyler, professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware, said he got “exactly what he deserved” because of - again - his white privilege. Tom Curry, associate professor at Texas A&M, gave an interview about “killing white people in context,” in which he said that “some white people might have to die,” because, of course, black people are dying. A Fresno State University professor, Lars Maischak, went on a twitter rant calling for Trump to be hung, “the higher the better,” and for Republicans to be executed. One particularly saucy tweet: “Has anyone started soliciting money and design drafts for a monument honoring the Trump assassin, yet?”

Back to Hollywood with Madonna, who talked about thinking of “blowing up the white house.” When Palin's campaign puts cross-hairs on crucial electoral districts it's an “incitement to violence,” but when Madonna says “blow up the White House” she's just speaking in metaphor, apparently. When Michelle Bachmann says “slit our wrists and become blood brothers” she's using “violent rhetoric,” according to Montel Williams, but when he says “slit your wrist, do us all a better thing, move that knife up two feet and start at the collarbone,” he must be speaking metaphorically. At least there's no ambiguity with Joss Whedon, who wants Speaker Paul Ryan to be raped to death by a rhino with its horn “because it's funny, not becuase he's a #GOPmurderbro.” Director David Simon tweeted that if Mueller (who's busily hiring Clinton campaign donors for his “investigation” team,) is fired, you should “pick up a goddamn brick.” Unlike Trump's WWE meme tweet, which was clearly an incitement to violence, he was just “speaking in metaphor” too. Lea DeLaria threatened to “pick up a baseball bat and take out every fucking republican and independent I see.” Rappers “YG” and “Nipsey Hustle” wrote an entire rap packed with death threats towards Trump. Marilyn Manson made a music video showing him violently decapitating Trump, reminiscent of Snoop Dogg's music video showing him shooting Trump. (These are the latest in a longer trend of vivid left-wing murder/assassination fantasies - they made an entire docudrama fantisizing about murdering George Bush.) Sarah Silverman, a “comedian,” tweeted her call for a military coup to depose the “mad king and his handlers.” It's unclear if her call for military violence against our democratically elected government - to remove fascists - was intended to be ironic. Perhaps it was a metaphor?

Artists are an arcane and subtle lot, so let's see if the straightforward, all-facts style of journalists is more clear-cut. Here's Bill Maher prodding people to assassinate the vice president on national television: “I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn't be dying needlessly tomorrow... I'm just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That's a fact.” Here's Courtland Milloy, Washington Post (WaPo) columnist, expressing his deep desire to “knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads” because “they” disagreed with him on health care policy. Here's Linda Stasi of the New York Daily News comparing the Boston Marathon Bombers to one of their murder victims becuaes he was a filthy Republican bigot.

But the media talks a good game. What about actual politicians? You know, the people actually leading the Democratic Party? Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-PA called for then-new Republican governor of Florida Rick Scott to be put up against a wall and shot. He clarified that Scott was a “millionaire and a billionaire,” a “damn crook,” which leads me to believe he was not speaking in metaphor when calling for his murder. A few months later he'd also react to the Giffords shooting with a New York Times op-ed calling for “an atmosphere of civility and respect.” State Rep. Chuck Kruger (a Democrat) tweeted that Cheney deserved the “same fate as Saddam.” Just a joke, bro, just a joke! Allen Brauer, communications chair of the Democratic Party of Sacramento County, wished death on the children of one of Ted Cruz's speechwriters: “May your children all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases.” Of course, this was justified because those evil Republicans started it.

I could - actually, it's 6AM, I have gone on all night documenting this, and I could go on another few. But if anyone else points this out - say, the NRA, in an ad saying “they use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again,” then the Washington Post (WaPo) whines that conservatives are “inciting violence.” As was detailed in the running debate with an antifa (anarcho-communist revolutionary) supporter on this very blog, the left is currently justifying violence via the dire need to “stop the Nazis who want us dead,” but when the NRA points out that the left is calling to “kill them [conservatives] first," it “sounds like an excerpt from North Korean state television,” a “stark picture” that's “designed to provoke fear, if not incite violence.”

A Qualitative Discrepancy

Some of you are already bristling, I'm sure, reaching out for tumblr and twitter links of conservatives advocating violence, or any of the left-wing politicians or groups who have received “hundreds” of death threats (usually anonymously, on the internet.) I'd link some myself, but aside from one WaPo story, every combination of search terms just turned up story after story detailing threats going the other way. Ho hum. It doesn't matter, because the quantitative argument, “look at all those redneck goons on twitter!” misses the point: you don't see right-wing public figures, media personalities and politicians issuing stark, unapologetic calls for violence. There's a vast discrepancy in who is making the threats between left and right - and why.

As illustrated by the above anecdotes, left-wing personalities are open, unabashed, and unapologetic about calling for Republicans to be murdered, in as many words. They don't bother walking their statements back even after someone acts on them. Even Phil Montag, who says “I won't say this publicly,” is still incensed enough to be shouting down his own Party colleagues in defense of someone who did publically chortle at attempted political assassination. Even if you live in 'Darkest Appalachia' where you can jaw about them damn 'coloreds' between bites of chaw, you don't dare get publicly identified saying it, because it'll cost you your job - and you sure as hell don't post it online yourself anywhere it's connected to your name. Liberals whinge about “microaggressions” and “subtle racism” because overt racism has been rejected by our culture for decades now. Many liberals hold conservatives to all be secret racists, harboring their despicable ideologies close to their vest, prevented from open expression only by the punitive power of larger culture - but even they agree that the left wing has all the cultural power. There is nobody they cannot destroy, and nobody too small to feel their wrath, as CNN's doxxing crusade against some random Redditor demonstrates. Leftists claim the violent Antifa riot staged to shut down Milo Yiannopoulos's Berkeley speech was justified, because he “used his platform to bully a transgender girl”(49:52) who was then harassed by internet trolls due to the publicity. I wonder how they feel about CNN - which has much more money, power, connections and influence than a single gay conservative writer - using their platform to target some random Redditor (who had an expectation of anonymity the transgender student did not) because Trump thought their meme was the dankest? Exposing his identity would assuredly wreck his life - SJWs take such glee in harassing employers to get people fired for voicing crimethink that they've got an entire tumblr dedicated to gloating about it.

The left wing has the power, and they know it. When a left-winger says “murder the President,” they're in the company of famous Hollywood actors, respected intellectuals and University professors, and even Democratic Party officials, both on and off the record. With leftists so geographically concentrated in major cities and in full control of every establishment capable of shaping opinion and ideology - the universities, the arts, even the media - they've no reason to feel afraid about being open with their crude, violent intolerance. Some of those professors in the above anecdotes paid with their jobs - (which doesn't mean they won't find another at a more “understanding” institution,) but some didn't - and only a few apologized. Almost all of them haven't deleted their tweets (hence the direct links to them), few apologized (often defensively and begrudgingly,) and a few, like that asshole Devine, actually doubled down. A conservative can't make a dank meme gif without CNN hunting them down and threatening to destroy them, but leftists can issue blatant terroristic threats under their own name and get away without any consequences whatsoever.

The Moral Disconnect

This is why left-wing violent rhetoric is far more dangerous and influential: the respectable authority of the establishments, institutions and public figures echoing it lends far greater weight to the arguments - effectively normalizing it as acceptable. They're also everywhere and repeated incessantly, because every traditional establishment of communication and education, from cradle to grave, is controlled by the left. This normalizes the narrative, which provides the moral justification for moral disengagement with the act of political violence itself. As Albert Bandura said, “Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears.”

In many of the earlier anecdotes - including Montag saying that he wished Scalise had been killed - they immediately justify it by citing some Crime of The Right (healthcare policy is popular currently, and the grievance Montag himself used.) You hear it all the time from antifa supporters and anyone else calling Republicans “Nazis,” painting them as jackbooted thugs forming death squads even as they speak. Just consider select quotes from this HuffPo article calling for violent revolution:

"The rise of Donald Trump has exposed the frightening underbelly of America’s foulest tendencies. Our racism, nativism, xenophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia, ableism, and propensity toward authoritarianism have been laid bare... There’s been an upswing in anti-Muslim hate crimes that correlates with his candidacy—including several offenders who cite him as their inspiration. Another of his supporters beat an unhoused Latino man. Yet another sucker punched a demonstrator at a rally and then, more alarmingly, went on to say, “The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.” Treating this like politics as usual allows it to become politics as usual, and those who do so risk complicity ushering in a new era of fascist politics in the United States.”

It's often phrased as “turnabout is fair play,” justifying violence, coercion, harassment and other kind of thuggery and hatred on the grounds that “conservatives did it first.” These are the people who decry capital punishment as barbaric and cruel one moment, then wholeheartedly embrace Old Testament “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” rhetoric in the next. It's doublethink by definition, and as Orwell observed, the crucial prerequisite for enabling political violence. And like Orwell's doublethink, it's reliant on an overarching support structure of propaganda, cultural control and incitement to thrive. Unlike prejudice or bigotry, which is resentful, reactionary and bred by ignorance, moral disengagement needs an active social movement to incubate and reinforce the message, as a high school history teacher discovered when his social experiment (The Wave) to demonstrate the allure of fascism to his students took on a life of its own in just three short days. (And you thought fidget spinners were bad!) Violence incited, encouraged and enabled by an overarching social structure will of course mirror that structure in its aims, methods, and level of organization - and indeed, when you look at left-wing violence as it's currently conducted, that's exactly what you see.

Deliberate Strategy versus Provincial Bigotry

Republicans have their problems - if you're Republican and doubt that, you're either a moron, or one of the Presidential primary candidates that got their asses kicked square by a reality TV show star with a bad spray-tan. (But I repeat myself.) And those problems are largely provincial. Stereotypes come from somewhere, and for Republicans the image of the cloistered “flyover-country” hick stems directly from the “good ol' boys club” problem of provincial, smoking-room corruption.

We've a ready example in the Kansas budget crisis. One of my educated, intelligent liberal friends declared it the evil fruits of Reaganomics, the inevitable consequences of backwards conservative economic theory. After establishing that Gov. Sam Brownback tried to apply Federal-level tax cut strategy to a state, my diagnosis differed - I suspected Brownback of being a blithering moron acting with perceived immunity to public opinion only the Good Ol' Boys coven can offer. Five seconds on Google later, and I found a newly-elected moderate Republican legislator saying exactly that:

“What we’re having is a standoff with the governor holding on to the old days where he had all these people elected,” said Senator Barbara Bollier, a moderate Republican who voters promoted from the state House last year. “They aren’t there anymore, and he can’t let go and follow the will of the people.”

Plenty of people pointed out how Brownback's policies weren't True Conservatism and thus shouldn't tarnish it, but when people vote in a conservative governor who destroys the economy and state budget, you might say it reflects on conservatives, eh? The provincial attitudes of rural red-state Republicans do have problems, as the author of Hillbilly Elegy himself stated;

"Nearly everyone in my family who has achieved some financial success for themselves, from Mamaw to me, has been told that they’ve become “too big for their britches.” I don’t think this value is all bad. It forces us to stay grounded, reminds us that money and education are no substitute for common sense and humility. But, it does create a lot of pressure not to make a better life for yourself, and let’s face it: when you grow up in a dying steel town with very few middle class job prospects, making a better life for yourself is often a binary proposition: if you don’t get a good job, you may be stuck on welfare for the rest of your life.”

He also observes that it's at least in part a reaction to the sneering disdain from the coastal elites (which, post-Trump election, has become outright hatred,) but as Joshua Rothman points out, that logic only goes so far:

“It’s one thing to criticize a culture. It’s another to see that the culture being criticized is formed partly in response to other cultures, and that those cultures are, in turn, worth criticizing. This is why explaining human behavior is so difficult: the buck never stops. The explanations don’t come to an obvious, final resting place.”

This is the truth the “they started it” justifications of the left utterly miss and the one I try to remember. So I don't pretend that conservatives don't commit violence - they do. The leftists attempting enumeration of it demonstrate the usual stupidity, such as calling a lunatic that was literally eating a man's face off a “Trump supporter” because he was wearing a MAGA hat while chowing down, or the Uber Killer who claimed to be under the “control of the Uber app” when picking victims. You don't have to be a clinical psychologist to diagnose apeshit crazy as the primary factor in those. But just because internet leftists are lazy doesn't mean violent rednecks don't exist, and some of these people aren't just violent, but willing to ambush and kill cops. And some of them even form little terror cells and plot terrorist bombings. Oh yes - conservative violence exists.

The scale, however, is entirely different. Deliberate ambush murders of police is at a ten year high - and and it sure as hell isn't white conservatives defining the epidemic of murders, is it? It's minorities who - by their own admission - are putting into practice the violent rhetoric of Black Lives Matter, who openly celebrate cop killers as “black revolutionaries.” The right wing simply doesn't have a parallel to this - even when the gibbering lunatics called “sovereign citizens” manage to ooze out of their mother's basement long enough to commit violence, they don't come anywhere near the virulence of Black Lives Matter: “sovereign citizens” have killed six police officers since 2000, but twenty officers were ambushed and murdered in 2016 alone. Maybe - just maybe - it's got something to do with Black Lives Matter having slightly better PR than rambling lunatics on youtube.

Nor can three rednecks compare to Antifa and the anarcho-communist black block in general, who are a domestic terrorist organization who openly advocate (and carry out) sabotage of public infrastructure, have staged multiple violent riots across the country in just the last year to suppress their political opponents and have international reach, as they demonstrated in the massive riots in Hamburg just days ago. Three rednecks being led on by an FBI agent eagerly providing them with automatic rifles to entrap them, they ain't. It's not even unusual - right wing “militia” groups tend to be some middle-aged rednecks talking tough in a bar within earshot of an FBI informant hoping to justify his paycheck, like the “Hutaree” clowns whom turned out to be guilty of nothing but losing the genetic lottery. Even the Oklahoma City Bomber's closest encounter with the Michigan Militia was attending a few of their meetings (sitting quietly in his reeking trench-coat in the corner, presumably,) and considering that 80% of the Militia scattered to the winds once the tenuous connection was revealed by the media, it's hard to credit them as a serious threat. McVeigh's act of violence was so devastating to the militia movement's credibility that the militia considers him a CIA stooge in a plot to discredit them. Contrast to Black Lives Matter, which weathered the Dallas shooting without a hitch and is still going strong, if not stronger.

The most telling comparison by far, however, is the least spectacular - in contrast to the oft-cited racist or bigoted crimes against minorities, immigrants, homosexuals, etc., leftist violence targets Trump supporters. With conservatives, the politically motivated ones (i.e. anti-government militias) are all bark and no bite, unlike the racists and bigots. Leftists display the exact opposite behavior; their violence is overwhelmingly political, mirroring the nature of the social-political movements that provide them with legitimacy, support and a public platform. This helps explain why left-wing politicians are so comfortable with endorsing it, like Texas state Rep. Ramon Romero, who physically assaulted Rep. Matt Rinaldi before threatening to wait in the parking lot and ambush him on his way to his car. On the floor of the Texas state legislature, no less. Left-wing violence isn't just outlash - it's revolution. It's violence with goals defined by ideology. If you doubt, just consider who is committing the violence.

College Professors and Students versus Middle-Aged Trailer Trash

One of the black-masked Antifa members who has been arrested for his crimes is Eric Clanton, former adjunct professor at Diablo Valley College, who was videotaped fracturing some Trump supporter's skulls with a u-lock during the Berkeley riots. The masked Clanton was identified by the "weaponized autism" of 4chan (compare to CNN, which can hunt down and coerce one random redditor, but found Eric Clanton to be unworthy of coverage.) “Conservative” violence invariably comes from middle-aged welfare-roll racists or flat-out skinheads, not otherwise-upstanding members of society - and certainly not the youth.

Nowhere is this more evident than the recent (and ongoing) insanity at Evergreen State College in California, where radicalized students have piled excess upon excess. What's most striking about the whole affair is how little I've heard of it - every time I hear more about it, new details are revealed that've seen scant to no national coverage. The latest information comes from a HuffPo article published by one of Evergreen University's own provosts, who just left the University this month. To summarize, students on this campus have:

Set upon a professor in an unruly mob to threaten, harass and intimidate, ultimately resulting in the University police telling him to avoid campus for his own safety,

Taken University administrators, including the President, hostage, complete with guards to escort them to and from the bathroom, all to coerce compliance with their list of demands - while the police milled around outside due to President Bridges cowardly order to stand down,

Until the President, who'd repeatedly ordered campus police to stand down, had to call in the State troopers for help after things got even worse despite his appeasement (they can be seen in the HuffPo article patrolling campus in full riot gear,)

And finally, the students forced a “community patrol” armed with baseball bats not just for “protection” from outside threats, but to intimidate other students who disagreed (there was a “scuffle” between students because some were chalking up messages to “get back to teaching.”)

But the cherry atop this turd tartufo is the lone death threat phoned in by someone promising to take down all those “communist scumbags” with a “.44 magnum,” who turned out to be - you guessed it - a 53 year old unmarried sad-sack racist with hints of mental health issues.

The conceit of leftists is telling us the last bullet point is at least equal to the preceding four, if not outright justifying the thuggery, violence, and coercion by dint of the grave and dire threat posed by some daffy trailer trash.

To reiterate, at Evergreen University, we've seen a student body, acting in the name of social justice and countering vile racists, go from mob justice to revolution to forming their own Gestapo in the space of a few months. A few months. This alone should give anyone pause, but it's not alone - it's just one more drop in the damn bucket of violence, hate and revolutionary rhetoric.

And that deep well of dangerous people has an unparalleled ability to recruit, organize, and mobilize.

Organized, Mobilized, and Well-Led

Left-wing violence has always been organized, or quickly self-organized; from the French Revolution, to the overthrow of the Czar in Russia, till the spate of 19th-century Communist uprisings that created terrifying totalitarian dictatorships that last today (including Cuba and North Korea.) Revolutionaries are violent by definition, since rejecting the legitimacy of a ruling state's laws entire leaves only one recourse for deposing it. To defeat a state's army, you need an army yourself.

Here is the left wing's army in action.

It's impossible to understate the severity or scale of what happened at the G20. The largest black bloc protest in history - enough to overwhelm the 20,000 police officers present - showed up and basically ran the show. They were even using social media to hunt down reporters that didn't agree with them - aided by establishment journalists. Click that link - the journalist describes how people were hunted down and beaten half to death because they were standing near her in the photo a journalist from a major German newspaper tweeted.

This is the power of the black bloc. They are an army, by definition. Consider, for a moment, what an army needs:

Young people, because soldiering is a young man's job - whether you're throwing hand grenates or molotov cocktails, you need to be fit and reckless

Leadership, because even a mob needs some inspiration, some demagogue - a Robespierre - to push them into acting together at the right time.

Ideology, because you need a reason to fight, a reason a lot of people can agree on strongly enough to unite, even if it's just a mob.

As I've established above, the violence-inciters and violence-doers on the left wing meet all these criteria. They're invariably young, they're educated in extremist ideology by extremist college professors (who set the example themselves, as Eric Clanton shows,) and they have a smorgasbord of left-wing voices to serve as demagogues, people who's latest utterances are on everyone's lips and Twitter feed by the next morning. But above all, the ideology - the political nature of the beast - is the most essential. Ideology unites, motivates and inspires in a way reactionary racism, resentment or bigotry simply cannot. Jews had been brutalized and persecuted for centuries before Hitler rose to power - anti-semetism was just one pre-existing prejudice he levered (along with nationalist resentment, poverty-born desperation and a rudderless young generation.) Racism alone isn't enough to drive wars and mass atrocities like ethnic cleansing and genocide. Consider the Kosovo War; the parties weren't just ethnic groups, but nations; a complete identity formed by culture, religion and inter-group loyalty - summed up, this forms a complete and distinct ideology. For racism to drive organized, effective and widespread right-wing violence, it must be part of a national identity - which is precisely why the Ku Klux Klan proliferated in the South, which was such a culturally, religiously, economically and thus ideologically distinct nation that it eventually formed a nation-state and started a Civil War. Racism and bigotry can prod bitter people (and the older they are, the more bitterness they've had in life) to murder people in ones and twos, but only ideology can motivate the young masses into an army capable of great crimes.

The left understands this - which is precisely why they're suddenly screaming “white supremacist” every chance they get. Racism isn't an ideology, but “white supremacy” is. It's essential to establish the existence of a sincere, widespread “white supremacy” movement in the right wing for their caterwauling of Naziiiiiiiii to be taken seriously.

It doesn't exist, of course. And if you look at the right-wing militias themselves, you start seeing why - they're a bunch of old farts, bored and bitter, fantasizing about how they'd blow away those government goons if they came to their house to confiscate all their guns. Not how they'd lead the Glorious Revolution - not how they'd stride into the Federal Reserve and upend the money-changer's tables before casting them from the temple - no, just how they'd defend Their Own Castle (Doctrine.) This is get off my lawn cranked to eleven, Ultra-Reee: Knee Deep in the Dad.

Young people don't find this exciting, sexy, or inspiring. And that's why these people show up at City Hall to scream NOT ON MY FRONT LAWN, but rarely, if ever, do anything violent. They never walk the walk. They're LARPing attention whores. Antifa puts on masks to fracture people's skulls, loot stores, torch cars and throw bricks at cops. Militia members put on masks and walk into police stations with assault rifles... so they can lie on the floor and shout AM I BEING DETAINED? (That link must be seen to be believed.)

The Bundy clowns are perhaps the perfect case-study - a bunch of ranchers with purely local range-related resentments that'd simmered for years before they occupied a government office, armed to the teeth - only to give up without firing a shot, the only casualty being a militiaman shot dead in circumstances shady enough that the Fed responsible was prosecuted for lying about the circumstances.

Compare that sorry dumpster fire to what Antifa's managed in the last twelve months alone - not only have they staged multiple violent riots in cities across America, not only have they achieved their goals (wider publicity and the silencing of speakers they hate,) but they're also forming their own militias now. Sure, they're just a different flavor of obsese LARPer at present - but that puts them equal to where the right-wing militias have been at for decades. This is where the right-wing peaks - and the left wing starts.

If you want to see where the left-wing ends, look at Hamburg, where the fires are still smouldering...

...and the left wing apologists are already downplaying and justifying it.

Clear and Present Danger

Now that I've documented the nonstop litany of outright, unabashed left-wing hatred being repeated by actors, Democratic party operatives and establishment journalists - echoing the open calls for violence and murder of conservatives - and observed both how quickly and naturally the left wing translates its ideology to organized oppression (Evergreen College), how that organized violence is already underway in the United States (Antifa's multiple riots across the country) and what these people are capable of, given time (the literal takeover of the entire city of Hamburg,) I want you to imagine how conservatives feel when CNN screams about a meme wrestling gif.

Or the New York Times screeching over cross-hair graphics on a map.

Or being told that those racist birther guys harassed Obama, so it's all a wash.

We've all been frustrated to have our friends rebuff arguments we thought were incontrovertibly true - it's only the normal friction between people. There's some things even close friends will never see eye-to-eye on. But conservatives can't shrug this topic off as mere disagreement, anymore. Using the tu quoque fallacy (right out of the Soviet playbook) to avoid admitting the problem of left-wing violence is bad enough, but now the left wing is using the purported existence of organized, militant right wing violence (“Nazis”) to justify violence against us. When you deflect or dismiss the existence of left-wing violence - or assert a parity with right-wing violence - you're dismissing a grave threat not only to us personally, but to the stability and continued existence of our democratic government as a whole. Everything I've detailed above isn't happening in a vacuum - also remember that California's begun forming its own foreign policy (in direct violation of the United States Constitution,) and the left actively encouraged deposing the rightful winner of the Presidential election by encouraging electors to break the law. The laws of civil society, the rules we all agree to follow, the underpinning of the social contract itself, is starting to unravel. The left wing is starting to look a lot like their own nation - with all that implies. And when we point to the sharp end of the spear; the Antifa rioter with a club, being pushed forward and supported by the entire left wing - we're scoffed at.

And that pisses us off.

Ere The Conservative Began To Hate

Conservatives have felt marginalized for a long time, because the left dominates so many of the important public spaces. It's not just the presence, but the vitriolic, savage hatred displayed against people who dare to speak up against leftist orthodoxy (and I do mean leftist, not liberal.) I've personally been threatened by a professor and had an African-American classmate stand up and scream me down. The tenured professor who threatened me has survived multiple complaints (much worse than mine) and my journalism professor not only took my screaming classmates side, but gently asked, in roundabout fashion, if I'd inherited my prejudices from my parents (all because I called Kwame Kilpatrick a crook - at least the courts agree with me.) Conservatives are used to being censored and cowed everywhere that really matters - in school, at work, you name it. And over the years, it's only gotten worse. We've tried to talk, and tried to talk, and tried to talk, and all that's gotten us is backed against a wall begging for “dialectic” while a screaming lynch mob closes in.

We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore. Moderate conservatives are about to give up on “talking” permanently, because it's clearly not working. You can't talk to masked thugs with clubs. Our concerns aren't imaginary, and they can't be brushed off - and this is the last chance for the liberals to engage with us and at least consider why we're scared stiff. If moderate liberals don't do this, and continue making excuses for the violent leftists in their own party, then the bloodshed that started on that baseball field will continue. The militant left will not stop, not as long as people who damn well know better are making excuses for them. And while our majority might be Silent, it's anything but cowardly. The militant, violent left is going to get more than they're bargaining for. And our last opportunity to halt this madness is slipping by because of people willfully denying reality. If liberals continue to ignore the problem, refuse to confront the true nature of the leftists sheltering behind them and allow them to keep pushing their agenda of violence, the blood will continue to flow.

#leftism #alt right #cnn #media bias #media #politics #donald trump #trump #leftist violence #leftist #punch a nazi #violence #extremism #steve scalise #congress shooting #radical left

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the-rodas-post · 5 years ago

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ENG4U1 - Assignment #4: Segun Akinsanya

Day 1:

5 Lines I Found Interesting:

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was an initiation into the crew.”

“One second we were nobody, and the next we had the power. “

“Toronto police use the term “gang” to describe anything from four boys playing dice on the corner to a full-fledged Hells Angels crew. I don’t like the word. What they’re really referring to is a group of people banding together—opportunists without opportunities. “

“I didn’t even need to use it: just holding it was enough for me to feel powerful.”

“It was a street stripe—it helped boost my reputation.”

Thoughts:

- I really enjoyed reading about Segun Akinsanya’s story.

- It showed that everyone is capable of anything.

- It also showcased how change can be either for the better it the worst, and in this case it was for the worst.

- He went from a very intelligent student with a bright future to someone who turned to crime as an output. It really shows how one person can really impact ones actions and words, how his mother unfortunately passed away catapulting a downwards spiral in his adolescence and overall lifestyle.

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Day 2:

I believe the main theme of this article is Power. Most importantly the power struggle one may face and how abusing it can lead to negative by-products. Power throughout the story is portrayed as a rare commodity that must be earned by the person in pursuit of it. At many points of each individual’s lives, we will have some type of authority, some type of control. As a High School senior, I haven’t have much of these opportunities to pick and choose my personal path, however exactly a year from now, I will face my first real look at power. I will get to choose what school I go to, what career I pursue, what people I choose to surround myself with post-secondary, etc. This ties into Segun Akinsanya’s article because he was once in the same position I was, he had a choice. He could have chosen to be around individuals who uplifted him and people who were positive influences, however he chose otherwise. The line that helped me visualize this concept was “One second we were nobody, and the next we had the power. “. This main line represents how Segun Akinsanya went from an innocent immigrant child who was focused on school and pursuing a career in the medical field, to becoming a member of a street gang. A famous saying goes as following: “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.” I believe this famous saying is relaxant to Akinsanya’s story because it shows how he went from having high hopes and aspirations to being a victim of violence. When Segun originally came to Canada, he and his family were unfamiliar with the culture, society and overall conductivity of Quebec life. This put Segun in particular disadvantage, as he had 3 sisters, a mother and a father who was always working, this led to Segun not having a primary father figure, which made him an outcast and singled out. By the time he had a clear cut opportunity to make friends and put himself out there more, he jumped on the opportunity immediately, because he knew how much it hurt to be alone. This meant sacrificing his work ethic, his beliefs and ultimately who he was generally as a person. A quote that demonstrates this is “They gave me a sense of power and belonging that I couldn’t find anywhere else.” This quote specifically, shows how Segun had some type of sensation or ease from gaining reputation and climbing the upper echelon of the street gangs by gaining power. He was power hungry. It’s an addiction. This instance of having an addiction reminds me of how my dad has been smoking since his teen years. Obviously both instance, smoking and street gang power, are both dangerous, one more than the other, however they both demonstrate what they can do to person. When my Dad does not get his daily cigarette, he normally can get tense or sweaty which are all side effects of the addiction of smoking. While Segun, he needed power to validate to himself that he was not vulnerable or weak in the eyes of the streets, and when he did not get the power or respect it would result in rage or intensity. In addition, Segun states “I used to walk around with a baseball bat to intimidate people. I didn’t even need to use it: just holding it was enough for me to feel powerful. I didn’t want to be that good guy doing his homework in the corner. He was invisible. I wanted people to see me. And for the first time, they did. I was popular.” I believe this quote shows that Segun was not only hungry for power but he was also hungry for attention. The line about being the “invisible guy doing homework” was ironic when I was reading this article because just a couple years before he was a baseball bat wielding gang member, he was the math award winning student who played chess with his sisters. It’s full circle, the person he would detest to be at that specific moment was the same kid he was just a few years earlier. Also, Segun says “My whole life I’ve wanted to be part of something bigger, but I always sought that out in negative ways.” I think this quote is significant because it generally ties into the main concept of power growing up. Segun use to believe power was being a top of streets gangs, and having people fear you. But as Segun has grown and become wiser he has learnt the true meaning of power and how power can be used for the better or worse depending on the circumstance.

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Day 4:

“Brave of you to expose such a past and experiences, this young generation we’re facing in the GTA is struggling to see how their lives really matter.. And you can help them see the light with this experience of yours. An amazing read, honestly didn’t expect to find it so interesting, you’re quite the blessing I hope those that read this or hear of your experiences can learn from them too, keep pushing Segun! All the best.”

- Nirushan M

I believe there is some major truth towards Nirushan’s comment. Every day on the news, there’s always something negative, either a shooting, robbery, fire, etc. Regardless there has not been a day that I can generally recall where I have not heard negative events that have occurred. Crime rates are sky rocketing, death rates are out doing the birth rates, it’s all ridiculous. These numbers and reports are not a true reflection of what the city of Toronto is. However, instances such as these are playing a big role in adolescences lifestyles and life choices. Many people think resorting to violence and aggression will always be the correct life path, however it’s not. This type of mentality has rubbed off on the youths of today through social media outputs, rumours, news, etc. These youths in the Greater Toronto Area need to understand that they are the future reputation and future society of Toronto and each and every single one of them can make a choice to either choose a life of success and peace or a life of crime and violence. This can be passed on throughout generations, as the influence of the previous generation is presented upon the current generation. Segun’s story should be presented across more high schools because it demonstrates what not do to. It also shows in life, it’s never too late to reinvent yourself or choose a different lifestyle then the one the individual is currently living. In the end, it is up to the person what life they choose to live.

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surly01 · 6 years ago

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A Bloody Week In Doom March 17, 2019

Prayers for the victims in Christchurch attacks.

“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

― Antonio Gramsci

The latest monster came to call in Christchurch, New Zealand in a story that dwarfed all others this week. I had some other ideas for what might fill this space this week, then the news from Christchurch, New Zealand, followed by the one-two punch of a Twitler emission rendered all moot. Brenton Tarrant strapped on a helmet camera, loaded a car with weapons, drove to a mosque in Christchurch and began shooting at anyone who came across his line of vision. His helmet-cam helped broadcast the act of mass terror live for the world to watch on social media. As of Sunday, the death toll had reached 50.

Tarrant thus joined the roll call of monsters alongside Stephen Paddock (Las Vegas), Anders Breivik (Norway), Robert Gregory Bowers (Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh), Omar Mateen (Pulse, Orlando), Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook), Nikolas Cruz (Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school), Devin Patrick Kelley (Sutherland Springs church in Texas), James Holmes (Aurora), Dylann Roof (Charleston, SC), and, of course, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who kicked off the 21st century with the Columbine massacre.

In ancient Rome, an interregnum was a period between stable governments when anything might happen, and the "the blood-dimmed tide" might be loosed: civil unrest, competition between warlords, power vacuums, wars of succession. In 1929, in such an interregnum found Italian Marxist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci languishing in a fascist prison, writing about the forces tearing Europe apart. He anticipated civil unrest, war between nations and changing political fault lines.

Interestingly, it was Gramsci who gave us the term "hegemony" now in use. Hegemony is a three dollar word representing a simple idea: the coercion of smaller fish by bigger fish. When the powerful use their influence to convince the less powerful their best interest lies in doing what is actually in the best interest of the powerful, that's hegemony. When we consider the above list of overwhelmingly white terrorists with a nationalist/supremacist bent, we can see terror is one way the powerful preserve their hegemony when they feel their power begin to wane when frightened by demographic changes posed by immigration.

Trump has the sensibility of a spoiled child tearing the wings off of flies. When asked whether white nationalism has anything to do with the tragedy in Christchurch, he replied in the negative. Echoes of “good people on both sides,” a la Charlottesville. The prime minister of New Zealand indicated late Friday coming changes to New Zealand's gun laws. A striking contrast that makes one wonder how many will have to die, again and again and again, until our own politicians, beholden to the NRA and their sea of laundered rubles, are moved to similarly act.

You'll recall that when it was his time to serve in Vietnam, the self proclaimed White House tough guy came up missing like Dick Cheney and his five deferments. Chickenhawks like Cheney always find "other priorities" to service, but are eager to send the disposable sons and daughters of the poor into harm's way, because what else are they for but cannon-fodder? Real military men who have seen battle are loath to commit their fellow citizens to needless battle; but chickenhawks, untroubled by loss or nightmares, send their non-relatives readily into the Valley of Death.

The mob-boss stylings of Citrus Caligula make a tough sound, especially when talking to the far right media like Breitbart.

Trump said: "I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad. But the left plays it cuter and tougher. Like with all the nonsense that they do in Congress … with all this investigations]—that’s all they want to do is –you know, they do things that are nasty. Republicans never played this.”

When you can't bully a majority of the people and the House of Representatives into accepting your will as fiat, that is apparently vicious tactics. Especially on the part of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who Trump refers to as "Nancy."

"So here’s the thing—it’s so terrible what’s happening,” Trump said before discussing his supporters. “You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay?"

Uh, not OK. This is Trump engaging in stochastic terrorism, or

the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted.

Trump is actively encouraging people taking the law into their own hands, in the same way Putin has his Night Riders (see below), as Mussolini had his black shirts, and Hitler his brown shirts. The purpose is unmistakable: to be bullyboys who operate outside of the law and through violent intimidation. For the last two years we've had a president who fundamentally does not believe in democracy, and whose recent utterances show no loyalty to either the Constitution or the traditions of American governance. This IS a time of monsters. And now this:

Trump’s Breitbart Biker Threat Came From the Putin Playbook—Then Tweet Deleted After Mosque Massacre

Trump told Breitbart there could be biker violence against leftists. It sounded even worse after Brenton Tarrant's mosque massacre manifesto called Trump "a symbol of renewed white identity." It does not get much clearer than that.

The Daily Beast Explains the Putinesque origins of Twitler's latest veiled threat:

"They call themselves The Night Wolves, “a new kind of motorcycle club,” or, sometimes, “Putin’s Angels.” And just as much as the Orthodox Church or the military, the Wolves have become a symbol of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But the idea that they might be used as his extra-legal enforcers in times of trouble is usually implicit—embedded in their flag-waving Putinized patriotism—never really spelled out....Trump is not so subtle, however, especially when he takes his cues from the Kremlin. Leave it to him to put the potential for violent defense of his interests by a motorcycle gang front and center in the public view."

On Friday morning, as news broke of the massacre, the murderer's manifesto called Trump “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose,” the Breitbart tough-guy tweet came down. Note a wider pattern of American racists and white supremacists looking to Russia for both moral and tactical support.

The New Zealand Massacre Was Made to Go Viral

Outside a mosque in Christchurch on Friday. Mark Baker/Associated Press

Charlie Warzel noted that the attack marks a grim new age of social media-fueled terrorism.

A 17-minute video of a portion of the attack, which leapt across the internet faster than social media censors could remove it, is one of the most disturbing, high-definition records of a mass casualty attack of the digital age — a grotesque first-person-shooter-like documentation of man’s capacity for inhumanity.

Videos of attacks are designed to amplify the terror, of course. But what makes this atrocity “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence,” as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described it, is both the methodical nature in which the massacre was conducted and how it was apparently engineered for maximum virality.

Even though Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube scrambled to take down the recording, they were no match for the speed of their users or for their algorithms which make connections for people consuming such content. In minutes, the video was downloaded and mirrored onto additional platforms, and ricocheted around the globe.

Warzel notes,

Internet users dredged up the alleged shooter’s digital history, preserving and sharing images of weapons and body armor. The gunman’s apparent digital footprint — from the rantings of a White Nationalist manifesto to his 8chan message board postings before the murders — was unearthed and, for a time, distributed into far-flung corners of the web.

The killer wanted the world’s attention, and by committing an act of mass terror, he was able to get it.

It was not the first act of violence to be broadcast in real-time. Yet this one was different because ofd the perpetrator's apparent familiarity with the darkest corners of the internet. The recording contains numerous references to online and meme culture, including name-checking a prominent YouTube personality. Tarrant knew his audience.

Tarrent's digital trail depicts a white supremacist motivation for the attack. His 87-page manifesto, for instance, is filled with layers of commentary apparently written to specifically enrage the communities that appear to have helped radicalize the gunman in the first place. It seems he understands both the platform dynamics that allow misinformation and divisive content to spread but also the way to sow discord.

I recently came across an article by Ezra Klein who identifies an ecosphere of YouTube prophets and avatars who populate the "intellectual dark web:" The rise of YouTube’s reactionary right: How demographic change and YouTube’s algorithms are building a new right. Many right wing publishers benefit from YouTube’s algorithms to build the new right.

YouTube’s recommendation engine follows the digital footsteps we all make. And it sees connections, not context. It knows when audiences repeatedly come together, but does not grasp why. And it predicts what they’re likely to view next. Thus are the "mainstreams" of conservative thought brought into proximity to the far right fringe.

As Klein has it,

"Many of these YouTubers are less defined by any single ideology than they are by a “reactionary” position: a general opposition to feminism, social justice, or left-wing politics."

On YouTube, tomorrow’s politics are emerging today. Tarrant noted this and made the online community work in the gunman’s favor. Our brown shirts are now digital: not only has their conspiratorial hate spread from the internet to real life, it’s also weaponized to go viral.

Proof That White Supremacy Is an International Terrorist Threat

It stretches from Christchurch to Pittsburgh and extends out in every direction.

The always-dependable Charlie Pierce noted that Anders Breivik, the murderous white-supremacist who killed 72 people in Norway in 2011, has become one of the most significant figures in international terrorism by providing a template for the modern white-supremacist mass murderer.

From Ted Kaczynski, he borrowed the idea of publishing a manifesto. From the Columbine killers, he borrowed the idea of using both bombs and guns. And from the international white-supremacist networks, he borrowed the murderous rage and bloodthirsty rhetoric necessary to carry out acts of mass murder, and to justify his crimes through an elaborate bullshit ideological exoskeleton that he wore like body armor. He put all of this together and created the modern mode of mass political murder, one that was carried out again Thursday in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Pierce notes that Tarrant's latest manifesto

reads like a vicious form of grandiose trolling. But there seems to be little doubt that the crimes themselves speak loudly of the basic truth that this was a right-wing act of war against a target population. And, because of that, we should take the following passage very seriously. The alleged shooter called the President* of the United States "a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose."

When asked if the rise of white natonalism or white supremacy posed a rising threat around the world, Trump replied,

“I don’t, really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess. If you look at what happened in New Zealand, perhaps that’s the case. I don’t know enough about it yet. But it’s certainly a terrible thing.”

On Sunday, Mick Mulvaney and other staffers made the rounds and insisted that Trump was "Not a White Supremacist." Which speaks volumes.

White supremacy now poses an international terrorist threat stretching from Norway to Pittsburgh, from Christchurch to Las Vegas, sharing objectives with the Night Riders or the Bikers for Trump, but better armed and more purposeful. Brownshirts used to intimidate; the new generation attacks to sow terror in targeted groups. This poses an existential threat to the very notion of liberal democracy. Today the target is Muslims; Tomorrow's target will be...?

For our purposes this week, Charlie Pierce gets the last word:

From [white supremacist terrorism] runs on a parallel track with the rise of a xenophobic rightwing nationalist politics that is conspicuously successful in a number of putatively democratic nations. Liberal democracy is under attack and, like any revolution, this one has both a respectable political front and a violent auxiliary that operates on its own imperatives. That one of those auxiliaries cites both a Norwegian mass murderer and the President* of the United States as inspiration for killing 49 people is not only evidence of the width of the threat, but also the depth of its commitment to the cause. This is the everyday al Qaeda of the angry white soul, and it's growing.

Now is the time of monsters.

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walterdehn3-blog · 6 years ago

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Little Known Means to help VBUCKS

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emilyj1028-blog · 8 years ago

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In today’s world...

...the national media has become the 4th branch of the American government. We need it and we need the truth, but at times the “truth” can be skewed to promote a real and raw racial divide of the United States. While we rely heavily on mass media to provide us with factual stories from around the country, we also often fall victim of the mass media’s hidden agendas...

Unsurprisingly, many news outlets are funded by certain organizations that have their own agendas that they insist on subtly pushing. These agendas in turn cause White Americans to believe that they have the proof they need to back up their claims of Blacks being inferior to Whites. Although we’re all human and worthy of being treated as such, this notion is not always reflected for Black Americans on network news shows.

The stories that are televised on network news, shape ideological messages for us viewers and create distinct interpretations of these messages. One of the most important flaws in the display of news stories, is that Blacks are consistently underrepresented. When they are represented, it is often for entertainment news, sports news or in situations of discrimination. Though some news bits may be positive, the bulk of the stories televised that include Black Americans, are situations where they are accused of a crime. If the story fits the network news narrative of Blacks being dangerous criminals, the story will air, even when a worse crime was committed by a White person.

There were stark differences in the representation of Brock Turner’s rape charges versus the brutality that a police officer caused on Eric Garner. Turner was described as being the star of the swim team at Stanford University. His rape charges were stated, but the subtle theme behind the accusation was that he was a good student who came from a good school. The picture that became synonymous with articles on his case was one of him smiling in a jacket and button down shirt, looking cheerful and proper. Nevertheless, he inhumanely committed sexual assault against a young female and spent the summer in jail. His inherent White privilege gave media the benefit of the doubt, and allowed viewers to feel unwanted sympathy for the rapist - unwanted sympathy for the rapist. In contrast, Eric Garner was choked to death by police in Staten Island. The minute this story came to light, news outlets fired back by stating he had a criminal record. His criminal offense was selling cigarettes on the boardwalk and there is no clear evidence of his supposed previous record. Regardless of his illegal selling of the cigarettes, this crime was not directly harming anyone and should never be used as an excuse to choke a man in public as if his life is not worthy of respect and concern. But all lives matter right...?

The two of these cases are not unique. This happens all the time in the media without us even realizing it. White Americans see it as prototypical for a White man to be inherently good, to possess good intentions and to be human. On the flip side, they see it as prototypical for a Black man to be more likely to resist authority, to commit dangerous crimes and to be lower on the totem pole of society. Brock Turner’s case and Eric Garner’s case succeeded in perpetuating these misinformed prototypes.

We all have our own implicit biases, but if they are indeed individual biases, there is opportunity to change them. However, the way that Whites and Blacks are portrayed in network news leaves minimal room for a changed mindset. The implicit bias manifests into everyday mental shortcuts that lead us to make snap judgments that appear to be reasonable and natural – although they are in fact deeply problematic. While there are educated White and Black men and women who possess the intellect to see past the inaccurate prototypes we see portrayed in the news, there are arguably a greater amount of Americans who will use these prototypes to further their racist agenda. If you were to watch the same thing over and over for your entire existence, you would not be able to admit that your thinking is problematic and systematically harmful to the union of our nation. Sounds an awful lot like brainwashing, eh?

By network news media pushing this hidden agenda of Blacks being criminal disruptors, the White mind is lead to believe that society would be more safe and peaceful without Blacks in it. Why is it that, when Black Americans unite to speak up about the discrimination they feel from the police, they are compared to the KKK and called a terrorist organization? The very existence of Blacks in America creates a threat to Whites, that they will one day be outnumbered and not be deemed the majority. The media repeatedly paints Blacks as a danger to society, so that Whites can justify their fear. The case that birthed the Black Lives Matter movement, was arguably the Trayvon Martin shooting. He was an unarmed 17-year-old high school student. But in the White mind, he was a black kid walking alone at night wearing a hoodie – an obvious threat. He was depicted in the media as having the stereotypical criminal look. One can question the idea that maybe they would have used a more relatable picture of him had he been a White teenager. The way he was inaccurately portrayed photographically only added to Whites anger against Blacks causing their own uprising of Black Lives Matter. Perhaps they would have been slightly less angry about the public outcry after his death, had Martin been portrayed as a smiling student.

Nonetheless, there are cases that perpetuate the implicit racial bias every day, but White Americans merely see them as news stories of the “typical” Black person in America. My personal critique of these Americans stems from something that I questioned from a Spike Lee film. In “Do the Right Thing,” the pizza owner, Sal, has pictures on the wall of famous Black men of that time with Jackie Robinson being one of them in particular. However, he himself is an obvious racist, along with his son, Vito. There are White men and women like this today in our society, that have their favorite Black singers, athletes or celebrities, but who will simultaneously belittle the everyday Black American who passes through their cookie-cutter town. It seems that as long as they are silent to social injustice, they can be tolerated.

Maybe the network news anchors don’t intend to further the prototypes of Whites and Blacks in America, but the network behind it does and their adherence to the network makes them just as guilty. The unfortunate reality is that we need the news because although some stories are skewed, the stories that aren’t, provide us with necessary information of what is going on around the world. The underlying positive takeaway is that aside from one’s upbringing and childhood, network news shapes the way we view Whites and Blacks in our everyday lives. The constant flow of information is like a faucet that won’t stop leaking water. The stories keep airing and repeatedly portray the same divisive themes. Maybe this will never cease to exist, but I choose to believe that people are not born racist; the influences from society and most importantly the media, is what makes them this way.

#race #racism #media #media relations #race relations #politics

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itsfinancethings · 5 years ago

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October 23, 2019 at 06:00AM

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Rhythm and Flow.

The first season of Netflix’s hip-hop competition show Rhythm and Flow has come to a close, and judges Cardi B, Chance the Rapper and T.I. have crowned a winner: D Smoke.

The bilingual Inglewood, Calif. rapper employed dense flows, probing protest lyrics and a mastery of several instruments to rise above his competitors in the finals, which included the Atlanta firebrand Londynn B and the versatile Providence, R.I. striver Flawless Real Talk.

In the series finale, Cardi B gushed about D Smoke’s performance, saying, “I really see a star.” She then mimicked a phone call to another famous rapper: “Hellooooo, Kendrick Lamar! I have a friend for you!”

But Cardi B probably didn’t realize that D Smoke has already crossed paths with Lamar in the past, opening for the rapper in West Hollywood eight years ago. Since then, D Smoke has split time as a musician and an educator, teaching high school students while also quietly racking up songwriting credits and recording his own music.

“I’ve worked hard to put myself in a position to just be prepared for something like this,” D Smoke told TIME after his win. In a phone conversation, the rapper talked about his musical background, his initial skepticism about appearing on Rhythm and Flow, and how he plans to spend the $250,000 cash prize.

Musical roots

D Smoke comes from a family of musicians: his mother is a piano instructor and a professional singer, while his brother is SiR, the R&B singer who is signed to TDE, Kendrick Lamar’s label. More than a decade ago, D Smoke and his other brother, Davion Farris, won an American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) award for co-writing Jaheim’s 2007 song “Never,” which peaked at #12 on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs. He would also earn songwriting credits for songs by the Pussycat Dolls and Ginuwine.

But D Smoke never committed to music full-time: after attending college at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), he went back to teach Spanish at his alma mater, Inglewood High School, after he was personally offered a job by the school’s principal. “I got bit by the bug—it was beautiful work,” D Smoke said. “It was rewarding, every day. I think it gave a lot of positive inspirational energy for me to put into my music.”

While D Smoke held down a day job, he continued to write music for other artists, record his own mixtapes, and perform with his brothers in their group the Woodworks—which opened for Kendrick Lamar at West Hollywood hotspot Whisky a Go Go in 2011. D Smoke also co-founded Woodworks Records, an independent label, with his uncle; a 2011 video shows D Smoke singing a Stevie Wonder song with his family.

D Smoke said that while he strived for mainstream success, he sometimes felt at odds with the industry’s demands. “I didn’t want to compromise certain values just to get quicker looks prematurely,” he said. “And being a thoughtful artist and having a very specific story and a commitment to my community, sometimes it feels like that road is longer.”

Seizing an opportunity

Last year, D Smoke was working at the High School For Recording Arts in Los Angeles—where he taught music engineering, English and financial literacy—when he learned about an opportunity to appear on Netflix. “When I found out that they were doing auditions, I was in the classroom and I shared the opportunity with my students—and they encouraged me to go for it,” he said.

D Smoke was initially skeptical of the concept, especially given that existing hip-hop shows either focused on lifestyle (Love & Hip Hop) or rap battles (The Rap Game.) “I asked a lot of questions prior to agreeing to doing the show because I wanted to make sure it allowed for true artists to shine,” he said. “I like the way they incorporated all the different elements: standing up for yourself in the cypher, holding it down in the battle. And then, what do you do in the studio when you get to create from scratch with a producer—and how do you represent your hometown? Are they going to come out to support you on short notice?”

D Smoke aced the initial audition–despite Cardi B insulting his outfit and Snoop Dogg trying to rattle him—and moved calmly through through the cypher round. In the battle round, he faced a major test when paired up against the rapper Old Man Saxon, who had also had decisively won over the judges with his unique swing-influenced and verbose approach. “For them to pair us up, we felt like, ‘This is an unfair battle,'” he said. “We shared that frustration immediately.”

After a tight face-off, D Smoke beat his friend—and in the next round, he impressed the judges with a music video condemning police brutality. D Smoke’s hometown, Inglewood—a city of about 110,000 in Los Angeles County—has has faced scrutiny for a recent history of police shootings—and recently received a backlash after the Los Angeles Times reported that the city was destroying its police records of shootings. “Inglewood is not a large community—somebody always knew the victim,” D Smoke said. He also recalled a time when he was pulled over by a cop and interrogated while riding a bike through the neighborhood. “The cop was completely out of protocol because I wasn’t breaking any laws,” he said. “I’m on my bike, I shouldn’t have to answer those questions.”

D Smoke’s poignant video, “Let Migo,” pushed him into the samples round, in which he flipped the funky George Clinton classic “Atomic Dog” into a contemplative jazzy ballad—a risky decision, especially given that most of his competitors specialized in catchier and more exuberant forms of rap like trap or drill. “I knew that it being competition-based, so many people are going to be like, ‘Bring the energy!'” he said. “But I knew that a slow song was going to be a creative advantage in the end, because it would stand out as a change of pace.”

In the season finale, Smoke performed a new song, “Last Supper,” in front of a live audience, in which he showed off his jazz chops on piano before re-staging Jesus’s last meal with dancers and delivering a tense verse about friendship, loyalty, and the struggles of communal uplift. He was met with a standing ovation and a showering of praise from each judge: “You don’t necessarily believe that in a workspace like this, you’re going to find someone you ‘believe in’ believe in,” Chance the Rapper told him. “I have no doubt that you are well on your way to being a superstar.”

‘It’s somewhat surreal, to be honest’

Last year, D Smoke was in a classroom; now, he’s about to meet rap icons on an equal playing field. He said that he has collaborations with Chance the Rapper, Cardi B and T.I. “in the pipeline.” He is in conversation with well-known producers—including Lamar’s collaborator Sounwave—and is taking meetings from labels, although he hopes to stay independent, just like Chance the Rapper did before him. “I don’t explicitly plan to sign,” he said. “I feel like with this degree of exposure, a committed team and a strategic plan, we can, in a similar fashion as Chance, reach peaks in music.”

As for the $250,000 prize? “I know there’s going to be a couple scholarships that go out to some kids from my high school,” he says. “I’m going to give some to my momma. But it’s not so much about spending it as investing it and using the publicity to bring in more checks of that nature down the line.”

#IFTTT #Blogger

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robbialy · 6 years ago

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Djin Gen forthcouming after a Guardian article from dec 10th 2018.

We do not usually respond to reviews or articles, or even books that paint negative pictures ov my SELF. Opinions no matter how vicious or brutal, are a part ov our cultural discourse. Butter once in a while coumthing is written that is so poorly researched resulting in thee creation or perpetuation ov untruths, false allegations or is just a wanton character assasination that we are duty bound to respond. NOT to counter people's personal opinions, though we have noticed these are always written by people who have never met me nor spent any time with me, butter to at least set thee record straight with FACTS and chronological dates that expose thee resulting web ov distortions,half truths and total misinformation:-

heres is thee link, feel free to write to thee Guardian about thee low standard ov writing and research if it irritates you.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/dec/10/genesis-p-orridge-throbbing-gristle

There was an article in thee Guardian today that was more a character assasination than review ov our Psychic TV concert at Heaven. So many facts are totally incorrect and misleading and there are so many we feel duty bound to correct just dates, names and facts. All thee corrections can be coumfirmed by thorough research and a linear chronology ov events via articles, interviews, essays and books etc.

There has been so much we do not choose to say in response to outrageous, nasty allegations. BUTTER we DO wish... if only journalists would check FACTS, they might see how false and impossible so many of these accusations are. And bear in mind, Cosey left me to live with Chris in 1978. (not 1981) and they had been lovers for at least a year already with my full knowledge. By then in 1978 my ongoing girlfriend was Soo Catwoman ( yes ov Sex Pistols fame), later Akiko Hada video artist too. TG carried on working together 3 more years.TG actually split up in 1981 Cosey was already pregnant with their child, and we were already remarried to Alaura, thee woman who became mother to my children Caresse and Genesse. "GODSTAR" did take time to enter the National top 30 at 29, it is true. But was number ONE in thee indie chart for FOUR months! Thee Rolling Stones office, at Mick's bidding we were told,called Radio One to stop playing Godstar or they would never be allowed to play Stones tracks again. It was written to make more public thee growing evidence that Brian Jones was murdered. It was not anti-pop, it was, and remains in my personal opinion, a classic little 60's influenced pop song.If we were persuading Cosey to have sex with other men, why we were told by a stripper friend, did she continue stripping until she was 7 months pregnant and doing porn films for money 3 yeras after she began living with Chris? Was Chris now persuading her? If all her porn work and porn photos were a "sex positive" art project then perhaps we'd expect that to be a concept of her artistic agenda rather than thee behaviour ov a woman with a weak will merely afraid of persuasion. We have not read Cosey's book, yet thee alleged rememberances and occasional allegations, we are told, occupy a good half to two thirds ov her book concern me, so thee majority ov reviews and descriptions ov her book seem reliant upon thee hearsay and very undocumented accusations regarding me that seem only to have surfaced to her 40 yeras after she chose to leave. Not once did she mention these grievances to me when we were together,and not once since 1978.She has had ample opportunity when we've all been in thee studio and on tours together. TG reformed for several yeras and we heard not a murmur ov old grudges regarding our brief six yeras together. Chris, Sleazy, neither ov them said anything, yet are supposed to be witnesses, though its a shame Sleazy tragically passed away as he could have shed more light on this. THERE IS COUMTHING that irritates me about how sloppy and factually chaotic these articles often are. I founded COUM in thee later Summer of 1969 Transmissions alone in Shrewsbury whilst visiting my parents. On returning to Hull in thee late Winter ov 1969 my friend JOHN SHAPEERO became thee second active member ov COUM Transmissions. Dr TIMOTHY POSTON became thee third member. Later RAY HARVEY and Ian "Spydee" Evetts joined. It was mainly an anarchic music group then. Cosey did not becoum active at all for about 18 months, even then only mainly making costumes at first. FACT CHECK: Cosey got pregnant almost as soon as we had mutually agreed unprotected sex on New Years Eve 1970 in Hull at thee fruit warehouse. Her father had thrown her out on thee street for being unemployed for 2 weeks. I hardly knew her butter couldn't refuse her shelter. It was freezing cold. ( FACT it was not until 2 years later that Paul Frew and myself dubbed our building "The HoHo Funhouse" during a stand off with police outside,.)

When we discovered she was pregnant after a tearful discussion we both unhappily agreed she should have an abortion. THIS IS IMPORTANT thee doctors who performed thee abortion implanted a "copper 7" birth control device IMMEDIATELY AFTER THEE ABORTION. She did NOT remove it, to my knowledge, until she and Chris decided to have a baby. So...THERE IS NO WAY she could have got pregnant from unprotected sex after that event that we know ov !! Now look at thee porn shoots she chose to do from 1973 until 1981 and she is not choosing or insisting on any protection. Perhaps because she knew she could almost certainly not get pregant and clearly had decided for herself to not be overly concerned with getting any sexual diseases. Or passing them on to me when she returned home.

We certainly did not witness Cosey having sex with anyone apart from me until 1973. When she asked me if she could live in thee commune in January 1970 I stressed I could not commit at all to be a couple nor "in a relationship"( only just part-time lovers ) as my total coumittment was to COUM, art as a spiritual path and Creativity, and always would be. Still is. We also can't say what sexual choices she made when she went out alone to party in Hull most weekends with her friends often tripping on acid and mandrax. We supported her right to choose ov course.

To this day we support Viva Ruiz's "THANK GOD FOR ABORTION" campaign as actively as we can.

PLEASE just begin looking at EVIDENCE and dates things happened, at CHRONOLOGIES and these allegations begin to look more and more flimsy at best. How do you sell a book when decades since thee 70's have little to no sensational content? Focus on thee person who sells copy....as we said, we have not read thee book. One ov its functions may be to irritate me, who knows. Why after all these yeras we are being attacked agen...hell we were a scapegoat at school, prosecuted for queen collaged postcards in 1975, pilloried as COUM after "PROSTITUTION" forced into exile in 1992 by thee British Establishment. Not even a parking ticket or half smoked joint was found. We were exonerated as victimes ov lies in a right-wing evengelical conspiracy to sell a book on "SATANISM". Coumthing we have never been nor been attracted to.

We stay away from biased opinion and attacks whenever we can. Thee papers dubbed me thee "MOST EVIL MAN IN BRITAIN" in 1991. Later they were exposed for having NO BASIS IN FACT for their accusations. Butter Lottie implies totally falsely, with no evidence "Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Squad raided Genesis P-Orridge's house and discovered a fascination with necriphilia, murder and nazism.." THIS IS PATENTLY UNTRUE AND PRESUMABLY AN INVENTION OV AN OVER HEATED IMAGINATION. Careful Lottie your predjudicial fantasies are showing. NOTHING ov thee kind was found. We have a list ov every item Scotland Yard took and it contains none ov that. Thee whole contrived attack was exposed later by Desmond Hill who DID check his facts and dig out thee truth. Where was this evil, degenrate Genesis, why in Kathmandu, with my famille helping and paying for a soup kitchen for Tibettan refugees, beggars and lepers at Boudenath Stupa, where we got up at 6am every day through the Winter with my daughters and twice a day fed anyone in need who came rice, dahl and clean drinking water. Psychic TV fans also sent a large bale ov warm clothes for refugee and beggar children to help them survive thee Winter. What had these evil people done before that, picketed thee Brighton Dolphinarium every weekend for almost two yeras until it was closed for loss ov incoum. Then with animal rights groups we arranged for thee two Dolphins to go to thee Turks and Cacos islands for rehabilitation in a Blue Lagoon project. Butter Lottie doesn't mention that either. Scotland Yard by thee way, they never returned my 2 tunnes ov property. Never reimbusrsed me for thee 2 homes we lost, both woth almost 2 million pounds value when coumbined at todays prices. Mud sticks for a while. Butter truth washes it away over time. We are patient and happy in knowing thee truth ov who we are ....

Thee journalist, Lottie, says DISCIPLINE is a great track because ov Chris. Now we have ALLWAYS said in interviews and conversations that Chris’ rhythm IS really great, a classic rhythm. We heard it that night at SO36 in Berlin... Chris would play me new rhythms and we’d say Yes we can sing to that, or no... we obviously said yes to this one. Then we said to Sleazy, what shall we sing about tonight? And he said "DISCIPLINE".., so we went onstage and I invented thee lyrics thee chorus, thee “vocal melody” in real time, onstage improvising in thee momeant... yet this journalist, Lottie, reduces my part to "screams ov Linda Blair" or coumthing. Thee loud crashes are my violin. Sorry butter remove my violin and vocals and it’s a good, even great, rhythm butter would NEVER be thee lasting anthem it is minus vocals, Cosey's guitar and Sleazy's tape noises.It would j only be a rhythm.

Thee Guardian journalist, Lottie, also says we " met avant garde performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti after dropping out ov Hull University before joining HoHo Funhouse art collective in London" It was May 1969 when we quit University, hitch-hiked to London to see The Rolling Stones in Hyde Park then accepted an ongoing offer to join famed kinetic artist David Medalla's " EXPLODING GALAXY" kinetic dance troupe in London. Christine Carol Newby was a lab technician in a Secondary Modern School. Which meant she put utensils, specimens etc on desks of teenagers ready for a TEACHER to give a class including those items. Then she cleared up the desks afterwards. Then thee COUPLE created...blah blah blah. THAT IS FIVE TOTALLY INCORRECT ERRORS IN ONE SENTENCE!!!!

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