#also Karen just fully admitted to killing that guy while there is a camera in the room had me stressed

[brutal-out-here]

Just watched 3x8 of Daredevil and ?? Huh ??

[arcticdementor]

There’s no nice way to say this: a certain subset of (mostly) white people have lost their minds online. These people wake up to a vast insurrection crossing all racial and national boundaries – and contrive to make this all about themselves. Their affects, their unconsciouses, their moral worthiness. How can I be Not Complicit? How can I be a Better Ally? How do I stop benefiting from white supremacy in my daily life? How do I rid myself of all the bad affects and attitudes? Can I purify my soul in the smelter of a burning police precinct? Occasional ratissages out into mainstream culture (we’re decolonising the Bon Appétit test kitchen!), but mostly what this uprising calls for is an extended bout of navel-gazing. Really get in there, get deep in that clammy lint-filled hole, push one finger into the wound of your separation from the primordial world, and never stop wriggling. Maybe there’s a switch, buried just below the knot, and if you trip it your body will open up like a David Cronenberg nightmare to reveal all its greasy secrets to your eyes. Interrogate yourself! Always yourself, swim deep in the filth of yourself. The world is on fire – but are my hands clean? People are dying – but how can I scrub this ghastly whiteness off my skin?

You could set aside the psychosexual madness of this stuff, maybe, if it actually worked. It does not work. It achieves nothing and helps nobody. Karen and Barbara Fields: ‘Racism is not an emotion or state of mind, such as intolerance, bigotry, hatred, or malevolence. If it were that, it would easily be overwhelmed; most people mean well, most of the time, and in any case are usually busy pursuing other purposes. Racism is first and foremost a social practice.’ Social practices must be confronted on the level of the social. But for people who don’t want to change anything on the level of the social, there’s the Implicit Associations Test. This is the great technological triumph of what passes for anti-racist ideology: sit in front of your computer for a few minutes, click on some buttons, and you can get a number value on exactly how racist you are. Educators and politicians love this thing. Wheel it into offices. Listen up, guys, your boss just wants to take a quick peek into your unconscious mind, just to see how racist you are. How could anyone object to something like that?

…

See, for instance, the form letters: How To Talk To Your Black Friends Right Now. Because I refuse to be told I can’t ever empathise with a black person, I try to imagine what it would be like to receive one of these. Say there’s been a synagogue shooting, or a bunch of swastikas spraypainted in Willesden Jewish Cemetery. Say someone set off a bomb inside Panzer’s in St John’s Wood – and then one of my goy friends sends me something like this:

Hey Sam – I can never understand how you feel right now, but I’m committed to doing the work both personally and in my community to make this world safer for you and for Jewish people everywhere. From the Babylonian Captivity to the Holocaust to today, my people have done reprehensible things to yours – and while my privilege will never let me share your experience, I want you to know that you’re supported right now. I see you. I hear you. I stand with the Jewish community, because you matter. Please give me your PayPal so I can buy you a bagel or some schamltz herring, or some of those little twisty pastries you people like.

How would I respond? I think I would never want to see or hear from this person again. If I saw them in the street, I would spit in their face, covid be damned. I would curse their descendants with an ancient cackling Yiddish curse. These days, I try to choose my actual friends wisely. Most of them tend to engage me with a constant low level of jocular antisemitic micoaggressions, because these things are funny and not particularly serious. But if one of my friends genuinely couldn’t see me past the Jew, and couldn’t see our friendship past the Jewish Question, I would be mortified. Of course, it’s possible that the comparison doesn’t hold. Maybe there are millions of black people I don’t know who love being essentialised and condescended to, who are thrilled by the thought of being nothing more than a shuddering expendable rack for holding up their own skin. But I doubt it. Unless you want me to believe that black people inherently have less dignity than I do, this is an insult.

…

If you want to find the real secret of this stuff, look for the rules, the dos and don’ts, the Guides To Being A Better Ally that blob up everywhere like mushrooms on a rotting bough. You’ve seen them. And you’ve noticed, even if you don’t want to admit it, that these things are always contradictory:

DO the important work of interrogating your own biases and prejudices. DON’T obsess over your white guilt – this isn’t about you! DO use your white privilege as a shield by standing between black folx and the police. DON’T stand at the front of marches – it’s time for you to take a back seat. DO speak out against racism – never expect activists of colour to always perform the emotional labour. DON’T crowd the conversation with your voice – shut up, stay in your lane, and stick to signal boosting melanated voices. DO educate your white community by providing an example of white allyship. DON’T post selfies from a protest – our struggle isn’t a photo-op for riot tourists.

Žižek points out that the language of proverbial wisdom has no content. ‘If one says, “Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it’s the only life you’ve got!” it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite (“Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air – think about eternity!”), it also sounds deep.’ The same goes here. Whatever you say, it can still sound woke. Why?

…

This stuff is masochism, pleasure-seeking, full of erotic charge – and as Freud saw, the masochist’s desire is always primary and prior; it’s always the submissive partner who’s in charge of any relationship. Masochism is a technology of power. Setting the limits, defining the punishments they’d like to receive, dehumanising and instrumentalising the sadistic partner throughout. The sadist works to humiliate and degrade their partner, to make them feel something – everything for the other! And meanwhile, the masochist luxuriates in their own degradation – everything for myself! You’re just the robotic hand that hits me. When non-white people get involved in these discourses, they’re always at the mercy of their white audiences, the ones for whom they perform, the ones they titillate and entertain. A system for subjecting liberation movements to the fickle desires of the white bourgeoisie. Call it what it is. This is white supremacy; these scolding lists are white supremacist screeds.

But systems of white supremacy have never been in the interests of most whites (‘Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black it is branded’), and they have never really fostered any solidarity between whites. Look at the stories. I had a run-in with the police, you announce, and a black person might have died, but I’m fine, because I’m white. No – you’re fine because you’re white and rich. You’re fine because you look like someone who reviews cartoons for a dying online publication called The Daily Muffin, which is exactly what you are. Bald and covered in cat hair. Frameless glasses cutting a red wedge into the bridge of your nose. The white people who get gunned down by police don’t look like you. Their class position is stamped visibly on their face, and so is yours. And you’ve trained yourself to see any suffering they experience as nothing more than ugly Trump voters getting what they deserve.

Why aren’t there protests when a white person is murdered by police? Answer 1: because, as John Berger points out, ‘demonstrations are essentially urban in character.’ Native Americans are killed by cops at an even higher rate than black people, but this too tends to happen very far away from the cities and the cameras; it becomes invisible. Answer 2: because nobody cares about them. Not the right wing, who only pretend to care as a discursive gotcha when there’s a BLM protest. And definitely not you. Sectors of the white intelligentsia have spent the last decade trying to train you out of fellow-feeling. Cooley et al., 2019: learning about white privilege has no positive effect on empathy towards black people, but it is ‘associated with greater punishment/blame and fewer external attributions for a poor white person’s plight.’ A machine for turning nice socially-conscious liberals into callous free-market conservatives.

The rhetoric of privilege is a weapon, but it’s not pointed at actually (ie, financially) privileged white people. We get off lightly. All we have to do is reflect on our privilege, chase our dreamy reflections through an endlessly mirrored habitus – and that was already our favourite game. You might as well decide that the only cure for white privilege is ice cream. Working-class whites get no such luxuries. But as always, the real brunt falls on non-white people. What happens when you present inequality in terms of privileges bestowed on white people, rather than rights and dignity denied to non-white people? The situation of the oppressed becomes a natural base-state. You end up thinking some very strange things. A few years ago, I was once told that I could only think that the film Black Panther isn’t very good because of my white privilege. Apparently, black people are incapable of aesthetic discernment or critical thought. (Do I need to mention that the person who told me this was white as sin?) This framing is as racist as anything in Carlyle. It could only have been invented by a rich white person.

Give them their due; rich white people are great at inventing terrible new concepts. Look at what’s happening right now: they’re telling each other to read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo. You should never tell people to read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo – but we live in an evil world, and it’s stormed to the top of the Amazon bestsellers list. You maniacs, you psychopaths, look what you’ve done. I’m not saying people shouldn’t read the book – I read it, and I don’t get any special dispensations – but you should read it like Dianetics, like the doctrine of a strange and stupid cult.

…

The book is a thrill-ride along a well-paved highway – ‘powerful institutions are controlled by white people;’ true, accurate, well-observed – that quickly takes a dive off the nearest cliff – ‘therefore white people as a whole are in control of powerful institutions.’ Speak for yourself, lady! All a are b, DiAngelo brightly informs us, therefore all b must also be a. She doesn’t advocate for her understanding of the world, she simply assumes it. So it’s not a surprise that the real takeaway from White Fragility is that Robin DiAngelo is not very good at her job.

…

Imagine a devoted cultist of Tengrism, who sometimes gets invited by company bosses to harangue the workforce on how the universe is created by a pure snow-white goose flying over an endless ocean, and how if you don’t make the appropriate ritual honks to this cosmic goose you’re failing in your moral duty. But every time she gives this spiel, she always gets the same questions. Exactly how big is this goose? Surely the goose must have to land sometimes? Geese hatch in litters – what happened to the other goslings? Something must be wrong with these people. Why don’t they just accept the doctrine? Why do they hate the goose? We need a name for their sickness. Call it Goose Reluctance, and next time someone doesn’t jump to attention whenever you speak, you’ll know why. Of course, the comparison is unfair; ideas about eternal geese are beautiful, and DiAngelo’s are not. But the structure is the same. Could it be that Robin DiAngelo is a poor communicator selling a heap of worthless abstractions? No, it’s the workers who are wrong.

(By the way, how did you feel about that phrase, racial humility? I didn’t like it, but her book is full of similar formulations – she also wants us to ‘build our racial stamina’ and ‘attain racial knowledge.’ Now, maybe I’m an oversensitive kike, but I can’t encounter phrases like these and not hear others in the background. Racial spirit. Racial consciousness. Racial hygiene. And somewhere, not close but coming closer, the sound of goosestepping feet.)

I didn’t seek out any of the material I talk about here. It came to me. And it’s making me feel insane. The only social media I use these days is Instagram – because if I’m going to be hand-shaping orecchiette all night, and serving it with salsiccia, rapini, and my own home-pickled fennel, it’s not for my own pleasure, and I demand to receive a decent 12 to 15 likes for my efforts. (I will not be accepting your follow request.) A week ago, on the 2nd of June, my feed was suddenly swarming with white people posting blank black squares. People I’d never known to be remotely political, people whose introduction to politics was clearly coming through the deranged machine of social media. Apparently, that was ‘Blackout Tuesday.’ I don’t know whose clever idea this was, and I don’t want to know, but it came with a threat. If all your friends are posting the square, and you’re not, does it mean you simply don’t care enough about black lives? Around the same time, I was helpfully made aware of a viral Instagram album titled Why The Refusal To Post Online Is Often Inherently Racist. I honestly can’t imagine how terrifying it must be to live like this – always on edge, always trying to be Good, always trying to have your Goodness recognised by other people, in a game where the scores are tracked by what you post on the internet, and the rules are always changing.

[sci-phi-guy]

Blade Runner 2049: Thoughts and Critique?

A few weeks ago (11/2/17 if Tumblr doesn’t time-stamp these posts) I saw the film Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the 1982 ‘flawed masterpiece’ of the same name minus the date.

And much like it’s predecessor it’s a flawed film, however those flaws are much more present that I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece; but it isn’t bad, it’s actually quite good, so much so that it definitely sticks out when compared to many modern films based on pre-existing franchises or iconography.

This film is frustrating, to put it bluntly. Frustrating because it’s a mixture of being both excellent, alright, and at some parts bad.

I haven’t posted jack-squat on this blog in ages, and my ability to express and articulate viewpoints hasn’t had much opportunity to be refined well, so consider this a warning that this kind of opinionated, and I wouldn’t fully call it a critique. Also this will be riddled with spoilers, so if you plan on watching this film to make up your own mind (which I would highly encourage), please don’t read this until doing so.

Overall I thought the film was good, but there were so many flaws that I wouldn't call it great. Many of those flaws act more like trade-offs from the original film that were worked differently in the new one, which do and don't work.

Visually it's really impressive, with director Denis Villeneuve knowing what to focus on in each scene and how the lighting, color composition and blocking help establish tone and flow the film through. However the original film had so much visual detail in it that your eyes were allowed to wander wherever with what felt like a vast but cluttered, overused and believable world. The new film feels almost empty at times, crowd scenes don't feel crowded, and the lack of background detail and constraint the director puts on you don't allow you to wander that much; the camera confined, but only because it knows what to focus on.

The scene of them flying to Wallace's building as it towers over the pyramids of Tyrells' in a rainy fog while a Tibetan choir sings genuinely chilled me.

Which leads me to the music which was also great, when it's there. It's nice that the composer tried something close but also distinct from the original film's score, but most of the music is this loud thunk noise; it doesn't sound as varied as the originals, nor does it get baked into the film as well.

The plot was simple but well-defined, some of the characters were good and well-defined (some of them), and the actors who played them did a good job performance-wise. Deckard in the original only did one-bit of 'detective-work', but K is a genuine detective in this new film, doing a great deal of work to solve this mystery of sorts; it does bite him hard by the film's end, which was smart and to me unexpected.

And yeah, the way women were in this film was unusually distracting, namely because it had so much presence in the film's plot, and as consequence affected the overall feel of the film. I liked Robin Wright's character, and I kind of like Luv when she wasn't in the presence of Wallace Breen. And yes, the scene when we first see him felt almost unnecessary, like it told you that "here the bad guy does something bad to tell you he is bad guy", when his ambition and goal was enough already, we don't need to see him make out with a naked woman and then kill her right after; my mom described this part as "voyeurism", and my parents' dislike for this movie is far stronger than anything I can say.

As for Karen (I know it's Joi, but she condemned herself as Karen the moment she brought out the holographic meatloaf), this was the most distracting thing about this movie, namely because she had so much in it, yet gave so little outside of being a motive for the male leads actions. The scene where she melds with the prostitute to have a three-way, while visually cool my man-ass will admit, inappropriate story-wise. Like Ryan thinks he's a born replicant, fails his Voight-Kampff test, and then has sex? I couldn't believe that, as I watched this scene in the theater, I was preferring the grubby, uncomfortable love scene in the original Blade Runner; because unlike this one, that scene between Deckard and Rachael had some sort of an odd context in the film, and was also appropriately-timed as well.

The part where they brought back Rachael to torment Deckard, after parading her skull around was cruel, but it's placement in the film is interesting because it does address a question the Final Cut of Blade Runner brought up: Is Deckard a replicant or not? They don't answer it, they leave it, toss it around actually. And it gives a pausing moment where Deckard says only one line: "I know what's real.............."

In the ending of the 2007 Final Cut of Blade Runner, Deckard finds an origami unicorn in his apartment, an image he saw in a daydream earlier in the film. They don't give a direct answer as to what Deckard is, they only hint and prod but never define. This twist ending is hailed by so many people as for making up a great majority of the original film's unsatisfactory 1982 version; it's far better than any 'happy ending', that's for sure.

But here's the thing: this man, whose profession is hunting down and killing people who have been defined as not real, who has been nearly killed by those who know they are not real , and has fallen awkwardly in love with someone who he knows and who she now realizes is not real, has now come to possibility that he himself may not be real. What does he do?

He accepts it. We don't know what he accepts, but whatever it is, he simply moves on.

And while Blade Runner 2049 may not follow this theme of accepting ones' reality to its' exact beats, it does what this film does in a whole and takes parts of what the made the original film work and expands on them with some strengths and weaknesses everywhere.

K knows his implanted memories are fake, yet accepts them as the bedrock of his identity, regardless of the slave-like state he lives in society. It's only when he begins to question whether he was born or not that he becomes more erratic, until it eventually leads the great detective to assumes the role of somebody he is not. It's why the twist near the end when we realizes that the child was a girl and not a boy like he assumed is so effective; K did far great a deal of intuitive detective work in this film, and yet even he misses out on what were some vital clues to fit the possibility that he may be more than what he is, whether he likes it or not. And it's only when he's in-front of that gratuitous billboard, when not-his-Karen calls him something only his-Karen could, that he accepts what he is, and goes to save Deckard.

It's not just him, but alot of the other characters here display varying takes on this theme of acceptance. Joshi half-heartedly accepts her death along with the possibility that K lied to her, Luv without choice accepts her dual position as the high-end of a massive corporation while being a slave to that corporations' leader, and even Wallace, literally blind in his grasp for power cannot accept his nor humanity's limitations and thus seeks a born race of slaves to fulfill his desire. Even the underground revolution of replicants, who show up for only a few minutes of a near three hour movie, consist of those who cannot accept their place in society because it is that of a slave.

Blade Runner 2049 is a flawed film, but it's still a good one despite some shortcomings and frustrating choices throughout. It walks away from the long line of passable films modern Hollywood has been rolling out with an established franchise attached to it, but only a few feet. Overall, it's a short step in the right direction.