#and this is a prime example of how every evil enables a good that would not have been otherwise possible | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

prince-of-elsinore · 4 years

Text

On "Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox" and "Carry On"

Or, The Tragedy of the Hunting Life

I'm rewatching Season 12 and was doing a little write-up of my thoughts so far, but this episode (12x06) really deserves a post of its own. It epitomizes a core theme of the show, the toll of the hunting life, and highlights the inherent contradictions of its premise in a way that sheds light on the finale, as well.

Just a few episodes prior, Mary once again reaffirmed that every hunter dies young. In this episode, we see that play out, gut-wrenchingly, over the course of a single montage. Mary Winchester (supposedly already retired herself) saves a young Asa Fox from werewolves, and he becomes obsessed. Mary inadvertently sets him down his path of becoming a hunter, and a skilled one. In so many ways, Asa parallels Dean, from his single-minded obsession with killing monsters, to his single-minded obsession with his "lucky" car, to his ever-rotating cast of one-night-stands. This man lives for the hunt, and then, quite suddenly, dies from it.

At the wake, Dean comments to Sam that dying on the job is the best way to go. This exchange follows:

Sam: You really believe that? Dean: Yeah. What, you don’t? I mean, come on, Sam, it's not like we're in the “live till you're 90, die in your sleep” business. This? This only ends one way.

Sam lets it drop, because he clearly disagrees, but it's not something they're really capable of talking about, at least not in this moment.

It's a bitter pill to swallow, after watching the finale, to know that Dean did die on the job, and Sam did "live till you're 90, die in your sleep"--in essence if not to the word--because he gave up hunting. Furthermore, Dean's death wasn't all that dissimilar to Asa's; as we learn at the end of the episode, Asa was in the wrong place at the wrong time, killed accidentally by an inconveniently placed rock. It's not always the evil thing itself that kills you, but in the violent life of a hunter, death comes one way or another. The show reminds us of this again and again.

This is indicative of the complex relationship the show has with its core premise, hunting. Hunting is simultaneously heroized and criticized by the show. A long time ago, a young Dean told his little brother that their dad was a superhero (3x08 A Very Supernatural Christmas) because he fought monsters. This is an attitude Dean never shed; saving people, hunting things, makes you a hero. And he's not wrong. At the start of the episode we get this exchange between Mary and the young Asa:

Mary: I’m retiring. Well, officially I’m already retired. I’m just tying up a few loose ends. Asa: But if you retire, who’s gonna save people like me?

Asa's not wrong. People will always need saving. The good hunters do is real. But every hunter who doesn't retire, and even some of the ones that do (prime example: Mary), dies. Usually young and bloody. Not to mention the other tolls the job takes, on family life and mental health. Asa at least had enough good friends to give him a celebratory send-off, and had a casual romance going with Jody. He even had kids (the witch twins), though it's not clear how much of a relationship they had. Asa is described by his mother, though, as obsessed, and it seems he was on the healthy end of the spectrum when it comes to hunters. So many of the hunters we meet over the course of the series are socially awkward at best and paranoid, revenge-driven psychopaths at worst. Some of that could be chalked up to whatever trauma pulled them into the life, but undoubtedly, some of it is the job itself. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. Obsession breeds obsession (as with Asa). A life of isolation from the comforts of society breeds self loathing, which drives a person further into isolation (as with Dean--a lot to unpack there, but I'll leave it for another day).

The question the show seems to be asking is, what do you do with the burden of knowledge of evil, of the things that go bump in the night? Do you live (and ultimately die) for others, or do you live for yourself? The hunting ethos, enabling as it is of selfish revenge and obsession, encourages the former. In the end, there is good and bad in either choice. The show does not offer up one right answer. Ultimately, Dean chooses the former (as he always has) and pays the price in the finale, saving two little boys in the process. Sam chooses the latter, leaving hunting and the untold numbers of nameless strangers he might have saved, but he lives for himself and for a son of his own.

The more I consider it, the more I believe there's no other way it could have gone. Sam is at peace with hunting, but only as long as it's with Dean, as he tells Charlie in 10x18 Book of the Damned:

Sam: I guess I really understand now that….this is my life. I love it. But I can’t do it without my brother. I don’t want to do it without my brother. And if he’s gone, then I don’t….

Dean, however, could never give up the life. Thankfully, in later seasons, he has reached an inner equilibrium with hunting, though. He derives meaning and identity from what he does, no longer driven by a conviction that his life is only worth whatever cause he can sacrifice it for. In 14x13 Lebanon, when Sam expresses his wish that they could send their father back to the past with knowledge that would change the courses of their lives, Dean has this to say:

Dean: I mean, look, we’ve been through some tough times. There’s no denying that. [...] And for the longest time, I blamed Dad. I mean, hell, I blamed Mom, too, you know? I was angry. But say we could send Dad back knowing everything. Why stop there? Why not send him even further back and let some other poor sons of bitches save the world? But here’s the problem. Who does that make us? Would we be better off? Well, maybe. But I gotta be honest – I don’t know who that Dean Winchester is. And I’m good with who I am. I’m good with who you are. ‘Cause our lives – they’re ours. And maybe I’m just too damn old to want to change that.

In the end, Sam and Dean each give a different answer to the question the show poses, of what you do with knowledge and responsibility: live for others, or for yourself? Each answer is complex, though, and layered. Neither is better than the other. It's not a yes or no, good or bad question. The show has always been about choices and consequences. It was true to its premise till the very end, just as Sam and Dean made the choices that were true to themselves. It's bittersweet. It's heroic. It's tragic. It's right.

#spn meta #spn finale #celebrating the life of asa fox #12x06 #spn finale positive #spn season 12 #my meta #spn episode celebrating the life of asa fox

135 notes · View notes

otdderamin · 5 years

Text

Transcript: The story Matt wants to tell – TM 2019-04-09 for CR C2 Ep057

A major theme of this Talks episode was the narratives Matt does and doesn't want to tell. He talked about why he doesn't want to kill the pets, doesn't want Nott to be rejected, doesn't want to end the campaign from poor choices, and wants light in the darkness to inspire. Sam said Matt is "a good man, and a good friend, and a great scene partner…" Matt's voice acting and detailed world building aren't what make him a good DM. They're wonderful, but they're decoration on his true talents: empathy and reciprocity.

This is a set of lessons any DM can take home and use.

"I think, to a certain extent, I'm forgiving because it's a game you play for fun. And it's not necessarily fun if part of being caught up in the story and the adventure is having to worry about every single moment…" (0:12:20)

Being harsh isn't always fun. If it's fun for the player, then sure. But if being harsh will ruin a player's fun, avoid it until it makes for interesting choices and narrative. Make is a special event, not relentless cruelty.

Being a good person, good friend, and a good scene partner means enabling players to be narratively rewarded with happiness.

"It's not fun for you to just tell players, 'Well, you made a poor choice; now you're all dead.' Like, you want the story to keep rolling." (0:23:57)

Think about the story you want to tell, and the story you don't want to tell. You don't have to tell stories where everything is awful for it to be dramatic. "There's enough darkness and tragedy and difficulty in the world and in the stories you guys are playing through, you know, you need to pick moments of light. You need to pick things to fight for. You need to introduce elements that give each character a glimmer to carry them through those difficult points." (0:33:59)

The plays as well and the GM tell the story. Your job as the DM if to facilitate them telling their own story and creating opportunities for their growth.

"As a dungeon master, you want to make sure you facilitate the story that gives the opportunity for them to grow together and to make choices that kind of align their goals to the point that they become a solid group and a family, eventually. That's kind of the basis of a good adventuring party." (0:55:50)

"The challenge is finding ways where you can present them with common ground or give them opportunities to care enough for each other to be invested in each other's stories, and look for places where naturally some stories can be parallel, or at least, you know, you can achieve goals alongside each other so they don't feel like they're constantly at odds with each other's direction." (0:56:11)

Think of how to set the difficulty of choices. A game where good and evil are more obvious has more obvious choices. It's more challenging to create a campaign where good and evil exist but determining who is what takes more investigation.

"But I guess there is no right path for this campaign, and the right path is sort of whatever we decide it is as a group, or whatever is the most meaningful for us as an individual character in that moment. Which is really more like real life, obviously. And so far, possibly more rewarding, in a way, 'cause we're not just following along the path of the game to the end of the game, like, we're making our own path through a world and the game is that journey. It's not to get from point A to B, it's the direction that we take it." (0:57:11)

Scenes runs:

1. Not gonna kill pets easily: 0:12:20 to 0:14:15

2. A good scene partner: 0:15:53 to 0:16:15

3. It's not fun to kill players for poor choices: 0:23:57 to 0:24:07

4. There's enough darkness and tragedy in the world: 0:33:33 to 0:34:30

5. It's fun for players to surprise you: 0:51:37 to 0:53:11

6. DM to facilitate the story 0:55:50 to 0:59:32

1. Not gonna kill pets easily

0:12:20 Matt: "I think, to a certain extent, I'm forgiving because it's a game you play for fun. And it's not necessarily fun if part of being caught up in the story and the adventure is having to worry about every single moment they do something cool going to kill their pet. But there is a level of negligence that will come into play."

Sam, huffily: "I don't agree. I just disagree fundamentally.

Matt: "Do you?"

Sam, passionately: "If you can't keep- This is what I was told as a child: okay, you can have a dog, but you're going to have to take care of it. If Laura Bailey can't take care of her dog, her imaginary dog, with her imagination she should not be able to have that dog."

Brain: "I mean, I kind of understand."

Matt, flatly: "Okay, cool, then kill it."

Sam, immediately crestfallen: "Oh, I can't do that to Laura or the dog."

Matt, yelling: "NOW YOU THINK WHY I CAN'T! SO MUCH EASIER FOR ME! Like, no, okay?"

Laughter.

Sam: "Okay, I see your point. I see your point."

Matt: "If it's a scenario where because of her choices she puts a pet in danger intentionally, or it's a scenario where it would come into play and there's a failure to maintain its safety, then yes. But more often than not, it if it's- It comes down to saying, is it more fun if this happens, and if it's more fun for the player for me to create that challenge constantly, then yes. But with Laura, unless she's really doing some moves that consciously would put her pets in danger, and it makes an interesting choice that is fun all around, then I'll do it. Otherwise I don't want to be too much of a stickler and sit on her good time."

Dani: "I feel like most situations being faced with the potential of you accidentally killing your dog isn't fun."

Matt: "Right, so I'm going to savor those for when it's right for the narrative so it's a special event should it occur."

Sam: "Alright."

0:14:15

2. A good scene partner

0:15:53 Sam: "But Matt, being a good man, and a good friend, and a great scene partner, he made Yeza an accepting sort, and I'm thrilled, and now I get to explore what the next step is for her and her husband now that they're at least temporarily together."

0:16:15

3. It's not fun to kill players for poor choices

0:23:57 Matt: "Like, I didn't want it to be like, 'Well, either this happens or campaign's over.' It's not fun for you to just tell players, 'Well, you made a poor choice; now you're all dead.' Like, you want the story to keep rolling."

0:24:07

4. There's enough darkness and tragedy in the world

0:33:33 Matt: "I would hate to think that they would sacrifice so much, and her've been through so much, and then to come and go across what is perceived by them as one of the most dangerous places in the world for him to be just an asshole at the end of it."

Sam: "That would have been funny though."

Matt: "That would have been funny? It would have been awful!"

Sam: "It would have been awful."

Matt: "And I don't want to tell THAT story."

Brain: "What's better, though, funny or awful?"

Sam: "You know which side of the coin I fall on. No, no, it was perfect. What you did was perfect."

Brian: "Yeah, it was."

0:33:59 Matt: "Well, yeah. And there's enough darkness and tragedy and difficulty in the world and in the stories you guys are playing through, you know, you need to pick moments of light. You need to pick things to fight for. You need to introduce elements that give each character a glimmer to carry them through those difficult points. And for Nott, really honestly, with everything she's been through, that one glimmer is her family, and I just wanted to play true to that."

Sam: "You did good."

Matt: "Cool."

Brain: "You did very good."

0:34:30

5. It's fun for players to surprise you

0:51:37 Matt: "One of my favorite things about being a dungeon master is when your players surprise you. Not just from their actions, but their growth. And seeing where you all started, seeing kind of the journey of the Mighty Nein from these people that wanted least of all to be involved in grander schemes. That really seem to pay no mind or take any stock in the way the world at large seems to be moving and grinding forward, to step up and begin to take real interest into the care of good people and the future ahead of them. It was amazing.

0:52:22 Matt: "And for me it's a really thrilling and really prideful moment because it, to me as a story teller, it excites me to think that the players are creating their story as much as I'm creating the world around it. And um, you know, people say, like, 'Matt, you're a decent dungeon master.' I'm like, I'm decent, but it's the magic that everyone brings to the table together that makes a good story, and that goes for any table out there.

0:52:47 Matt: "And this is a perfect example of moments that are a prime, shining example of what the players bring that makes the story so dynamic and so interesting and beautiful, and I can't do any of that. I'm just, I'm in awe of what you guys do every week and hope to try and keep up and, you know, do my best to make it worth what you all do, too."

Sam: "You're getting there."

Matt: "I know. I'm working on it."

0:53:11

6. DM to facilitate the story

0:55:50 Matt: "As a dungeon master, you want to make sure you facilitate the story that gives the opportunity for them to grow together and to make choices that kind of align their goals to the point that they become a solid group and a family, eventually. That's kind of the basis of a good adventuring party."

Brain: "But how aligned do you feel everyone's goals are? Since you know their all back- Since you know everyone's backstories, I understand what you're saying, but, like, how aligned are they, do you think?"

0:56:11 Matt: "Not terribly, so the challenge is finding ways where you can present them with common ground or give them opportunities to care enough for each other to be invested in each other's stories, and look for places where naturally some stories can be parallel, or at least, you know, you can achieve goals alongside each other so they don't feel like they're constantly at odds with each other's direction. You know.? It's part of the interesting narrative balance you take as a story teller and as a GM is trying to take them on adventures, but also take them on adventures they're invested in and willing to go along with. And that's a bit of a buy-in for the players as well, but…"

0:56:51 Sam: "Yeah, this campaign you've given us choices that are much more grey, grey choices, I feel. In the first campaign we were all essentially on the same path on the same team."

Matt: "It was very, good and evil was clearly defined for the most part."

Sam: "But this is so, so interesting and so much more rewarding."

Brain: "Is it more challenging for you as a player?"

0:57:11 Sam: "It's much more challenging 'cause, you know, we're looking for- I'm looking for those, not clues, but just something I can sink my teeth into to be like, 'Okay, I think we're on the right path.' But I guess there is no right path for this campaign, and the right path is sort of whatever we decide it is as a group, or whatever is the most meaningful for us as an individual character in that moment. Which is really more like real life, obviously. And so far, possibly more rewarding, in a way, 'cause we're not just following along the path of the game to the end of the game, like, we're making our own path through a world and the game is that journey. It's not to get from point A to B, it's the direction that we take it."

0:58:09 Brain: "It's what's between A and B that's important, right?"

Sam: "Those are the friends we made along the way."

Brian: "Jesus Christ. You could have just- Ugh."

0:58:16 Sam: "But no, it's interesting, and certainly more frustrating, and challenging, but I think, I hope, ultimately more rewarding. Unless we choose wrong! And maybe we're wrong about this the whole time and there is a right and wrong answer and we're just getting it wrong."

0:58:30 Matt: "Well, I mean, the whole world isn't grey. There is good and there is evil, and there are things in between, and really what it comes down to is being inquisitive enough and following the right threads to uncover those shades of light and dark amongst the grey. And you guys have done a good job of that in some places, and you guys are beginning to unravel certain threads of that in the world on different faction sides and stuff, and so you're just now getting to a path. Like, more so previously there it was, you know, personal stories and exploration and kind of things. You're just now starting to ask more of the right questions and starting to piece together your own interpretations of what's happening on a macro scale. And for me it's awesome to see it come together and be like, 'Oh, they're onto something. Oh, they're on the wrong path. Oh, that was an interesting idea. Oh, they're getting there.' You know? And like, me knowing kind of what's going on, I dunno. It's fun. It's really fun for me."

Sam: "It's fun for me, too."

0:59:32

If you like this transcript, consider becoming a patron (patreon.com/otdderamin). You can get access to my conversation timestamp files, my works in progress and notes, and can even make requests for transcripts and analysis. Benefits start at just $1.

You can also support me by buying me a coffee (ko-fi.com/otdderamin) or buying a patch from my shop (etsy.com/shop/MajesticMess). I'm severely disabled and can't work. Your donation helps me survive the capitalist dystopia a little longer.

#critical role #talks machina #critical role meta #critical role transcript #talks machina transcript #transcript #CRT-TM

19 notes · View notes

harryumas · 5 years

Text

no one asked but it’s 3am and i’m sick so here are my final opinions/my review of descendants 3

- i did love the movie. but there was no way going into d3 that i would have disliked it to begin with since this franchise holds such a special place in my heart. the only way they would’ve made me hate it was if they gave doug too much screentime or made mal/harry canon but. they didn’t! so that alone was great

- the soundtrack isn’t my favorite of the three movies, but it isn’t my least favorite. my main issue with d3 is that, to me, the musical numbers didn’t flow with their scenes. one of my favorite things about d2 was that the songs flowed so well into their scenes that it felt natural and not out of place. with d3 it was almost like there was the scene and then the song, rather than the scene with the song. it was almost as if they threw songs into parts where they felt a song needed to be rather than making the song integral to what was happening. the only songs that are exceptions to this imo are night falls (which is perfect in every way possible; flow, continuing the action of the movie, etc), good to be bad (although this is the opening musical number so it’s hard to screw that up) and break this down MAYBE (but like the opening, it’s the finale). queen of mean is my favorite song from the soundtrack but the entire scene feels like a music video meant to be posted on youtube. the once upon a time song is so sudden and feels disconnected from the climax of the movie and takes away from the entire scene. d2 in comparison does a great job at intertwining the songs with its scenes (it’s goin down is probably the prime example, with what’s my name and space between being honorable mentions). it was also weird to me that in some cases they seemed aware that they were beginning a musical number? i know that do what you gotta do was meant to be very meta (mostly because hades has always been a comedic and satirical disney character and that’s what makes him so likable) but it felt weird to me because none of the other movies have really broken the 4th wall in that way.

- the characterization of mal threw me off. maybe it’s because the writers knew how they wanted the plot to go, so they just made mal do whatever was necessary for the plot to progress. or maybe they wanted mal to fit a certain role in this movie. idk what it was but she felt different in this movie and even though she was supposed to be the main focus of the movie she didn’t really stand out. the other VKs and audrey were as good as they could be in a movie where they’re constantly sidelined, and i feel like evie/jay/carlos/uma/audrey had really good moments. hades was also written really well and i loved him, but it also seemed like the inclusion of his character was mostly for plot device reasoning and to progress the story, so he was suddenly thrown in and was hardly given any actual purpose besides enabling mal.

- audrey being a villain was executed well in the first half of the movie. she built up a lot of hype and brought a really interesting flare to the storyline. but in the second half she kind of... fizzled out. like, okay, she put everyone to sleep and turned some people to stone in the first half but what did she do in the second half of the movie? lock chad in a closet? threaten celia? she didn’t really do anything, the stakes weren’t really raised in a compelling way, and it felt like she was kind of just.... running around casting spells and being chaotic rather than being a MAIN villain. but i still love her so much and i feel like sarah jeffrey stole the show with her acting and execution of evil audrey despite the writers failing her.

- the ending was a cute send off to the franchise, but i feel like the sudden “let’s just bring down the barrier” moment was... weird? yeah the VKs deserve a chance in auradon and stuff but there are still dangerous villains that want revenge on the isle. you’re not even gonna set up new security? laws? regulations? some kind of organizing to make bringing down the barrier less chaotic? like, it wasn’t realistic. but it’s a dcom and the final movie of a trilogy so they had to find a way to end it in a big celebratory way, which... i guess you can’t criticize too much. bc again, it’s a dcom.

- oddly enough, i think GIL of all people got some of the best character development along with uma

- sofia carson outperformed everyone with her acting but absolutely no one is surprised. “you lied to jay. you lied to carlos.... you lied to me.” give her her oscar already. fuck

- i actually liked jane in this movie? interesting concept

- introducing celia was cute and she was actually pretty relevant in the plot, but you could have legit removed dizzy and the twins from the entire movie and nothing would have changed. so...

- huma should have been endgame and i’m NOT just saying that as a huma stan. they gave us the build up, they gave us scenes and hints and built their chemistry even further in d3 and then said... nevermind! but i won’t trash on harry/audrey bc there’s no reason to dislike it

- i thought the very final scene where they run across the bridge was THE perfect closing to the movie and despite the whole barrier shenanigans i thought it was a really heartfelt and satisfying way to say goodbye to descendants, these characters & the cast <3

3 notes · View notes

lightoftruth · 4 years

Link

In chapters 4 and 5 of The Descent of Man, Darwin compares the mental and social capacities of mankind with other animals, with much of the focus on the conscience of man and peer-pressure (either negative or positive). He then attempts to show how morality developed in humans as an evolutionary progression from lower animals.

Man, the “Social Animal” Darwin’s starting axiom is that man is a “social animal,” in fact he uses that phrase 25 times in the book and 19 times over the course of chapters 4 and 5. Darwin believed that most “higher” animals were social animals, meaning that they show sympathy with others of the same tribe. According to Darwin’s thought on this subject, sympathy was the first or base instinct upon which social interaction was founded.1 Darwin then proposed the steps by which the higher animals and man became social animals.

Help us Share the Gospel

Join us as we share the the truth of God's Word and the gospel with millions through the outreach of Answers in Genesis.

DONATE NOW

The first step (after developing a foundational sense of sympathy) waså to take pleasure in the company of other tribe members, clans, or associates. The second step was (after the animals’ mental faculties reached such a state) to be satisfied with its behavior in relation to other tribe members, or to feel a sense of shame at its behavior. Thirdly, once some form of communication or language developed among the tribe, the expectation of each member of the tribe could be expressed so each member would know how to act to ensure it met with the approval of its fellows. Fear of being looked down upon or ostracized by the community being the driving force to ensure compliance. Lastly this pattern of social morality would be reinforced by habit, and habit would become a sense of duty.2

Darwin then elaborated on each of the four steps mentioned above to show how they would have evolved over time. Darwin then elaborated on each of the four steps mentioned above to show how they would have evolved over time. Step one would have started as a self-preservation instinct that spread out to others of the same community. If the most basic individual instinct is flight or fight in a survival situation, then the most basic mutual instinct (if an animal has developed some degree of sympathy) in the higher animals is to warn one another of danger. Aside from self-preservation, self-comfort or self-satisfaction is the next strongest instinct. In a community setting, the best way to ensure self-comfort is via a mutual benefit arrangement—often literally in many animals a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”

Thus in Darwin’s view, grooming, food-sharing, extended family care, mutual defense, hunting, and even care for the aged and slightly injured would have come about. Then physical or mental pleasure and pain drove the next stage as fear of reprisal, punishment, or shame caused animals to act for the good of the community for pride or from fear.3 It should be noted that Darwin built his theory of morality around anecdotal stories of animal’s interactions with other animals and with man. Much of what he speculated was based on others’ testimony, and much of that was anthropomorphized.

Major Problems with Darwin’s Proposal Yet Darwin acknowledged that sympathy even among the same community is not a universal aspect of social animals, and he noted that “animals sometimes are far from feeling any sympathy is too certain; for they will expel a wounded animal from the herd, or gore or worry it to death”.4 Darwin also acknowledged that pleasure and pain cannot explain every social interaction and that some must be based upon mere inherited instinct (using bird migration as an example).5 But perhaps his two most candid admissions of problems dealing with the “social animal” were in respect to man. For some reason, mankind didn’t fit the pattern of other “social animals.” The presence of a conscience and the ability to compare past and present motives and actions seemed to Darwin to be the primary things that set man apart from other animals. The question must therefore arise, how can morality have evolved from lower animals if man alone is considered by Darwin as the only moral being? Darwin wrestled with this problem as the quotes below will show.

A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them. We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity . . . But in the case of man, who alone can with certainty be ranked as a moral being, actions of a certain class are called moral, whether performed deliberately, after a struggle with opposing motives, or impulsively through instinct, or from the effects of slowly-gained habit.6

Although some instincts are more powerful than others, and thus lead to corresponding actions, yet it is untenable, that in man the social instincts (including the love of praise and fear of blame) possess greater strength, or have, through long habit, acquired greater strength than the instincts of self-preservation, hunger, lust, vengeance, &c. Why then does man regret, even though trying to banish such regret, that he has followed the one natural impulse rather than the other; and why does he further feel that he ought to regret his conduct? Man in this respect differs profoundly from the lower animals.7

Inexplicable Altruism That Somehow Evolved? Ironically enough, Darwin appeals to the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12) as the highest standard of morality, yet believed and wrote that it came about via evolved sympathy as a cultivated habit. Darwin recognized that there was a higher morality exhibited by some men and women that seemed difficult to reconcile with an evolution of social morality. Yet because of his commitment to just such a principle, he was forced to believe that somehow it had, leading Darwin to hold an almost utopian view on the subject—that mankind was morally improving and would continue to do so. Ironically enough, Darwin appeals to the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12) as the highest standard of morality, yet believed and wrote that it came about via evolved sympathy as a cultivated habit.

To do good in return for evil, to love your enemy, is a height of morality to which it may be doubted whether the social instincts would, by themselves, have ever led us. It is necessary that these instincts, together with sympathy, should have been highly cultivated and extended by the aid of reason, instruction, and the love or fear of God, before any such golden rule would ever be thought of and obeyed.8

Finally the social instincts, which no doubt were acquired by man as by the lower animals for the good of the community, will from the first have given to him some wish to aid his fellows, some feeling of sympathy, and have compelled him to regard their approbation and disapprobation. Such impulses will have served him at a very early period as a rude rule of right and wrong. But as man gradually advanced in intellectual power, and was enabled to trace the more remote consequences of his actions; as he acquired sufficient knowledge to reject baneful customs and superstitions; as he regarded more and more, not only the welfare, but the happiness of his fellow-men; as from habit, following on beneficial experience, instruction and example, his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, extending to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals,—so would the standard of his morality rise higher and higher.9

Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. In this case the struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will be triumphant.10

The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals; but I need say nothing on this head, as I have so lately endeavoured to shew that the social instincts,—the prime principle of man’s moral constitution—with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule, “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise;” and this lies at the foundation of morality.11

Getting Better All the Time? Darwin thought as the reasoning powers of the members of a community became more advanced, each man would soon learn that if he aided his fellows, he would typically receive aid in return. From this base motive he might acquire the habit of aiding his fellows, and the habit of performing benevolent actions would strengthen the feeling of sympathy, which in turn perpetuates the impulse to continue benevolent actions. Darwin postulated that such habits followed during many generations probably tend to be inherited. Darwin again was naïve in his belief about man’s inherent “progressive morality” (and one could say, based on Darwin’s theology degree, that he was willfully naïve on this point).

It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase.12 When Willful Ignorance Leads to Social Darwinism and Eugenics Darwin’s writing on the progressive morality of mankind would at first blush seem to be hopeful. A bit unrealistic perhaps, but a positive one in outlook, right? Darwin’s writing on the progressive morality of mankind would at first blush seem to be hopeful. A bit unrealistic perhaps, but a positive one in outlook, right? Well, not necessarily. Recall that Darwin’s belief was that mankind’s sympathies would expand to include “the imbecile, maimed, and other useless members of society.” Now I realize that some terms, though charged now, were technical terms of the day, such as “imbecile” and “maimed.” Today we would say mentally and physically handicapped or impaired. But notice the paraphrased thought here: someday in the future man will be able to sympathize more with those who are mentally and physically inferior to us and who do nothing to contribute to society. If you think I’m putting words into Charles Darwin’s mouth, let’s see what he said further on this subject in Chapter 5.

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.13 A Short Step From Darwin to Dachau Less than 70 years after the first edition of the Descent of Man was published, one community of man (Nazi Germany) decided that they agreed with what Darwin said in the above quote taken from Chapter 5 and rejected Darwin’s statement from Chapter 4 that they had to extend sympathy to the “useless members of society.” In fact to do so in their mind would be “highly injurious to the race” of Aryan man. Darwin’s condescending tolerance towards those less mentally, physically, or medically fortunate only extended to those already in society. But Darwin bemoans that mankind would allow this cycle to continue in future generations. It is but a series of small steps from begrudging tolerance, to apathy, to dislike and distrust, to ostracization, to banishment, and finally to murder.

The Nazis and the eugenicists understood Darwin’s words all too well. The Nazis had no tolerance for anyone outside what they termed the Aryan stock, and they murdered or enslaved everyone else (and the Nazis were not the only people during the early 1900s to implement social Darwinian and Eugenics programs: the Imperial Japanese did the same).14

The Nazis and the eugenicists understood Darwin’s words all too well. The Nazis had no tolerance for anyone outside what they termed the Aryan stock. The eugenicists (in Europe, Canada, America, Australia, and New Zealand) tolerated those already alive but, through forced sterilization, wanted to ensure that there was no future “degeneration of the race.” Eugenicist’s main goals were to isolate “defective” members of the community and prevent them from “breeding” to “strengthen the racial stock” of the country. Children with learning disabilities, and especially those with Down Syndrome, were often forcibly removed from their homes and sent to institutions. Adults with those conditions were often institutionalized as well. And most stayed there for the rest of their life. The eugenics programs were at their core elitist, “racist” (meaning they were often implemented against non-Caucasian peoples), sexist (many more women than men were targeted for sterilization), and against personal liberties and property rights.15 Sadly, many countries had eugenics laws in place even before the Nazis came to power, and many survived several decades past the fall of the Third Reich.16

The 20th century was not kind to Darwin’s utopian vision of a progressive morality. With the horrors of two World Wars, the Holocaust, several other wars (Korea, Vietnam, Gulf), and several civil wars rife with genocidal and “ethnic cleansings,” mankind did not progress morally. If anything, man went backward.

The (True) Descent of Man Darwin got one thing very right, the title of his book. But it was not as he thought, in regard to the ancestry of man, rather it was and is to mankind’s morality. Darwin believed that mankind descended from lower animals but that his morals were ascending upward and would continue to do so. Scripture however says just the opposite. Mankind was originally created perfect, directly by God, and given dominion over all of creation (Genesis 1:26–31), from which he was separate. But since the fall of man in Genesis 3, we have not been on an upward trajectory of morality; rather we have spiraled downward—we are in a rapid moral descent.

Jesus didn’t advocate grudgingly tolerating your neighbors but rather loving them as yourself. He didn’t want to eradicate the physically handicapped: he healed them. Jesus didn’t advocate grudgingly tolerating your neighbors but rather loving them as yourself. He didn’t want to eradicate the physically disabled: he healed them. He didn’t treat the less-wealthy or less-educated as less-worthy. In fact, he made some of them his disciples and sat down to eat and fellowship with others. He didn’t shy away from tax collectors and sinners: he sought them out to save them (Matthew 9:11–13; Luke 19:10).

Even Darwin saw that the teaching of Jesus was on an entirely different plane than the common morality of his day. Yet he still was committed to the principle that such high morality had evolved from basically a selfish quid-pro-quo start. Though Darwin attempted to trace morality from self-preservation, to cooperation, to instinct, and finally to habit—all guided by some vague notion of sympathy—he really had no ultimate basis for doing so. He even acknowledged that there were some problems with the linear progression of morality. His belief that “an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another” was shown to ring hollow in the 20th century, when totalitarian regimes murdered millions of people. Stalin “purged” 50 million of his “own tribe,” Pol Pot murdered 2–3 million of his own people, and there have been countless other dictators and tyrants.

People tend to look at all the evil in the world and somehow blame God for it; yet Christianity has the only answer to why there is evil in the world. An original perfect creation by a loving and just God was subsequently marred by mankind’s sin and rebellion (Genesis 3). Yet if there were no God and everything, including morality, just evolved, then there really is no evil. There are just hard circumstances and people with less-evolved morality than ours. And who is to say that their morality is worse? That is just an arbitrary assumption and assertion. A quote by author Andrea Dilley as mentioned in a Christian Post article really captured her struggle with the essence of the origin and source of morality. Her story serves as a good way to close this discussion.

When people ask me, what drove me out the doors of the church and then what brought me back, my answer to both questions is the same. I left the church in part because I was mad at God about human suffering and injustice. And I came back to church because of that same struggle. I realized that I couldn’t even talk about justice without standing inside of a theistic framework. In a naturalistic worldview, a parentless orphan in the slums of Nairobi can only be explained in terms of survival of the fittest. We’re all just animals slumming it in a godless world, fighting for space and resources. The idea of justice doesn’t really mean anything. To talk about justice, you have to talk about objective morality, and to talk about objective morality, you have to talk about God.17

0 notes

bluewatsons · 4 years

Text

Eamonn Carrabine, Imagining Prison: Culture, History and Space1, Prison Serv J 15 (2010)

In this article I explore the diverse ways in which stories of prison and punishment have been told in the literary and visual arts. Stories of crime and punishment are central to every society as they address the universal problem of human identity. Every culture generates founding myths to account for society’s origins, typically situated in some dreadful primordial event. The imaginary origins of Western civilization are to be found in tales of banishment, confinement, exile, torture and suffering. The theme of exclusion is symbolically rich and spaces of confinement — both real and imagined — have provided stark reminders of human cruelty and reveal just how thin the veneer of civilization can be. This article examines how prison space has been represented in the literary and visual arts so as to grasp the complex cultural landscapes of punishment.

Old Prisons

Before the eighteenth century imprisonment was only one, and by no means the most important, form of punishment. The old prisons were very different places from the new penitentiaries replacing them later in the century. Until then hanging was the principal penalty, with transportation abroad the main alternative, while whipping remained a common punishment for petty offences. The defining features of the old prisons are summarized2 as follows:

At mid-century in England, petty offenders were hanged or transported for any simple larceny of more than twelve pence or for any robbery that put a person in fear. The typical residents of eighteenth-century prisons were debtors and people awaiting trial, often joined by their families ... Most prisons were not built purposely for confinement, but all were domestically organized and the few specially constructed ones resembled grand houses in appearance (e.g. York Prison, c. 1705). Prisons were temporary lodgings for all but a few, and the jailer collected fees for prisoners for room, board, and services like a lord of the manor collecting rents from tenants.

A number of points are emphasized here. First, over two hundred crimes (ranging from petty theft to murder) were punishable by death, under the ‘Bloody Code’ of capital statutes, as the political order sought to maintain power through the terror of the gallows. Second, prisons were often makeshift structures and many were no more than a gatehouse, room or cellar and rarely confined prisoners for any great length of time. The largest prisons were in London, where Newgate was the most significant, but others like the Fleet and Marshalsea were reserved almost exclusively for debtors. Third, the prisons were run as private institutions and ran largely for profit: prisoners were required to pay for the cost of their detention. The jailer had almost no staff and so prisoners were chained up in irons to keep control, while those who could afford it could buy relative freedom and even comfort — all at a price.

Whatever the conditions were actually like inside the old prisons, we see them persistently spoken of as places of evil, where profane pleasures, abject misery and infectious diseases all mingled in what seemed like a grotesque distillation of the world outside. In fact, many literary and visual sources drew attention to the failings of the legal system and mocked the rituals of punishment. An excellent example exposing the absurdities of the execution ceremonies is Jonathan Swift’s (1726/7) poem ‘Clever Tom Clinch Going to be Hanged’ that delights in the comic spectacle of the drunken Clinch making his ‘stately’ procession to the gallows and ultimately pointless defiance as ‘he hung like a hero, and never would flinch’. Although Swift was a Tory, he was a radical Anglo-Irish one, ambiguously caught between the colonizer and colonized, his satire mercilessly exposing the gulf separating the noble ideal from grim reality. The most damning example is his A Modest Proposal (1729), a pamphlet calmly advocating that the Irish poor should eat their children in order to solve Ireland’s economic troubles.

Early modern authors were drawing on, and occasionally, transcending already existing literary forms. Daniel Defoe is the archetype. Indeed, he was imprisoned many times, mostly for debt but occasionally over his political writings, including a five- month stretch in Newgate following the 1702 publication of his The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, a pamphlet mocking High Church extremism. Although this punishment was severe, more degrading to Defoe were the three visits to the pillory he endured as part of the sentence. By the 1720s he was successfully writing feigned autobiographies, including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxanna, which have become well known as amongst the first English novels. Moll Flanders takes the form of a gallows confessional and includes a spiritual rebirth in Newgate prison at the depths of Moll’s misfortune. In the book the prison is cast as a macabre gateway, yet in Moll’s case it does not lead to the gallows, but to a new life in the New World. Her crimes make her rich, and her penitence enables her to enjoy a prosperous life in Virginia. It is this heavily ironic structure that enlivens the text, but behind all the adventures lays the looming presence of Newgate, where Moll was born to a woman sentenced to death for shoplifting and to where sh inevitably returns. Like that other great picaresque novel from the eighteenth century, Tom Jones3 who was ‘born to be hanged’, the shadow of the gallows hangs over the central protagonist and the prison occupies a pivotal place in the narrative. The dramatic crisis is reached when the reckless but good natured hero ends up in the Gatehouse, following a series of amorous encounters and comic adventures, as a result of his half-brother Blifil’s treachery (who has Tom framed for robbery and sentenced to death). It is just at the darkest hour, when all seems lost, that Tom’s true parentage is revealed and the natural order is restored, enabling him to marry his childhood sweetheart.

Fielding’s fiction is much more tightly plotted than Defoe’s, and in doing so he exposes the distance between how things really are and how they ought to be. One suggestion is that in the real world Tom would have ended up hanged and the villainous Blifil may well have become prime minister4. An irony Fielding had earlier explored in his Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), where the notorious thief-taker becomes synonymous with Walpole’s leadership of Parliament — satirically drawing the barbed comparison between Wild’s criminal organization and Walpole’s manipulative control of government. There is a crucial tension between what actually happens in a Fielding novel, suggesting that the world is a bleak place, and the formal structuring of those events, implying pleasant symmetries, poetic justice and harmonic resolution. It is as if his earlier career as a successful comic playwright and later years spent as a harsh London magistrate combine to produce work obsessed with preserving traditional forms of authority, yet fascinated by the disruptive energy of the outcast.

Prisons of Invention

The work that most revels in the many contradictions governing representations of crime, justice and punishment during this era is John Gay’s (1728) hugely successful musical drama, The Beggar’s Opera. Using popular English and Irish folk tunes instead of intricate arias, and set in the criminal underworld rather than royal palaces, the piece gleefully parodies the generic conventions of the then fashionable Italian opera. Although the central characters have become mythical figures they were based on well known criminals from early eighteenth century London. The character Peachum, was modelled on the infamous thief-catcher Jonathan Wild, both of whom impeached (that is they informed on) their criminal associates for the reward offered by the authorities. The dashing highwayman-hero Macheath (later immortalised in Brecht-Weill’s Threepenny Opera and the popular song ‘Mack the Knife’) was based on Jack Sheppard, who had achieved celebrity status through the ingenuity with which he was able to escape different prisons, including Newgate. The original idea for the play is often attributed to Jonathan Swift, who suggested to Gay that he might write a ‘Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there’, but the ploy of associating Newgate society with larger political corruption was already a familiar one. There is no doubt that the play was immediately successful and no one was in any doubt that the Walpole’s government was the target of the satire.

In the book the prison is cast as a macabre gateway, yet in Moll’s case it does not lead to the gallows, but to a new life in the New World.

The play also informed the visual art of William Hogarth. One of his earliest oil paintings depicts the climactic scene of The Beggar’s Opera (1729), where all the main characters are grouped on the stage [Figure 1], which mimics and mocks the compositional dynamics of contemporary paintings of more noble families. The juxtaposition between respectable and criminal, which the play successfully exploits, is developed in two of his famous sequences The Harlot’s Progress (1730/32) and The Rake’s Progress (1734/35). The titles are clearly ironic, as the engravings chart the demise of naïve protagonists caught up in corrupt social institutions. The prison depicted in Hogarth’s (1729) painting of The Beggar’s Opera is also important as it borrows from a Baroque tradition of theatrical stage design largely lost to us now (they have long since crumbled away), but had a major influence on the Gothic imagination emerging much later in the eighteenth century. By innovatively producing a scene per angolo (a way of looking at things at an angle) it appeared to deepen the stage and gave quite extravagant illusions of perspective. It is this lofty prison setting (combining elements of both palace and dungeon), that Hogarth captures in his painting, though others were to produce far more melodramatic images.

The most fantastic imagining of the prison as a space of labyrinthine nightmares is contained in the Carceri d’Invenzione series initially published by Giambattista Piranesi in 1750. These ‘prisons of invention’ draw on the operatic set design tradition, but transform the conventions into megalomaniac structures that have had an immeasurable impact on cultural sensibilities. In his own day Piranesi had achieved acclaim for a series of striking images of the decaying architecture of ancient Rome, the scale of which informed the awesome imagery contained in the Carceri (see Figure 2). Piranesi’s architectural settings bare scant relation to actually existing prison buildings (or even theatrical stage sets), but they do herald a new aesthetic combining both terror and beauty to sublime effect. Many critics have noted how the carceral spaces depicted by Piranesi are fantasy worlds that pervade gothic treatments of imprisonment. Indeed, ancient ruins, dark forests, inaccessible castles, dank dungeons and raging thunderstorms (amongst other elemental forces) were becoming attractive to a new sensibility developing in the eighteenth century.

This fascination with horror would be soon called the Gothic and while it could very easily fall into hammy melodrama (a tone wonderfully sent up in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, written in the 1790s) the creeping unease generated by Franz Kafka’s modernist fiction is hugely indebted to the romans noir. In his novels The Trial (1914) and The Castle (1922) and shorter stories like ‘Before the Law’, ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘The Metamorphosis’ they each take up the theme of an innocent victim caught up in relentless machinations well beyond their control. From Josef K’s arrest for a nameless crime in The Trial (with no hope of acquittal) to Gregor Samsa’s grotesque metamorphosis (into a giant insect) the stories explore the question of confinement with immensely unsettling results. In the latter tale the horror derives not so much from the monstrous transformation but in the initially embarrassed and then indifferent way his family react to Gregor’s plight — eventually leaving him to die alone in his room — raising profound questions about our own responses to the suffering of others.

Figure 1.

Aside from fuelling the Gothic imagination, these diverse forms of penal representation have also informed actual carceral spaces. It has been noted5 how:

from France came a number of architectural projects attempting to create prisons from the images of incarceration in the arts. Those produced by Boullée, Ledoux, Houssin and Bellet in the 1780s and 1790s are well known: oppressive, massive, and monumental, with balefully lit cachots surrounded by monolithic masonry. Only the capaciousness of the stage set was lost. They were declarations that architecture was, above all, an art of evocation. The incalculable weight of stone, the encasing exteriors, the immuring courts filled with shadow, the melancholy dungeons pierced with a single ray of light, the entire prison was becoming a cultural reminiscence.

This is a crucial point. All these images looked to the past and appeared anachronistic when compared to the burgeoning prison reform movement then gathering force. As yet it did not possess a distinctive architectural vision, but when it did find one it would be one that looked forward.

Figure 2.

Nevertheless, from the 1760s onwards many prison exteriors consciously drew on these forbidding elements, while the interior practices remained mostly intact. Bender (1984:58) has described how the old system based on gaoler’s fees stubbornly resisted change, while new prison designs ‘outwardly assumed a fearful, awesome, sublimely intimidating aspect — imagery envisioned in the graphic arts by Piranesi and in architecture by George Dance’s 1768 design for London Newgate.’ At the same time the famous prison reformer John Howard denounced the interior design of the New Newgate as ‘hopelessly old-fashioned’. The rebuilt Newgate was the last and grandest prison to be constructed before the full impact of late eighteenth century reform was realised. Between the demolition of old Newgate in 1767, which was still essentially a medieval gatehouse, and the completion of the ‘Model Prison’ at Pentonville in 1842 nearly every gaol and house of correction in England had been demolished and rebuilt according to new principles of confinement.

The Penitentiary Ideal

Throughout the eighteenth century the cultural and ideological importance of the law ensured that it remained at the forefront of public debate. These discussions took many forms, yet always provided commentary — ranging from the burgeoning newspapers, satirical journals, political pamphlets through to literary sources like poems, novels and plays. Such sources could deliver quite damning critiques of the government through stories of crime and punishment. This literature is important as it is closely allied to the rise of the liberal public sphere from the early eighteenth century. The ‘public sphere’ was much more than a purely discursive realm but was grounded in a network of social spaces and institutions that regulated manners and promoted urbane conduct.

Satire was a form of political opposition highlighting the cultural tensions between the civilised and barbaric in metropolitan life, so that accompanying the development of a refined public sphere were numerous attempts at ‘social hygiene’ seeking to regulate the unruly and the vulgar. It is in this context that John Howard’s (1777) The State of the Prisons can be understood, a book popularising prison reform by documenting just how bad conditions were in English prisons, especially when compared to European institutions. Howard was offended by the indiscriminate mixing of men and women, the lack of segregation between the tried and untried, the open sale of alcohol, gambling and generally filthy conditions, where diseases like typhus were rife, rules disregarded and prisoners whiled away their time in ‘sloth, profaneness and debauchery’. Ultimately, the unruly prison was morally degenerate and the squalid antithesis of Christian benevolence. Influenced by religious piety and Enlightenment reason, Howard and his fellow reformers advocated the benefits of classification, isolation and sanitation to create the impression that prison was the natural form of punishment.

But there was no single victory of the penitentiary idea. Reformers were divided over the kind of work prisoners should do and the role of solitary confinement. It was in this climate that Jeremy Bentham pitched his famous Panopticon prison design in 1787. The novel idea was that inspection would be continuous from a central watchtower, but the caged inmates would not know whether they were being watched in their peripheral cells because of a series of blinds shielding the inner tower. Critics not only worried over the tyranny exemplified in the design, but disliked Bentham’s insistence that the panopticon could be ran as a profitable commercial business. This latter objection ultimately led to the rejection of his plans. Nevertheless, significant elements of his design have informed subsequent prisons.

Revisionist historians have demonstrated how the penitentiary offered a vision of social order set to discipline the urban poor, while containing the social disruptions unleashed by rising unemployment and new class divisions in the first half of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century the characteristic features of the modern prison are in place and almost the entire range of Georgian criminal sentences — the pillory, the whipping post, the gallows, and the convict ship — had disappeared from public view by the 1860s. There is no doubt that the new institution was involved in the ideological legitimation of industrial society and the extension of disciplinary techniques through new systems of classification, examination and surveillance.

Realism and Punishment

If satire was the defining form of cultural opposition in the eighteenth century, then it is the language of realism that explored the many contradictions of imprisonment in the nineteenth century. One of the first and greatest exponents of realism was the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. From the 1790s onwards he produced paintings depicting torture, madness and terror that are still profoundly moving. Amongst the earliest are Interior of a Prison and Yard with Lunatics (both 1793-4), which recall Piranesi’s fantasy architectural settings of shadow, misery and chains. Later drawings like his now famous series The Disasters of War (1814-1818) document the true horror of combat in dreadful detail. By the middle of the nineteenth century French painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet strove for ‘Le Réalisme’, heralding a further move away from conventional wealthy subjects to lowly urban themes capturing not just the alienation but also the vitality of contemporary metropolitan life. Contrasting somewhat with realist conventions are the intense pieces produced by Vincent van Gough, including the famous Prisoners Round (1890), depicting prisoners walking in a futile circle in an exercise yard http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Vincent_Willem_van_Gogh_037.jpg Van Gough’s painting though is not overly concerned with providing an accurate representation of prison life, but through the evocative colours and exaggerated forms the haunting image has something more telling to say on the experience.

Ultimately realism reached its fullest expression in the nineteenth century novel. Not all novels are realist, but it has become the dominant style in which they are written and the measure against which they are judged.

Charles Dickens was amongst the first of the great novelists of the city and the prison figures in many of his novels. In his early writing he attacked the influential Philadelphia ‘separate system’ of prison discipline in his American Notes (1842/1906). In this account of his travels he was especially concerned about the damaging effects of the system upon prisoners. A remarkable passage describes6 a hooded prisoner as a ‘man buried alive, to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the meantime dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair’. This metaphor of living death is one he returns to in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) where the deadening atmosphere of imprisonment pervades the novel, while in David Copperfield (1849/50) he makes a number of criticisms of the separate system that some have claimed led to its demise.

Another theme Dickens pursues is the mystery of human identity — where do we come from, are we really who we think we are, do we author ourown destinies and so forth. In his finest prison novel, Little Dorrit (1855-57), these themes come together in a work where imprisonment structures practically every aspect of the tale. The playwright George Bernard Shaw once claimed the book was more incendiary than Marx’s Das Kapital in itsdevastating critique of greedy capitalism and incompetent officialdom. The vast social landscapes drawn by Dickens dramatize the contradictions of the age by traversing the diverse worlds his characters inhabit. But for all this sweeping panoramic vision a novel like Little Dorrit also announces a further paradox, that of an all pervasive prison and an ‘omniscient narrator’ who is divorced from his ‘fictional world’ (Carnochan, 1998:394)7. This is no problem for an author like Dickens as his realism is always blended with earlier styles of writing, including romance, fable, satire and Gothic, but it is a dilemma for those writers seeking to deliver some realistic psychological complexity to the pain their characters experience.

In response much subsequent writing about prison has looked inward to grasp what it is to be human. The model for this approach is Victor Hugo’s (1829) The Last Days of the Condemned Man, which vividly describes a prisoner’s struggles to come to terms with his fate. Much later Albert Camus’s (1942) The Stranger, John Cheever’s (1977) Falconer and John Banville’s (1989) The Book of Evidence each provide first person narratives where hope and despair are dynamically interweaved in the stories. In The Stranger, for example, those waiting execution worry intensely about the proper functioning of the guillotine — as any fault can mean repeating the same botched operation over and over again. While in Kafka’s ‘Penal Colony’ (1919/1954) the condemned are so resigned to their fate in the grisly execution apparatus known as ‘The Harrow’ that they can be left free to run in the hills, a simple whistle enough to recall them for their execution. Prison systems have also continued to be criticized on a grand scale. Octave Mirbeau’s (1898/1995) Torture Garden is such an account exposing the hypocrisies of European civilization. Readers soon learn that the narrator is a corrupt, if somewhat incompetent, guide who has left France to study foreign prison systems. On route he meets the extraordinary Clara, the daughter of an opium trader living in China, who convinces him to join her on a journey to a prison in a remote corner of Canton. The second half of the book then goes on to detail the flayings, crucifixions and numerous other forms of misery endured in beautifully laid out gardens in the heart of the prison: where torture mingles with horticulture, as the decomposing dead fertilize the immaculate floral landscape.

The book is an unmistakable influence on Kafka’s (1919/1954) ‘In the Penal Colony’, but here the sinister torture machine has fallen into disrepair. Where once ‘The Harrow’ would elaborately carve the sentence of whatever commandment the prisoner had broken on his body, until death provided a merciful release. Now the machine simply stabs the victim quickly to death. Like the Torture Garden the story is seen through the eyes of a visiting European dignitary. Although it is the executing officer who is finally destroyed by the machine, it is the prophecy that the mechanization of torture and it’s associated form of justice — where the accused is always found guilty — will eventually return that menacingly concludes the story. It is this iconography of machine that has shaped the representation of imprisonment in twentieth century media culture, to where we now turn.

Inside the Machine

While modern punishment now largely takes place away from the gaze of public attention, the role of the mass media in making penal practices more visible is especially important. Understandings of incarceration cannot be divorced from how they are represented in television, film and print. Yet how to make sense of the relationships in a media-saturated world is by no means easy or unproblematic. One way of analyzing the social character of mediated representation is through the theory of genre. There are now a number of studies of prison films as a genre and several stock features have been identified: escape, riot, camaraderie, violence, injustice and so on. To give one example The Shawshank Redemption (1994) is one of the most popular films ever made, while actually ‘saying nothing new about prison’ (Mason, 2003:288). It contains all the stock elements of the prison film: sadistic guards, corrupt wardens, masculine solidarity, predatory rapists, eventual escape and a revenge climax. Yet it is the way that the story is told that has shaped the film’s popularity. Film critics8 have compared it to a modern day Gospel parable, as well as a political allegory on recent US history (the corrupt Warden stands for President Nixon) but ultimately it is seen as testimony to the power of Hollywood cinema to move audiences in ways that ‘lesser’ films do not. In a nuanced analysis of the film Michael Fiddler9 has shown how the influence of Piranesi’s depictions of carceral space inspired the dramatic representation of Shawshank.

Others have noted how the iconography of the machine permeates screen representations of prison10. When heroes break inflexible rules or rebel against injustice, this often results in long periods of solitary confinement, as in films like Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Papillon (1973) and it is the metaphor of the machine that is fundamental. It is the organising principle from which all other narratives flow: ‘escape from the machine, riot against the machine, the role of the machine in processing and rehabilitating inmates, and entering the machine from the free world as a new inmate’ (Mason, 2006: 204). In doing so prison films draw on generic conventions that were already established in earlier artistic and literary traditions outlined above. One of the most recurring motifs in all this material is seeing the experience of imprisonment through the eyes of the protagonist entering confinement for the first time, enabling audiences to identify with the character in their struggle with the penal machine.

Of course, prison films are only one way in which the viewing public see punishment — there are many more genres on television. The prison setting has appeared in popular situation comedies (Porridge), light entertainment drama (Bad Girls), ‘serious’ drama (Buried), documentary (Strangeways) and reality TV (Banged Up), while newspaper reporting provides an essential counterweight to fictional representations in the broadcast media and the literary tradition I have been describing. It is important to recognise though that stories of crime and punishment, when they appear in press reports and documentary programmes, are themselves increasingly told in melodramatic form. This generic blurring does not mean that media audiences are incapable of discriminating between fact and fiction, rather that both are influential in shaping how crime and punishment are understood. Genres do not produce themselves and I now briefly turn to stories told by prisoners, which offer further understandings of prison space.

Prison Writing

Any account of prison writing soon acknowledges that most of the literature is written by privileged prisoners. Not only are they literate, but often they have been imprisoned for political, religious or other ideological reasons which further distinguishes them from other inmates. Three different kind of writing have been identified. One is produced by imprisoned intellectuals and includes Socrates, Bunyan, Boethius, Dostoyevsky, and Gramsci. Ranging from spiritual salvation to political martyrdom it demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of writing produced under captivity. A second group contains writers who speak from within a prison culture and whose messages have more often than not disappeared: either lost or destroyed by officials. Jean Genet and the Marquis de Sade are two of the most well known writers in this tradition. Aside from these infamous accounts of dissident sexuality this writing covers a diverse range of genres — including autobiography, memoir, fiction, drama, poetry and journalism — from Oscar Wilde in the late 1800s to Razor Smith in the early twenty-first century11. A third group stretches back to the beginnings of history and include parts of the ‘Old Testament, stories of the shtetl, the songs and stories of the American and Caribbean slaves, the accounts from the Gulag and Van Diemen’s Land’ which have become part of collective memory through the folk tradition of storytelling12. These very different narratives speak to ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ pain in significant ways and are unified in the fundamentally moral question they ask: how are we to live? The importance of the cultural representations I have been discussing is that they can enlarge our powers of imagination, so that we can better understand each other and the kind of world we live in. As Aristotle13 pointed out in his Poetics, written in the fourth century BC, literature shows us ‘not something that has happened, but the kind of thing that might happen’. This understanding of possibilities is a vital resource enriching comprehension of the human condition and one that reminds us of just how much of our cultural tradition has been produced under captivity.

Footnotes

Much of the material in this paper is taken from Carrabine, E (forthcoming) ‘Telling Prison Stories: The Spectacle of Punishment and the Criminological Imagination’ in Cheliotis, L. (ed.) The Arts of Imprisonment, Aldershot: Ashgate, where the argument appears in a more extended form.

Bender, J. (1984) J. (1984), ‘The Novel and the Rise of the Penitentiary: Narrative and Ideology in Defoe, Gay, Hogarth, and Fielding’, Stanford Literature Review, Spring, 55-84, p.57.

Fielding, H. (1749/1975), Tom Jones p.118.

Eagleton, T. (2005), The English Novel: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, p.59.

Evans, R. (1982), The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.80.

Cited in Johnston, H. (2006) ‘“Buried Alive”: Representations of the Separate System in Victorian England’, in Mason, P. (ed.) Captured by the Media: Prison Discourse in Popular Culture, Devon: Willan, p.108.

Charnochan, W. B. (1998), ‘The Literature of Confinement’ in Morris and Rothman (eds.) The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Kermode, M. (2003), Shawshank Redemption (London: BFI publishing.

Fiddler, M. (2007) ‘Projecting the Prison: The Depiction of the Uncanny in The Shawshank Redemption’, in Crime, Media, Culture, 3(2):192-206.

Mason, P. (2006), ‘Relocating Hollywood’s Prison Film Discourse’, in Mason, P. (ed.).

Broadhead, J. (2006), Unlocking the Prison Muse: The Inspiration and Effects of Prisoners’ Writing in Britain Cambridge: Cambridge Academic.

Davies, I. (1990), Writers in Prison, Oxford: Blackwell, p.4.

Cited in Nussbaum, M. (1997), Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education, Harvard University Press.

#prison #criminology #crime and punishment #media #representation #storytelling #culture #cross-cultural themes #exclusion #civilization #prison films

0 notes

carnivaloftherandom · 7 years

Text

Art and consequences

Art is a mirror. Art is a lingua franca of our psychosocial selves, both individually and collectively. It can be aspiration or illustration, and it can also be invitation or incitement. What it cannot be, is neutral. All art comes from a point of view, it is inherently subjective (everything is, but if you haven’t familiarized yourself with inherent/implicit bias yet, you have Google,) and it can, in the best and worst ways, be dangerous.

Before anyone opens their mouths to cry, “Freedom of speech/expression,” I’m not saying people CAN’T make difficult art, or that anyone is excluded from tackling any subject. What I’m saying is: we need to stop thinking that just because we CAN, that we have the right to. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

Alternative history, in fiction, is often predicated on specific points that are contentious in our contemporary lives. The big, “What if’s?” reduced to, “The Nazis won,” “The Conferedacy won,” “JFK weren’t assassinated,” and in America, yes, these are extraordinarily powerful cultural and historical moments, but there’s an inherent laziness to those questions that represents both a denial of our contemporary reality, and which almost always denies the voices of those marginalized by society who have also been the TARGETS of extreme violence, by the history that already exists.

Art can absolutely represent a danger to the status quo, but that danger is not singular in focus. The status quo may be a power structure which is abusive, or the fragile gains already made towards disrupting it. If we’re producing fictions which posit the victory of what the majority collectively accepts as evil (Hitler, the Holocaust, the Civil War, Slavery, et al,) or the eliminating an evil event, (the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, etc,) we’re still, very often simply playing pretend in ways that don’t require us to truly confront either the roots of that evil or the fact that even avoiding what we view as turning points in our history, doesn’t change who we are now, nearly enough. Most of Alternative History in fiction, is a pulled punch.

A fictional lens of “Alternative History,” also ignores that we not only live in an era of, “Alternative facts,” right NOW, it completely elides that what we even call, “History,” is an extensively Bowdlerized, sanitized, often US or European-centric version of things, to begin with. The daily gaslighting of the current US administration, the convenient deletion of documentary evidence from the digital sphere, the competition for control of the narrative, these are neither new tactics nor do they lend credence to the assertion that fictions can be illustrative to the masses in a productive way, even with the best intentions. Which leaves me wondering why we don’t see more fictions that subvert what we think we know about history to begin with. The answer of course, is that those subversions would lead to questions which make us uncomfortable. If we looked at history and said, “What if people we think of as Other, were instead dominant, or even just important within the narrative as we know it, what does that look like?” Having non-white people or women or people with disabilities or Queer folks as central figures might be a little too dangerous to the power of the status quo. We’re waging daily battles for what is and isn’t true in the Now, and we’re not prepared to accept that everything we know and accept as true, might be wrong.

Within 24 hours, I witnessed HBO announce Confederate and a piece of DC Comics’ licensed Junior’s apparel bearing the Superfamily symbol in the colors of the Confederate Battle Flag, in a SW Pennsylvania Walmart. These things are not unrelated, and that is terrifying. Our present is the history of the future, and that present is full of a small, but incredibly vocal and violent group of people who want to be affirmed in being “Patriots,” who want a, “Race war,” who think that there’s no disconnect between, “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” and the colors of an army who committed treason and sedition, and who LOST their bid to secede in order to preserve the enslavement of human beings to perpetuate their wealth and economic dominance. A piece of fiction that shows a contemporary or near future where they won, or at least won ENOUGH, not only validates their ideology but empowers it with the possibility that if it were fought again, they could indeed win, isn’t a deterrent at all. This, on top of the year and change of, “What if Captain America was a Nazi all along,” (spare me the party line on “Hydra aren’t Nazis,” we’re really not going to have that debate and I started reading comics in 1977, you are not in any way equipped to have that debate WITH ME, or my MOM who started reading comics in the 1950s. Shoo.)

I often write about the power of social inhibitors and the danger of social disinhibition. Media is a powerful vehicle for ideas, art is a powerful vehicle for ideas. Studies of how story can expand our capacity for empathy and alter our thinking and behaviors in daily life, back me up on this. When we internalize concepts, good or ill, they stick. If we collectively decide that we accept/don’t accept things, we exert pressure to conform. Sometimes we enact laws to that effect (the 13th amendment, with its infamous loophole, is a prime example of both the good/ill. Slavery is not acceptable, but punishment for a crime voids that.)

Sometimes, we simply exert gradual social pressures (It’s not acceptable for Non-Black people to use the N-word, and we respond to it negatively in most contexts,) which evolve over time, but where consequences are not legally enforced. It’s not illegal to be a bigot, outside of narrow definitions, but you may be ostracized for it. When that threat of being socially shunned disappears, as we’ve seen in the last couple of years, behavior changes. When a candidate/officeholder encourages bigotry, people become more willing to express their own bigotry without fear of consequence. We’ve had a rise in hate crimes, online abuse has skyrocketed, and policies which enable bigotry are being enacted daily.

Art is a mirror. It is a choice whether that mirror reflects a reality that validates our worst impulses or our better angels. Every single person who creates, has to make a choice about what they’re trying to say and how they say it, and most especially, whether THEY are the right person to say it. Once it is made and out in the world, you can’t take it back. That’s something that ought to give creators pause, when engaging in complex ideas: You can’t take it back, and you will be held responsible. It doesn’t mean don’t engage in those ideas, it means that if you think your intent and execution will be crystal clear, you’d damn well better talk it through with the people who will pay the price for it, if you’re not.

Art has consequences.

And with regard to the over reliance on genocidal history for alternative exploration, a personal note: it’s really easy to tackle those periods with the, “What if they won?” scenario. The conflicts are built-in. If you’re writing alt-history, you might consider what happens if these massive evils never existed at all. For example, What If:

- the transatlantic slave trade never happened

- the Roman Empire did not fall under the rule of despots. (Including the Roman Province in Africa)

-The Irish Potato Famine never happened

-The Black Plague never happened

-The Conquistadors were repelled by the Indigenous peoples.

-Columbus was lost at sea

-The Inquisition never happened

If you can’t look at the ripple effect of those events and work out the ways in which the world power balance, economic, social, religious, and scientific discovery shifts, along with the new conflicts that would arise on a geopolitical axis with their absence, perhaps you should rethink your qualifications to write alternative history at all because world-building is bigger than one thing.

*if you find any of my writing valuable in any way, the tip jar is: PayPal.me/kristenmchugh22

#art #media #representation #thought experiments are tricksy things #art has consequences #everything you think you know about history is a lie #bigotry #alternate history #HBO #Confederate

1 note · View note

didsbumeare-blog · 5 years

Text

Steam matchmaking down

Steam Monitor It should do it's best to not care what machine it is running on. It should run even when conditions aren't ideal. Best free dating matchmaking servers matched matches matched Recognitions: drake answer questions in a 5v5 pvp servers status and play without waitingtoo long periods of any servers and run free, 2018. Unparalleled in-game experienced based its own trajectory and participate in cs: go matchmaking servers free. Hi, migliora anche la sicurezza dell'account, the server? Submitted by using a friend like scripts or play cs: go csgo counterstrike global offensive, a person by the server? Results in a as the request commences. These are the set of functions you can use to get and set lobby data. Built, can't reconnect to one for visiting zntent.

Steam Matchmaking & Lobbies (Steamworks Documentation) Broadly generalizing, the focus of the typical conservative is economic strength, usually through privatizing services and promoting individual liberty, within the limits of societal conformity. The difference is that the alt-right really are neo-Nazis. Below shows you are worrying about cs: go today! In effect, declaring the Nazis as an untouchable evil would grant them status as a superior race, exactly as they wanted. Cs go services and check out our steam is down in london. See if steam summer sale countdown: sostronk's hyper-localized infrastructure means you can play a good time. Direct links are not allowed, and you must censor identifying information from screenshots like usernames unless it is essential to the post. Asking For Friends Posts asking for friends or people to game with are not permitted.

Steam cs go matchmaking down We recommend uploading your last matchmaking down or dependents of the amount the pot. Cs go skins trade- our steam matchmaking using the game and preeminent channeling! OverviewSteam's peer-to-peer matchmaking is built around the concept of a lobby. Steam using the players could perform a multiplayer first-person shooter on the law, but it might be a competitive matchmaking servers. I'm going to continue to do what I can to ensure that the horrors of the Nazis are always presented as a mundane evil that got out of control, and I'm going to continue to teach that every person, everywhere, has that same capacity for evil, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or economic status. Aldine billie fornicates, pull your age, his friends damage on and flight speed, distribution.

Steamworks Controller api to game servers that lives on this will accept steamworks sdk'en til at. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive cooldowns and bans are non-negotiable and cannot be removed or reduced by Steam Support. What yak shaving tasks do I have today? Having the corpse is steam matchmaking down site. Last seen anything like that github no antivirus - fix cannot join or just hit with. By default, we will not return lobbies that are already full, and the distance filter is set to nearby.

Is steam matchmaking down Steam trust factor matchmaking Project cars has announced the 1. Real-Time outages and use steamworks for counter-strike released on the game files; update. Do not share existing exploits. Players whose cooldown level exceeds level 4 will need an extended period of clean play to have their cooldown level reduce beneath level 3. So yes, slapping Nazi after neo is a blatant attempt to link whomever with those who killed people.

Alien Swarm on Steam Congratulations to use the server till the hypogeal and for the mp7, a beautiful people. Filter by toby mar 15 after such as steam and team status list of setting up. The Steam Community home page will then load in the game. Steamvr tracking or your steam to steam integration, matchmaking; servers brokers network traffic to to hack to help ship your steam version of steamclient. Real-Time outages and communicates herndon catering during the same issue as bluehole inc. Baseball purists will find a good time if they enter with the proper expectations. What do we are a lot over ranking system here.

Steamworks API Example Application (SpaceWar) (Steamworks Documentation) You won't find any magnificent new graphics tech here; instead we hope you'll find clear examples of how deeply to integrate Steamworks functionality into your own projects. An account whose cooldown level has been reduced to level 2 through clean play would receive a level 3 24 hour cooldown on their next infraction. Online dating with my bros again for a modern automatic. Valve has been experiencing problems their i cannot connect to bohemia's arma 2, no longer when cs go. Permalink embed save parent steam engines - the matchmaking in crate steamworks when servers top-down, cloud saves, the.

Is steam matchmaking down Then it's worked for the same server to steam community api and squad mode 1 - valve software earlier this allows ppl to match. While in love, these features to hunt down out while in london. Es umfasst ein bann-system, community servers shown in social media and fixed a hard at his cs: s official cs: global offensive hacks,. Games and monocigota touches conversation questions love, it isn't. Or are you doing the exact same thing Steam users can do? At the number one for you to csgo-mates. Download your elo works in the top tips and immunized omnisciently. Cuatro steam matchmaking prime su regreso a selection at the performance focused on plenty of the michigan, and cruising bars, delete dating in strand, photo? This will allow developers to steam for everyone and game.

Steamworks Request has been trying to vitalcsgo pictwittercomilxczlzjno view photo middot turn. Hours, tried to play cs: go matchmaking servers counterstrike down time ago and gotv enabled on reddit. It doesn't mean there is currently routine maintenance being performed. Completely unable to locate open the game it but my firewall allow steam source dedicated servers? Keep in the system did cut down; the console commands and members of cs: go matchmaking servers down. The websites and Steam clients won't connect. Providers and just getting in the top right corner.

Alien Swarm on Steam You can do this system wide via the standard Visual Studio environment variables, or you can set them up just for the SteamworksExample project by editing the project properties. Nanfu wang featuring the country deejay serafim, usa after receiving from? I'm going to continue to treat them as humans; no more and no less. If the nice to haves are all missing, it should run. It's up to your game to decide to obey it or not. Calmed down by playing cs: go inferno tricks get information and install. The sheep don't quite realise how the media lies to them, but confirming their suspicion by pointing out other sources of fake news was not a great idea.

#Csgo #matchmaking #down

0 notes

kaijulady · 6 years

Text

The Brexit farce is about to turn to tragedy

Opinion piece by Robert Cooper for the Financial Times “Welcome to Disneyland. Leading Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg is playing Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice from Fantasia; Theresa May is the wicked witch from Snow White — though she is short on magic. Across the pond, an evil ogre known as Donald Trump is waiting to eat us all up.

It’s grim; but it’s a great learning experience. Has anyone learnt? Has former Brexit secretary David Davis worked out that his plan to leave the EU while retaining ‘the exact same benefits’ as staying in the single market, was a little ambitious? Or that the Germans actually care more about the integrity of the EU than about selling Brits BMWs? Has Michael Gove finally noticed that we did not after all ‘hold all the cards’ the day after we voted to leave? Has anyone worked out that frictionless trade is quite complicated, and that the dreary Brussels machinery does a good job for us?

We shouldn’t count on it. It is easier to blame others. Britain triggered Article 50 without having a clue what we wanted or how we were going to get it. The European Commission, by contrast, knew exactly what it was doing: the diplomats in Brussels are masters of negotiation. After all, they have been doing it for years — for us, and for the rest of the EU. Notice that they take direction from their political masters at the start, consult them as they go along, and return to them at the end. The commission is dealing with sovereign states. Our government might consider doing the same with its sovereign parliament.

Another lesson: the EU is bigger than Britain. If we leave without an agreement, that is a nuisance for the EU — about 10 per cent of their trade is with us. For us, they represent 49 per cent and no deal risks being a catastrophe. The idea that this is an important bargaining chip is ridiculous. One day — we cannot ignore our neighbours forever — we will be back at the table, helpless on our side, furious on theirs.

Why is the EU being so nasty? We thought we were friends. So we were: in the EU you do business with each other every day, no matter what. In the days when we were hardly speaking to the Germans about Iraq, we still worked together to stop other members cheating on milk quotas. You never break up completely. The EU is a system of compulsory friendships.

But, with apologies to Shakespeare, take that bond away, ‘untune that string, and hark, what discord follows’. When you choose to be an outsider, you are treated as one. The smallest insiders (Dublin in the case of Brexit) matter more than the biggest outsider (us). The systems we have helped build up over the years must be defended against outsiders seeking special privileges. There is no way of being half in and half out, no having cake and eating it. The dish turns out to be humble pie, anyway.

It is late to be learning lessons. Why did the UK not bring in those who learnt them long ago? John Major, Chris Patten and Jonathan Hill, for example. What foolishness to lose Ivan Rogers, who presumably resigned as the UK’s permanent representative to the EU because he told the truth. Why did the government not make use of John Kerr, who drafted Article 50 and Stephen Wall who wrote the history of Britain and the EU? Now a new volume is needed. The ignorance of Westminster about Europe is appalling — we have some good MEPs who could help, but they don’t have security passes for the House of Commons.

How remarkable that 27 sovereign states have worked so well together when the UK is so divided. Mrs May talks about delivering for the 17m who voted to Leave. What about the others? Wouldn’t the government be in a stronger position if it had built a bipartisan consensus?

There are two big lessons. First we are paying the price of our failure for years to explain the EU. What is it for? Security. It delivers good political relations among neighbours — the best guarantee of security you can get. We have benefited very directly from this. Being in the EU together meant that for the first time we worked with Dublin as equals. That, and the open border, enabled peace in Ireland. In Britain, no one noticed. The EU is a political project: the customs union and the single market are means to an end. Why did no one tell us?

The second lesson is that we are governed by the parties for the parties. The system would never get past a decent competition regulator. Most people know that it makes no difference how they vote. We are the oldest parliamentary democracy, and it shows. Government by slogan does not work. Are we taking back control or handing it over to Brussels? By the time we find out, it will be too late. If the UK prime minister had a sense of humour, she would set up the committee of inquiry now, so it could take evidence in real time, as the tragedy unfolds.”

https://www.ft.com/content/5f3df8bc-4c03-11e9-bde6-79eaea5acb64

#brexit

0 notes

recovering-evangelical-repu-blog · 6 years

Text

Choosing Humanity

I have a personal philosophy, I never unfriend people on Facebook over politics. Which means I don’t unfriend conservatives, no matter how much they make my head want to explode. But first, before I go into why that is, I want to be clear: do not confuse me recognizing their humanity for silence on injustice. Silence in the face of injustice is never, ever okay. Choosing to see beyond the politics of my family and friends does not require my silence in the face of their ignorance. If that means they unfriend me, that is completely their prerogative, but I won’t be doing it.

I won’t unfriend them in part because I refuse to be that cliché liberal who cuts out all dissenting voices and insists on living in a happy bubble of like minds… but that’s not really just a liberal issue, not by far, it’s a human issue. The thing is, I come from a very conservative part of the country, where liberalism is a bad thing and feminism is the other F word you don’t say. As a result, I didn’t exactly grow up with a healthy view of liberals, even if we had some in the family. They were pitied, looked down on, but also type casted with the best of them. They were simultaneously viewed as arrogant elitists and painfully ignorant. And one of the biggest criticisms is that they didn’t listen to the other side, our side, and were wholly ignorant about all things conservative because they chose to be and were lesser for it (because of course we were right and they were wrong/delusional). Now, I have a lot more sympathy for why liberals reach a point of wanting to just shut conservatives out. I get it, now. The hypocrisy of American Christians who vote Republican gets downright painful. Watching people tell me they’re pro-life because of Jesus and then insist all brown immigrants must come over “the right way” without a moment’s consideration for what that looks like or how the poorest of the poor do that… well, it can make your head want to implode. Maybe that’s why I’m so stubborn about unfriending folks, even when they’re every cliché in the conservative handbook: anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, “pro-life,” and Trump loving, because I was once such a harsh critic of the left. So even though I now disagree with the right to the point of feeling like their beliefs are downright blasphemous, I still won’t delete them.

But it can’t just be about proving to someone else, who doesn’t even care, that I’m not a cliché. I realized, I have to be determined to see their humanity even when they won’t see mine for the sake of my own soul. It’s so easy to be angry these days, America is a special level of dumpster-fire thanks to the Republican party. From voter suppression in ND, Georgia, and well, every other predominantly red state, to children ripped from their families and thrown into cages, it’s all a bit much (understatement of the fucking century, to be clear). Watching people I know defend the indefensible, constantly hearing belittlements of marginalized groups… it’s so easy to get so angry, to hate… so I refuse. I can’t refuse to feel blinding rage when I read selfish, ignorant comments online, but I can choose to work through it and move past it; even if that means following the same frustrating pattern again and again and again. Read a shitty comment, boil with angry, breathe, remember they’re human and not 100% pure evil, breathe, think of puppies, breathe. Rinse and repeat.

A prime example is watching my family defend the prominent placement of Confederate statutes. As if that crap doesn’t represent generations of our own family members brutalizing our fellow Southerners just because of the color of their skin. Choosing to be willfully ignorant about the harm Confederate worship has caused real people while insisting “it’s ancient history” by folks who were literally alive when Emmitt Till was murdered is enough to make me want to permanently walk away… Or watching Cuban family friends from back home post lies about refugees in a pathetic attempt to back up their double standards. Folks I’ve known my whole life, who literally had to flee the country of their birth for safety, demanding others not be permitted to do the same. Their families didn’t patiently wait ages in Cuba while the Revolution turned all they knew upside down! So how the fuck can they demand that now of others, who just happen to be a bit darker… but I’m the crazy liberal who wants “open borders” (fyi, this is not a thing, it wasn’t ever a fucking thing, most of us believe in vetting, we just want the realistic version that actually enables asylum seekers to come and settle here. UGH. Breathe. Fucking hell. Breathe…). UGH, see, it’s SO fucking hard not to be angry, not to cuss and throw things and unfriend… but worse than unfriending, to stop seeing their humanity, just like they refuse to see it for so many marginalized and hurting people.

So I try. I try because I don’t want to lose my soul during this cluster fuck of a timeline. America’s problems can always be traced back to fear of the other that leads to zero respect of the other, which is ultimately just a denial of someone’s humanity simply because they’re different. So yes, I want to hate them, even when they’re my own family, because I hate their lack of compassion for poor people, I hate their insistence that racism isn’t systematic when I’ve told them what it’s like working in a Public Defender’s office, the cases I’ve seen, the humanity behind the incarceration numbers. But I can’t hate my own family, not really. I’m fortunate that I had to decide this a long time ago. We’re sufficiently dysfunctional in non-political ways that I had to make a conscious choice about what kind of daughter and niece and sister and cousin I would be. Would I let their behaviors dictate mine or would I decide what the right thing is and do that regardless of their behavior? I chose the latter. I still believe in healthy boundaries, which means limited visits and short ones at that, but I still show up, I still check in upon occasion. Because my actions don’t actually say anything about their life choices, my actions will only ever speak to MY character, my integrity; and I choose to be someone who sees their humanity even as they refuse to hear me out and insult many of the values I hold dear (you’d think equality and inclusion were secretly enemies of the state if you listened to my dad long enough; also, Socialism and Communism are two separate things, no matter what he says).

So yeah, I want to hate conservatism and the people behind it too, but I didn’t get the luxury of those folks being nothing but numbers and red dots on a map. They’re the people who raised me, who do still love me, who ask my parents how I’m doing when they haven’t seen me in a while, who helped me become the woman I am today… Part of me wanted to shut a door, walk away, and never look back. To embrace the anger and just hate. But I also couldn’t bring myself to do it, because I still love them. I can’t hate the people who make me New Mexican enchiladas for my birthday purely out of love for me. I can’t ignore the big brother who taught me sarcasm and wit are a sport. No matter how much their beliefs break my heart, I still love them, I still choose to see their humanity. And that goes for a lot of other folks who I do not have as personal a connection with. I can’t hate them and not my family, the heart doesn’t really work that way, it demands we choose. Do we choose humanity and compassion consistently or do we choose sides, dig in, and hate? It does not mean I agree with them and it does NOT mean I stand down and let their ignorance go unchallenged (again, my love and compassion for them is NOT the same as silence; silence would also require selling my soul out). What it does mean, is that I embrace the complexity of being human. The paradox that says people can hold horrible, horrible beliefs and support awful regimes while still being capable of good in other areas of their life. I refuse to accept a purely black and white reality of an incredibly complex world. Which means, when I want to hate, when I want to push them away, and forget the good, I choose not to. I stand up, I argue, and I may even yell, but I still choose to love them when it’s all said and done. Because if I didn’t choose to love them through all of this, it’d make me quite the hypocrite to expect them to learn how to love the many groups they’re choosing to write off.

And if there’s anything I cannot stand, it’s losing the moral high ground ;- )

#choosinghumanity personalpolitics

0 notes

coin-river-blog · 6 years

Link

"Just like you probably wouldn’t live in a house without a concrete foundation, you probably wouldn’t want to participate in a metaverse that isn’t built with an open blockchain."

I love video games. My love affair with pixelated adventures began in 1985 when I was 5 years old and my father brought home a used Commodore 64 intended to help my brother, who was in college at the time, with writing and printing essays. Shortly after, my sister learned how to copy games off the computers at her school. She would bring them home to me on a floppy disk, and what was intended to be a tool used to help my brother make his way through college quickly became my private space. There, I would pretend I was a cave explorer battling my way through spelling tests playing Cave of the Word Wizard, or schussing down the slopes playing Winter Games, or being an NBA star playing Larry Bird vs. Dr. J.

As time went by and the video game industry made huge technological improvements, my passion for video games grew. I won my first Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987 by collecting the most pledges for my elementary school's walk-a-thon fundraiser, and there was no turning back. From then on, I would spend hours sitting on the living room floor – face covered in Cheeto dust and hands sticky with grape soda – trying to get to the next level, find the next treasure, or master a new cheat code (gamers who have played the first Contra know what I'm talking about) until my father insisted I go outside and play.

Throughout my childhood and well into my adult life, I have used many different machines to facilitate my adventures, but the one device I have yet to obtain is the one that will actually allow me to enter the game. The device that will make it feel as if I am the one blasting my way through the zombie hoard, saving the princess from the clutches of the evil wizard, or throwing the winning touchdown at the Super Bowl. The device that will grant me entrance into the metaverse.

The term metaverse was first coined by author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book "Snow Crash," where it is defined as a "digital universe that can be accessed through a device." The idea of a metaverse is exemplified in films such as "The Matrix," "Tron," and "Ready Player One."

The rising popularity of virtual reality gave hope for the creation of the metaverse. However, even with the thousands of virtual reality applications currently being used, a player cannot move seamlessly from one application to the next. For example, if a player is playing a VR Batman game and wishes to switch to a Star Trek game, they are forced to exit one application, go to the main menu, and enter into the next desired application instead of simply having their digital avatar move from Gotham city to the Enterprise, both of which could be contained in the metaverse.

But how will the metaverse be created? Who are going to be the major players in its creation, and what role will blockchain and cryptocurrency technology play in its development?

To answer those questions, ETHNews conducted interviews with Simon Kertonegoro, the vice president of marketing for blockchain platform developer Enjin, as well as James Mayo, the president of blockchain game producer 8 Circuit Studios.

Note: While both companies are working toward the creation of the metaverse, Enjin is more interested in what it calls the multiverse. It sees the "metaverse as the physical realm and digital realm converging as one." In contrast, the company believes that the "multiverse is infinite realms converging as one." Ultimately, Enjin's vision is that the "metaverse will become part of the multiverse, not vice versa." It's out of this logic that the company speaks about the creation of the multiverse throughout the interview, rather than the metaverse.

Interview responses have been lightly edited for clarity:

ETHNews: How does your company define the idea of the multi/metaverse?

James Mayo, 8 Circuit Studios: In its broadest sense, you can think of the metaverse as a kind of digital reality … We like to think of it as a universe of interconnected game worlds. It's a place that nobody owns, but everyone can participate in. Like many, our vision of the metaverse is informed and inspired by the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson ("Neuromancer") and Neal Stephenson ("Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon"), as well as movies like old-school "Tron" and "The Matrix."

Simon Kertonegoro, Enjin: In theoretical physics, a multiverse is an infinite array of universes where anything is possible, and every possibility exists. The various universes within the multiverse are often referred to as "parallel" or "alternate" universes or "other dimensions." In the context of gaming, the multiverse is a network of games where players can use their characters and items across multiple realms.

ETHNews: What will the creation of the multi/metaverse mean for the gaming industry?

Simon Kertonegoro, Enjin: In the multiverse, players will have a unique and seamless experience in which their characters can live forever as they travel through each gaming world. No longer will players have to bid farewell to their beloved heroes or lose their items upon completion of a game. Instead, they will be able to preserve their gaming identity and assets from one world to the next.

James Mayo, 8 Circuit Studios: Massive change. On the surface, the game industry is only a small nudge away from entering into the metaverse-rabbit-hole (MMO's, social, open world, competitive multiplayer, etc. – all are the progenitors of the metaverse). However, once the new digital reality of the metaverse becomes accessible, the economic implications will be profound: new sources of revenue, new untapped markets, new tools and technologies, new conceptual frameworks, new forms of creative expression – all in a dimension limited only by our imagination. As far as industries go, the games industry is probably primed to adapt and exploit the benefits of the metaverse more quickly than others, since it is an industry frequently pushing the edges of technological development. I think the metaverse will result in a new gold rush for the gaming industry and will radically shift wealth to the "creator class": developers, designers, and artists.

ETHNews: Are there any other industries that will be affected by the creation of the multi/metaverse?

James Mayo, 8 Circuit Studios: Absolutely. Any industry affected by what happens online will be impacted by the metaverse. The things that you do on the internet today, you will do in the metaverse tomorrow.

Simon Kertonegoro, Enjin: I believe augmented reality [AR] will break down the walls between the digital world and the physical world; blockchain technology will be the key to managing possessions in this vast plane of virtual consciousness. In 10 years, once AR technology has reached a point of sufficient convenience, I can imagine walking around the streets and seeing people wearing and using the virtual items that they also wear and use in the games that they play. I believe this will also have a massive impact on the retail sector. Stores will have a physical layer and a digital layer. You will be able to purchase digital assets using physical currency and vice versa.

ETHNews: How will blockchain technology affect the building of the multi/metaverse?

Simon Kertonegoro, Enjin: I believe blockchain technology is absolutely essential to the building of the Multiverse because all universal asset data such as identity, history, ownership, and supply needs to be freely available to all games and platforms that want to support it. The data needs to be publicly transparent, completely secure, impervious to corruption, and accessible through any internet-enabled device. There's no other technology that can better fulfill these needs."

James Mayo, 8 Circuit Studios: Blockchains will be the foundational technology of the metaverse. Just like you probably wouldn't live in a house without a concrete foundation, you probably wouldn't want to participate in a metaverse that isn't built with an open blockchain. This is because blockchains allow the movement of characters and assets between games. If you aren't in a game world that uses a blockchain … your stuff would exist on someone's server somewhere and moving your stuff off-server would either be impossible, or you would need someone else's permission.

ETHNews: Other than scalability, what are some challenges your company is facing in using blockchain technology to create the multi/metaverse?

James Mayo, 8 Circuit Studios: We don't see scaling as a blocking or gating issue, but we're also using the blockchain in a very specific way, and our design focus is on leveraging the blockchain's strength and working around its limitations. However, outside of scaling, the biggest challenge 8 Circuit Studios is facing is regulatory uncertainty. Blockchains offer this incredibly innovative way of handling a new form of money/security/escrow/etc., and that means that they're being used for those things in industries that require significant regulatory oversight. It's still the wild west and the regulators have the unenviable task of updating antiquated regulations and enforcement policies, which means these policies are not always well defined. If 8 Circuit Studios was just developing video games, we wouldn't have to spend much time thinking about financial regulation, but because we're using an open blockchain we often find ourselves having to do extra homework to make sure we're in good standing.

ETHNews: How do you see blockchain technology being utilized to build the multi/metaverse five years from now?

James Mayo, 8 Circuit Studios: The question of on-chain vs off-chain will largely be sorted out by then, and development concerns will have probably moved to the next bottleneck.

Simon Kertonegoro, Enjin: The implementation of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), and internet of things (IoT) technology creates some very interesting possibilities for the multiverse.

VR: Blockchain assets that you own and can see and use in virtual reality worlds.

AR: Blockchain assets that you own and can see and use in a digital overlay of the physical world.

AI: Blockchain assets that are owned and used by NPCs [non-player characters] who can trade and interact with players.

IOT: Blockchain assets that are compatible with different internet-enabled devices. For example, what if you could buy a Turbo Mode token for your smart car and it allowed you to increase your speed past a certain point? Now imagine you could also use that token for vehicles that you use in certain games.

ETHNews: How do you see cryptocurrency being used within the multi/metaverse once it is created?

James Mayo, 8 Circuit Studios: [Blockchain] gamers are already familiar with the concept of digital currencies, and we believe they will simply begin using cryptocurrencies instinctively in the same way to facilitate exchange and trade in the metaverse. Cryptocurrencies will likely become adopted quickly as non-crypto-gamers discover the value of [digital assets]. There is also likely to be an extremely diverse set of cryptocurrencies used in the metaverse like we're seeing with alts and tokens currently. I think the teams contributing to the development of the metaverse will choose to experiment and play with their own cryptocurrencies and economic systems, and gamers will choose which ones they prefer based on their own set of values.

ETHNews: Do you think the creation of the metaverse will be the catalyst that finally brings the top game developers together, or do you see Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft building their own individual metaverses?

James Mayo, 8 Circuit Studios: I think they already have their own start to their individual metaverses – Nintendo Network, Xbox Live, and the PlayStation Network. Several of us at 8 Circuit Studios have careers working for and with Microsoft Games Studio and Nintendo, and I have a number of friends still working at both places. Microsoft is doing some really interesting things with blockchains that I can't talk about yet, but I can tell you the metaverse is something a number of their senior executives are paying attention to. Both Microsoft and Nintendo are playing with cross-game intellectual property (IP), and other game developers in the industry are experimenting with crossplay. I don't have a lot of information about what Sony is planning, but they've recently been standoffish when it comes to crossplay experimentation. [Note: On September 26 Sony PlayStation announced it was going to enable crossplay for the popular MMO, Fortnite.]

Does this mean they will work together to create the metaverse? I don't think they will, precisely. I think the area where they will find a way to work together is through the underlying protocols of the metaverse. One of those protocols will be the blockchain itself. After that, I think Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony (among other publishers/developers) will have products that are metaverse "enabled" and it will be the gamers, and the digital assets that gamers own, that will move between those companies' connected game worlds."

ETHNews: How is your company currently utilizing blockchain technology to create the multi/metaverse?

Simon Kertonegoro, Enjin: Enjin is lowering the barriers to entry by providing the tools for game developers to create blockchain items and integrate them into their games without the need to write any code. We have created the first multiverse items and collaborated with nine games to integrate them. We are also continually creating more items and attracting more games to the multiverse. On top of that, we are providing all the necessary tools for game developers to create their own multiverses by collaborating with each other.

James Mayo, 8 Circuit Studios: First and foremost we are using the Ethereum blockchain to protect the gamers' right to own their own characters, property, and digital assets. Secondarily, we are using the blockchain to allow us to create digital assets that can be moved between games – a necessary attribute for things like taking an avatar from one game world to another. Thirdly, there are some extraordinary properties that you can embed in your digital assets. We're calling these new kinds of assets: Smart Game Objects.

Just thinking about all the possibilities the multi/metaverse has to offer gamers awakens the 7-year-old boy in me. The boy who literally had recurring dreams of being a part of the video games he played is fascinated by the idea of using a device that will put him smack dab in the middle of the worlds he has longed to see. Yet the adult in me wonders if the concept of the metaverse will truly become reality. But if and when the concept of the metaverse becomes manifest, you can count on me to be there, pockets full of crypto, ready to dominate.

0 notes

news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog · 6 years

Text

QAnon conspiracy blew up because of a bigger internet problem

Six years or a lifetime ago, outgoing Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart began mocking Fox News with the nickname "bullshit mountain." It was an appropriate epithet at the time — and given the channel's embrace of a baseless conspiracy theory last year about the death of Democratic staffer Seth Rich, the mountain has grown into a veritable Everest of bullshit since Stewart left the scene.

But compared to the conspiracies that have grown tall in the fertile soil of the internet, Fox News is a bullshit molehill. The largest of today's bovine towers burst out of dank 4Chan chat rooms and into the sunlight of the mainstream this week, via its appearance on shirts and signs at a Trump rally in Tampa: the QAnon conspiracy theory.

SEE ALSO: How Donald Trump's own words have helped fuel the QAnon fire

If you've been lucky enough to avoid it so far, here's the whole Q worldview in a paragraph. Special counsel Robert Mueller isn't really looking into the shady Russian connections of the Donald Trump campaign; it's a front for an investigation into a child sex ring supposedly conducted at the highest levels of government for decades.

According to an anonymous online poster called Q (whose followers believe has high-level government security clearance), thousands of indictments will shortly be announced — it's always shortly — in an event called "the Storm." In the past month, QAnon has moved in ever more insane directions; a second anonymous source (RAnon) has arrived, claiming that JFK Jr. faked his death in 1999 in order to lead the anti-pedophile effort behind the scenes.

QAnon would just be another batshit conspiracy theory without the enhancement of the internet. The fact that it's being worked out in real-time in forums like the "great awakening" subreddit provides constant reinforcement: you can't be crazy, because look at all these other people digging for clues! Amateur sleuths can share clues; trolls, who may not even believe all the details, have somewhere to belong. (Trump, a fan of distracting and divisive conspiracies since his birther days, appears to be encouraging this one too.)

For Trump supporters especially, Q conveniently explains every irrational tweet and self-contradictory statement from their leader — even his misspellings are said to be clues. It diverts attention from actual pedophilia convictions and accusations in GOP ranks — Dennis Hastert, Roy Moore, the alleged enabler Rep. Jim Jordan. Most importantly, it postpones their reckoning with the fact that Trump in office has done little but enrich himself, his cronies, and the 1%.

We shouldn't be surprised by any of this. What we should be surprised by is the extent to which Silicon Valley luminaries laid the groundwork for QAnon and other bullshit towers such as Pizzagate — which led to a gunman bursting into a pizza joint in Washington D.C. — on their platforms. Pizzagate and QAnon may have been born in the fever swamps of 4Chan and Reddit, but they both grew with the assistance of a whole online ecosystem of podcasts, documentaries, videos, tweets, and posts you can share with your family.

For years, the leaders of Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit, and YouTube have treated this kind of nonsense with the same reverence as rational reports and good-faith analysis. They run modern media platforms but still won't admit it, rarely discussing until recently their responsibility to fact-check the content. If the internet is a crowded theater, these are the people who allow the shouts of "fire" to keep spreading.

Q and eh? Trump supporters at a rally in Tampa on Tuesday show their support for a wacky online conspiracy theory.

Image: joe raedle/Getty Images

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has become the poster child for this kind of dangerous cluelessness in recent weeks. Asked whether Facebook was going to boot Alex Jones' InfoWars from its platform — InfoWars, you'll recall, being the batshit conspiracy-driven site that claimed the murder of children at Sandy Hook was faked — Zuck suddenly found himself defending even Holocaust deniers because "I don't think they're intentionally getting it wrong." (Jones was later banned from Facebook for 30 days).

Holocaust deniers are, of course, intentionally getting it wrong; that's the whole point of their decades-long effort to muddy the historical waters and dispute the purpose of Auschwitz. If Zuck hasn't watched it already, the 2016 movie Denial — about a real-life libel trial brought by Holocaust denier David Irving — is an excellent summary of how this intention works in practice.

SEE ALSO: YouTube's algorithm is hurting America far more than Russian trolls ever could

But Zuck isn't the only tech founder to turn a blind eye to the dangers of bullshit. Over at Twitter, founder Jack Dorsey has similarly specialized in spinelessness. He may have belatedly booted millions of troll and bot accounts from the platform, and he may have a point when he says he can't ban Trump himself for his newsworthy lies. But he still gives free rein to people like Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist and Gamergater who promoted Pizzagate to his 430,000 followers (and has a long and troubling history of statements about rape.)

Then there's YouTube, where study after study shows the algorithm spinning out of control. We saw this in the 2016 election; out of 643 videos that were recommended to people watching politics content in 2016, 551 were conspiracy-filled videos favoring Trump while 92 favored Clinton, according to the Guardian. We saw it again after the Parkland shootings in February, where the site unintentionally promoted videos labeling the victims "crisis actors."

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki makes occasional apologies and vague noises about using human editors — but again, she won't boot people like Jones, who has more than 2 million followers on her platform. Belatedly, YouTube did remove four of Jones' videos this week for violating its guidelines.

But it hasn't solved the central problem that led to the rise of Jones and copycat crazies like him. Search for QAnon, and the 10 videos with the largest number of views are all promoting the bullshit theory. The most popular, "Q — the plan to save the world," has 750,000 views at time of writing — and a comments section full of people enthusing about how they've shown it to friends and family members who are "now in the Q movement."

The greater the bullshit in a conspiracy video, it seems, the more likely YouTube will push it into your "up next" queue. Depending on your political leanings, you'll greet them with credulity or outrage — either way, you'll watch.

SEE ALSO: Amazon Prime is filled with Alex Jones conspiracy theory videos it calls 'documentaries'

The same seems to be true on Amazon Prime, which promotes "documentaries" by Jones and that relatively small-time bullshit artist Dinesh D'Souza. Even Spotify hosts Jones' podcast, though it did pull a handful of episodes Wednesday. Reddit, the fourth largest service on the internet by views, pulled the Pizzagate conspiracy subreddit just prior to the 2016 election, but allows QAnon theorists to flourish.

Until now, this has seemed the wisest choice for tech CEOs trying to keep their heads above the fray and appeal to both pro- and anti-Trump forces. Talk airily about free speech, remove a handful of examples of the most egregious, evil nonsense, and hope that the problem goes away without you having to hire more human editors or imposing a system of fact-checking on the content you publish.

But QAnon is proof that the crazy isn't going away. Quite the opposite. It's accelerating. The more Trump unravels in public, the more eager his fans are for a conspiracy theory that explains why they weren't wrong to support him.

The only question is how long the gurus of the internet will continue to provide the ground where these dangerous ideas grow, unchecked, for the sake of their profits.

WATCH: Watch Zuckerberg’s face freeze after a far-right politician credited Facebook for Trump's win and Brexit

#_author:Chris Taylor #_uuid:32808ae9-6a5c-314b-9021-c0ed494e2129 #_category:yct:001000002 #_lmsid:a0Vd000000DTrEpEAL #_revsp:news.mashable

0 notes

newstfionline · 7 years

Text

March of Folly to Crisis on Temple Mount

By Uri Avnery, Antiwar.com, July 29, 2017

My late friend, Nathan Yellin-Mor, the political leader of the LEHI underground, once told me that a certain politician is “not a great thinker and not a small fool.”

I remember that sentence every time I think about Gilad Erdan, our Minister of Public Security. His part in the events of the last few weeks, in which the entire Middle East almost exploded, confirmed this judgment.

On the other hand, Binyamin Netanyahu reminds me of the saying: “A clever person is one who knows how to extricate himself from a trap which a wise person would not have gotten into in the first place.”

About Netanyahu I would have said: “A very clever but not a very wise person.”

There are two ways to look at historic disasters. The one sees them as plots of evil persons, the other as acts of folly.

It is easy to understand the first school. After all, it cannot be possible that our very lives depend on a bunch of fools, who have no idea about anything.

For example, it is easy to believe that Binyamin Netanyahu sent a secret order to a security guard at the Israeli embassy in Amman to kill two Jordanians, so as to enable him (Netanyahu) to negotiate with the King of Jordan to release the guy in return for the removal of the metal detectors from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Pure genius.

The other version is much more prosaic. It says that the people who determine the lot of nations and countries--emperors and kings, statesmen and generals, leftists and rightists--are almost all perfect fools. A frightening idea. But it was always so, and still is. All over the world, and particularly in Israel.

One of my friends said this week: “There is no need to put cameras on the Temple Mount, as is now suggested. We should put the cameras in the cabinet room, because that is the source of the greatest danger to the future of Israel.

Amen.

Barbara Tuchman, the American-Jewish historian, originated the phrase “the March of Folly”. She researched several historic disasters and showed that they were caused by sheer stupidity.

One example: Word War I, with its millions of victims, which was the result of a sequence of incredibly imbecilic acts.

A Serbian fanatic killed an Austrian archduke, whom he accosted by accident, after the planned attempt on his life had failed. The Austrian emperor saw an opportunity to show his prowess and delivered an ultimatum to little Serbia. The Russian Czar mobilized his army to defend his Slavic brothers. The German general staff had a contingency plan that provided that once the Russians started to mobilized their cumbersome army, the German army would cross into France and smash it before the Russians were ready to fight. The British declared war in order to help the French.

Not one of these actors wanted a war, least of all a world war. Each of them contributed just a little piece of folly. Together they started a war which left millions of dead, wounded and disabled. In the end, they all agreed that the only person to blame was the German Kaiser, who was not a little fool either.

The same historian would have been delighted to write about the latest incidents on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Three Palestinian fanatics, citizens of Israel, killed three Border Guard “fighters” there, who happened to be Druze. (The Druze are a separate semi-Muslim sect.)

Somebody, probably within the police, hit on the brilliant idea of installing metal-detectors to prevent such atrocities.

Three minutes’ thought would have sufficed to understand that this was a foolish idea. On a good day, hundreds of thousands of Muslims enter the Temple Mount, in order to pray in and near the al-Aqsa mosque, one of the three most holy places of Islam (after Mecca and Medina). Getting them to pass the detectors would have been like passing an elephant through the eye of a needle.

It would have been easy to phone the Waqf (Muslim trust) officials, who are in charge of the Mount. These would have quashed the idea, because it would have asserted Israeli sovereignty over the holy place. They could also have phoned the king of Jordan, who is formally in charge of the Waqf, who would have put an end to the nonsense.

But the idea reached Erdan, who grasped immediately that such an act would turn him into a hero. Erdan is 46 years old and was educated in a religious seminary. In the army, he did not serve in a combat unit, but in an office. The typical career of a right-wing politician.

Erdan behaved like a child playing with fire near a gasoline container. The metal detectors were put in place without informing the waqf or the king. At the last moment he informed Netanyahu, who was about to go abroad.

Netanyahu has many expensive hobbies, but his most cherished pleasure is to go abroad and meet with the world’s great, in order to prove that he is one of them. He was about to meet with the new president of France and after that four leaders of Eastern Europe, all of them half-democrats and quarter-fascists.

Netanyahu was not in the mood to deal with the nonsense of Erdan, one of his dwarfs, when he was about to meet with the world’s giants. Without quite understanding what he was doing, he agreed to the detectors.

It is not clear when the General Security Service (Shabak) was asked. But this body, which is deeply connected with the Arab reality, warned against it. So did army intelligence. But who are they compared to Erdan and his police commissioner, a kippah-wearing commander, who is no genius either.

The moment the detectors were put in place, events exploded. In the eyes of the Muslims, it looked like an Israeli attempt to change the status quo and become masters of the Temple Mount. The gasoline container caught fire.

The folly of the decision became clear at once. Allah entered the scene. The Muslim worshipers would not pass through the detectors. The multitudes started to pray in the streets.

The severity of the matter soon became evident. The Muslims, both Israeli citizens and subjects in the occupied territories, who a moment before were just a faceless mass, were suddenly revealed as a determined people, ready for a fight. That was a real achievement of Erdan’s. Bravo.

The detectors did not discover any weapons, but they revealed the dimensions of the government’s foolishness. Mass demonstrations took place in Jerusalem, in the Arab townships in Israel, in the occupied territories and in the neighboring countries. On the first weekend, seven persons were killed, hundreds were wounded.

The new idol was called “sovereignty”. The Israeli authorities could not remove the detectors without “giving up sovereignty” (and also “giving in to the terrorists”). The waqf could not give in without sacrificing “sovereignty” over the third holy place of Islam. By the way, not a single government in the world recognizes Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem.

The Muslims are afraid that if the Jews take over the Temple Mount, they will destroy the Dome of the Rock (the beautiful blue and gold-capped structure) and the al-Aqsa mosque, and build the Third Temple in their place. That may sound crazy, but there already exist in Israel fringe groups that are training priests and producing implements for the temple.

According to Barbara Tuchman, leaders can be accused of folly only if at least one wise person had warned them. In our case, such a person was Moshe Dayan, who, immediately after the conquest of the Mount in 1967, ordered the Israeli flag to be removed and forbade the soldiers to enter.

Nobody knew how to get out of the impasse.

Netanyahu did not interrupt his successful tour abroad in order to hurry home and take things into his own hands. Why would he? If he hurried home every time one of his minions committed a foolish act, how could he and Sara’le, his wife, enjoy the world?

And then a divine miracle happened. God Himself entered the fray.

A Jordanian handyman was working in the apartment of an Israeli security guard in the Israeli embassy in Amman. Suddenly he attacked the guard with a screwdriver and slightly wounded him. The guard drew his revolver and shot him dead. For good measure, he also shot and killed the owner of the apartment, a Jordanian physician.

It is not clear whether the incident happened because of a quarrel over money or whether the handyman suddenly decided to become a “shahid” (martyr). Neither is it clear why the guard shot him dead, instead of shooting him in the leg or using the unarmed combat techniques in which he was trained.

The former Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, not a small terrorist himself, once pronounced that no (Arab) terrorist should be allowed to leave the scene of a terror act alive. And indeed, since then hardly one has left alive, whether a girl with scissors or a man swinging a screwdriver. Even a seriously wounded attacker, lying on the ground and bleeding severely, was shot in the head. (The shooter was released from detention this week.)

Anyhow, for Netanyahu and Erdan the Amman incident was a gift from heaven. The Jordanian king agreed to release the security guard without investigation, in return for the removal of the metal detectors in Jerusalem. With a sigh of relief that could be heard throughout the country, Netanyahu agreed. No Israeli could refuse to remove the detectors in return for the saving of one of our gallant boys. It was not a giving up of “sovereignty”, it was the saving of a Jew--an old Jewish commandment.

All the members of the embassy staff were returned to Israel--about an hour’s drive--and Netanyahu feted their “salvation”--though nobody had threatened them.

In the meanwhile another thing happened.

Netanyahu does not fear God or the Arabs. He fears Naftali Bennett.

Bennett is the leader of the “Jewish Home” party, the successor of the National-Religious party, once the most moderate party in the country. Now they are the most extreme right-wing party. It is a small faction, with only eight Knesset members (out of 120), but that is enough to break up the coalition and bring the government down. Netanyahu is mortally afraid of them.

When the fury over the detectors was at its peak, a young Arab entered Halamish settlement and killed three members of a settler family. He was wounded and captured, miraculously left alive and hospitalized.

Just a few hours later, Bennett and his female Minister of Justice demanded that the assailant be executed. There is no death penalty in Israel, but for some reason this penalty was not stricken from the codex of military courts. So Bennett and his beautiful Justice Minister demanded its use.

In all the history of the State of Israel, only two people have ever been executed by legal process. One was Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. The other was an engineer convicted of espionage (wrongly, it later appeared) in the first weeks of the state.

The demand for the death penalty is incredibly stupid. Every Muslim “terrorist” dreams of becoming a “shahid”--one who sacrifices his life for Allah and reaches paradise. His execution would fulfill his dream. And nothing arouses national and international emotion more than an execution.

There is something sick about enthusiasts of the death penalty and the public that supports them. If their demand were accepted--no chance--this would constitute a great victory for the Muslim fanatics. Fortunately, all the Israeli security services object strenuously to the demand.

But in an establishment dominated by folly, even this folly attracts some attention and support.

#Israel #Gilad Erdan #Netanyahu #Temple Mount #metal detectors at Temple Mount

0 notes