#and i haven’t even started in the political implications of they being war criminals

[thecocodrille]

I just love drawing this gremlins, they so cute and they love each other. ( I’m crying for the implications of this au, and how they need to hide how much they care for each other :’c )

[seilahsacress]

This is a Naruto and Mystic Messenger combined rant

Spoilers if you haven't seen one of them yet. I personally think Naruto spoilers are ok, if you're anything like me you won't have the mental strenght left to finish this terrible series and just look everything up online at some point anyway but I heavily recommend you play MysMe blind.

Oh well

You've been warned!

Don't proceed longer

Itachi and Rika are the same shit and I don't know which one's apologists I hate more. I think Rika fans are worse? Since they always felt slightly more real to me? But the same goes for Itachi apologists too? Seriously, which side's apologists are worse?

Both those people committed what can be called the absolute worst crimes imaginable to humans. Itachi committed an ethnic genocide out of nationalist feelings. Rika started a cult that kidnapped and drugged people so that she can play the goddess there. Their actions had to have catastrophic effects on the true victims in the respective scenarios, right? There are. MM actually portrays them. Don't know about you but I personally can't get over that scene where Seven had to physically restrain Saeran from committing suicide. Just... Shudders, really...

Then how do the narrative and the fandom treat those unarguable villains? Free forgiveness :D Ignoring the real life implications of their actions, hiding behind pseudo intellectual concepts to excuse them, whining how complex things are when they're attacked and overall "holier than thou" attitude... Oh boi... In for a ride... SCP-001 proposal "When The Day Breaks" (Apologies for adding a third fiction franchise to this post, now you can proceed)

The excuses people make to whitewash their favs are disgusting. For Itachi stans, it's "politics are complex uwu" followed by zero real life examples where an ethnic genocide was justifiable. For Rika stans, it's brain-melting to read manipulations of social issues. They hide behind her "tragic backstory uwu" and the smartass "mental disorder T-T" argument, and treat you like the fucking idiot if you dare "stigmatize" this poor victim girl. Fuck you.

Itachi is a war criminal, Rika is an abuser. There's no way to mental exercise one's way out of this. Those shitty "they thought they were doing the right thing, they were tragic backstories and mental disorders T-T T-T" excuses don't mean fucking shit. Sit down and imagine the real life implications for a second, I beg you.

Do you know who else may have been thinking they were truly doing the right thing? Communist dictators. Suicide bombers. Whatever. You name it. Do you know who else "had no other choice T-T sad T-T complex politics T-T"? Savage bastards organizing the Armenian Genocide.

Do you know why people go through abuse? Cause there are abusers out there, and fuck them. Do you think abusers are merely mainstream "ehe ehe >_< fun to evil~" Hollywood dumbshits? No, most of the time they genuinely believe they're entitled to the other person's appreciation. They have their own "feeeeeelingz~" and sad issues the victim is "obligated" to help them through. Wow, sounds a lot like a specific MysMe girl! Do you know who else other than Rika had an abusive childhood and suffers from depression, anxiety? Billions who did better than being abusers and criminals themselves. And do you know just one more person who was also sick in the head? Fucking Hitler.

In both Naruto and MysMe, respectively Itachi and Rika get away with shit. Former more in a meta sense but whatever. We all know the deal with Naruto's shit narrative, fuck it. Then Rika? The girl from a series I actually like? Welp... She's not punished. Yoosung and Zen don't even know a thing. She's taken good care of and the moment Jumin maybe considers that she needs to face consequences (someone else on Tumblr exactly wrote "bless his soul" and I second it), she's sent away. And appearantly Seven is ok with it? Lmao time to pretend the last few episodes of SE2 never happened and we have an entirely new SE3 to explain all the unresolved plot points.

[kuriquinn]

The Last To Know [5/5]

Blanket Fic Disclaimer

Beta Reader: None right now. Check back later.

Warning: Some language

AN: I decided to add another chapter. Sakura and Sasuke deserve their moment, and Sakura has to resolve her issues with Kakashi and Naruto separately so as not to cheapen the SasuSaku stuff :)

First Chapter

“Sakura!”

Her blushing musings come to an abrupt, crashing end as a familiar voice shatters the somber silence of the cemetery.

Within a blink of an eye, Naruto has skid to a halt in front of her, face sweaty and red from exertion, shoulders heaving as he pants for breath.

Sakura frowns in speculation, gazing at the spot where Sasuke just stood, and where Naruto has appeared.

If they were still genin, she might suspect Naruto were engineering some kind of trick on her—masquerading as Sasuke in an effort to gauge her mood before approaching her. Except, the things that Sasuke said to her are too personal and too specific for Naruto know about; even if he were pretending, he wouldn’t think to say those things.

So the timing is just really coincidental…

Suddenly Sasuke’s words make sense and a rare jab at annoyance for her other former teammate pricks at her. He probably felt Naruto coming this way and decided to leave them to talk.

Sakura wonders if it’s actually a good thing that Sasuke is more aware of the world now than he was when they were kids. He never used to care if she and Naruto were fighting.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I am so sorry!” Naruto wails, throwing himself on the ground in front of her and actually bending his head to the ground in dogeza. “I will never do anything like that, ever again, and I will tell you everything I know from now on—except, well, things that I tell Hinata, because there’s some stuff you can only tell your wife, you know? Well, know, you don’t, because you don’t have a wife—but everything else!”

“Maybe not everything,” a mild voice adds, and of course Kakashi is standing nearby, appearing too swiftly and silently for her to notice. Unlike Naruto, he isn’t prostrating himself on the ground, but he holds himself at a polite distance from her, as if waiting for permission to approach.

Naruto glances up at Kakashi, with a confused look, then his eyes go wide in understand.

“Right! And except for some of the Hokage stuff, because I can’t,” he tells Sakura. “But other than that!” He then ducks his head toward the ground again. “And if I do it again, you can beat me until I can’t move, or rip off my arm again, or…or force feed me vegetables, just as long as you forgive me!”

On anyone else, this would be irreverent and behaviour unbefitting of the crime, but she can hear the desperation in his voice despite the hyperbole.

“Us,” Kakashi corrects quietly. “Though it would be unseemly for your Hokage to get on his knees in front of a civilian.”

“Yeah, right, you’re just worried you’ll break your back or something, old man,” Naruto quips.

Sakura considers her friends for a long moment, feeling as if her innards are churning. It has been days, but the wound of being kept in the dark is still fresh. She knows she’s not ready to completely forgive them yet.

“Leaving a friend in the dark is the same as leaving them behind,” she tells them in as neutral a voice as she can manage, trying to put her thoughts in order. Both men wince at the very personal implications behind that statement. “You know…you knew all I ever wanted was to stand beside you. To be acknowledged and treated like I was on the same level. Since I was a girl, I wanted that more than almost anything and you…you both treated me like a child. Worse, a stranger who wasn’t trustworthy enough or mature enough to handle the truth.”

“This particular truth has done more harm than good to those who know it,” Kakashi responds quietly.

Sakura inclines her head, acknowledging the validity of that, but has no intention of letting him off with the official party line.

“When has holding back the truth ever done any of us favours?” she counters. “Was Naruto better off not knowing why the entire village hated him as a child?”

Kakashi’s jaw clenches beneath his mask.

“Were you better or happier not knowing who your parents were?” she goes on, addressing Naruto directly as he slowly sits back on his haunches. “That was protect you, right? Are you grateful to the people who kept that information from you?”

“That’s…” Naruto begins, twin spots of angry colour burning in his cheeks.

“What about Sasuke? How much of his life was wasted hunting revenge over something he thought was truth…all because a certain someone was trying to protect him?”

“Those are all extreme examples, Sakura,” Kakashi warns.

“Maybe. But they didn’t start off that way. They all started with the simple need to protect someone. And in the end, the people who were supposed to be protected were busy hurting in the dark,” she insists. She turns to face both men, squaring her shoulders. “I understand that my not knowing the truth about such a horrible situation is not as serious as having an entire village hate you for something you can’t control…but it was still a breach of trust. Especially because what you two and Sasuke think of me…it has always mattered more than what anyone else did. And the idea that you don’t trust me…it makes me feel physically sick.”

She has to pause here, fighting a resurging lump in her voice, uncertainty at being so direct once again making her falter a bit.

Hold on to the knowledge that they really want what’s best for you, Sasuke told her, and she does.

The seriousness of their behaviour is not diminished in any way, but she knows it wasn’t done out of malice or calculated intent. In their ignorance, they continued a behaviour that she never clearly asked them to stop. They ought to have known better—Kakashi especially, being that he is usually more perceptive—but still they only wanted to keep her from unpleasant knowledge.

She is not so petty or frail as to walk away from such a close friendship based on one indiscretion, but they have to know that she won’t tolerate it again.

Sakura looks up at the sky, carefully weighing her words, and the nods to herself.

“I won’t be treated like wallpaper by you guys anymore,” she vows, glaring at them both challengingly. Her eyes linger on Naruto. “I am your equal. Maybe I’m not the ancient reincarnation of a demigod like you or Sasuke…and maybe I didn’t come back from the dead or master a thousand techniques like you, Kakashi-sensei.” She nods at him. “But I am just as important. It’s time you both acknowledged that in action and not just words.”

He inclines his head at this, agreement written in his eyes.

“The three of us are the students of the Sannin—you and me and Sasuke,” Sakura tells Naruto. “But more important than that…we’re Squad 7. We’re Kakashi’s students. We’ve been a team since the bell test.”

Naruto can’t help a nervous, nostalgic chuckle at that.

“If I don’t have all of the information, I can’t be an effective part of that team,” Sakura concludes. “And when that information is something that has hurt a member of my team? A dear friend? What else can I imagine but those bonds weren’t as strong as I thought they were?”

“No way!” Naruto cries. “You know how strong our bonds are, Sakura. We couldn’t have done everything we did if it wasn’t. Even before the war.” He scrambles to his feet, gazing down at her with eyes softened by regret. “You’ve always been one of the people I care about most. The best thing that ever happened to me was being put on a team with you and Sasuke—and you were at least nice to be around. Sasuke and I would be dead a hundred times over if you hadn’t been there keeping an eye out for us, even before you got all scary strong. And yeah, sometimes we forget, but it’s only because we love you. And you shouldn’t have to worry about the hard stuff if you don’t have to.”

“That’s not how it works, Naruto,” she replies quietly. “We’re adults now. We’ve lived through war. I know just as much as you do that the world isn’t a very nice place. Do you think when I work in the hospital all I do is prescribe medication and wave my hands over people and make them feel better? I have to sew up bloody wounds and tell people they’re dying—little kids who haven’t even reached the Academy yet! Sometimes I have to sign papers to remove children from abusive homes, or force poison into someone’s system on the off chance it might make them better. I have to operate on criminals just to make them fit enough to stand a trial where they will probably be executed anyway. None of that is easy or good or right, but I have to do it.”

She turns to Kakashi, who has been listening in silence.

“Will you try to protect me from that, too?” she challenges.

He sighs, shaking his head.

“You’ve made your point, Sakura. And I don’t disagree. But some matters are more delicate than others. As your Hokage, all I can promise is that I will do everything legally possible to ensure proper information dispensing. As the highest-ranking member of the team that took out Kaguya Ōtsutsuki, you are entitled to be informed of relevant information on your comrades, and I’ll ensure you have it as soon as possible,” he tells her. A beat later, the official-sounding tone disappears in favour of something more sheepish than she’s used to Kakashi using. “But as your former teacher, you’ll have to forgive me if it takes a little longer to remember these things. For me, you three will always be my adorable students. I will always want to protect you.”

“Okay, hold on, I know why that applies to Sasuke, but when was the last time you protected me?” Naruto scoffs.

“You haven’t been arrested for any of the graffiti incidents yet,” Kakashi points out.

“…Right.”

“It’s a start,” Sakura acknowledges, too used to the by-play to pay it much attention. “I can accept that it’s a start.”

His eyes crinkle in a smile.

Sakura turns to Naruto and frowns at him.

“If you ever pull something like this again—” she begins.

“I know, I know,” Naruto interrupts, holding up his hands as if to stave off some invisible blow. “I got the message when you punted Kakashi-sensei through the window. You’ll flatten me or turn me into a stain or paste or—”

“No,” she says. “I won’t.’

“You…you won’t?”

“No.”

“Oh.” He looks confused.

“But I will never speak to you again,” she informs him. The line is a childish one, something not out of place in the Academy courtyard, but the words ring with promise, the weight of the threat as edged as a declaration of war. “You, or Kakashi-sensei. And I’ll put in for a transfer to another village.”

She turns to Kakashi now, raising an eyebrow as though waiting for him to protest, but he simply looks thoughtful.

“There are a lot of places in the world that need talented medic-nin. I am already doing them a disservice by staying here in the village when I could be out there helping the people who need it. We aren’t at war anymore, so I’m not bound to serve only Konoha’s interests alone, but the well-being of all people in the world,” she explains. “If it turns out that I’m not trusted here by my friends and comrades, or by my own superiors…” She shrugs. “Kankuro has been trying to get me to come work for the hospital in Suna for months now. I’ve been considering a temporary exchange for the good of the hospital’s teaching policies, but I can easily make that permanent. And Karui tells me that the Raikage is conducting interviews for a new chief of staff of the hospital in Kumo.”

“But…but you can’t,” Naruto looks perplexed. “You’re a Konoha-nin.”

“My life does not depend on this village, no matter how much I love it,” Sakura says. “And with all the work the Kage are doing to promote trust between the villages, it’s not so difficult to travel these days. Honestly, I might still leave to travel the world for a little some day. But my coming back will depend entirely on what kind of village is waiting for me.”

The let’s that sink in, and from Naruto’s chagrined expression, she knows he’s taking her seriously.

“This will always be your home,” he tells her, “and I promise, I’ll make it a village—no, a city—worth being proud of. There won’t be anymore secrets from you. Ever. Believe it!” And then, in a move she hasn’t seen in years, he holds out arm in front of him, parallel to the ground, fist clenched. “I promise.”

In her mind, an image from her memories—a short, stupid looking kid with blond hair and wearing orange—superimposes itself on the picture that Naruto makes now.

I won’t go back on my word…that is my ninja way!

Sakura smiles, a little wistful, but without the bitterness of the past few days.

“Alright,” she says. Then she turns serious again. “But it’s still going to take some time. I’m still not happy about all this, and I haven’t completely forgiven you yet. So don’t be surprised if I avoid you both for a little while, because none of this is okay.”

“That’s fine,” Kakashi says. “We can be patient.” Naruto groans, and he amends. “I can be patience. And I can bury Naruto in enough paper work that he’s forced to be patient.”

“Hey!”

“Don’t think you can joke your way out of this,” Sakura warns, shaking a finger at her former instructor. “We are going to talk about the situation with the Elders, because that is not going to continue. We owe it to Sasuke—we owe it to the entire village to untangle that particular snarl.”

“No arguments from me!” Naruto grins. He  rubs at his nose. “Hey, I have a great idea! How about, to seal this whole deal, we go get some ramen?”

“…You really don’t understand the concept of giving people space, do you?” Sakura sighs.

“You’re surprised by this?” Kakashi counters.

“I bet if I send a clone to grab Sasuke, he’s come with us,” Naruto continues, apparently not hearing them. “It’s will totally be like old times! And hey, maybe Teuchi will extend my free ramen pass to you guys too. I mean, you sort of helped me save the world, and it’s the first time in ages we’ve been able to sit together, so maybe…”

Sakura allows Naruto’s ramblings to wash over her.

She wasn’t lying when she said things were not completely forgiven; trust is not something so easily regained with a few words. She suspects it will be months, perhaps years before she can be around them without a modicum of doubt rising up, whispering to her that they still think she is weak.

But Sasuke thinks she’s strong.

And more importantly than any of that, she knows she’s strong.

She will get through this.

And she’ll show Kakashi and Naruto just how serious she is tomorrow when she demands a formal investigation into corruption on the part of the Elders. It’s sure to stir up conflict among the village’s government, but if there’s anything Sakura’s teammates have taught her, it’s that change doesn’t happen unless someone makes trouble.

Naruto was the pest that made people believe; Sasuke the menace that made them forgive.

Let’s see what I become, she thinks to herself with a confident smirk, following the two men away from the cemetery.

終わり

Whew! I’m exhausted! This fic ended up being more emotionally driven than I expected it to be, and a lot longer. Anyhow, I hope you enjoyed it.

I’ll try to edit it tomorrow and post the full version on ffnet, ao3 and wattpad as well. After Curriculum night…it will probably be the only thing I have the energy to do tomorrow, because it’s gonna be a loooong day of parents and teachers and students and just…socializing in general *shudder*.

As always, reviews and constructive criticism are much appreciated! Also, if you are in a supportive mood , you can find my tip jar here.

クリ

[cappuccinocommie]

alright, i'll bite! why was homecoming almost marxist?

THANK YOU! OH MY GOD I HAVE BEEN BURSTING TO SAY THIS SHIT SINCE LIKE TWO DAYS AGO

WHY “SPIDERMAN: HOMECOMING” (2017) WAS ALMOST MARXIST: AN ANALYSIS

I’ll do only the non-spoiler shit above the cut because I don’t know if you’ve seen or not, and put the spoiler stuff under a read more. 

Let’s begin with the most obvious difference: the new “Spiderman: Homecoming” movie is NOT AN ORIGIN STORY. 

This in itself is incredibly important, because it means that the old politics of Spiderman can really no longer apply in this new narrative. In previous Spiderman movies, Peter Parker/Spiderman has been said to be analogous to America – a budding young country, finding itself wielding untold economic and military power, and unsure of how to use that power in the world. Likewise, Peter struggles with his powers, even wondering if it’s right to use them in the first place – but by the end of both series, he feels he is called by a sacred duty to be Spiderman. So the previous two franchises were essentially metaphors for American imperialism. You can find a much better explanation of why that is on THIS video; because I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet. (my guess is that the creator of this video feels very differently than I do about America’s place in the world, but it’s a good analysis all the same.) But remember the motto: “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

Not only is that motto NEVER MENTIONED in the new Spiderman (you heard me right, they DON’T SAY the “great motto” line, ever), Peter has no qualms about his powers. He doesn’t struggle with “how to use them properly.” He KNOWS he’s Spiderman. He wants to help people. And that sets up his primary goal during the entire movie: to prove himself to Tony Stark. (I’ll get back to this.) But case in point; Peter can no longer be comfortably analogized to be representative of America; at least not in the way he previously was, as a world power trying to find how to best impose its influence. He’s something different now. 

This is where it gets spoilery. I’ll see you below the cut. 

Okay. So let’s talk about the opening scene.... which has literally NOTHING to do with Spiderman. 

THE OPENING SCENE

It starts “8 years ago,” or RIGHT AFTER the battle of New York in the first Avengers movie. We see a cleanup crew, a ragtag band of workers with a contract from the city to scavenge all the alien technology. 

But enter “DAMAGE CONTROL.” They are an organization designed to clean up the mess left behind by superhero battles, and they unceremoniously kick the workers from their jobs. But it gets better – Damage Control is headed up by, you guessed it, TONY STARK. Which makes THIS beautiful line possible: “So the people making the messes are the people profiting from cleaning it up.” Which, if you didn’t already know that Stark is bourgeoisie…. Stark is bourgeoisie. Though his days of selling weapons to armies might be over, his days of hurting workers are not. 

But instead of just capitulating to Damage Control, those scavengers KEEP some of the alien technology and are able to create incredible tools and very deadly weapons from it, as well as a flying suit that enables the leader of the group to be the Vulture.

This is an ENORMOUS departure from the previous two films. “Spiderman” (2002) opens with a voiceover from Tobey Maguire as Peter before introducing Peter himself, on a school bus. “The Amazing SpiderMan” (2012) opens with Peter’s backstory, of his parents disappearing when he was a young child. In Homecoming, Peter isn’t even mentioned or shown until, like, 5 minutes in. This may seem like a minor detail, but it’s incredibly important. The backstory that we get in Homecoming is not for the hero, but actually of the VILLAINS – Vulture and his crew. We get their backstory, and they are humanized and even justified in our eyes. Damage Control, headed by Tony Stark, took their jobs away. Why shouldn’t they have fought back to keep themselves and their families fed?

(Essential Disclaimer: Yes, using alien technology to build incredible powerful weapons and selling them is bad. But… we should also probably consider how this is a deliberate, DIRECT parallel to Tony Stark’s own origin story.)

PETER PARKER: WORKING CLASS HERO

So, THEN we get to see Peter. It’s essentially a recap of his time in the Civil War movie, in which he had a brief role fighting on Iron Man’s side against Captain America and the Winter Soldier. But after that battle, it shows Peter being quite unceremoniously dropped back at his house, and consequently ignored by Tony Stark.

That sets up Peter’s motivation. He WANTS to be Spiderman. He wants to fight alongside the Avengers. He wants to prove himself to Tony Stark so he can be Spiderman, the Avenger.

My interpretation of this is thus: the Tony Stark uses the Peter Parker. He needs SpiderMan be “on the ground,” to help and fight his wars. But Peter is ignored afterward; he’s given a high-tech suit and put back in his place. This, to me, is directly comparable to the bourgeoisie’s relationship to the working class. I also have a theory that the high-tech suit represents a “wage,” but that’s a bit extraneous. 

Peter’s motivation is also analogous to the ideal of the “American Dream.” Just as the proletariat believes it can achieve its wildest, wealthiest dreams if it just works “hard enough,” Peter believes he can join the Avengers if he just impresses Tony Stark. He believes he can “rise up in the ranks.” 

But this is shown to be damn near impossible. Peter is shown to… not actually be that great at fighting everyday crime. He liberates a stolen bicycle, but can’t find its owner. He gives an elderly woman directions (arguably his most successful effort in the entire movie). He tries to stop a car from being stolen, only to find out that the “thief” was in fact the owner of the car.

Then, when stopping an ATM robbery, Peter happens across super-powerful weapons made of alien technology – sold to the thieves by Vulture and his crew.

After a fight with those thieves goes awry, Peter tries to contact Tony Stark again, and is once again ignored.

After the next run-in with the weapons, Peter is actually told by Tony Stark – or rather his empty – to drop it, and to let other people handle the situation. Which, let’s talk about that. The suit that came to rescue Peter was empty, and Tony Stark was actually off in a foreign country at a party or something. This, to me, says a lot about the alienation of the working class. 

Then, we get to the “PETER FUCKS UP” stage. 

Vulture has a weapons deal on a ferry that Peter goes to in order to finally capture the criminals – it goes badly, and the boat is lasered in half and almost sinks, until Tony shows up and saves everybody. He’s angry at Peter and actually takes the suit away. He thinks Peter doesn’t deserve to be Spiderman. 

(Another important note: Tony’s alliance with the government, or really the bourgeoisie’s alliance with the state, is really fleshed out here. Not only does Damage Control do state work, but Tony, instead of dealing with the Vulture problem, called the FBI to let them deal with it. But also didn’t tell Peter that.) 

Peter goes back to normal life, and even gets a date to homecoming, a girl named Liz. On the night of homecoming, he goes to her house – only to discover that her father is the Vulture. 

Vulture recognizes him, too, and because of how much his daughter likes Peter, gives him a chance to let it go. But Peter being Peter, chases after Vulture as he and his crew go on one last job – to steal Tony Stark’s property when it’s being moved from Stark tower to another location. 

This results in a VERY interesting dynamic. Peter is bound to retrieve Tony’s property, because he needs to get back into Stark’s favor and because it’s the “right thing to do.” (Also, Tony owns a bunch of dangerous shit that would be bad in the Vulture’s hands.) But in the end, though Peter succeeds at saving Tony’s property, he saves Vulture’s life. There’s no hesitation. No second thoughts. Peter instinctively uses the only strength he has not only to warn Vulture about the explosion, but drag him out of burning debris. They collapse in the sand together. 

PETER’S REWARD

After all of that happens, Peter is on Tony’s good side again. He’s brought to the new Avengers headquarters, where he’s told he will get to be an Avenger, get a new, super hi-tech suit, and that there’s a bunch of reporters waiting behind a door to hear from Spiderman. Peter is suddenly offered everything he wants after his loyalty to Tony Stark, after saving his property. Peter has achieved the American Dream. 

But he turns it down. He goes back to being regular old Spiderman. He doesn’t join the Avengers. And though Tony bluffs it like it was a test, it’s revealed that he genuinely made that offer to Peter, and was extremely surprised that he turned it down. 

LOOSE ENDS

A big thing in movies is that a lot is shot, but a lot is also cut. So what ends up on the cutting room floor, and what ends up on screen, is very important. Not only do we get the entire opening scene being about Vulture and his crew’s backstory, Vulture also gets several solo scenes at their base. 

Tony Stark NEVER gets a solo scene where he’s not talking to Peter. This has a large effect on who we perceive to be closer to us as the audience; it has a great deal to do with who we feel CONNECTED to and empathize with. Tony Stark is not meant to be an empathetic character... but Vulture, who is arguably a victim of Tony Stark, is. 

Now... I say Homecoming is “almost Marxist,” because I don’t think it ever fully draws marxist conclusions. Does it have implications of class struggle and of working-class solidarity? I think absolutely. But it never comes to the obvious conclusion that it set up – that Tony Stark is actually still damaging, even as a “philanthropic” billionaire, and Spiderman is bound to fight the villains created by his mistakes. Vulture is a sympathetic villain, but he’s never made out to be MORE than that – as a product of the vicious society he lives in, wherein workers are crushed under capitalism and have to fight for survival. It’s even possible that both of these conclusions were actually shot, and ended up cut, though I doubt it. 

But Peter is DEFINITELY DIFFERENT from the old, imperialist Spiderman, and I hope that we get to see more of who the new Spiderman is politically and philosophically in the future Marvel canon. 

[neiru2013]

(1/4) Idgi, if you support veganism (which I'm going to say essentially means all animals lives are not below ours/don't want to cause them harm when unnecessary, or could be because of environmental reasons, which I'm going to assume it isn't).

The same right to self expression that allows me to openly support animal rights, women’s rights, LGBT+ rights, non/religious freedom, racial equality, etc also allows others to disagree with those rights or (much more often) with what the causes of the problems are and how to best resolve them. Freedom of speech cuts both ways or it doesn’t exist at all. It is what allows us to fight for these rights in the first place, and why so much progress has been made in many social justice fields. But most issues are not black and white, they are nuanced and interconnected, which is why open discussion and debate which includes as many viewpoints as possible is essential. All the better if they are dissenting viewpoints, because an echo chamber of people who already agree with each other does not allow anyone to grow.

If you disagree with someone, start a conversation. Ask them why they believe what they do and actually listen to them instead of making assumptions. You may be surprised what you learn. There may be an angle you haven’t considered, or they haven’t considered. There may be a misunderstanding that could be cleared up. Dismissing or vilifying them before you make an effort to understand where they’re coming from only puts up psychological barriers and radicalizes people. Even if you find out that they’re a genuine asshole, though, they have just as much right to their opinions as you do, as long as they do not use force to infringe on the equal rights of others. Criminalizing thought is dangerous.

(2/4) How can you turn around and be okay with a Nazi spreading hateful speech? And Nazism is similar to White Supremacy (I guess they’re intertwined?) because it is an inherent belief that White Str8s are superior to everyone else basically. So if this person values the lives of some of the students who go to Berkley less than others. Why. Would. He. Be. Able. To. Spread. This. On campus. (And by “hateful speech” I mean his words that are linked with the concept of White Supremacy).

I hope to gods you are not implying that Milo is a straight white supremacist Nazi because that could not be more wrong. Milo is a Catholic gay guy with Jewish ancestry who dates black men, and would be on the top of a Nazi kill list. He is a nationalist, but he’s not a white nationalist. He doesn’t care what race you are, he doesn’t value some lives less than others. He does care about border security and preserving Western values, which he believes are equality and freedom of expression, and he talks about his concern that authoritarian ideologies (he focuses on certain factions of the Left and of Islam) are a threat to those values and to public safety. He says a lot of inflammatory, sarcastic, and outrageous things to get a rise out of people. He makes flippant, crude, and at times bigoted jokes that hurt people’s feelings, half of which he doesn’t mean and his entire audience knows it. But he never incites violence, he’s always open to civil debate with opponents, and he makes fun of them when they aren’t being civil. He stirs up discussion by being an obnoxious clown with a lot of unpopular opinions.

Others can rightfully disagree with him, criticize him, and protest him, but to riot and cause violence to people and property in an effort to threaten and silence him is absolutely unacceptable. It is a sad day when someone like Milo Yiannopoulos becomes the champion of free speech in the USA and liberals become the violent thugs. And yet here we are. Reminds me of a quote by the Italian author and critic Ennio Flaiano: “There are two types of fascists in Italy: fascists and anti-fascists.” (Except that Milo isn’t actually a fascist.) And what have these riots accomplished? People curious why liberals are so afraid of a sassy gay Jew have made Milo’s book is #1 on Amazon’s Best Sellers list, with George Orwell’s thought crime dystopia 1984 right behind at #2:

So congratulations, I guess. Mission accomplished!! He could’ve given his speech and left, and nobody would’ve cared. But no. Now Milo has successfully been made a political martyr by a hypocritical, authoritarian PC/SJW culture that relies on virtue signaling and strawman fallacies, and resorts to violence because they’ve forgotten how to string together coherent arguments as part of a mature, nuanced conversation. Now even more people will read Milo’s book and flock to his YouTube channel. Suppressing speech/ideas does not work.

(¾) So I feel like I don’t have to draw out the obvious implications of hate speeches (them basically physically attacking or possibly killing anyone that doesn’t fit they’re cookie cutter mold). Also I feel like I’m almost on a slippery slope fallacy, except we can basically connect public opinion of views on certain people with hate crime right? In Quebec when we elected a Separatist, the amount of hate Muslims got went up because that political view was given an: “ok, green light”.

As you’ve noted, the Islamophobes in Quebec didn’t spring up overnight just because a Separatist was elected. People who committed those crimes already held hateful beliefs. You’d have to ask each one of them how they developed those beliefs, or why they decided to act on them at that particular time. Maybe they would’ve done the same acts, just spaced farther apart, and the election inspired them to act sooner than later. But to say that free speech, even hate speech, should be held responsible for the actions of others is a dangerous slippery slope indeed. I say those people are responsible for the formation of their own opinions and of their own resulting actions. By choosing to commit violence, they have crossed a line from thought crimes to real crimes, and that is unacceptable. And, as I’ve said, violence can be fought with violence. People have every right to defend themselves from attack.

(4/4) So I hope you get what I’m saying, otherwise I think it’s really fucked that you can care about animals not dying but don’t care about anyone that Nazis are targeting.

Please point me to a single thing I’ve ever posted or said that in any way indicates I don’t care about anyone that “Nazis” are targeting. I would be among the first people that real Nazis would target. I spent my childhood in an Islamic Middle Eastern country (Azerbaijan). I have personally witnessed an actual race war. I am a first generation immigrant who came to the USA under refugee status as a Jew fleeing civil war and the breakup of the Soviet Union. My dad was a migrant worker picking artichokes in the fields while we lived in Italy waiting to be accepted into the USA. I am several letters on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, practice a religion that most people fear or don’t even know exists, and hold very unconventional political views. As a person of Jewish, Slavic, and Persian descent, I beg of you, be very careful who you label a “Nazi.” Do not diminish that term, do not water it down, and recognize that a defining feature of fascism is the violent suppression of nonviolent dissent. Having grown up under communism, I take freedom of expression very seriously. It is the right I hold most sacred. And that means the freedom to disagree with me, because I do not put up with double standards.

[96thdayofrage]

“A jihad in the Congo makes no sense whatsoever.”

A video calling for an Islamic State jihad in the Democratic Republic of the Congo appeared online and in a few news reports last week. It was purportedly made in Beni Territory, within Congo’s North Kivu Province, where a phantom so-called Islamist militia, the Allied Democratic Forces, has been blamed for massacres of the indigenous population that began in October 2014.

The footage features a bearded, camo-clad North African or Middle Eastern man draped in ammunition belts and holding a Kalashnikov rifle, while calling on Islamic State jihadists to come to Congo—in Arabic. Camo clad Black African militia men stand behind him.

Trouble is, the Congo is somewhere between 80 and 95 percent Christian and only two percent Muslim, and the Roman Catholic Church is its most influential nongovernmental institution. Arabic is neither the international language, nor any of the national languages or indigenous languages. So this might even seem comical if the indigenous people of Beni weren't being massacred by the illegal resource trafficking militias already operating there and the proposed caliphate weren’t a new cover for that.

I asked Boniface Musavuli, a native of Beni and author of The Massacres of Beni: Kabila, Rwanda, and the Fake Islamists , to help contextualize the so-called news.

Ann Garrison: Boniface, what's your first response to this video? Do you think these ISIS jihadis have any real existence or any real interest in a holy war in your country?

BM: This video appears mainly as an attempt to manipulate international opinion, to make people believe that eastern Congo is becoming a bastion of international Islamist terrorism. The reality is that only two percent of Congo’s population are Muslims, and there is no radical imam to lead a holy war. Congolese Muslims have never fought against the government or even organized a political demonstration against the authorities. There is therefore no sociological basis for the establishment of a caliphate in Beni. A jihad in the Congo makes no sense whatsoever. Congo has never been claimed as a "land of Islam," and the Congolese government does not send soldiers to Muslim countries.

“Congolese Muslims have never fought against the government or even organized a political demonstration against the authorities.”

AG: The Arab guerrilla fighter—or actor—in the video is not "white" according to the Western construction of that idea, but he is most certainly not a Black African, and the image of him at the head of a band of Black Africans has an unpleasant, racially supremacist implication. What do you think of that?

BM: I think that this image is making believe that the massacres that started in Beni in 2014 were from the very beginning sponsored by evil Arab Islamist organizations, and that the time has finally come for them to appear alongside their Black performers.

AG: "Islamic State" seems to have become a franchise business like McDonald's, but it's not clear that IS headquarters, wherever that may be, has granted a franchise to this highly unlikely "Islamic State of Central Africa." According to “ISIS calls for jihad in eastern Congo ," someone posted the video to a few "pro-ISIS" websites, but I haven't been able to find any of them. Have you?

BM: No, but that article with the video that was supposed to be on the "pro-ISIS websites" appeared on the online news outlet "politico.cd." It did not appear on YouTube as we might have expected, and it did not appear on any other news websites either, so it seemed as if politico.cd was the only one that received it.

AG: Some of the video was included with a version of the politico.cd report in the Daily Mail , a sensational British news outlet. The only other Western site that seems to have reproduced the story is PJ Media , but last week the New York Times and AP both ran stories about the Ugandan Muslim Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) that this Arabic ISIS militia has allegedly been working with all along—even though the ADF story has been proven fraudulent by UN investigators . And Radio Okapi, a UN Peacekeeping Mission outlet, seemed to take it seriously when they interviewed Nicaise Kibel'bel , a Congolese journalist who just published a book, The Advent of Jihad in Eastern Congo, the Islamic Terrorism of the ADF.

BM: Nicaise Kibel'bel won a CNN African Press Freedom Award in 2009 before starting to write his book on Beni. He published this book in December 2016. He is very close to General Mbangu Mashita, who directs the military operations in Beni, which are, in reality, operations to traffic resources and kill the local people. It is therefore possible that he has an interest in conveying a story that serves as Islamist cover for the crimes of the army and the regime of Kabila.

AG: Do the people of Beni believe that Islamists are killing them?

BM: The people of Beni knew from the beginning that the Congolese soldiers who are part of the resource-trafficking networks are killing them. The people lived for a long time with the ADF Muslims in the forest—almost 20 years—and the ADF trafficked timber but it never massacred them. The killers are the units commanded by General Mundos, a close friend and collaborator of Kabila; they have been killing the people since October 2014. This video will not change what they know to be true.

AG: Politico.cd links to its source for the ISIS video, the “SEARCHING FOR INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST ENTITIES (SITE) website: SITE Intelligence Group, breaking news, articles, and analysis on the jihadist threat , which is led by private Israeli intelligence professional Rita Katz in Bethesda, Maryland. SITE Intelligence Group released the video of ISIS beheading American journalist Steven Sotloff before ISIS itself released it in 2014, after which President Obama said the US would "degrade and destroy ISIS,” which the U.S. is still bombing—or funding—in Syria today. Which depends on whom you ask, of course, and there are also people who say the US is doing both.

I can't imagine President Trump using this "ISIS of Central Africa" as an excuse to drop Cruise missiles on eastern Congo, but this certainly makes it look as though US and Israeli intelligence agencies are for some reason investing in the idea that this group exists. ISIS always seems like a serviceable cause for militarization or military intervention of one sort of another.

“It looks as though US and Israeli intelligence agencies are for some reason investing in the idea that this group exists.”

And regardless of who's actually producing politico.cd, they obviously favor US policymakers’ viewpoints. On Monday, October 23, one of its three most recent posts was about UN Ambassador Nikki Haley's trip to Congo's capital Kinshasa to meet with President Kabila. The other two were about New Jersey Senator Cory Booke r, whom they identified as a "rising star of the Democratic Party, the first Black Senator from New Jersey." The Booker reports varied only slightly, and both included a letter that he and six other senators had written to President Trump and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley asking them to compel Kabila to hold an election in 2017 by imposing harsher sanctions, and threatening the murky international financial networks that Kabila and his circle use to stash all the wealth they've stolen from their own people. I can’t help asking why they’re willing to let the loot sit in its overseas vaults, election or no, instead of returning it to the people, since they claim to know where it is and how to seize it as they did Gaddafi’s.

BM: That wouldn’t be in their interest. They say they’re concerned that we have an election and that we be able to freely express ourselves, and they want Moise Katumbi to win, but they’ve never said that the Congolese people should benefit from Congo’s resource wealth. Their big mining corporations are here too, most of all in Katanga, where they take as much ore as they can for a little as they can and exploit Congolese labor miserably.

AG: You say they want Moise Katumbi to win? The mining billionaire who was governor of Katanga? I’ve been told he’s the West’s new horse to ride.

BM: Yes, they want Moise Katumbi to be the next president. This is obvious if you read the policy and security journals published in Arlington and Washington D.C.

AG: Another piece prominently featured in politico.cd summarizes "A Worsening Crisis in Congo ," a recent essay by Enough Project founder and executive director John Prendergast and Sasha Lezhnev in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. Both are leading ideologues of the humanitarian war crusades led by former UN Ambassador now Harvard professor Samantha Power, but writing for the CFR audience, they’re frank about how essential Congolese minerals, most of all copper and cobalt, are to US national security. Both are absolutely key to both weapons and consumer commodity manufacture. Congo contains 60 percent of the world’s known cobalt reserves, and the U.S. has no cobalt ore worth mining. Congo also has the world’s second largest copper reserves.

Prendergast and Lezhnev warn that if instability keeps escalating as Kabila clings to power, it could endanger the security of roads leading out of the Kolwezi and Kasumbalesa copper and cobalt mines. Like Cory Booker, they want Trump to manipulate Kabila and his criminal cronies by threatening their overseas assets if they don't behave.

But getting back to ISIS, whatever interest the U.S. may have in promoting the ISIS of Central Africa story, it also benefits Kabila and his circle by enhancing their cover for the army’s crimes in Beni, doesn’t it?

BM: Absolutely. I’m sure he’s hoping this Islamic State video and Nicaise Kibel'bel’s delirious new book about Congo jihad will create an even thicker smokescreen to hide behind.

“Congo contains 60 percent of the world’s known cobalt reserves, and the U.S. has no cobalt ore worth mining.”

AG: OK, let's talk about the indigenous people of Beni, the ones suffering because of all this. If I understand correctly, the majority are indigenous in that their families are rooted there—Beni is their homeland—and they survive by farming and/or artisanal, pre-industrial mining. Is that more or less accurate?

BM: The majority of Beni's population live by subsistence agriculture. The mining sector remains small and artisanal. Beni is mainly a transit zone for eastern Congo's minerals and other resources to be exported to the markets of East Africa and Asia.

AG: Not to the West?

BM: Yes, but indirectly. First the minerals go to the East, to China, Malaysia, Korea, Japan, India, but we are in a globalized economy. The factories in these Asian countries, such as China, process Congolese minerals more cheaply than they could be processed in the West, but they operate with capital from Western investors.

AG: And if Beni is a transit zone, where are the minerals and other resources coming from?

BM: Some of course come from Beni, most of all timber, but others come from Ituri District and other territories of eastern Congo. Beni is the border territory where the resources are transported into Uganda.

AG: The Ituri District borders Uganda too, but the smuggling routes have been developed from points in Beni to points in Uganda?

BM: Yes.

AG: And what else can you say about the timber trade? I know that most of Beni is rainforest, the earth's lungs, and cutting it down is hastening climate catastrophe, but who's doing it and where do they trade it, to what markets?

BM: Beni's precious rainforest timber is illegally logged and smuggled out by the Congolese army, then sold on the world timber market, as UN reports have shown. It's first stored in Uganda, then shipped to overseas markets. Beni’s timber exploitation zones were occupied by the ADF until 2013, but they've broken up and dispersed. Since then, the forests have been occupied by traffickers pretending to be ADF, most of all by the Congolese army. UN experts revealed that General Mundos, Joseph Kabila's henchman, was logging Beni’s rainforest timber and exporting it, but we don’t know what part of it is controlled by Mundos and Kabila behind him.

AG: What about the Ugandans and Rwandans that you’ve said are among the aggressors and traffickers?

BM: Regarding the role of Rwanda and Uganda, it should be noted that at the time when the ADF occupied the forest and controlled the timber sector, they were working for the benefit of Uganda, even though, officially, they presented themselves as "Ugandan rebels hostile to the government of Museveni." That lie masked their mafia trafficking.

When the ADF were driven out of the Beni forest, thousands of Rwandans arrived in areas they’d formerly occupied, where timber is exploited, but the timber still continues to transit through Uganda. The only victims of this illegal economy are, of course, the indigenous people, who are driven off their land and replaced by hordes of Congolese soldiers and Rwandans.

“Beni's precious rainforest timber is illegally logged and smuggled out by the Congolese army, then sold on the world timber market.”

AG: So they kill indigenous people and terrorize them till they flee just to get them out of the way?

BM: Yes.

AG: And what about foreign, industrial mining corporations. Has AngloGold Ashanti set up operations in Beni yet?

BM: There are gold-buying comptoirs—middlemen—in Beni and Butembo, who buy from artisanal miners, but there are no big industrial mining companies. The firm AngloGold Ashanti, which merged with Sokimo to form Kibali Gold, has operations more than 300 km from Beni, near Watsa in the province of Haut-Uele.

AG: Is there anything else you’d like to say about this?

BM: Yes. I don’t believe this new ISIS jihadi terror story, but I’m very worried that the gangsters in power may bring real jihadi killers to Beni to terrorize the people more and make the international community believe their cover story. I believe they are quite capable of bringing killers from Arab countries to eastern Congo, and this could make things even worse, even though that’s hard to imagine.

Today the United Nations activated its Level 3 humanitarian emergency designation for the entire Democratic Republic of the Congo . That puts it on par with the three other crises currently recognized as L3 emergencies: Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. They said that North Kivu Province, which includes Beni, hosts the largest number of internally displaced people in the country—close to a million. And it’s not even one of the most urgently targeted areas yet, though they say it’s very fragile and its conflicts could suddenly intensify again at any time.

Boniface Musavuli is a native of Beni Territory, North Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, now living in exile in France. He is the author of the book “The Massacres of Beni: Kabila, Rwanda, and the Fake Islamists ,” published in July 2017. The book is currently available only in French but will hopefully become available in English.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@kpfa.org .

[nancy-astorga]

After a decade fighting the cartels, Mexico may be looking for a way to get its military off the streets

In December 2006, just after taking office, Mexican president Felipe Calderon deployed Mexico’s military to the cities and countryside to take on the country’s drug trade.

It was not the first time Mexico’s military had been sent out to fight narcos, but Calderon’s escalation — from 20,000 soldiers deployed around the country to 50,000 — marked a shift, the effects of which have reverberated around the country.

But in recent months, Mexico’s military leadership, after a decade of fighting a seemingly indefatigable foe, has been increasingly critical of the tasks it has been assigned.

“We didn’t ask to be here. We don’t like it. We didn’t study how to chase criminals,” Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos said in early December. “Our function is something else, and it’s been made into something unnatural. We are doing things that don’t correspond to our training because there’s no one else to do them.”

Critical comments from the military about its decade-old domestic deployment are rare, but Cienfuegos has made similar statements before.

“Of course we have committed errors,” he said in an interview with Mexican news outlet Pulso in mid-March. “One of those was when we entered fully combat against drugs.”

In that interview, Cienfuegos also underscored the gap between the military’s training and the roles it was being asked to fill on Mexico’s streets. “The military is not intended for the work it does today,” he said. “No one with responsibility for this institution is prepared to do the functions of the police.”

While Cienfuegos has been one of the most high-profile critics of the domestic deployment of Mexico’s military, he is not the only one.

“I think that there is frustration on the part of Mexican military personnel about being engaged in eternal conflict,” David Shirk, a professor at the University of San Diego and director of the school’s Justice in Mexico program, told Business Insider.

“There’s a lot of dissatisfaction,” said Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, “because the use of the military to conduct law-enforcement operations actually goes against the Mexican constitution.”

Beyond the broader legal implications, the day-to-day impact of Mexico’s actions in a domestic law-enforcement role has caused frustration both inside and outside the ranks.

“There’s dissatisfaction within the military because it’s been the institution that they have always regarded as the most uncorruptible, if you will, within the country; however, now … there’s been more corruption within the ranks,” Vigil, who keeps in contact with Mexican law-enforcement officials, told Business Insider.

“So they feel that it’s corrupting the oldest and most respected institution within the Mexican government,” he said, adding:

“At the same time … you have federal prosecutors that are not very happy [because] the military are not trained investigators, and in my conversations with the PGR, they feel they’re losing a lot of cases or not being able successfully prosecute cases … because the military goes in, they’re not trained in this area — they do a very good job — but they go and trample evidence. They trample over crime scenes. They destroy evidence inadvertently.”

Mexico’s high impunity rates — only about 1% of crimes in the country are punished — have been attributed to the Mexican military’s poor preparation for law-enforcement duties, said Vigil, author of “Metal Coffins: The Blood Alliance Cartel.”

For military personnel, filling a domestic role has brought with it unwelcome additions to the chain of command.

“On the other hand,” Shirk said, “and especially because we’ve also seen measures to try to reduce military impunity, increasingly the military has … to answer to civilian authorities. So if they screw up, or if they get mixed up in something like Ayotzinapa, they’re way more vulnerable.”

It’s strongly believed that members of the Mexican military were involved in the Ayotzinapa incident — the kidnapping and suspected killing of 43 student teachers and social activists in southwest Mexico in September 2014.

That is just one incident of many suspected military abuses.

A few months prior, after an incident in which 22 people were slain, military personnel were accused of executing at least 12 people in Tlatlaya in Mexico state and altering the crime scene to make it look like a confrontation.

Eight soldiers were charged but ultimately released for lack of evidence, and four ministerial police officers were sentenced to jail terms for torturing survivors of the massacre.

“I would say since about 2014, more and more reports at the national and international level have been coming out with evidence with the human-rights abuses and violence perpetrated by the military,” Molly Molloy, a professor and librarian at New Mexico State University, told Business Insider in December. “It stands to reason … that if you put thousands of armed, trained people in the midst of a sort of criminal gang conflict … that more people are going to be killed.”

Some of those military personnel have even joined ranks Mexico’s cartels, committing offenses they are supposed to be combatting.

Since 2008, the US has supplied funding, equipment, and training to the Mexican military through Plan Merida. Many of those defectors, like the soldiers who eventually formed Los Zetas drug cartel, have put that training and that equipment to brutally effective use in Mexico’s underworld.

According to Vigil, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration is looking to move away from the style of drug war pursued by him and his predecessor, Calderon — most importantly, by de-emphasizing the Kingpin Strategy, which had the Mexican government pursuing high-ranking cartel figures.

“It’s like the proverbial hydra,” Vigil said of the organizations targeted by this strategy, “where you cut off a head and then a hundred take its place, and I’m talking about the splintering, the fragmentation, which has led to even more violence.”

“So now what the Peña Nieto administration and Miguel Chong, the interior minister, are going to do is they’re going to … alter their strategy and do a top-to-bottom dismantling of these organizations,” Vigil added.

“They are changing their strategy to look at the entire infrastructure, attacking the entire infrastructure,” he continued.

“It’s not going to be overnight, but they, thank god, are looking to make necessary changes and hopefully have more significant impact and more lasting impact” on drug-related violence.

Despite those signs that the Mexican government is reassessing its drug war and looking to move away from a military-first strategy focused on the upper ranks of cartel leadership, the viability of such a shift will likely be hamstrung by Mexico’s failure to effectively dismantle criminal organizations and build stronger legal and law-enforcement institutions over the last decade.

Shifting the military away from the Kingpin Strategy “was arguably what they said they were going to do from the beginning, but they didn’t do it,” Shirk told Business Insider.

“As much as I think that the government should be thinking about a comprehensive longer-term strategy, I’m skeptical of that to the extent that I haven’t seen some of the elements that I would like to see for that to be an actual … effective policy measure,” he added.

Analysis of Mexican government outlays by Reuters this year found that since 2015, the Peña Nieto government has cut spending on security programs, after increasing that funding during the first two years of his term, which started in December 2012.

Moreover, the long-time presence of the military in a law-enforcement role has undercut local and state police forces and made local and state governments reluctant or unwilling to enact reform programs.

“In the absence of competent state and local authorities, the Armed Forces are not able to retire, on penalty of leaving the population undefended in the face of organized crime,” Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope wrote in a column in early December. “However, the presence of federal forces reduces the incentives for local and state political actors to build their own capacities.”

“Bad if they stay, bad if they go,” Hope said.

“Ten years ago it was decided that the police should be rebuilt, and we still haven’t seen that reconstruction,” Cienfuegos told the Associated Press in December. “This isn’t something that can be solved with bullets. It requires other measures, and there has not been decisive action on budgets to make that happen.”

SEE ALSO: The battle for control of the Sinaloa cartel is intensifying, and ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán’s sons are under fire

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