#antebellum (2020)

[hug-kiss-marry-kill]

[fanofspooky]

Scream Queen - Jena Malone

Requested by @cultofcreatures

[disloyalroyal]

Imagine a US president being your comfort character

[cryptvokeeper]

the Dixie chicks were also vocally against the invasion of Iraq and George bush in 2003 and faced massive backlash for it

[theunknownintrowert]

why do cute talented but not too famous actors always act in mediocre boring or even obnoxious films 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 i can't do this anymore

i watched "antebellum" (2020) bc of rob aramayo. his part was good but the movie in general doesn't make any sense and it's also a torture to watch, it's made very badly

gimme "lilies not for me" and "i swear" already I BEG OF YOU I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE

and i still haven't seen "nocturnal animals" ffs. heaven help me

why can't every actor just be like andrew garfield fr. the man started off strong from the very beginning of his carreer and every of his project is interesting. some of them are disturbing as well but still interesting. geez. yikes.

anyway i hope "harley and the davidsons" will be good. i'm saving it till the very last. i also need to rewatch "galveston" coz i saw it a few years ago and don't remember rob there at all. but i DO remember the film and the reason i'm hesitating to rewatch it. oh lord please let us see s3 of "the rings of power" as soon as possible

back in 2022 i had a hyperfixation party called "watch andrew garfield's every project" and i'm doing the same with rob coz the whole andrew's filmography is cool (i still haven't seen a couple of things tho), so it was very naive of me to think that i might have get another good filmography of my new favourite actor again. unfortunately things don't work that way every time. and rob is still a good actor, his characters are different and interesting, but the films are not that great.

besides "the rings of power", my fave projects with him so far are "behind her eyes" and "the standoff at sparrow-creek", i love his characters in both of them, and also both of them have cool plot twists

[ladysarai]

2024 Fandom in Review

I have never before had any REASON to do this, but this year was... wow. Just. Get this.

My TOTAL word count since 2006 on AO3 is: 140,392

2024's word count was: 113,325

So until this year, in NEARLY TWENTY YEARS OF FANDOM, I had only posted 27,067 words in 17 stories. And until this year, the last time I posted a fic was in 2020. I posted TEN stories this year. SINCE JUNE, FRIENDS.

I have posted ten stories and 113,325 words in the last six months. I do not even recognize myself.

I should say that I don't recognize US, because @nutterzoi, my beloved bestie and amazing co-writer, wrote FIVE of these with me, for 102,203 of those words.

Fandoms written: Inception. Literally ALL OF THIS is due to Inception and the Inception fandom. Pairings written: Arthur/Eames. Number of words written: 113,325 (how??) Your personal fave: CURRENTLY it is Ice and Mirrors, because it's my newest baby and I wrote it for my @nutterzoi and kept it a secret. c: Also I tried something new and went non-linear! Which was a challenge for me! Total kudos: 769?!! Longest fic: Everything I Never Knew I Always Wanted (56,014) Highest kudos: Antebellum (237) Most hits: Everything I Never Knew I Always Wanted (1,796) Most comments: Everything I Never Knew I Always Wanted (17) Most bookmarks: Everything I Never Knew I Always Wanted (62)

Author’s Favorites: Everything I Never Knew I Always Wanted, There's More of Gravy than of Grave about You, Ice and Mirrors, Proximity and Chance, The Missing Piece

Your proudest accomplishment: Everything I Never Knew I Always Wanted, because it was written for the Inception Big Bang, and we actually finished it. It was one of the first fic ideas that came to me when I discovered the fandom and Zoe and I took it and shaped it into something really full and have an entire AU for it. It came out beautifully, and we finished it on time, and it's the longest fic we've ever managed to finish and post. So I'm very proud of this one.

List of fics completed this year (in order they were finished), including the first line of each fic:

Safe as Houses: By the time they reach the safe house just outside Oslo, Eames is well past exhausted, and he’s not sure how Arthur is even still upright.

Antebellum: He’s not watching Arthur sleep.

Homecoming: Arthur hates Gotham City.

Debriefing: It takes too long for Eames to find a chance to escape Fischer.

Everything I Never Knew I Always Wanted: Arthur is in Belarus when he gets the call about Dom. (@nutterzoi actually wrote this line. The first line I wrote in it was this monstrosity: Eames is undercover, underground and entirely off the grid when it all happens, because he was foolish enough to take a job with an extractor who was having an affair with the daughter of a fucking Columbian cartel drug lord while married to a woman with ties to the bloody Russian mafia.)

The Missing Piece: “What’s wrong with him?”

A Tremendous Thing: As a general rule, Arthur tries to keep his information brokering to certain set hours.

Proximity and Chance: Eames stumbles and the only reason he doesn’t land on the forest floor is that he falls into a tree trunk.

There's More of Gravy than of Grave about You: Eames looks up at the knock at his door, smiling and gesturing for Mal to come in when he sees her there.

Ice and Mirrors: It’s so cold that the air is sucked out of Arthur’s lungs.

....You know, I tend to think of myself as being very wordy and too prone to run-on sentences, but these are all quite short. Who knew!

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Also I totally forgot about this until I saw something on FB but…

Ryan and Blake had a plantation wedding in South Carolina way back in 2012 when it was cool and chic to do that. The old slave cabins were even part of some of their photos. 🤦‍♀️

And remember when Blake tried to launch her own form of Goop? I think she called it Preserve, something uppity like that. Anyway, the lifestyle brand had a newsletter that she called…wait for it: Allure of the Antebellum, in which she essentially romanticized female slave owners. Here’s a good recap from Vox:

🤦‍♀️ 🤦‍♀️

So people immediately started calling Blake out for her casual racism and she shut down Preserve not much longer after citing lack of interest (because her products were ridiculously overpriced…sound familiar?) but an ad analysis brand found that Blake lost her audience because she was so tone-deaf in that newsletter. (And also just last year, in 2023, Blake made comments loaning about how “hurtful press coverage” made her shut down her company. Jeez, it’s like looking in a crystal ball.)

Anyway, she and Ryan were able to sweep this under the rug for a lil bit. Till Ryan made his own tone-deaf comments about Black Panther, something to the effect of “congrats on being the first blockbuster with a Black superhero” and got slammed for it on Twitter with a bunch of people calling him out for having had a plantation wedding.

So then fast forward 2 years. It’s the summer of George Floyd protests and privilege (or the lack thereof) is being reckoned with. In May 2020, they make a $20,000 donation to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, along with a statement saying "We're ashamed that in the past we've allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is.”

But they get dragged for filth about having a plantation wedding and finally, three months later in August, Ryan issued a formal apology saying:“It’s something we’ll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for. It’s impossible to reconcile. What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest. What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy.” He then went on to say they got married again at home some years later because “shame works in weird ways.” 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

I don’t know. Here’s a thought. Maybe if you’re planning a wedding whose photos you’re going to sell to magazines later, maaaaaybe you should’ve done a tour of the place you found on Pinterest to see the warts they don’t talk about on social media before committing. Just a bit of advice for next time, Ryan.

So yeah. This has been, I’m sure, a great few days for Ryan and Blake, with all this dirt coming up.

All because Blake decided to make her movie’s promo tour Barbie 2.0. You know, I saw a thing on social media this afternoon that she and her squad were telling people to have a girl’s night out to see the movie and dress up in florals and bring flowers to share like they’re Taylor Swift friendship bracelets. 🤦‍♀️ 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

And this is on top of Colleen Hoover deciding to make a coloring book companion for her novel. A coloring book, y’all. Thankfully she listened to the backlash and canceled it.

Also, putting a tag on these posts now so if anyone is uninterested, you can block and mute it.

[archliches]

sorry i said no more posting but i lied: anyone else feel fucking crazy about people acting like we've just regressed into some pre-antebellum pre-diluvial hellfire epoch the likes of which we've never seen before. because last i checked 2020 was literally all of 4 years ago. my blog header has been the same longer than Biden was president. not enough time has passed for me to need my ID card reissued, or to get a TB shot, or to wear through a pair of shoes. and cops with riot gear have been beating protestors the whole time. all these trump voters were here last week and six years ago and will be here tomorrow. the US Government commits war crimes by proxy the same way they have every day that ends in y.

what is genuinely new here? what giant switch has been flipped? "the administration will do evil things more/louder/faster" i hate to break it to you but they were going to do evil things anyway. and they have been doing them. constantly. whether by vitriolic action or simpering inaction the material results are the same.

[rmstitanics]

List 5 topics you could talk about for an hour without preparing any material.

With Malice Toward None: a Musical of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. I’ve been developing this musical since summer 2020. With Malice Toward None focuses on exploring the mental health struggles that Lincoln experienced during his presidency. The musical is narrated by Robert Todd Lincoln, who recalls the storyline’s events with complete omniscience while at the 1922 Lincoln Memorial dedication. Relevant themes for the show include mental health, public history, teams that become brotherhoods, compassion, the stages of grief, leadership, and a bunch of other concepts that I’ll probably end up yapping about on here at some point. Orchestrally, the show can be described as “if Les Misérables, Hello Dolly, and Evita decided to have a threesome in my brain”.

all of my original characters. seriously. I have SO MANY OF THEM that I’ve developed over the years, mostly for historical fiction. 😭 the ones that are living rent free in my head the most right now are Anastasia Andrews-Ismay (the human personification of the Titanic), Lieutenant General Ethan Clay, and Dr. Constance Pierpont Morgan. Honorable mention goes to my Star Wars OC Shi’al Valorum 💅 if any of these muses seem familiar to you then we’ve probably either been in a discord server together or you’ve somehow stumbled across one of my roleplay blogs.

the rms titanic. literally EVERYTHING about this ship and her sinking is my Roman Empire. I’m particularly fond of yapping about Captain Smith, Thomas Andrews, Wallace Hartley, William Pirrie, J.P. Morgan, or any of the officers — but if you get me talking about the vilification of Bruce Ismay by the sensationalist yellow press in the aftermath of the sinking, then I WILL NEVER SHUT UP.

star wars. my first exposure to the Star Wars franchise was when I was a sophomore in high school and I got to see a screening of A New Hope where the soundtrack was played by a live orchestra. suffice to say, this altered my brain chemistry and I’ve never been the same since. I’m a Prequels girlie and Jedi apologist to my CORE; my favorite characters are probably Yoda, Dooku, Mace Windu, and Bail Organa.

film and tv soundtracks. …the fact that I once did a TWENTY FIVE MINUTE LONG presentation on the film score for Titanic (1997) should tell you everything that you need to know about this silly fixation of mine.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: ghost hunting, tarot cards, classical music, Taylor Swift, creative liberties taken by Lin Manuel Miranda for Hamilton, historical fiction as a genre in an era where media literacy is on the decline, Antebellum America, the Great Triumvirate (Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Daniel Webster), the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, and public history.

TAGGED BY no one. I stole it from the for you tab LOL

TAGGING: @viellohi, @the-rmstitanic, @man-i-dunno, @allysah, @charmwasjess, @quicksiluers, @aceofthyme, @tipsywench, @macaron-n-cheese, @meerawrites, @elisabeth515, @its-rmstitanic, @mattaytchtaylor, @tommy-288, @chamberlainswifey, AND YOU.

* make a separate post. do not reblog.

[noelcollection]

An American Voice

Since the events of 2020, we have attempted to be more active and reach out to LSU Shreveport campus. This action of outreach is meant to help student, faculty, and campus personnel be aware of a rare and unique resource that is available to them, and any visiting persons to the campus. We have just started our 2024 J.S. Noel Collection Pop-up Exhibits, we aim to highlight a vary small section of the James Smith Noel Collection that might interest various research. This time we focused on one person, Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in June in 1872 after the United States’ Civil War, his parents were former slaves. He was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio; and started writing from a young age. He wrote is first poem at the age of 6 and read it aloud at the age of nine for a local church congregation, “An Easter Ode.” Dunbar was 16 when he published two poems in the Dayton’s newspaper The Herald; “Our Martyred Soldiers” and “On the River” in 1888. A few years later he would write and edit Dayton’s first weekly African-American newspaper, The Tattler. Paul L. Dunbar worked with two brothers that were his high-school acquaintances to print the paper that lasted six weeks. Those brothers were Wilbur and Orville Wright, the fathers of American aviation. Dunbar was the only African-American student at Central High School in Dayton.

Dunbar’s parents had been slaves in Kentucky, following the emancipation, his mother moved to Ohio, and his father escaped before the Civil War ended. Joshua Dunbar went to Massachusetts and volunteered with the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. His parents, Matilda and Joshua, were married on Christmas Eve and Paul L. Dunbar arrived six months later. His parents had a troubled union, they separated after the birth on Paul’s sister; but his father would pass away in August in 1885 when Paul was only 13 years old. His mother played a key role in his education, she hoped her son would become a minister. He was elected president of his high school’s literary society which lead to him to become editor of the school newspaper and debate club member.

Paul Laurence Dunbar finished school in 1891 and took a job as an elevator operator to earn money for college where he hoped to study law. Dunbar had continued to write and soon a collection of poems he wanted to publish. He revisited the Wright brothers, but they no longer had a printing faculty and lead his to the United Brethren Publishing House in 1893. Oak and Ivy was soon published and he busied himself selling copies as he operated the elevator. The book contained two sections, Oak with its traditional verse; and Ivy was written in dialect.

His literary talents were recognized and Attorney Charles A. Thatcher offered to pay for college; however, his interest in law had shift to his writing. Dunbar had been encouraged by the sell of his poetry, and Thatcher helped by arranging for Dunbar to do readings in a nearby city. Psychiatrist Henry A. Tobey also took an interest and assisted in distributing Dunbar’s first book. The two contained to support Dunbar through the publication of his second collection of verse, Major and Minors, in 1896. While he was consistent at publishing, he was a reckless spender resulting in debt. He was a traditional struggling artist as he tried to support himself and his mother.

There was hope in the summer of 1896 when his second book received a positive review in Harper’s Weekly, William Dean Howells brought national attention to his poems; calling them “honest thinking and true feeling” and praising his dialectic poems. There was a growing appreciation for folk culture and black dialect. His popular works were written in the “Negro dialect” that is commonly associated with the antebellum South; though he also wrote in the Midwestern dialect that he grew-up hearing. Dunbar would write in various styles, including conversational English in poetry and novels. He is considered to be the first important African American sonnet writer. His use of the “Black dialect” in writing has been criticized as pan-handling to readers.

Dunbar was a diverse writer, he experimented with poetry, short stories, novels, plays, and a musical. He even ventured beyond the lens of the lives of African Americans and attempted to explore the struggles of a white minister. The Uncalled, Dunbar’s first novel, held similar names and themes of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and was not well favored. It was with his venture into novel writing that he dared to cross the “color line” with his first novel which focused solely on white society. He continued to try to capture white culture but the critics found them lacking.

He moved past novel writing and began to work with two composers, Dunbar wrote the lyrics for the first musical that would be preformed by an all African-American cast on Broadway; In Dahomey. Beyond his writing career, Dunbar was also active the early civil rights movements happening in 1897. He married after a trip to the United Kingdom in 1898, Alice Ruth Moore was also a poet and teacher from New Orleans. She also published a collection of short stories, and they wrote companion poems together. There was a play in 2001 based on their relationship.

Dunbar had taken a traditional job with the Library of Congress in D.C. and with his wife in tow they moved there. However, with his wife’s urging, he left his job to focus on his writings and his public readings. This also allowed him to attend Howard University for a time. However, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1900 and his doctors suggested that drinking whisky would alleviate the symptoms. They also moved to the cold dry mountains of Colorado for his health. This resulted in trouble in Paul and Alice’s marriage, they separated in 1902 but never formally divorced.

Dunbar returned to his hometown of Dayton, Ohio in 1904 to be with his mother, his health continued to decline and depression consumed his mind. Paul Laurence Dunbar died from tuberculosis at age 33 on February 9, 1906 and was interred in Dayton.

Dunbar did not become one of the forgotten poets of literature, his use of dialect in his poetry allowed for his works to remain relevant and important in poetic criticism. We of the James Smith Noel Collection at LSU Shreveport are proud to retain and maintain a small collection of his works and show case their importance.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jake Mackey

Published: Aug 2023

“Live not by lies.” —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A “virtuous lie” is a false, misleading, or highly contestable claim that is promulgated without qualification as flatly true in order to serve a purportedly emancipatory end, despite the fact that evidence of its falsehood, deceptiveness, or contestability is readily available. We live by these lies. They underlie a great many communications in the media, in academic journals, in government, and at elite educational institutions like my college.

For example, a recent announcement for a talk read: “In this lecture, [the guest] asks, what can we do about unkindness? How can [we] grap­ple with this messy, borderless concept, which has influenced so much of our post-1492 era?” The announcement does not so much assert as simply presuppose, and ask readers to accept, that “unkindness” is a distinctive characteristic of the post-Columbian world. Readers are invited to draw the inference that “unkindness” had less “influence” in the world before Europeans arrived in the Americas. Like much of the messaging on elite campuses, this one implies that the West in general and perhaps the United States in particular are uniquely culpable in history’s evils.

Another example: I attended a talk by a prominent author, a journal­ist, at a super-elite private high school. He took pains to paint North American slavery in the most gruesome of colors, as well one might for the edification of young people, who are inevitably ignorant of its true toll. In so doing, however, he told two virtuous lies: first, that slave-farmed cotton drove the expansion of the antebellum U.S. economy and, second, that increases in cotton productivity resulted from increases in the torture of enslaved people.

These two claims, both of which come straight out of the “New History of Capitalism” and, via Matthew Desmond’s contribution, are central to the 1619 Project, have been debunked.1 And yet these lies are virtuous. North American slavery was a moral abyss. One can never overstate its horror or overdo one’s condemnation of it . . . even if one lies. The lies of the “New History of Capitalism” are virtuous, serving purportedly noble goals, such as reparations, as the speaker took care to make explicit in his talk.

A third example: on May 21, 2020, as if to foreshadow the murder of George Floyd that was to come four days later, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor of law at both UCLA and Columbia and coiner of the concept of intersectionality, wrote in the New Republic that anti-black police and vigilante violence represented “modern embodiments of racial terror dating back to . . . the reign of white impunity rooted in slavery and Jim Crow” and opined that such violence was part of a pattern that amounts to “a kind of genocide.”2 In a similar vein, star attorney Ben Crump ti­tled his 2019 book Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People. Chapter two is titled “Police Don’t Shoot White Men in the Back.” Note that this was the tone of the discourse before George Floyd.

What we see in this catastrophizing rhetoric about genocide is the product of the virtuous lie that black people, and black men in particular, are being murdered by racist police with wild abandon. As Derecka Purnell put it in the Guardian: “We know how we die—the police.”3 This perception is the result of a virtuous lie. The lie promotes a distort­ed view of reality. It is a well-meaning distortion but a distortion none­theless, designed to bring attention to the cause, worthy in itself, of police brutality against black people.

The reality, of course, easily accessible to all online, is that while there are indeed disturbing anti-black disparities in the police use of nonlethal force,4 there do not appear to be racial differences in the way police deploy lethal force. In other words, police are, overall, no more disposed to kill a black person than a white person. This basic finding has been discovered and rediscovered again,5 and again,6 and again,7 and again,8 and again,9 and again,10 and again.11 And yet so taboo is this finding, and so sacred is the lie, that people have been fired for noting the former in order to correct the latter. Such was the fate of Zac Krieg­man, a director of data science at the news and information company Thomson Reuters. When he pointed out that Black Lives Matter, whatever the organization’s salutary contributions to our political life, was promoting a virtuous lie,12 he was fired.13

Indeed, Kriegman was not the only casualty of the virtuous lie that lethal police violence specifically targets black people. In 2019, a paper was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that found “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic dispari­ties across shootings.”14 Due to an unusual set of circumstances, includ­ing a congressional hearing about policing, the article quickly became a flashpoint. First, it was officially “corrected,” though its findings were not altered. A few weeks later, George Floyd was murdered. Soon after, as the article began to be cited and contested in the ensuing debate about policing, PNAS asked two independent researchers to look into the article’s data and methods. They found that the article “does not contain fabricated data or serious statistical errors warranting a retraction.” Nevertheless, the article’s authors themselves retracted it, citing as their reason “continued use of our work in the public debate” about policing. PNAS chimed in, too, saying that “partisan political use” of the article warranted retraction.15 The virtuous lie and the political program it serves must be protected at all costs.

Virtuous lies are not confined to high schools, colleges, major media companies, and scholarly journals. Our government and medical estab­lishment increasingly run on virtuous lies as well. For example, in 2019, California passed a bill, AB 241, that requires “implicit bias” training as part of routine continuing education for physicians, nurses, and physi­cian assistants.16 The bill asserts the following: “Implicit bias, meaning the attitudes or internalized stereotypes that affect our perceptions, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner, exists, and often contributes to unequal treatment of people based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, and other characteristics.” And in case you missed the causal chain running from implicit bias through behavior to health outcomes: “Implicit bias contributes to health disparities by affecting the behavior of physicians and surgeons, nurses, physician assistants, and other healing arts licensees.”

AB 241 is wholly based on a string of interconnected virtuous lies about implicit bias. The first virtuous lie is that researchers have settled on a coherent and consistent understanding of what the term “implicit bias” means.17 The second lie is that whatever implicit bias may be, we know that it influences behavior.18 The third falsehood is that we know that disparities in health outcomes are caused by the behavior of implic­itly biased medical personnel.

The truth about implicit bias is easy to state: “[I]t is not clear precisely what is being measured on implicit attitude tests; implicit attitudes do not effectively predict actual discriminatory behavior.”19 Moreover, with respect to disparate racial outcomes, it is important to note that measures that attempt to use implicit bias “to predict behavior find little or no anti-Black discrimination specifically.”20 This is good news! It means that racial health disparities are likely not wholly or even significantly attributable to the implicit bias of medical personnel.

What discrimination there is in medicine—and there surely has been and is discrimination—is based on entirely explicit attitudes supported by pseudoscientific theories. For example, it used to be a common prac­tice among medical laboratories to adjust the renal values of black patients to take into account black people’s supposedly greater muscle mass relative to white people.21 Such adjustments might, however, have caused doctors to overlook kidney failure in black patients. Again, some white physicians are said to believe that black patients are less suscep­tible to pain than white patients because, the theory goes, they have longer nerve endings and thicker skin.22 These are not “implicit biases.” These are wholly conscious false beliefs that can be dispelled by acquaintance with the truth.

Nevertheless, California’s medical personnel now must pay the opportunity cost of submitting to training for implicit biases, training that we know to be useless. In a sense, the mandating of implicit bias training is a fourth virtuous lie, for the fact is, “most interventions to attempt to change implicit attitudes are ineffective.”23 What we have, then, is an entire government-mandated regime of healthcare education built atop the foundational virtuous lie of implicit bias.24 Articles appear regularly to bolster the lie in journals that could once be trusted. If everything you knew about implicit bias in medicine came from the latest article about it in Science,25 for example, you’d know very little indeed.26

We live by lies like implicit bias because we suppose that doing so makes us good people. To question them is to align oneself with all that is oppressive. Our moral credentials are burnished if we condemn European contact with the Americas as the moment at which “unkind­ness” became a force in human affairs. We signal our ethical seriousness with respect to American slavery and continuing black socioeconomic inequality if we applaud rather than quibble when debunked theories are presented as plain facts to high school students. We stand ostentatiously on “the right side of history” if we endorse BLM’s narrative that black people are “intentionally targeted for demise” by police.27 Similarly, medical personnel in California now attest their racial innocence by submitting, ironically enough, to the proposition that their implicit bias is causing them to mistreat racial minorities and to a highly profitable training industry that purports to remedy it.

As in the case of the narrative about police killings, to question any of the claims built upon the virtuous lie of implicit bias is to court personal and professional disaster. Edward Livingston, then a deputy editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), discovered this in early 2021 when he went on a JAMA podcast and made the mistake of suggesting that accusing doctors of racism was perhaps not the best way to resolve inequities in health outcomes and that the solution might instead lie in addressing socioeconomic disparities.28 This marked him for destruction. A petition against JAMA gar­nered nine thousand signatures, the podcast episode was scrubbed from the web,29 an investigation was announced, he was asked to resign his editorship, which he did,30 and he was made the subject of a “restorative justice session” at UCLA medical school, where he teaches.31 Yet the spread of the miasma was not stopped by these expiations. JAMA’s editor-in-chief, Howard Bauchner, who had had nothing to do with the ill-fated podcast episode, fell over himself apologizing for the incident but was investigated by an AMA committee and soon had to resign his editorship.32

The fates of Kriegman, Livingston, and Bauchner, as well as my own reticence to push back on the high school speaker, reveal a central feature of the logic of the virtuous lie: to correct these lies is tantamount to opposing noble goals. Nobody wants to be the one who points out that a virtuous lie is not true. In the case of the high school speaker, any pushback would have come across as a defense of American slavery. In the case of “our post-1492 era,” to ask for evidence would be to mini­mize the enormity of the post-Columbian devastation of Native Ameri­cans and of the transatlantic slave trade, just for starters. Regarding claims of a state-sanctioned genocide of black people, to gesture toward research to the contrary would be to affirm the status quo and to oppose much-needed reforms.

The Epistemology of the Virtuous Lie

Let us distinguish the virtuous lie from two adjacent phenomena—Plato’s “noble lie” and Rob Henderson’s “luxury belief”—and then consider the choice of the term “lie.”

The noble lie. Plato introduces the noble lie in Book 3 of his Republic. Socrates, the lead character in the dialogue, urges that in order to found his proposed ideal city, they would need to craft “one noble lie which may deceive” the city’s three social classes, that is, the ruler class, the soldier class, and the producer class:

“Citizens,” we shall say to them in our tale, “you are brothers, yet god has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron.”

The point of Plato’s noble lie is to reconcile people to inequality and their place in the social hierarchy, in order to create the ideal city, with a place for everyone and everyone in their place. The mechanism of reconciliation is a naturalization of the hierarchy not by analogy or comparison to metals but through the assertion that people of differing stations are quite literally made of different metals. The rulers are gold­en, the soldiers silver, and the workers brass and iron.

Luxury beliefs. Rob Henderson defines luxury beliefs as follows: “Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.”33 People crave status symbols and signs of distinction. Some such signs are expensive clothing or tastes that can only be cultivated by those with surplus time and material resources. Beliefs can function as another status symbol, however. Henderson uses the example of “defund the police,” which is endorsed disproportionately by those of high socioeconomic status, who, as a result of living in places relatively invulnerable to crime, would suffer the least from defunding. This belief is a luxury for them. It has no material impact on them, but it signals their high status to their peers, who are equally safe from crime. Yet this belief is often unaffordable for poorer people, who tend to live in places that make them vulnerable to crime. “Defund” is a luxury beyond their means. If the elites, who dominate the media discourse and exert control in government, get their way and succeed in defunding the police, the costs of the policy will be borne disproportionately by the poor.

Virtuous lies versus noble lies and luxury beliefs. Virtuous lies differ from both Plato’s noble lies and Henderson’s luxury beliefs. Plato’s noble lie promotes acceptance of an inequitable social order, depicting it as natural, inevitable, and just. In contrast, the virtuous lie invariably produces dissatisfaction with the social order, which it depicts as illegitimate or unjust. The noble lie reconciles us to social inequality whereas the virtuous lie is intended to serve a project of dismantling inequality. Finally, the noble lie is ultimately metaphysical. That is, it purports to offer an account of the underlying nature of reality that can be adduced to explain social arrangements. The virtuous lie, in contrast, is concerned with the social arrangements themselves in their historical, sociological, economic, and psychological dimensions, as the examples above show.

Virtuous lies share with luxury beliefs both a commitment to emancipatory political programs and a concern to signal moral goodness. As Henderson’s example of “defund” suggests, however, luxury beliefs are inherently normative. They depict a prescribed course of action. Virtuous lies, in contrast, are purely descriptive. They purport to represent states of affairs as they exist in the world, for example, “police hunt and kill black people,”34 or “Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.”35 Virtuous lies like these provide the “factual” basis for normative luxury beliefs like “defund the police.”

Why call virtuous lies “lies”? A lie is, by definition, a false claim that is asserted despite its known falsity. A lie involves intent to deceive. I would not pretend to know that everyone who utters what I have called a virtuous lie knows that it is false (or at least highly questionable) and intends to deceive. Surely some do, but I imagine that many or even most who repeat virtuous lies do so sincerely, because they know no better.

Why might so many know no better? The term “lie” seems especially fitting here. Unlike the unwitting laypeople who repeat them, those who invent and promulgate these untruths, including activists, media compa­nies, and law professors, are in a good position to know better and have an epistemic obligation to the truth that should give them pause.

There is something gratuitous about virtuous lies, not only when they are uttered cynically by knowledge-economy elites but even when they are uttered unwittingly and sincerely. Respected professors of law who specialize in racial issues and major media companies whose own data scientists have alerted them to the truth have no excuse. But neither do laypeople, really. The information that problematizes or even de­bunks virtuous lies is not kept locked away. Anyone who even halfway cares about what the world was like before 1492, whether slavery was central to the economic surge of the early United States, whether there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering black people, or whether implic­it bias is a well-defined construct that has a clear effect on behavior can find the truth with the click of a mouse, or at least a vigorous debate, that should cause one to back off of strong claims.

Those given to whataboutery will have been champing at the bit to utter one word in response to my theory: Trump. The man is, after all, a liar of world-historic proportions. One of his most vicious lies is that the 2020 election was stolen. Indeed, according to a recent CNN poll, 63 percent of Republicans still believe that Biden “did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency.”36 But Trumpian lies, and right-wing lies more generally, are manifestly not “virtuous” insofar as they are outwardly self-serving, even if the teller believes in the ultimate truth of the cause. They make no pretense of serving an emancipatory project. They serve a project of acquiring political power and they do so nakedly. In a sense, this nakedness is refreshing. After all, virtuous lies, too, are promulgated in pursuit of political power, but under cover of the pretense of fighting it.

Vicious Consequences of Virtuous Lies

Why not just embrace the most emancipatory virtuous lies? After all, they promise to inspire the activism and political will needed to address some of our most urgent problems. The answer is that virtuous lies offer only a false promise. Let me say why.

First, the internet has put any citizen with even a modicum of curiosity and a free Sunday afternoon in a position to adjudicate these claims for herself. We are in an era in which you simply cannot keep information from people anymore, and you cannot lie to them.

Second, the lies will alienate at least as many people as they inspire. The virtuous lie is not a reliable formula for any political change apart from greater polarization. In other words, a commitment to these lies on the part of the media and our knowledge-producing class more broadly means that there will always be a number of Americans who embrace the lies out of ignorance or tribal loyalty. There will also, however, be a growing number of Americans who, as I have already suggested, will figure out that they are being lied to. This will create, or is already creating, a division in which a side consisting of tribally committed virtuous liars faces off against a side consisting of people who resent being lied to. This division is and will be toxic to our politics and hence to our democracy. It will only promote the rise of more Trump-like figures, who feed on and exacerbate the resentment of voters who dislike being lied to.

Let’s take just one of the virtuous lies discussed above, the lie about racist murders by police, and follow it through. Some might say, sure, perhaps it is not quite true that the police go out hunting for black people. But this fib is innocent because it has beneficial effects. The proof is right before us: after all, it has spurred a massive nationwide and even worldwide movement for change. What could be bad about such a lie?

I would answer that the lie is not worth it. The cost of the lie is paid as a psychological toll on all Americans, but on black Americans especially: the needless psychological suffering that results from hearing that you are being “hunted” by agents of the state in your own country. As Musa al-Gharbi put it in these pages, speaking of such narratives more broadly:

For people of color, getting “educated” in America is to be cud­geled relentlessly with messages about how oppressed, exploited, and powerless we are, and how white people need to “get it together” to change this (but probably never will). Narratives like these grew especially pronounced during the post-2011 “Great Awokening.” The internalization of these messages may contribute to the observed ideological gaps in psychic distress among women and people of color.37

The cost of the lie is paid as damage to our perceptions of black and white race relations. Gallup has polled Americans on this almost every year since 2001.38 In 2001, 70 percent of black Americans said race relations were good. In 2021, not even half as many, 33 percent, could make that affirmation. The drop-off began in earnest in 2013, right around when use of terms like “racism” began to rise spectacularly in the media,39 and the newly formed Black Lives Matter began its messaging campaign.

The cost of the lie is not only ill-conceived campaigns to “defund,”40 but also damage to (already strained) trust between communities and police, especially black communities, whose disproportionate victimization by criminals shows they need policing, good policing, the most.41 The cost of the lie is black Americans’ sense of alienation within their own country. The cost of the lie is the creation of preconditions for destructive rioting the next time a cop is caught on camera killing a black person,42 whether under legally justifiable circumstances (such as to save lives) or not.

There is a final cost to be reckoned with. Police killings do not ultimately constitute a distinctly “black” issue, and a narrative that casts it as such has inherent limitations. First, the narrative’s framing is divi­sive: there are “black” issues and there are “white” issues, but there are no “American” issues that affect us all. This framing requires activists to leverage enough guilt or empathy among Americans who are not black to enact a “black” agenda of reform. Moreover, the “hunting black people” narrative is impotent to make common cause with those seeking justice for unjustified police killings of people of other races. (Almost half of the people killed by police are white.43) This impotence undermines the possibility of a broad-based, nonpartisan movement for reform.

For example, when police (both, as it happens, Latino) in Fresno, California, killed an unarmed white teenager, Dylan Noble, in 2016, and the killing was caught on video,44 Noble’s friends, family, and sympathizers initiated months of protests. But when protesters displayed “White Lives Matter” placards, perhaps inspired by Black Lives Matter, they were predictably decried as “racist.”45 What if there had been a movement for police reform not based on identity politics with which Dylan Noble’s family and supporters could have made common cause? Later, a young black man, a rapper, Justice Medina, organized a protest in Fresno for all the lives lost to police violence, including that of Dylan Noble. He named Dylan Noble in one of his songs, and he sought to distance himself from BLM: “I’m out here for the human race,” he said.46

Medina is precisely right: police reform is not well addressed through identity politics, in which one group’s grievances are pitted against another group’s perceived sins, biases, and privileges. The issue of police violence falls instead within the broader purview of American identity, which emphasizes our mutual bond and shared interests as citizens. Writing of the killing of a white woman, Hannah Fizer, by a police officer in June 2020, Adam Rothman and Barbara Fields point out that “a successful national political movement must appeal to the self-interest of white Americans” and advise that “those seeking genuine democracy must fight like hell to convince white Americans that what is good for black people is also good for them.” Only in this way will we find “the basis for a successful political coalition rooted in the real conditions of American life.”47

The upshot is that virtuous lies, whether about the police or about any other matter of concern, will get us nowhere. Only if the media and knowledge-producing classes eschew such lies and hew closer to the truth can we hope to depolarize our discourse, restore faith in our information-generating institutions, and bring together a broad swath of the country in solidarity to confront the challenges that face all of us as American citizens.

-

[ Sources: see Notes. ]

[mermaidinthecity]

Antebellum Rooftop Cinematic Experience at The Grove in Los Angeles, California - September 14, 2020

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this week (#173):

3 by young Chinese prodigy Gu Xiaogang:

🍿 Even though Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains is his first (and only) feature so far, it feels so mature, as if an old master put it out after a long and successful career.

It's an slow epic saga (2.5 long hours) of a large family struggling during four seasons through life's ups and down in this provincial city. It's a metaphor for a classic scroll painting from the 14 century, and apparently only the first chapter in an upcoming trilogy. A tremendous, slow-moving achievement told in magnificent style, and half a dozen transcendental set pieces. 10/10 - Best experience of the week!

I was steeped in that Chinese mentality and culture, that of practicality, resourcefulness, tradition and hope, for nearly a decade, and I miss it. 💯 score on Rotten Tomatoes.

🍿 The Sail of Cinema (2020), a beautiful mood piece which can be used as a perfect introduction to his work. Bonus points for use of 'Moonlight Sonata'. 10/10.

🍿 As Spring Comes Along (2024), a short art poem about a couple who hasn't seen each other for a long time.

🍿

Menashe (2017) is one of the few films in Yiddish that I've seen (Not too many of them, eh?). A24 indie production from 2017 about a Hasidic widower, struggling to keep his 10-year-old son with him, within the restrictive ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn.

I dislike all religions equally (Well, some more than others...) but this is an uncritically and authentic beautiful piece of film making. Especially since the 'hero' is an unlikely ordinary man and he's not going to change. 8/10.

🍿

The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry, my first film from Jordan. An enigmatic, nearly wordless story of a young woman who travels to the desolate outskirts of Aqaba in search of Ismail who had disappeared without explanation. 6/10.

🍿

10 more selections from the US National Film Registry, all seen for the first time:

🍿 Newark Athlete is the earliest film in the collection; a 12 second silent short from 1891, produced at The Edison Studio.

[ Also, The "Phonautograms" recordings by Edouard-Leon Stott de Martinville, the earliest known sound recording from 1853!]

🍿 The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, a 1897 documentary of a championship prizefight boxing match, which took place in Nevada. At over 100 minutes, it was the world's first (and longest) feature film. But only 19 minutes survived today.

🍿 The classic The Great Train Robbery (1903), my first film by Edwin S. Porter, director of over 250 silent films. A "sensationalized Headliner", which included a separate close-up shot of the outlaw leader shooting directly at the camera. My r/todayilearned post: After retiring from the movies, the actor who played the lead robber, (Photo Above) became a milkman. 9/10.

🍿 First viewing of Gone with the wind was not what I expected! I knew it was a bloated confederacy 'Lost Cause' fanfiction and a revisionist myth-making, glorifying slavery and the fantasy of the antebellum South. But I also thought it was the 'greatest love story of all time', and that was harder to get. Scarlett O'Hara grew to become a strong woman with fierce survival skills, but she was so flawed; Vain, selfish, conniving and unscrupulous. Her lover and third husband, Clark Gable, was no hero either. Their tragic on-again off-again love story was a 4 hour long soap opera. The gorgeous cinematography and massive production were breath-taking though. 4/10.

🍿 All the King's Men, a fictionalized and badly-dramatized story about the corruption of power. A veiled story about populist Louisiana governor Huey Long, how he rose from humble ideological beginnings to become a power-hungry despot. 4/10.

My first film by Robert Rossen, who was blacklisted for being a communist sympathizer, but who later "named" 57 of his friends to Joseph McCarthy's HUAC. I need to watch 'The Hustler'!

🍿 "There are plenty of warm rolls in the bakery; stop pressing your nose against the window!"

Pillow Talk, a frothy romantic comedy with Rock Hudson and Doris Day. A charming story about two neighbors who have to share a party-line, a phone technology that is now all but forgotten. Like Ted Gioia, I love Doris Day's jazz singing, so in spite of the out-dated genre politics, I found this light-hearted movie lovely and enjoyable.

🍿 Saul Bass was world-famous for his astounding graphic designs and inventive title sequences. But he also directed a few films, one of which, Why Man Creates, won the 1968 Oscar for Short Documentary. It's a whimsical plaything, with Bass's geometrical genius and good-nature foolery on display. Strong whiff of Terry Gilliam wildness and style. George Lucas was an un-credited second unit cameramen on the film. 🍿 Quasi at the Quackadero, a home-made 'Yellow submarine' inspired psychedelic short, about 2 ducks and a robot at an amusement park. Made by a 'Sesame Street' animator, it's like Max Fleischer on acid. M'eh. [*Female Director*].

🍿 Before Stonewell, an informative 1994 documentary about how gay people existed before the Stonewall riots. Fascinating, even if you knew much of it. Oppression, hatred, uprising. [*Female Director*].

🍿 Scratch and Crow was a symbolic, non-narrative word-less art-short by an indie artist, Helen Hill, who was murdered at 36 in New Orleans. [*Female Director*].

🍿

4 Documentaries:

🍿 City of Gold, my first atmospheric documentary by Canadian Colin Low. A pleasant nostalgic trip back to the small Yukon town of Dawson City, which for one summer in 1895 was the center of the Klondike Gold Rush. Its slow panning style, overlapped with soothing narration, inspired Ken Burns to develop his famous 'Ken Burns Effect'. Winner of the 1957 Cannes Festival, and nominated for an Oscar. 9/10.

🍿 A day in Tokyo was created in 1968 by the Japan National Tourism Organization to promote tourism in the rebuilt city. It captured the time, 23 years after it's destruction, when it was ready to take its place as the primer metropolis of the world. It tells of its history from the Edo period until then, (but it doesn't mention the war).

🍿 "He articulated what the rest of us wanted to say, but couldn't say..."

When Martin Scorsese kicks the bucket, sometime in the near future, his obituaries will lead with 'Taxi Driver' and 'Raging Bull'. But besides his 27 features, his World Cinema Project, acting in commercials, producing, etc, he also directed 17 documentaries, including 5 excellent music docs, all about "our" sounds and times, and "our" heroes.

No direction home: Bob Dylan (2005) is centered on a lengthy interview Scorsese did with the 'bard' about his early years, leading up to his 1966 bike accident. Re-Watch ♻️. Here's my 2003 "Grow-a-brain" Bob Dylan link-blog.

🍿 Related: Joan Baez: I am a noise is her recent biography, embarking on her career-ending tour at 79, while reflecting back to a full life of peaks and traumas. I loved her music deeply all my life (her, as well as her beautiful sister Mimi!), and she always meant so much to me.

And of course, I will always remember the time on June 11, 1984, when I met her walking down the street, and she kissed me on the mouth... [*Female Director*].

🍿

"Would you like to come in for a cup of tea - or perhaps something stronger?..."

Return to Glennascaul (1951) is a spooky Irish ghost story, framed and narrated by Orson Welles, as he picks up a stranded motorist on a dark and (not) stormy night on his way to Dublin...

🍿

Re-watch: Laurel and Hardy classic The Music Box, (1932). These two numbskulls never learn. 9/10. ♻️

🍿

2 by Argentinian Mario Soffici:

🍿 Italian-born Soffici directed some of the highest rated Argentinian films of the classic era.

His Rosaura at 10 O'Clock (1958) is a strange crime drama with a story that changes so much, that it's hard to know what is true and what fiction. It takes place at a boarding house, where a shy painter starts getting perfumed love letters, and the nosy owner who meddles in his affairs. It turn out to be nearly like 'Rashomon', where everybody has their own story. There's one violent scene where a pimp beats up a woman brutally and unexpectedly.

🍿 For many decades, Prisoners of the Land (1939) was considered as the "Greatest Argentinian movie". It's a tragic revenge story about peasants fighting a cruel plantation owner in the jungles of 1915, a drunk doctor and his beautiful daughter. Very John Huston and South American Herzog-like in sweaty, feudal nightmares of whip lashing and booze.

🍿

Another film from Argentina, Viruta, is a high-production home movie made by a woman named Otilia Shifres. Her grandparents emigrated to Buenos Aires from Grodno, a small town in Poland, at the turn of the 20th century. In the film she searches for and constructs a family tree of the relatives that were left behind, going all the way to 1770. It's impressively slick for an amateur feature-length project.

The only reason I came across this personal documentary is because my own father, Eli, (who died in 2016 in Israel at the age of 90) is one of the relatives whom she discovers, and my two sisters even make an appearance in the film (at 56:00) telling her about our side of the family! [*Female Director*].

🍿

"Why don't you study a blank piece of paper for a while, and improve your mind?..."

Ready, willing and able (1937), a second-rate Broadway-style song-and dance musical, trying to emulate the finesse of better talents (like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers). But this un-charismatic movie is the one which introduced the Johnny Mercer song 'Too Marvelous for Words', and it ended with The fantastic Typewriter Dance, an over-the-top Busby Berkeley style number.

🍿

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013), my first film with the cringey wanker character of Alan Partridge. It opens with the Philip Glass Koyaanisqatsi theme, which was nice, but the pompous, misogynistic radio host asshole didn't resonate with me. 3/10.

🍿

Throw-back to the Adora Art project:  

Adora as Bob Dylan and with Suze Rotolo.

Adora with my sister, Dafna.

🍿  

(My complete movie list is here)

[newhistorybooks]

"Police brutality has been a defining controversy of the modern age, brought into focus most readily by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the mass protests that occurred as a result in 2020. However, the problem of police brutality has been consistent throughout American history. This volume traces its history back to Antebellum slavery, through the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the two world wars and the twentieth century, to the present day. This handbook is designed to create a generally holistic picture of the phenomenon of police brutality in the United States in all of its major lived forms."

[bambamramfan]

Year in Review

This year I wrote two LARPs, went on more than a few road trips, started Lexapro, went to one con, and otherwise did not accomplish a lot that can be measured, except for watching a truly absurd number of movies. Fortunately Letterboxd makes it a lot easier to record that.

By my count, I watched 469 movies this year. This does not count rewatches. When this counts television, it is only for an entire series counting as one movie. Many of the movies - basically anything 1.5 stars or less - I did not finish because they weren’t worth my time.

Full movie list here, because it's too large to fit into a Tumblr post.

I would say none of the movies I watched this year were truly great, S-tier movies, compared to last year which had two (EEAAO, and Vengeance.) However, I found this year had a good variety of movies at the A-tier below that (some of which I still need to see.)

But this makes choosing “the best” difficult. Instead I will hand out awards:

The “Hold a Gun to my Head and Threaten Cronenberg Style Violence on Me to Pick 2023’s Best” Award goes to Infinity Pool, by Brendan Cronenberg.

The Studio Ghibli Award for “I Meant to See This but my Theater Stopped Showing It” Award goes to How Do You Live AKA the Boy and the Heron.

The “I Can’t Believe Three Contenders for Best Movie of the Year Were All Released on the Same Day” award goes to Oppenheimer, Barbie, and They Cloned Tyrone.

The “Dogtooth” Award for Yorgos Lanthimos Sure Does Like Fucked Up Sexuality goes to Poor Things. Also a recipient of the “Cruella award for Damn Emma Stone is Fine” Award.

The Don Glover Award for “Black Made Movie that Manages to Hugely Offend the Identity-Left” goes to Antebellum.

The Most French Award goes to Holy Motors.

The First And Only Time Directing Awards are split. The “I Really Want to Be Nicholas Refn and Everyone Hated It” Award goes to Lost River by Ryan Gosling. The “If You All Liked It So Much Why Hasn’t Anyone Hired Me to Make Another Movie” Award goes to Emma. 2020 by Autumn de Wilde. (Though Don Jon by JGL is a runner up.)

The Alice Krige “Borg Queen, Controlling Mother of a Cult Leader, Vengeful Hollywood Witch - What Can’t She do?” Award goes to She Will. 

The Brit Marling “Creates a Cult Following Also a Cult” Award goes to Broadcast Signal Intrusion, by Jacob Gentry.

And finally, the Zack Snyder “Everyone Hates This but C’mon It is Clearly Amazing Camp” Award goes to Saltburn, by Emerald Fenell.

[gravalicious]

“The most troubling aspect of Afropessimism, however, may be its treatment of slavery. Despite the fact that Wilderson knows this is one of the most fiercely contested components of his worldview, he treats it as if it were a minor point, relegating an important statement of his position to a footnote: “It is worth reiterating that, through the lens of Afropessimism, slavery is, essentially, a relational dynamic, rather than a historical era or an ensemble of empirical practices (like whips and chains).” I submit that there is something deeply troubling about a casual parenthetical that proposes to evacuate the significance of the entire material history of antebellum slavery. It’s also logically bizarre, since it seems constitutive of the entire project that slavery have been real at least at some point in order for the relation to obtain in the first place. But these issues are brushed aside, since this erasure is necessary for the theory to do what Wilderson wants it to do; slavery must be transformed into a portable and fundamentally psychological relation untethered from historical memory and founded purely on the basis of melanin and the antagonism that an all-encompassing and all-powerful “whiteness” poses to it.”

Jesse McCarthy - On Afropessimism (2020) [LA Review of Books]