#but i can see how culture and capitalism DO have profound effects on one another

[kitkatcadillac]

i have not gotten all the way through the hbomberguy video yet or anything im just a little more than halfway through but since i dont know how to talk about anything else ill say this is only a microdetail brought to mind by his mentioning of some of somertons plagiarism and using being gay(as a marginalized group) as a selling point and defense

but that it is so fucking twisted to claim to be a queer rights activist and supporter and then steal a trans asians article, written from and about the pov of a trans asian person, to remove so much of the personal trans experience and input so often "lgbtq"

like not to tinfoil hat on you but i think theres this thing thats been going on for years thats had its ups! and its had its downs. but that is ultimately, that "lgbtq" has been pushed into being marketable but in this really fucked up way wherein its like... if its gay, great! if its lgbtq, fantastic! but you get into LITERALLY!!!! any other labels that are considered "othering" (see: less marketable) it gets dicey.

like. look me in the eyes. i know, and you know, that he did that in part because he was trying to hide, well, plagiarism. but he isnt the only one that sees unique queer identities and their experiences and knows if he just packages it up pretty... if he makes himself sound smart, and if he blankets it over to "lgbtq" its more marketable.

listen. im not saying you should not ever love lgbtq or queer as blanket terms. but by referring to every singularly, uniquely queer experience as lgbtq, as queer, when it defines itself as something more specific, it ends up having a smear effect of erasure.

i think unfortunately the nature of marketability is competition, and it just sucks that that makes stupid football teams out of everything. if theres a market for it theyre gonna start a fight about it. dems vs reps, queers vs straights, gays vs trans. its very easy to want to turn everything into a fight, into support this and ditch this, instead of actually taking the time to create like... learning opportunities. a big point in all of this shouldnt be like oh well fuck these people in particular, it should be to be careful about the information youre consuming and to do some research yourself too.

theres also a good point that im seeing so many people that are surprised and shocked about people they respected and trusted turning out to be this way and never realizing so many messed up things about the sort of messages those people have been putting out. i mean like, okay, weve all seen the you are not immune to propaganda garfield, but seriously. the transphobic rhetoric was right there. the misogyny was right there. the BLATANT misinformation about gay history and its relationship with corporate was RIGHT THERE, in a nicely packaged form with clear and agreeable speaking, nice video and audio editing, and (obviously) quotable, sharable information.

👏 be! 👏 fucking! 👏 careful! 👏 about letting someones grab on marketability trick you into making an already bleak situation worse. it is so fucking easy to get caught up in us-and-them rhetoric when that is so much the worst thing to do im begging you. do not discover your mistakes and respond to them by doubling down when you recognize that it is a mistake.

[faint-petrichor]

it's also a basic element of the human experience. if you call yourself an artist (in the sense of carrying a profound significance, not when it is literally your occupation) you may as well be saying "yeah, I jerk it" with a shit eating grin. seeing some rocks on the ground and arranging them in a nice way is art. but because under capitalism all things are reduced to their commodity value, a schism develops between art the human experience and the social construction of art, and therefore the construction of 'the artist', with all its romanticizing, as a sort of branding to elevate the commodity value of their labor. in order to more effectively sell their labor they must construct the 'non-artist' to elevate themselves above. it's basically the classic move of saying a bunch of flowery stuff while actually being a total asshole.

this is important to understand because no matter who you are, you have probably learned to sort yourself into one of these categories, even though they are utterly immaterial, and wound up feeling somewhat alienated from creative expression as a consequence. and additionally, because it might be limiting what you think making art can be and to what end it is valuable. maybe you already do make art and didn't realize it because the silly little things you do aren't conventionally recognized as art.

art doesn't have to have commodity or therapeutic value (I mention this one because it's another common understanding). it often exists to play a role in social reproduction, in strengthening social bonds and crafting collective identities. just through like, you know, making art to show friends or as a group activity. like, have you ever gotten fingerpaints and a huge sheet of paper to go wild on with your friends? It can be incredible.

I'm mentioning all this both to illuminate an aspect of capitalist alienation but also to point out how much our recreation and social connections are often mediated by consumption when they don't need to be limited to that. art as a group actualizing experience beats into the dirt art as a primarily consumptive hobby.

it's not everything, but at least for me it's a little bit freeing to do activities sometimes not confined to the consumer paradigm. it reminds me of what can be. on top of you know like, having made a little thing I get to feel pleased about or having something to show my friends and bond over. it's a small way of taking agency back over my life, over the cultural reproduction within it away from corporate media and the like.

the talk about art as something divine and mystical runs completely counter to reality: anyone can do it if they wanted to. its not a super power, its a skill. like handling a knife or power tools. anyone can do it.

[kendrixtermina]

Interesting details about the 3 houses cast (From dialogue in ‘Heroes’)

The first name Ferdinand’s father is ‘Ludwig’ and he is apparently an insufferable braggart who also said his own name alot

Before moving into her uncle’s castle, Anette spent her early childhood in a small, humble house in the Capital. Gilbert & his wife couldn’t afford domestic servants so she did the chores herself.

Mercedes’ father died in a “conflict in the empire”. Before he died, he taught her mom the secret recipe that Mercedes mentions in the Constance and Dedue supports. A bit of her fatalistic passive attitude early on comes from feeling that she couldn’t change much about her life while she and her mom were being mistreated at the Bartels’ home

Claude has a lot of fun with the mushroom poison.

Despite their student’s glowing opinions, Byleth isn’t actually all that confident about their professor-ing, which is probably not unexpected given how the job was suddenly dumped in their lap.

They’re somewhat uncertain about whether they have real connections with people beyond just the professional level. I guess that’s another parallel to Edelgard.

Someone observed that they look “more like a mercenary and less like a teacher” while they’re fighting.

Apparently their students described them as “a bit eccentric at times”

They seem to like/appreciate it when other ppl can pick up what they’re really feeling/thinking. (I really hope Jeralt knew that) 

 It’s considered rare for Claude and Dimitri to agree on anything

The sad thing is that the trio is noted to be quite effective when they cooperated. I guess we also saw this in Cindered Shadows

There is a hilarious sequence where Byleth is like, “This may call for drastic measures” and everyone starts looking at Claude and correctly assuming that he’s probably already cooking up some sort of crazy plan

 Ferdinand apparently likes the “refined way” that Edelgard swings her axe

Petra considers hunting one of the most important skills you can have, both because you acquire many crucial materials (like leather etc) and because it also hones a lot of skills. Bridgid is very green & plentiful, so most people do some degree of hunting and even the rulers are expected to know it. Someone remarks that it’s probably a culture that places emphasis on self-sufficiency. That’s an interesting way to think about it, especially if you think about Petra’s attitudes, how she approaches even this cobjectively crappy political hostage situation as an opportunity and has a very problem-solvy approach to things. I’d noted that, but I’d never connected it with the hunting thing; I thought it was just Petra being awesome, which it basically still is, but it adds a cool layer to consider how she got this way and how this may be her way to stay close to her homeland’s values even in exile.

“In Brigid, there is a phrase we say. A gray sky will be pierced by the sun. A raging tide will be leading to land. Beyond failure, success is waiting.” 

Hubert seemed to know that he ten elites fought against the godess even pre timeskip. 

He also sees Edelgard as one of the few ppl who really paid attention to him when he was younger -  I guess this goes with this understated complex he has about his looks & personality.

Edelgard likes to just lie around and relax, but only when she’s all alone. At least pre timeskip or pre holy-tomb scene she didn’t think like she could really be herself in the company of others. She does seem to put some deliberate thought into what image to project/embody

Dimitri seems to think that having a crest (and high status) makes it his duty to protect & take care of the people – I guess that’s another way in which he’s completely ruled by obligation. He gets characteristically intense about this. “My life was never mine to begin with, I guess I haven’t the right to throw it away”

the glorious “nice weather” exchange has already been posted. Edelgard (and Lysithea) are the first to clarify that they shouldn’t bring their grudges into this situation since they’re not in Fodlan atm.

Edelgard and Claude are beyond shook when AzureMoon!Dimitri actually agrees. Chill Dimitri is apparently not something they ever imagined. He is obviously the most changed in “his” route, with the other two its no less profound but a lot more subtle. 

Lysithea has an interest in botany (now I really want her to talk plants with Bernie )

Hilda: “I haven’t heard about there being a future me here. She’s probably busy relaxing on a beach or something…”

Mercie and Anette immediately reassured each other that their future selves are probably cute af. Aww

 This is probably unsurprising, but future!Dimitri is still very tormented by his less than stellar actions during and right after the timeskip

Small Dimitri is heartbreakingly surprised to hear that there’s any version of him that’s alive and on the throne, though he hides it because his friends (or at least Annie and Mercie) did not have such doubt

Edelgard decides from the get-go not to concern herself with the future version of her. I get the sense that she really wants to avoid the scenario where she allows her resolve about what she feels absolutely must be done to falter after meeting a regretful future version of herself; I really like this, I know some haters will probably spin this into something about her not caring about the consequences of her actions but it really circles back to how she’s philosophically all about self-determination & can’t let something like a future possibility determine what she does… nor can she back off a sacrifice meant for the greater good just because it might turn out poorly for her (which it does, just not in the CF timeline that this particular future version is from)

 Cut to the future versions who have contrasting ideas about what to do about their tiny selves. Claude thinks they should not risk causing any time paradoxa. Dimitri ponders the thought of warning his younger self (and past!Byleth). Edelgard doesn’t think it would make any difference at all, especially since they would each be showing their tiny self the timeline where they win.

Though I guess one think to consider here is probably that Dimitri would be the most surprised by a sucessful older version of himself

Claude eventuallly agrees, since they were each doing what they thought was best (Claude, too, is sort of uniquely situated to grasp this as the one who can part on good terms with each of the other two in their respective timelines) – though he’s hoping that the time crash will maybe send their younger selves in a different direction (in which you see that this is distinctly VW!Claude & thus a bit more hopeful)

 the others actually agree & it ends with a fun semi-friendly sparring match

 Edelgard wants to show past!Byleth how awesome she’s going to be in the future

it is very in line with my interpretation of her character that she would describe her own disproportional strenght as “hideous”

Claude’s lines are solid gold in this. Like he’s just being aggressive irrevent to bridge the obvious awkwardness “Go on, we’re old dining hall palls!”

This gets Lysithea wondering what might’ve happened if they’d actually graduated as planned. I mean I kind of respect that they DIDNT put in a golden ending but I guess if you want one you can imagine that they got one after returning from Askr I guess.

let’s just hope that “the timeline none of them experienced” doesn’t just turn out to be silver snow lol

[arcticdementor]

Woke anti-racism certainly appears to have taken on the trappings of religion. White people have been seen washing the feet of black people and asking for forgiveness, a ritual firmly in line with the Christian tradition. And terms like ‘white guilt’ and ‘white privilege’ are treated much as Original Sin used to be – things for which humanity must forever atone.

One person who has long been exploring the religious fervour of today’s increasingly moralistic politics is the essayist and author Joseph Bottum. Indeed, his 2014 book, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, seems almost prophetic. There he argued that the demise of traditional Protestantism in the US has led liberals to transfer their religious beliefs, habits and passions into the political realm, moralising it in the process. Our age of ‘post-Protestantism’, he concludes, has eroded the boundary between the religious and the political, infusing politics with a religious mindset and discourse.

spiked’s US correspondent, Sean Collins, caught up with Bottum, at his home in the Black Hills of South Dakota, to find out what he makes of the contemporary political moment, woke anti-racism and the phenomenon of cancel culture.

Sean Collins: As you note in An Anxious Age, the collapse of Mainline Protestantism (that is, the older, non-evangelical Protestant denominations) in the US is striking. In 1965, more than 50 per cent of Americans belonged to Protestant congregations. Now it is less than 10 per cent. Why, in your view, is this collapse so significant for broader American society and politics?

Joseph Bottum: In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville identified the central current of America as a current of morals and manners. However much rival sects feuded against one another, there was this central current. And it is the Mainline Protestant churches which provided America with those morals and manners. (‘Mainline’ is a term that was created later, but we can apply it retrospectively.)

The Mainline churches helped define American culture in several ways. First of all, the churches were mostly apolitical, which has had a profound effect on American culture. For instance, there’s never been a great American political novel. The average French streetwalker in a novel by Zola knows more about politics than the heroes of the greatest American novels. What is it to be an American? At the highest artistic level, it is to be concerned about the cosmos and the self. Politics is incidental to Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn. And that’s because Mainline Protestantism rendered politics secondary to what it deems is most important — namely, salvation and the self.

…

Collins: Right, so we now live in, as you put it, a post-Protestant US. But, if I understand your thesis correctly, you argue that the beliefs, mindsets and manners that animated earlier Protestantism have not been abandoned, but instead have been projected on to the political realm. A key transition you cite is the Social Gospel movement, which becomes more prominent during the 20th century. Then closer to our time Christianity gets stripped out altogether, and you are just left with social activism. Sin remains a preoccupation, but it has been redefined as a social sin, like bigotry and racism. Have I got that right?

Bottum: Yes. There’s an extraordinary point here. Walter Rauschenbusch [an American theologian and a key figure in the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries] lists six species of social sin. If you go through the list, they are exactly what radicals are objecting to now: bigotry, the ignorance of the uneducated, power, corruption, militarism and oppression. It lines up so perfectly with today’s agitation.

What we’re seeing now is an amplification of what I wrote about five years ago: an intense spiritual hunger that has no outlet. There’s no way to see people kneeling, or singing ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’, or swaying while they hold up candles, and avoid acknowledging that it’s driven by a spiritual desire. I perceived this when I wrote about Occupy Wall Street, and it’s become even more like this. It is an intense spiritual hunger that is manifesting itself more violently. Because to the post-Protestants, the world is an outrage and we are all sinners.

…

Similarly, there is ostracising and shunning. Cancel culture is just the latest and most virulent form of the religious notion of shunning, in which people are chased into further appreciation of their guiltiness. Two years ago, the Nation published a poem about an older panhandler giving advice to a younger one, about how to get people to give you money. The Twittermob went after that poem, on the grounds that the poet was a white man from Minnesota. And the magazine apologised, and the poet apologised for writing the poem. That’s what the shunning is looking for. If you profane, if you’re shunned outside the Temple, the only way back is to become fanatic, to convince people that you understand how guilty you are. And even then I’m not sure there’s any way back.

At the very least, one of the effects of the shunning is to frighten everyone into silence. Its purpose is to get people fired, to put people beyond the pale, to get them out of our sight. This is for a couple reasons. First, it is to ensure we are not infected by this sinfulness. And second, it is a public declaration of our power. It says, look how powerful we are, that we can do this to people.

…

We live in just the strangest times. But understanding the historical roots of these radicals as post-Protestant, and understanding the spiritual hunger which has no outlet for them, helps us to explain it. This is what happens when you have a Mainline outlook that is broken loose from all of its prior constraints. These ideas used to be corralled in the churches. If you let an idea like Original Sin – that’s a dangerous and powerful idea – loose from its corral, it goes to a place where it can exist, which is politics. One of the great dangers is that religious ideas are in politics. The line that I use is that, if you believe that your ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken, but are evil, you have ceased to do politics and begun to do religion.

…

Suppose you analyse this class in terms of its members’ answer to the question, ‘How do you know that you are saved?’. In the past, people would say ‘because I believe in Christ’ and the rest of it. But the modern version of this question is, ‘How do you know you are a good person? And how can you have assurance of your goodness?’. Which is Max Weber’s question in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – and Weber says this anxiety about salvation actually has economic and political consequences. Let’s apply that Weberian analysis and ask what are the consequences of being worried about your salvation, phrased in today’s terms of being worried about being a good person. If it’s all about social ills, then you know you are a good person if you are opposed to those social ills, if you are anti-racist, even if you don’t do anything. You are convinced of your own salvation. You are one of the Elect if you adopt this stance of being opposed to the great sins.

Now, younger people are not going to put up with the hypocrisy of knowing you are a good person but not actually doing anything. And they are starting to be violent. Members of the Elect are much more economically and socially insecure than the elite, but they have the same education, they’ve got the same social markers. In some ways, we are seeing an intra-class warfare between the Elect and the elite.

…

Collins: Yes, today’s leaders in cultural institutions and universities seem to lack backbone. They have espoused this politically correct rhetoric for years, but it’s like they didn’t truly believe it or act on it, and now the younger generation are calling them on it.

Bottum: Right, the younger generation are not going to put up with the hypocrisy. That’s part of it. The second part is, when they see the old power figures tremble, they start thinking, why aren’t we in the positions of power? Then class elements, elitism, start to creep back in. But the original impulse came from seeing leaders like college presidents being hypocrites. They were just mouthing what they thought was just the latest line of the old liberal consensus. What they didn’t fully intuit is that the old liberal consensus was completely gone, and the new line had become something very radical. If today you were to put forward any of the shibboleths of high liberalism of the 1950s, you would be denounced as a terrible conservative.

…

Collins: I’ve also noticed a tendency to avoid detailed analysis of economic and social conditions, or concrete policy reforms. Instead, the issue of race after George Floyd is a simple moral denunciation, or a vague reference to ‘systemic racism’. You hear ‘Why do I have to keep explaining this?’, ‘I’m so exhausted’, and so on, as if the issue was beyond debate.

Bottum: Right. But also it’s defining the Church. It’s a way of saying you either have this feeling or you don’t. And if you don’t, you’re evil, and if you do, you’re good. Christian theology, and Christian spiritual practice, has dealt with this for millennia. This is the distinction Calvin would make between justification and sanctification. The idea here is that we no longer need to argue it, because any argument of it is engaging with people beyond the pale. They are outside the Church, they are the profane. They are just wrong. What are they wrong about? They are wrong in the central feeling of moral goodness. This is the attempt to get others to shut up.

We are living in the age of the ad hominem. The fundamental way to answer a claim is to say something about the person who said it. Whether it’s a tu quoque, or an abusive ad hominem, or poisoning the well – the ad hominem is a whole genus of different species of fallacy. How do we know others are wrong? They are wrong because some bad people have said it too. Bari Weiss [the former New York Times op-ed editor] must be wrong [about the illiberal environment at the Times], because Ted Cruz forwarded her tweet. That’s a wonderful ad hominem – guilt by association. It’s not about the content of what is said, it’s about the people who said it.

Why should Trader Joe’s give in, and say how stupid and guilty it was for not realising the error of its ways? Because otherwise its managers and staff are not good people. It doesn’t matter if there is any objective truth to it. The only thing that matters is where you stand. Are you one of us, or are you one of them?

If I can show that you are one of them, then your only response is to apologise abjectly, even though you didn’t know. You didn’t know that touching your middle finger to your thumb is making a white power symbol. It doesn’t matter whether you knew that. A Hispanic driver for a power company in California got fired because his hand was hanging out the window, with his finger touching his thumb. A women photographed it and declared it was the white power symbol, and the power company fired him. It’s really astonishing.

…

It’s not enough to be one of the good guys, to be on the right side. You have to be bulletproof against any charge. You have to be constantly abject. You have to agree with your condemners, or you’re evil. The [French philosopher] Merleau-Ponty wrote about this in terms of the Moscow showtrials – about the psychological process by which people can come to confess their own guilt about something that, at some level, they know they are not guilty of. So the psychological aspect is interesting. But this mode of permanent abject contrition is best understood in its religious modes. This is what you get when the Church of Christ becomes the Church without Christ, and these old Protestant concerns enter the public square, enter politics, divorced from and freed from their old constraints. To paraphrase GK Chesterton, the world is full of Christian ideas gone mad.

Collins: Why does the Elect have to go as far as to ‘cancel’? You could imagine a movement promulgating certain moral ideas in society, and hoping to win converts. Such a movement wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to purge others, who didn’t agree with them, from their workplaces and colleges. What drives the Elect to go to those lengths?

Bottum: Look, you wouldn’t want a Satan worshipper turning up at your Church on a Sunday. You would drive them out. But of course these people don’t live in churches any more. This is what happens when those old ideas break loose and become modes of behaviour in politics. They don’t want these people in their church, but their church is politics. Their congregation is Twitter. They want these people not to exist, they want them banished. There are the power reasons for this: look at how powerful I am; I am a 17-year-old kid, and I had a major US corporation kow-towing to me. But there’s also this kind of religious sense that we can’t let sinners into the church. That’s what shunning was for, to get people to confess their sins, to realise their sinfulness. That’s what we’re doing now – it’s just that the church, the locus of faith, is no longer your congregation on Sunday. It’s public life.

This demand that politics somehow solve everything is an apocalyptic, religious sense of politics. For hundreds of years American jurisprudence has worried about the impact of religion on politics. What’s really extraordinary is that it is finally happening – politics is becoming religionised – but it’s being done in the name of anti-religion.

[aion-rsa]

Cobra Kai and the Legacy of The Karate Kid

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Since Netflix picked up Cobra Kai it’s been sweeping up viewership like Johnny on Daniel-san’s leg. When The Karate Kid debuted in 1984, it was a smash hit, delivering returns of $100 million on a modest budget of $8 million. It also earned Best Supporting Actor nominations for the late Pat Morita (Mr Miyagi) from both the Oscars and the Golden Globes. Miyagi was a crowning achievement for Morita whose career spanned 175 roles beginning in 1964. 

The Karate Kid was embraced by pop culture, redefining the martial arts genre. It had a profound effect on the practice of martial arts in the United States. The Karate Kid stands alongside Enter the Dragon and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon as a film that reshaped the way Americans viewed martial arts. Martial arts made an amazing leap, one of the largest in U.S. history, boosting the whole economy. Everyone who ran a Dojo during the mid-80s remembers what a windfall it was. 

The Karate Kid spawned three sequels, a cartoon series, a reboot, as well as several homages outside of the franchise’s canon that starred original cast members. Just like Bill and Ted Face the Music and Star Trek: Picard, the new series updates a time-honored franchise as Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) grapple with the drag of growing old along with a coming of age soap opera of the next generation. Easter eggs sell it to its loyal fanbase with nods of nostalgia while new teen characters share the spotlight to lure fresh viewership. The original cast keeps it genuine, abetted with cameos from other peripheral characters. Daniel and Johnny were career defining roles for Macchio and Zabka, something they’ve long embraced with many non-canon cameos since their last official appearance in these roles in 1989.

The Mr. Miyagi Tetralogy

The success of The Karate Kid guaranteed a sequel, so the bulk of the cast reassembled for The Karate Kid Part II two years later. It picks up immediately following the first film, in the parking lot immediately after the All-Valley Karate Tournament where Kreese (Martin Kove) punishes Johnny for losing, causing Johnny and his squad to leave Cobra Kai. However, Daniel and Johnny’s love interest, Ali (Elizabeth Shue), did not return. Ali is written out with a dismissive comment by Daniel about how she dumped him for a football player. Fans are clamoring for Shue to appear in Cobra Kai and the show references Ali repeatedly. Towards the end of Season 1, Daniel shows Johnny Ali’s Facebook revealing that she’s married and a doctor. The Karate Kid Part II, quickly narrows down to Daniel and Miyagi as they journey to Okinawa, where Daniel finds a new love interest in Kumiko (Tamlyn Tomita). 

The Karate Kid Part II did better than the original, earning $115 million worldwide. While it didn’t garner any major award nominations, it was well received. Since it was set in Japan, it hasn’t been referenced much in Cobra Kai beyond when Johnny’s son Robby (Tanner Buchanan) discovers Daniel’s den-den daiko (rotating hand drum). As an interesting side note, the sequel subtly revealed Mr. Miyagi’s given name in Japanese. When Chozen (Yuji Okumoto) picks Miyagi up, his name is written in Japanese as Nariyoshi Miyagi, which is only one character different than Morita’s actual Japanese given name, Noriyuki (Nari and Nori are alternate spellings of the same character, which means ‘completed’). 

The Karate Kid Part III also picks up where Part II left off, but it drops the ball. It delivered a disappointing $38 million box office and was the final pairing of Daniel and Miyagi.  Nevertheless, it is referenced by Cobra Kai almost as much as the first film. Daniel and Miyagi return from Okinawa to find the LaRusso’s residence at South Seas complex being dismantled. The implication is that it is to be demolished, and yet it appears in “Different but the Same”, the 9th episode of Cobra Kai (why the new owners kept that painfully 80s South Seas logo is incomprehensible, but it made for a good Easter egg). Daniel’s mom, Lucille (Randee Heller) appears in Part III, who has cameos in both seasons of Cobra Kai, but she is quickly written out, sent away to take care of Daniel’s Uncle Louie (Joseph V. Perry). It’s a short scene to set up Daniel living with Miyagi, but Cobra Kai picks up on it with Louie LaRusso Jr. (Bret Ernst), a pivotal character in Season 1. 

Kreese is supplanted by his fellow Vietnam veteran, Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) and Karate’s Bad Boy Mike Barnes (Sean Kanen). Both Silver and Kanan had authentic martial arts backgrounds so this installment had the best fight choreography. Ironically, The Karate Kid has had mediocre choreography throughout the series. After the initial film, Zabka continued to train under Pat Johnson, a genuine master of the Korean martial art of Tang Soo Do. Johnson was the choreographer and played the referee for the first three films. Fans complain that in Cobra Kai, Macchio still lacks convincing martial skills (he’s had 36 years to train). However, the Season 2 finale fight in Cobra Kai redeems the franchise with a brilliantly choreographed long take scene in the center of a massive brawl.

Part III flops on several levels. The over-the-top villainy of Silver was too caricatured, complete with the hackneyed ‘bwahahaha’. Furthermore, without Shue or Tomita, there’s no romance. Robin Lively played the new girl, Jessica Andrews, but she was only 16 at the time, and while Macchio’s babyface still allowed him to play a convincing teen, he was 27 so romance with a minor wasn’t an option. Nevertheless, Cobra Kai references Miyagi and Daniel’s Bonsai tree business from Part III with a chiding comment from Daniel’s wife Amanda (Courtney Henggeler) and the special Miyagi-do Kata that Daniel learns in the threequel is the one recited repeatedly throughout the series. 

The Next Karate Kid abandoned Daniel altogether to follow Miyagi’s new pupil, Julie Pierce (Hilary Swank). Despite being a total flop critically and financially, it’s Swank’s breakout role, and her budding talent shines, although not enough to redeem the film. What’s more, Miyagi’s given name is inexplicably changed to Keisuke. The new production crew apparently could not read Japanese.

The Saturday Morning Cartoon

Before Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, kids had to wait until Saturday morning to see cartoons. The Karate Kid was a 1989 Saturday morning cartoon series on NBC. It only ran for one season – thirteen 20+ minute long episodes – with none of the original actors voicing their characters. Daniel (Joey Dedio) and Miyagi (Robert Ho) were joined by a new character, kimono-wearing Taki Tamurai (Janice Kawaye), in a series-long quest to recover a small pagoda with magical powers. Their search took them around the world – London, Paris, Hong Kong, San Francisco, New York and more – a different location for each episode. The plots were all the same: the threesome almost recovers the pagoda, only to have it slip out of their hands again until next week’s installment. Again inexplicably, Mr. Miyagi’s given name was changed to Yakuga. In Cobra Kai, it is restored to Nariyoshi on his gravestone, meaning someone finally read the Japanese in Part II. 

The Karate Kid animated series was available on several streaming networks like Netflix, Hulu and iTunes, but all those services have abandoned it. It’s a weak show. The cheap cell animation is poor quality and horribly dated. Episodes can still be found on the web, but it’s not worth the search. It’s clearly outside of canon because there’s no magic in any of the live-action movies unless you count Mr. Miyagi’s magic healing hands, parodied in the first season finale of Cobra Kai. 

That Other Karate Kid

In 2010, a The Karate Kid remake starring Jaden Smith as Dre, the new Daniel, and Jackie Chan as Mr. Han, the new Mr. Miyagi. The project was met with intense internet backlash from the start. Even Macchio jumped on the critic bandwagon at first. In an MTV interview, as reported by Digital Spy, Macchio said “It feels pretty good that some people are pretty angry that they’re trying to remake The Karate Kid. It feels good that the public feels you don’t touch certain things. Sometimes you go back to that, and probably shouldn’t.” It’s ironic in the wake of Cobra Kai, but he changed his tune soon after Will Smith called him personally to ask him to advise Jaden. “He called and said, ‘Would you mind getting on the phone with my son?’ I felt like Yoda to young Skywalker.” Macchio confessed that his initial negative reaction was said too “candidly” and endorsed the project.  As the film’s premiere approached, more reporters reached out to Macchio to get his take. The Sun asked him if he might make a cameo to which Macchio replied (again ironically), “I have less of a desire to be in it or do a cameo because no one wants to see Daniel LaRusso in his forties. It would be like robbing the Karate Kid fans of their youth for me to be in it so I think it’s best to keep it separate.” Given the success of Cobra Kai, fans clearly want to see Daniel-san pushing sixty.

Another major issue was that all Asians are not alike. Karate is a Japanese martial art. Jackie Chan is Chinese and propounds Kung Fu. In Hollywood, the whole point of a reboot is to capitalize on the brand name, but naysayers complained that Karate was the wrong title for the reboot. Jackie wouldn’t be a sensei. He’d be a sifu. The title became so contentious that even the Wall Street Journal chimed in. 

Hollywood made a quick save for the title. When Dre’s mother Sherry (Taraji P. Henson) asks Dre about his ‘Karate,’ he replies, “It’s not Karate, mom.” The scene was strategically included in a Cinemark ‘First Look.’ And the title was changed for the Chinese market to Gongfu Meng (Kung Fu Dream). The Karate Kid was never released in theatrically China just like some 80+ Jackie Chan films were never released theatrically in the west so the brand name had no value. The Chinese version also added a finale fight where Han fights Li (Yu Rongguang), this version’s Kreese.

Jaden’s The Karate Kid is a complete reimagining of the story, like the Kelvin timeline in Star Trek or the Flashpoint timeline in DC comics. With a budget of $40 million, it earned $359 million worldwide making it the most financially successful installment yet. Naturally, talk of a sequel has been discussed, however last year, Jackie Chan said that any statements claiming that he would participate The Karate Kid 2 or Rush Hour 4 were “false”.

Beyond the Karate Kid Canon

Over the years, Macchio, Zabka and Kove have appeared in homages and parodies of the franchise. In 2003, Macchio and Zabka played themselves on How I Met Your Mother.  The episode ‘The Bro Mitzvah’ was about Barney’s (Neil Patrick Harris) bachelor party where he wanted to have the hero of The Karate Kid attend, so his friends arrange for Macchio to join the festivities. However, in Barney’s perspective, Johnny is the real hero. This ‘Barney wax on’ viewpoint is held by many fans, akin to the ‘Jar Jar Binks is a Sith Lord’ theory of Star Wars. In the Cobra Kai episode ‘Molting’ Johnny explains his take on the events in The Karate Kid. Technically speaking, Daniel’s winning crane kick should’ve disqualified him because strikes to the face are illegal. Daniel steals Ali and provokes Johnny, drenching him in the bathroom while he’s trying to roll a joint. 

For something completely different, an unauthorized musical spoof of The Karate Kid played at the off-Broadway Teatro la Tea in 2004. It’s Karate, Kid! The Musical featured Daniel-san, Johnny, Mr. Miyagi and Ali but Cobra Kai was replaced with the Bitchkicks. The show featured songs like “Damn You, Daniel-san”, “Wax On! Wax Off!”, and “The Way of Fisting”. 

In 2007, Macchio and Zabka reprised their iconic roles for the music video ‘Sweep the Leg’ by No More Kings. In the video, Zabka is a has-been living in a trailer watching The Karate Kid every day with his Cobra Kai buddies. Spliced with clips from the film, all the original Cobra Kai squad appears, Kreese, Jimmy (Tony O’Dell), Bobby (Ron Thomas) and Tommy (Rob Garrison). Even the South Seas condos are shown. Zabka wrote and directed the video. 

In another 2010 parody, Macchio plays himself in Funny or Die’s ‘Wax On, F*ck Off with Ralph Macchio’. Haunted by being typecast as squeaky-clean Daniel, Macchio struggles to sully his image to get more work in Hollywood. When Macchio tries to pick up a prostitute, she tells him to come back when he’s 18, to which he retorts ‘I’m 48!’ Molly Ringwald appears claiming that Macchio wanted to change the name of the Brat Pack to the Smile Bunch. There’s a reference to Jaden’s reboot too. 

Kove dove into replaying Kreese in 2011 with Comedy Central’s Tosh.0. In a segment called Web Redemption, host Daniel Tosh mocks a viral video by Josh Plotkin where he tries to break a board over his head. Kove and Ron Thomas appear in Cobra Kai gis in a breaking competition with a scoreboard that echoes the All-Valley Karate Tournament. And just last year, Kove donned Cobra Kai colors again for a QuickBooks ad in which he blames his aggressive teaching style on stress caused by not being able to manage his school’s finances. He drops comments like “Support the leg” and “More mercy” and goes so far to change the name of Cobra Kai to Koala Kai.

Cobra Kai is exactly where it needs to be on Netflix. The series is beautifully written and performed, coupling drama and comedy with bumps of action, all within bite-sized 20+ minute episodes. As its fan base continues to expand, so does anticipation for Season 3. And please, bring back Ali. Can’t Shue can take a break from The Boys? The final scene of Season 2 is such a tease, and after all that Johnny has been through in this series, he deserves a little mercy. 

Season 1 and 2 of Cobra Kai are now available on Netflix. Season 3 premieres on Netflix in 2021.

The post Cobra Kai and the Legacy of The Karate Kid appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3idbNrS

[workersolidarity]

One thing that should unite the left more than ever is that we're all being fucked over capitalism in general. Especially if you live in a culture that is built on commodification and capitalism, and to break through the lies that we have told and try to do good by leftism is noble and it betters humanity the more leftism rises.

I would hope. But just like the early 1930's, were at a junction of history. Neoliberal Capitalism could easily degrade into more Nationalism and the continued rise of Fascism.

Or trend could go towards the Socialist Left.

The part that worries me is how the Ruling Class has such a brutally tight grip on Western culture. They've been so effective in their propaganda over the years that it's now acceptable to read Mein Kampf and try to "understand Hitler".

You walk into many public libraries and book stores and easily find a copy of Mein Kampf or an awfully generous biography of Goebbels.

But good luck trying to find a copy of Foundations of Leninism or Dialectical and Historical Materialism anywhere besides the internet.

Somehow the Bourgeoisie have convinced the public that, yeah, Fascism is bad, but it's okay to be a little Fascist-curious.

But Stalin, oh my Lord! Now that guy is completely and utterly unacceptable to read or try understanding! He's "worse than Hitler" and "killed more people in the Soviet Union than Hitler did in the Holocaust" are refrains I hear all the time.

Nevermind that the entire Anti-Stalin/Anti-Communism paradigm is based on out-and-out lies. Nevermind that a little Independent research debunks any and all claims of Stalin's supposed crimes. Doesn't matter!

Even among other Socialists you'll hear the same tired lies, most of which can be traced to Trotsky (somehow he's an acceptable Socialist but not Stalin), or from Krushchev's "Secret Speech", and some of the lies come directly out of fictional literature from the Cold War Era! Yet, even so-called "Leftists", "Socialists", and "Anarchists" who question anything their Government says about any other topic, disbelieve the Corporate Media on topics of War, but swallow without question these baseless lies about Stalin and the Soviet Union.

This is such a remarkable stranglehold on a narrative of Revisionist History, I'm stunned whenever someone actually questions it.

Consider some other well worn lies that people swallow hook-line-and-sinker.

A. America won the war against Fascism

Nevermind the fact that the US didn't even enter the European Front until the tide had turned. Ask any Westerner and they'll tell you it was the US that defeated the Nazis and Fascism, and liberated the Concentration camps.

B. America entered World War II to defend "Freedom" (whatever that means), to Liberate the Jews, to defeat Fascism and Nazism, and to defend "Western Values" (another meaningless refrain repeated without thought everywhere in the Western world).

Again, completely ignoring the fact that the US didn't even enter the War until the Red Army was marching on Berlin. Nevermind, that the US was only interested in preventing a Europe united under Socialism. Nevermind that any Holocaust survivor remembers like it was yesterday exactly who Liberated them from the Concentration camps; and Earth to America! It wasn't us!

These are just the most obvious examples of how the Bourgeois of the Western Imperialist Powers have a complete stranglehold on the Narratives that even most Leftists still believe.

You're allowed to question anything in America. As long as that anything isn't the Historical Revisionism of the Second World War or the Anti-Stalin Paradigm.

So for me, the question becomes, how exactly do we educate the Proletariat in Western Nations if we can't even get them to believe that Stalin didn't kill 60 million Soviet Citizens (out of 100 million total) and the Soviet Union wasn't an Totalitarian dictatorship that was essentially the same as Nazi Germany?

I mean, how do you build Socialism when the Bourgeoisie have convinced the world that the only example of Socialism to have ever existed wasn't actually Socialist but was instead akin to Fascism?

And now even the word "Socialism" is being debased by Liberals and Social Democrats to mean something completely different from what it is? If prominent Politicians and Political figures are allowed to go around claiming Sweden is a Socialist country, then how do you ever convince people that this not only isn't true, but real Socialism looks like the Boogieman of Nation States the Soviet Union?

How do we reclaim Socialism from the Capitalists and Liberals? Better yet, how can we reclaim Socialism with scaring off Working Class when they have disinformation coming, not only from their enemies, but also from the Petty-Bourgois Political figures who've convinced them they're on their side?

We're essentially battling multiple disinformation campaigns coming from all sides. How can we blame the Working Class for being confused by all this?

And this is how the Bourgeois Class of today operates. They allow Liberals to reclaim Socialism without challenging it all that much because they see how this will only add to the confusion and divisions of the Working Class; essentially assuring enough confusion to keep a genuine Revolutionary Proletariat from forming.

Which leads me back to the beginning. Things can go either way right now. But with Liberals being so distrusted and no adding to the difficulties facing Communists in building a genuinely Revolutionary Working Class, I see Workers facing a much easier path towards Fascism than I do Socialism.

I don't know what to do other than educate people as best I can, involve myself in local Socialist Organizations as I already do, and just hope that something profound changes in the radicalization process for Workers.

We need to build a broad infrastructure on the Socialist Left that can bring diverse viewpoints that share a unified vision for Revolution together. This has to include a network of Revolutionary Socialist media productions such as podcasts, radio shows, websites and news sources, as well as a network of Socialist Organizations and Parties; basically some type of connecting Infrastructure that as it grows and matures, could eventually lead to a unified Vanguard Party that will hopefully be able by then to be dominated by Marxist-Leninists while slowly shedding it's more Right Wing and Opportunist wings of the Party.

That's the only way I can visualize an actual path towards Revolution. Any goal less than that is doomed to fail. That should be clear to everyone after Venezuela and Bolivia this year.

So yeah, again I've gone way way over the top in response to a comment, but this is the most important issue facing the Socialist Movement. I have some hope, I do. Just not a whole hell of a lot.

[scifigeneration]

A 'coup des gens' is underway – and we're increasingly living under the regime of the algorithm

by Simon Gottschalk

It’s almost impossible for users to detect which information is being collected, who’s collecting it and what they do with it. Sarawut sriphakdee/Shutterstock.com

I recently attended a large meeting of faculty to discuss graduate students’ evaluation, recruitment and retention.

“Let the data drive your goals,” one of the speakers repeated, mantra-like – with genuine enthusiasm and conviction – and I couldn’t help but wince.

The slogan struck me as symptomatic of what social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff has dubbed a “coup des gens.”

If a coup d’état denotes the illegal replacement of one political system by another, a coup des gens – “gens” meaning “people” in French – is characterized by the forced replacement of human beings by abstract information systems.

In my recent book, “The Terminal Self,” I show how we are increasingly coerced to interact with computer technology in all aspects of our daily lives. Among many other effects, this coerced interaction forces us to sync our cognitive functions to the logic of the computer and feed it endless streams of data, rendering us ripe for constant surveillance and exploitation.

Managing the flows of ‘the new oil’

Data is now used by companies to help them evaluate, rank, select or dismiss potential customers. It can be used to measure medical risk, credit-worthiness, psychological health, job performance, spending habits, food preferences, moods, dating preferences and political views.

As European Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva put it, “personal data is the new oil of the internet and the new currency of the digital world.”

The high value placed on data has ushered in what French sociologist Paul Virilio calls an “informational fundamentalism” – an ideology that exalts digital information as the ultimate good and supreme power to which all must surrender their will, time and common sense.

In order to function efficiently, most institutions must intelligently manage these swelling flows of data. However, the technological capacity to manage vast quantities of data doesn’t necessarily lead to intelligent analysis.

On the contrary, notes media studies scholar Mark Andrejevic, “We have become intelligence analysts sorting through more data than we can absorb.” Individuals simply don’t have the brainpower to sift through the constantly growing flows of information they need to process and mine to make intelligent decisions.

An increasing part of our day-to-day lives requires not just processing the “information bombs” – the emails, messages, breaking news and announcements – that randomly detonate in our daily lives. It also demands that we constantly input information into the system.

Feed the beast. adriano77/Shutterstock.com

Think of the growing number of knowledge workers and professionals in different sectors of the economy who essentially have become data entry assistants. Their jobs primarily consist of feeding always more information to an ever-hungrier digital organism, for reasons that seem obvious but are rarely questioned.

We see it in the granular-level data many public school teachers are now expected to enter about every aspect of their students’ learning. We see it in the endless, and often flawed, surveys professionals of all stripes are asked to complete about their daily tasks, progress and “satisfaction.”

This mind-numbing data entry work deskills knowledge workers, alienates them and betrays a tragic mismanagement of human capital.

The digital Trojan horse

If the duty to enter information is openly enforced at work, it’s covertly induced at home. Whenever we’re leisurely browsing the internet, consulting websites, clicking on links or sharing our pictures, politics and preferences, we’re also – unwillingly and unwittingly – producing gigantic volumes of information. Invisible others then greedily harvest, store, organize and sell this data for the purposes of social control, persuasion and behavior modification.

“On Google, you are what you click. On Facebook, you are what you share,” writes Upworthy CEO Eli Pariser.

This extraction of digital information can influence real human lives. In his extensive analysis of corporate surveillance in everyday life, digital culture scholar Wolfe Christl warns that data-mining companies are wielding personal data to automatically make decisions about people that may worsen existing inequalities.

For example, Christl shows how health analytics companies like GNS Healthcare gather massive amounts of data from genomics, medical records, lab data and mobile health devices to provide information about users to health insurance companies. These companies can then significantly manipulate the costs of health insurance for different categories of applicants.

Similarly, he points out that data collected about someone’s emotional stability, happiness and likelihood of having a baby can influence whether they’re hired, retained or promoted.

With algorithms increasingly displacing humans in this kind of decision making, citizens’ fates are increasingly determined by information systems. As Zuboff explains, it’s a trend that reduces people to sources of data extraction and targets for exploitation.

The most baffling aspect of this situation is not the surveillance capacities themselves, as daunting as they are. It’s our tacit submission to a regime of constant and remote surveillance that – except in spy movies or paranoid delusions – would have been considered preposterous a few decades ago.

More worrisome, in a 2017 interview on “60 Minutes,” former Google marketing manager Tristan Harris explained the insidious motives of data harvesting: Tech companies aren’t just trying to find information about users to sell it to companies that want to push merchandise. They’re competing to create the best “brain-hacking” programs that collect the most accurate information about what makes users tick emotionally and what seizes their attention.

The objective is to manipulate users’ emotional reactions – remotely and at the neural level. In the wrong hands, this sort of manipulation can be used not just to sell people stuff, but to also influence their political decisions. According to political scientist Collin Bennett, this project is well underway.

Access denied

To add insult to injury, it’s almost impossible for users to detect which information about them is being collected, who’s collecting it and what they do with it.

Every swipe on a smartphone screen and every message that’s typed is recorded as “signals” that help gain insight into a user’s personality, interests, mood and financial health. The credit scores of a user’s Facebook friends can even be used to calculate their own credit-worthiness. Because of the complete anonymity of the agencies that collect and use this data, it’s unrealistic to hope that one could correct – and avert the consequences of – the errors that inevitably emerge in someone’s “profile.”

It’s distressing to feel unilaterally monitored, powerless and uninformed. According to one study, those who realize that their privacy has been exposed without their consent experience “emotional, psychoanalytic and corporeal responses which are sometimes stultifyingly profound.”

But this surveillance is also a form of exploitation.

After all, we’re the ones producing this information. We’re the ones increasingly sacrificing our time to read website guidelines, watch instructional videos, fill out digital forms, forward information, sustain digital social networks and generate valuable information about ourselves for others to use.

Shouldn’t those who generate this value have more control over the conditions of its production, sale, dissemination and use? And if this right cannot be granted due to inextricable technological difficulties, shouldn’t the same level of transparency be imposed on those who collect, sell and use it?

The regime of the algorithm

The growing dependence on information, the normalization of surveillance and the increasing use of information systems to make important decisions about citizens’ lives amounts to a “coup des gens.”

However, democracy requires privacy, and freedom entails protection from invasion, whether it’s physical or digital. In his famous treatise on the Fourth Amendment, Supreme Court Justice Brandeis argued that “the right to be let alone” is “the right most valued by civilized men” and is “fundamental to a free and civil society.”

Adult citizens of a democratic society should have the right to decide which sort of information is being gathered about them, who can use that information and how they can use it. They should have the right to verify that this information is accurate and, when it isn’t, to correct it. They should have the right – and the responsibility – to question this bulimic addiction for data and its ultimate purpose.

As Dave Eggers writes in his novel “The Circle,” “The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavor is catastrophic to true understanding.”

About The Author:

Simon Gottschalk is a Professor of Sociology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[the-invisible-self]

I copied the text of this article below for anyone who is unable to read it behind the content blocker:

Summary: In the second season of Netflix’s series The OA, its creators question the relentless technological progress of our time, but the result is somewhat scattered.

The OA

Article by Sanja Grozdanic

In early 2017, soon after the release of the first season of The OA, its co-creator Brit Marling spoke at length with her friend Malcolm Gladwell about the series for Interview magazine. During the conversation, Gladwell asked Marling why she is so drawn to fantasy and speculative science fiction, both as a writer and an actor. These genres, she explained, best reflect her view of the world and the deep mythology she naturally invests in everyday moments and objects.

“I think I need to believe in that version of reality because I get very scared when I don’t,” she said. “I feel very alone when I don’t feel that.”

Social isolation, technological domination and the profound discontent of a generation are all explored by The OA, a series that positions itself against the exploitation demanded by capitalism and is strung together by a storyline dense with time travel. Understandably, it has divided audiences. It has been called “absolutely insane”, “batshit” and “brilliant” – and yet has also gained a cult following and brought into focus a desire for the construction of new narratives and mythologies.

As Marling told Gladwell, “The OA is our attempt at writing and making a new human language through movement, this mythology we’re inventing.”

The series began its first season with Prairie Johnson (Marling), a woman missing for seven years who is rescued following an ostensible suicide attempt. Prairie was once blind – now she can see. She will not reveal to her family how she gained her sight, nor tell them what happened to her. She denies she was trying to kill herself, insisting she was only trying to “go back”. To where is the central mystery of the show’s first season, tagged as Part I, slowly revealed over eight episodes.

As the first season unfurled itself, I understood The OA to be an extended metaphor for post-traumatic stress disorder. In another life, in another dimension, Prairie is held captive by the show’s central villain, Dr Hap (Jason Isaacs), a scientist obsessed with near-death experiences and the power they bestow on survivors. Prairie, I believed, constructed her captivity as a trauma response – a hyper-fantasy of good versus evil, which allowed her to regain a sense of control.

The show’s perplexing narrative structure echoed a survivor’s frenzied mental state, a reading of existential crisis that I liked. When mental illness is feminised, it is often depicted as tepid and lifeless. But The OA gave weight to Prairie’s somatic condition, depicting it not so much as a defect but as a lifeline; a way to give form to what she cannot say. “Madness as a defense against terror. Madness as a defense against grief”, as Susan Sontag described it. One cannot live in such a world, but its genesis is all too human.

Part II of The OA proved my reading entirely incorrect.

In this season, the series relocates from North Carolina to San Francisco, California. It feels a fitting evolution in many ways – from the margins to the centre of technocapitalism.

In San Francisco, Prairie awakens in the body of Nina Azarova – a Russian heiress who lives in a penthouse, dresses in Gucci and is engaged to a tech billionaire named Pierre Ruskin. She has no memory of this life of material excess, but no one from her former life – of Prairie, the blind orphan – remembers her. Concerned for her welfare, a psychologist sends Nina to a facility on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for a 14-day psychiatric hold.

At the same time, elsewhere in the city, private investigator Karim Washington (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is hired by an elderly Vietnamese woman searching for her missing granddaughter, Michelle. Michelle disappeared after winning thousands of dollars playing an app, which seems to alienate and consume its users, while tempting them with the possibility of vast riches.

Following Karim’s attempts to trace the app back to its creator, the series starts to question the ethics underlying the startling decadence and terminal decline of the Silicon Valley social order. Karim discusses the app with a tech worker who suggests crowd-sourcing is nothing more than a euphemism for free labour. “What, erase the boundary between work and play, hide your sweatshop in the cloud?” he asks her. “Exactly,” she replies.

Who will protect those most vulnerable, like Michelle, in this rigged game? How are we compromised when our most intimate, private desires are mined as data? In a sprawling converted factory, Karim finds young women held in a literal dream farm, an attempt by a tech billionaire to instrumentalise the social unconscious in a search for the secret to time travel. A dystopia perhaps not radically removed from our present.

But amid all these subplots, the point is scattered, lost between too many narrative arcs. The choice to be so laser-focused on Marling’s character feels like a misstep – particularly while the profound discontent of this season’s younger characters seems far more urgent and vital than Nina’s struggle. Those characters are sidelined. Instead, the series insists upon a love story that has long since lost its romance or intrigue. Karim, too, is denied sufficient screen time and character development.

It is clear The OA is attempting to tap into something deeper. A renewed interest in the exploration of multiple dimensions and realities, including the series’ Netflix stablemates Russian Doll and Stranger Things, suggests a general recognition of a profound cultural lack. Suspended over a void, we face several conflicting futures. History repeats itself endlessly – infinite parallel worlds with interchangeable players.

Pierre Ruskin could be Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor long dogged by rumours he wants to inject himself with the blood of young people to stave off the effects of ageing. In another, more socially minded dimension, he could have been Alexander Bogdanov – the Soviet physician, philosopher and science fiction writer who also had an interest in what blood transfusion could do, but from a communist, rather than hyper-capitalist, perspective.

The 19th century defined the idea of progress as an infinite and irreversible improvement; the Hegelian idea of cumulative progress. Indeed, the myth of progress has been the West’s ruling ideology. But for downwardly mobile millennials facing social collapse, environmental catastrophe and unprecedented species extinction, this narrative has lost its primacy, or indeed its validity.

In the final episode of Part II, detective Karim saves one of the app’s users, but in doing so only manages to seem moralising and out of touch. Though addicted to the physically invasive, impossible game that inherently negates social life, the millennial doesn’t want to be saved. Remorseless and defiant, they see no future in the present Karim offers.

With this season, Marling and her co-creator, Zal Batmanglij, show themselves to be genuinely interested in moving The OA beyond emotional landscapes to the structural conditions fomenting this discontent. As Batmanglij explained, the pair sought to make “a gangster movie without the gangsters, because it’s the idea that it’s not just killing one bad guy or two bad guys, but it’s a whole city is to blame”.

But the question remains whether a show commissioned by Netflix – a company now worth more than Microsoft founder Bill Gates and only slightly less than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos – can ever honestly critique our present moment, shaped by the dominance of the tech giants. A successful Netflix product can be judged by its compulsive consumption; how quickly do viewers watch a season? “At Netflix, we are competing for our customers’ time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, et cetera,” said Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings. Where profit was once maximised with families and romantic comedies, in our moment of precarity it is apocalypse that is commercially seductive.

[recentanimenews]

FEATURE: How Geography Affects Battle in One Piece

  How much does the lay of the land influence the outcome of a fight? When we think of anime battles, we generally tend to focus on the combatants themselves — their specific abilities and how their various powers might play off each other. But battles are more than a contest of pure abilities, and in conflicts with a grand scale, the geography of the landscape and positioning of forces can be even more consequential than individual strength. I always enjoy a story that manages to evoke a sense of geographical solidity, moving beyond the simple “combatants in an open field” to embrace fights that ramble across castles, mountains, or even entire kingdoms. Recently, I’ve been delighted to see how well Eiichiro Oda evokes a sense of space in his monumental One Piece.

    Like many of One Piece’s best elements, Oda’s skill for manipulating geography as a dramatic tool develops steadily over time. But even in the saga’s early arcs, it’s easy to see how he’s already using time and space to add unique dynamics to his fights, beyond the simple “can this character beat that other character.” Usopp’s introductory arc offers the earliest examples of this tendency, hinging its conflicts on drama like “can we intercept the enemies as they’re making landfall,” and making Kuro’s movement across the island a consistent, evolving threat. These flourishes might not seem that substantial, but they give the conflict a sense of dynamics beyond pure collisions of force, while simultaneously giving Syrup Village a greater sense of lived-in solidity, making it that much easier to care about the village’s fate.

  Later on, things start getting far more geographically interesting. As the Straw Hats arrive at unique islands like Little Garden and Whiskey Peak, the pure excitement of discovering strange new ecosystems and natural wonders starts to become one of the show’s greatest appeals. While any number of shows offer exciting battles, One Piece’s emphasis on the joy of discovery, rather than combat, consistently sets it apart. Through his unique environments, Oda makes each new island a reward unto itself, simply as a place to be discovered and explored.

    At the same time, Oda begins integrating these strange, unique environments into the fundamental course of his narrative drama. Along with the pirate Wapol, one of the principal antagonists of the Drum Island arc is simply the inhospitable mountain range the arc inhabits. The Straw Hats contend with sheer cliff faces, avalanches, frigid temperatures, and much else, taking advantage of the scenery to sculpt conflicts that circumvent the genre’s tendency toward purely fight-based drama. As a result, the audience is not only offered a more diverse array of hooks but also gets a much clearer impression of Drum Island as a living place, not just a name and a villain.

  By the time the Straw Hats reach Alabasta, Oda’s geographic ambitions have grown even grander, as he begins to introduce full-on maps of the overall field of conflict. Alabasta’s conflict stretches across an entire country and offers the audience the perspective of a general in his field tent, marshaling forces for total war. Conflicts can now be constructed purely around timing and geography, like when Luffy squares off with Crocodile in order to let his crew cross the desert, or the team’s desperate gambit to get Vivi inside the capital city. Cities now have a sense of substance and specificity; each new venue is distinct, with even the various desert towns possessing more individuality than the East Blue’s largely similar islands.

    Because of this, as Alabasta’s cities fall, their ruin feels appropriately apocalyptic — like something of true value is being lost. Alabasta’s cities have histories and personalities, and watching them be destroyed makes both the scale of these conflicts and the brutality of their villains painfully clear. When stakes and geography are unclear, fights can start to feel indulgent or weightless. By grounding Alabasta’s battles in the desperate will of its people and the distinct beauty of their homes, Oda makes every clash feel like the last bulwark against the end of the world.

  By the time One Piece arrives at Skypiea, all of these emerging strengths have clicked into place, making for an arc that first dazzles through the pure inventiveness of its scenery and later thrills through the tactical complexity of mastering that terrain. The journey through Skypiea allows all of the Straw Hats to express their distinct strengths, make friends across a variety of cultures, and discover hidden histories as they navigate cloud rivers, ancient forests, and mysterious ruins. With Skypiea’s history and geography so clearly established, the arc is able to culminate in battles with a truly absurd sense of scale, where it feels like the sky itself is falling.

    Since then, One Piece has maintained this marvelous fusion of adventurous scene-setting and destructive finales, with arcs like Enies’ Lobby demonstrating its profound dramatical appeal. It’s one thing to be told that some character’s power is frightening; it’s quite another to see how their power impacts the very geography of the world around them, shattering bridges and toppling towers as they go. Through Enies’ Lobby and Thriller Bark, Oda demonstrates that establishing a clear hostile environment is just as effective as a friendly one — after all, who doesn’t want to see a monument to evil get reduced to rubble, one strike at a time? One Piece’s emphasis on geography bolsters both its creative and dramatic appeal, and I can’t wait to see how Oda employs this trick next!

      Nick Creamer has been writing about cartoons for too many years now and is always ready to cry about Madoka. You can find more of his work at his blog Wrong Every Time, or follow him on Twitter.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Nick Creamer

[marthakramirez]

Social media’s profound effects on society

This week's articles pushed me toward a dystopian view of social media.

Kleemans et al. tapped into every parent's biggest fear: social media manipulating and having a detrimental effect on children. One of the biggest criticisms of social media is that it creates insecurity among some of its most vulnerable audiences, like teenage girls. Social media became inundated with retouched images. These images, though largely misleading, are seen as the standard for beauty. This standard is entirely unachievable without photoshop. The problem gets worse when girls don't recognize that these images are retouched. Many of the girls in the study could spot filters and effects, but couldn't tell apart reshaped bodies. Research has been tapping into the profound effects of these "idealized images" on society.

A recent article by the New Yorker, The Age of the Instagram Face, examined this phenomenon of "idealized images." They describe a new "cyborgian face" has emerged as the new standard of beauty on Instagram. The face has "catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips." One of the most interesting features is that it is "distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic." The face plays on human aspirations of perfection that were unattainable before social media. The article also talks about how the world is becoming more visual with social media, so people are finding ways to "upgrade" themselves to be more visually appealing. The scariest part of all, which Kleemans et al. alluded to, is that young girls can't tell the differences between retouched pictures and real ones. They think the heavily photoshopped images are realistic. 

As these "idealized images" continue to gain popularity and people continue to edit themselves, the effects of these practices will certainly be felt by society's most vulnerable, from low self-esteem to body dysmorphia and beyond.   

McGregor et al looked at self-personalization - when candidates highlight their personal lives over their policy positions, in digital campaigns. They argued that people are voting for people and not policies. They also argued that "personalization is something politicians do to themselves" (p. 266). However, I argue that previous literature suggests otherwise. The media often apply gender roles and stereotypes to candidates without their consent. It is not a choice. A pilot study that I conducted supported the long-held assertion that media outlets apply gender roles and stereotypes in their coverage of candidates. When covering female candidates, the media focuses on feminine policies like education while they focus on masculine policies like the military for male candidates. These gender roles also apply to the way media describe candidates: women are described as motherly while men are described as strong. The media also focus more on female candidate's appearance, like their clothing or physical characteristics. When covering male candidates, they focus on their policies. The data from my study and previous literature suggests the media are the ones that force candidates into these gender roles and stereotypes.

The fact that some of these candidates are choosing to embrace these stereotypes reminds me of when minorities take back offensive words or slurs and reclaim them. McGregor et al. found that women candidates see more of an advantage in showing "themselves explicitly as caregivers to their children." If the media is going to continue to force these roles and stereotypes on candidates, many have no other option than to take them back and use them to their benefit. It's easier to embrace and capitalize on them than continue to fight an uphill battle to overcome them. It will be interesting to see how social media, which tends to be liberal and progressive, will play into how these gender roles and stereotypes affect candidates. 

Instead of studying traditional selective exposure, Dvir-Gvirsman put a twist on her research by examining audience homophily in media websites. While most research looks at how audiences choose media outlets because of their partisan content, Dvir-Gvirsman focused on the audiences of the websites because it could "be a way to establish belonging to a political group." 

It was smart of the researcher to tap into the primitive human need to belong. This intrinsic psychological need to belong is a strong motivating factor that is often ignored in research. It's like when people will pretend to like a certain type of music so they can fit in and "belong." Opposites don't always attract; people often seek out those who are similar to them. The rise of "online network society" made it easier to find like-minded people where one can fit in. There are no geographical barriers; you just log in and find a whole community of people who think just like you. Group identity theory is way overlooked; people vastly underestimate the power of "belonging."

Groshek and Koc-Michalska looked at the relationship between support for populist candidates like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump and social media use. The circumstances of this election presented the perfect setting to study two populist candidates. This reminds me of the governor race of 1928 in Louisiana, where Huey Long, a fiery populist, ran against another populist candidate. It is funny to see history repeating itself almost a century later. Newspapers were essential to Huey Long's campaign success. This time, Trump and Sanders are capitalizing on social media. Though the medium has changed, this study shows how the media still plays an important factor for anti-establishment candidates. Interestingly, the study found that traditional media has minimal effect on support for populist candidates. Since Huey Long won with the help of traditional media, I wonder how he would have marketed himself on social media today. 

I enjoyed reading Saviaga and Savage's article on social media conversation around the Latino community. As a Latina, I don't often see myself represented in scholarly work in communications or digital media. However, from personal experience, Reddit doesn't seem like the best outlet to study. Though I understand the researchers chose Reddit because it played an important role in the dissemination of false information during the 2016 presidential election, I still don't feel like it was a good choice. After visiting the website Statista, only 7% of news users are Hispanic, however they don’t have numbers for how many of those 7% are active current users. Personally, I don't know a single Latino that uses Reddit; most of the Latino community uses Facebook. So even if there were a lot of trolls spreading false information, I'm not sure how profound the effects could have been on the Latino community. I think Saviaga and Savage underestimated how unrepresentative this study is of the Latino community. I also didn't like how there were no numbers or references to how many Latinos are on Reddit, to see how many were affected by the posts. 

Either way, it was disappointing to see how trolls are attempting to capitalize on data voids to spread fake news to vulnerable communities. It is still good to see some representation in the literature shedding light on these issues, though we have a long way to go. 

References:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/decade-in-review/the-age-of-instagram-face 

[mozgoderina]

Condition Report 2000 (Tate Gallery) / Glenn Ligon

Condition Report 2000 by the American artist Glenn Ligon comprises two framed images, identical except that one is marked by annotations. Despite its apparently unassuming aspect it offers a profound meditation on the nature of speech, identity and history, and more particularly on the relationship between repetition and difference, as well as inherent meaning and the power of context.

The diptych reproduces one of Ligon’s earliest text-based paintings, Untitled (I Am a Man) 1988, which in turn borrowed its featured phrase, ‘I AM A MAN’, from one of the most famous episodes of the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Condition Report follows on from, and traces, this chain of production across time and space, asking how the same utterance transforms when spoken in different ways, by different people. Condition Report draws viewers into a network of references that link together discourses of power and inequality, with the exploration of creativity and selfhood. What becomes clear as one makes one’s way through this web is the extent to which each of us inherits a set of potential roles and capacities based on one’s position within a network of power relations. As Ligon put it, ‘On some level one is always playing oneself’.[1] Condition Report offers an opportunity to confront the mechanisms of history that have delimited the ways in which one can play oneself, as well as to ask what it might mean to question those boundaries.

The text prominently displayed on both panels of the diptych, ‘I AM A MAN’, derives from the placards carried by protesters during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike. On 12 February of that year, over 1,000 African-American men went on strike to achieve better pay, safer working conditions and the right to union representation. Up to that point the workers had received a minimum wage of $1.60 per hour for up to forty hours per week, though the completion of sanitation rounds pushed the time worked closer to sixty hours.[2] These wages were so low that forty percent of the workforce qualified for welfare benefits.[3] The equipment they were given to do their jobs was outmoded and unsafe: only two weeks before the strike two workers had been crushed when the bin of their truck malfunctioned. Furthermore, workers could be sent home, by their white supervisors, without pay and for any apparent infraction. Only a few days after the truck tragedy, supervisors sent sewer and drainage workers home during a rainstorm, while they stayed on the job (with nothing to do) collecting their day’s wages.[4] This last insult salted fresh wounds and the men voted to strike.

The sanitation workers’ battle for more just working conditions became emblematic of the larger struggle roiling the United States. It occasioned boycotts, sit-ins and marches across the city, and attracted national attention with the help of several visits from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was in Memphis that King delivered his famous ‘Mountaintop’ speech before being gunned down on his balcony at the Lorraine Motel on 4 April 1968. It was clear to people in Memphis and beyond that the mistreatment of the sanitation workforce and especially the mayor’s intransigence – Mayor Henry Loeb refused to bargain and threatened to fire and replace all the striking workers – was racially motivated and rooted in a ‘plantation mentality’.[5] The proclamation emblazoned on the protesters’ signs, ‘I AM A MAN’ signalled this connection between the specific labour dispute and its wider import: the epochal and urgent struggle against systematic, discriminatory exploitation and dehumanisation. The placards voiced affirmative contradiction to the assertion that echoed through every facet of daily life structured by nearly eight decades of Jim Crow racial segregation laws and centuries-old foundations in the American history of slavery. These men demanded their humanity be recognised.

Ligon first borrowed this weighty phrase to produce one of his earliest text-based paintings, Untitled (I Am a Man) 1988. That work is almost a replica of the placards used in 1968. The artist imported the font and their placement against a white ground. Ligon also intervened in the form of the original, translating it into another register. Art historian and curator Scott Rothkopf has noted that Ligon altered the spacing.[6] Whereas the placards read ‘I AM | A MAN’ (text on two lines), Untitled says, ‘I AM | A | MAN’ (text on three lines). The difference is subtle, but this variation perhaps suggests another kind of distance – namely the temporal expanse of the twenty years between the placard and the painting.

While Ligon’s painted lettering is black, the original text on the placards was red.[7] If this detail usually goes unremarked in relation to this work, it is because the popular familiarity with Ligon’s source material is predicated on black-and-white photographs of the sanitation workers’ protests taken by Ernest C. Withers (visible in the background of fig.2 above). Indeed Ligon has said that the idea of using the slogan came to him on seeing one of these photographs in the office of US congressman Charles Rangel while working as an intern at the Studio Museum in Harlem.[8] Whether Ligon knew the image he saw converted red writing to black or not, the fact that he represented its reproduced and widely circulated appearance – rather than its ‘original’ form – further highlights that he approached the statement at a historical remove. Untitled (I Am a Man) begs the question: can this painting replicate the same utterance, or does its meaning somehow change as it moves across time and space?

To grapple with this question and take stock of the civil rights slogan’s reiteration, commentators have had to account for both how cultural politics had shifted in the intervening span of time and how racialised vision had persisted. Anchoring this endeavour in the play between the repeated text and the painting’s literal ground of gestural white brushstrokes, art historian Darby English has argued that Untitled (I Am a Man) was ‘the first work in which Ligon’s desire to fuse ostensibly irreconcilable representational modes – the formalist painting, the political statement and the private question – resulted in something fraught but whole’.[9] Before making text-based paintings Ligon had painted abstract expressionist-style canvases, but by superimposing ‘I AM A MAN’ on top of such brushwork, Ligon alluded to the way his own work was never received as that of an ‘artist’ but always as that of a ‘black artist’. Art historian Huey Copeland has written that even in ‘the salad days of identarian critique’ that were the late 1980s and early 1990s, ‘mainstream criticism … trivialized the work of black artists even as it was brought forward to capitalize on the reigning taste for alterity’.[10] Ligon’s own identity, or others’ perception of it, would pop out in relief from the surface of his works, making it subject to different criteria of evaluation than the work of other (read: white) artists whose identities could remain submerged, seemingly beside the point – like a supposedly neutral background.

By taking up the words of the Memphis workers, Ligon was not demanding his humanity be recognised, in order that his work be considered in terms of artistry rather than blackness, so much as staging the fact that the demand still had traction in a very different context. That is, he not only acknowledged how the discourse of racial identity affected the reception of his art but also used his work as a platform to showcase the limits that history placed on his role as an author. As Ligon put it, art ‘has been a treacherous site for black Americans because [it] has been so tied with the project of proving our humanity through the act of writing’.[11] Ligon’s appraisal not only drives home the poignancy of the 1968 strikers’ need to proclaim their manhood with a slogan, but also links that event and his reiteration of it with the nineteenth-century tradition of the slave narrative. For former slaves, ‘demonstrating proficiency in language arts became a form of resistance’, wrote scholar Kimberly Rae Connor, ‘a literal and literary way to articulate the humanity of black Americans’.[12] It is the apparent persistence of the need for such resistance on which Ligon’s work shines a bright light. As Copeland put it, ‘Ligon’s work enacts a kind of repetition familiar to students of African American culture, so that history, text, and performance become circulating quantities always subject to reiteration and renewal’.[13] So even as Ligon gives voice to his own authorship, he also demonstrates the extent to which that authorship is spoken for him, through him, issuing from elsewhere.

Ultimately even the ‘I’ in ‘I AM A MAN’ comes under pressure. Is it Ligon who speaks? This last question animates Condition Report. Made twelve years after Untitled (I Am a Man), this work adds another link to the chain of iterations. This time, however, Ligon distanced himself from the act of enunciation by turning his painting into a reproducible print and collaborating with conservator Michael Duffy. It is Duffy’s annotations that we see on the diptych’s right side. He has marked cracks and smudges, the wear and tear of the painting’s travels. The two images side by side produce a kind of visual dissonance. On the left the familiar vision of Untitled (I Am a Man) bodies forth, while on the right the words are surrounded by hand-drawn lines, circles and notes. These marks flatten the image of the painting, turning the image of the entire text/ground relation into the background that supports Duffy’s additions.

It is tempting to suggest that the effect of the juxtaposition amounts to a kind of ‘before and after’ parable, an assertion that the critique mounted by Ligon’s original has been subsumed into the background – that is into the cultural context that informs how we think about race and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. That it has become a historical artefact, without bearing on the later moment. However, the diptych’s redoubled insistence on the surface qualities of Ligon’s painting more likely signals the opposite: because even the most minute deviations from ‘purity’ on the white ground itself stick out, reveal themselves as matter in the wrong place. The supposedly neutral background has not disappeared, but become more intolerant of difference.

This is not to suggest that this conservational exercise was invested with particular sociological implications by either Ligon or Duffy. Indeed, the enunciating ‘I’ has receded, as reproducibility has replaced manipulated citation (as the mode of production) and the smudge has supplanted the slogan (as the conspicuous figure). Rather, the point is to see how powerful are the categories that inform our apprehension. As a conservator, Duffy naturally focused on identifying threats to the canvas’s integrity – such was his role; he could only police the background’s border. As a work, Condition Report both concretises and expands the argument made by Untitled. Each of us inherits a part to play based on our position in a historical chain. To say that daily life is performance is to acknowledge how history has shaped the contours of how we understand and are understood, which makes it all the more vital to interrogate what we conceive as given.

Notes 1. Glenn Ligon, ‘Interview with Stephen Andrews’, in Glenn Ligon: Some Changes, exhibition catalogue, The Power Plant, Toronto 2005, p.175. 2. Michael K. Honey, ‘Introductory Essay’, I AM A MAN, http://dlxs.lib.wayne.edu/iamaman/memphis, accessed 7 April 2015. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Scott Rothkopf, ‘Glenn Ligon: America’, in Scott Rothkopf (ed.), Glenn Ligon: America, exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2011, p.20. 7. Thanks to Barbara Andrews, Director of Education and Interpretation, National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, USA, for helpful correspondence on this issue. 8. Kari Rittenbach, ‘Condition Report 2000 by Glenn Ligon’, Tate summary, January 2012, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ligon-condition-report-l02822/text-summary, accessed 25 March 2015. 9. Darby English, ‘Glenn Ligon: Committed to Difficulty’, in Glenn Ligon: Some Changes, Toronto 2005, p.44. 10. Huey Copeland, ‘Glenn Ligon and Other Runaway Subjects’, Representations, vol.113, no.1, Winter 2011, p.76. 11. Glenn Ligon in Lauri Firstenberg, ‘Neo-Archival and Textual Modes of Production: An Interview with Glenn Ligon’, Art Journal , vol.60, no.1, Spring 2011, p.43. 12. Kimberly Rae Connor, ‘To Disembark: The Slave Narrative Tradition’, African American Review, vol.30, no.1, Spring 1996, p.36. 13. Copeland 2011, p.84.

  Source: Tate Gallery. Link: Glenn Ligon, Condition Report 2000 Illustration: Glenn Ligon [USA] (b 1960). 'Condition Report', 2000. Iris print, screenprint (81 x 57.5 cm each). Moderator: ART HuNTER.

[franciscretarola]

Amatrice: how the L’Aquila earthquake predicts its future

(Poggio Picenze, near L’Aquila... all photos by Francis Cretarola) (from 2017) The day after the August 24th central Italy earthquake, we received numerous messages from Le Virtù customers, friends from all over North America, and friends in Italy. People on this side wanted to know how to help and those in Italy, especially those around L'Aquila, Abruzzo - which is very close to Amatrice and knows more than it cares to about this type of event - were telling us that, this time, they were okay. As we started to put together our relief efforts, we wondered if Amatrice, Accumoli, the villages in Marchè along the Tronto river, and the other badly damaged towns would ever be rebuilt, if life in them would ever be the same. Our knowledge of L'Aquila and the aftermath of its 2009 earthquake didn't make us very sanguine about the future. 

But on the second day after the quake, I saw a Facebook post made from Amatrice by a friend of ours from Paganica (a small village just outside of L'Aquila). She was in Amatrice volunteering to help the victims. And seeing the post made me think about the last time we'd seen her. It was last summer, in her home village. She had wanted us to see how things were, many years post-earthquake, in Paganica. 

What follows is reconstructed from my notes from and photos of that visit. 

__________

Cathy and I park beneath the church of Santa Maria Assunta, in Piazza della Concezione, just off the main road that snakes through Paganica, a satellite town of L'Aquila. Like many of the villages around Abruzzo's capital city,  Paganica suffered terrible damage during the April 2009 earthquake. It was at the epicenter of the event. Across the road from us, the baroque facade of Santa Maria della Concezione is scarred by fractures. Directly in front of our car, Paganica's monument to "ai caduti," those fallen in Italy's two world wars (a squat, massive rectangle of stone inscribed with the names of the dead), is rotated about 10 degrees counterclockwise on its base. The shaking had been fierce. 

It's July of 2015 - six years after the quake - and our friend Germana Rossi, a native of Paganica, has promised to take us inside the zona rossa, the forbidden "red zone" protected by chain-link fence that's deemed too dangerous for habitation or visit.  

In 2001, we lived up the road in the village of Assergi, also part of the extended city of L'Aquila.  On days when we didn't want to drive the twenty minutes into the city to shop its daily market, we did our food shopping at a little mom-and-pop store in Paganica. We ate often just up the road at the Villa Dragonetti, a fresco-covered, 16th-century palace where the cuisine was as simply elegant as the hospitality was easy and warm. We met Germana later, in 2006 in Philadelphia, when she came over as part of the Abruzzese folk group DisCanto. We gave the group the keys to our row home in South Philly during their stay (and we crashed down the street on my brother's floor). In 2007, Germana returned the favor and offered us the use of her late grandmother's home in the oldest section of Paganica, the part of town now locked behind the fence. 

Few people walk the piazza. The faces of those we do see seem preoccupied and drawn. And a little suspicious of us. In the weeks and months immediately following the quake, L'Aquila and its surrounding areas became destinations for "disaster tourism." Though we know this place well and are here by invitation, it's hard not to feel awkward and inappropriate. 

After a short, uncomfortable wait, Germana arrives. She wears a brightly colored summer dress and greets us happily. Everyone in Paganica knows her and the other Rossi family members,  which puts me at ease. 

Germana wastes no time and we move toward the old town, the entrance to which is blocked by the fence. As though swinging open a garden gate, Germana moves part of the fence and enters the zona rossa. We follow closely behind her.  

We walk up into the oldest part of the town along alley-like medieval streets. Many buildings are braced with wood or steel supports. Cracks web across facades; some interiors are exposed and visible from the street; the early evening sun shines through gaping holes in roofs. Germana points out - almost dispassionately - damaged architectural treasures, broken monuments of the town's ancient culture and history. And I am reminded of the tour she gave us in 2007, when she proudly pointed out some of these same details, the elements that gave Paganica part of its character and specific beauty. Nature has invaded the streets. Weeds rise chest-high, grass bursts from the cobblestones. At one tiny square, a man - also defying the authorities - appears from nowhere. Germana smiles and they exchange brief but warm greetings, speaking in a shorthand understood only by terremotati (earthquake survivors). She introduces us to him. He smiles wanly, but then walks over to a slim fig tree which has taken root in the street in the six years since the quake, plucks two pieces of fruit and gives them to Cathy and me.    

We arrive at Germana's home. She pushes open the narrow wooden door and we enter. I remember the space well, even through its debris-covered chaos. All around us, the broken and dust-covered relics of a family history lie waiting to be reclaimed. We climb the steps to her parents' room. Their bed is exactly as it was immediately after the earthquake. Large chunks of masonry, which at 3:32 in the morning fell onto the sleeping couple, still cover it. It's terrifying. Nothing has been done since the quake. The Rossi family was allowed to return to take whatever articles they could, but no restoration has been attempted. The government has not acted and it will not allow the family to begin its own work.  

It's tough to know what to say. Nothing comes to mind that wouldn't be said merely because I feel like I should say something, anything. Cathy and I returned here shortly after the quake in 2009. We visited all we could of L'Aquila, most of which was and remains cordoned off behind fencing, and met with Germana.  Her parents, who were living in one of the many tent cities inhabited by the survivors, came to meet us at the Villa Dragonetti, which had miraculously escaped severe damage. They sat at our table and apologized for being disheveled, for not being better able to welcome us. The father's face was still scarred from the fallen masonry. We've come back to L'Aquila every year since, but this is our first time behind Paganica’s fencing.  

Germana leads us back to the car and asks us to follow her to Poggio Picenze, another village inside the so-called "L'Aquila crater." It was also terribly hit. Her friend, Stefania Pace, wants to show us her home.  

We pull over at a bar outside Poggio Picenze's fenced-off old town to meet Stefania. She's a blond woman in her mid-forties. It doesn't take long to understand that she's possessed of a strong wit and spirit. She's sad, as Germana’s sad, but not broken. Banked anger flashes in her eyes as she and Germana explain the bureaucracy that prevents action and the corruption and waste that informed then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's original reconstruction efforts.  Berlusconi had treated the earthquake as an opportunity to salvage his scandal-damaged reputation and to funnel money to his supporters. In the mountains around L'Aquila, "new towns," characterless, (as it turns out) often poorly built warrens blight the landscape. Some are positioned in such a way that their inhabitants can stare down into the fenced-off ancient villages to watch centuries of history, tradition and culture slowly rot under the weight of the seasons. The psychological effect on the population, especially the elderly, is profound. Many, like Stefania, are still living in what was supposed to be temporary housing. 

Again, we walk past the fence - no one is guarding any of these places - and into the old town. The devastation is terrible, and the place, centuries old as it is, looks more like an ancient abandoned ruin than a 21st-century town. Only a car, its roof crushed by fallen masonry, reminds of the present day. Stefania's husband Mariano has joined us and leads us to their former home. Stefania can't bear to enter, but we walk in. Part of the house is fairly intact, and he points out many of the improvements he'd made shortly before the quake, restoration projects designed to highlight the home's original rustic character.  He laughs grimly while recounting the plans he'd had for the space. The property immediately next to the theirs has been obliterated. A second-story door opens on a room and floor that no longer exist.  

Everything is overrun by insurgent grass, weeds, and saplings. Mariano bounds up the hill to a small tree, another fig, picks some fruit, and brings it back to Stefania.

When we received word of the L'Aquila earthquake, it was just after 9:30 pm in Philly and we were winding down a pleasant Sunday dinner service at Le Virtù. We spent the next six hours calling friends and relatives in the region. It wasn't until the next day that the scope of the disaster became clear. Much of the city, particularly its medieval center, was destroyed. And some of the towns around L'Aquila - Paganica, Camarda, Fossa, Onna - had fared worse.

It was a gut punch. But our loss had been relative. All our friends and family had survived, though some had lost their homes. In the days that followed, standing in Le Virtù, our paean to Abruzzo decorated in photos, ceramics, and artifacts collected during our travels in the region, suddenly felt absurd and robbed of meaning. The restaurant was dedicated to the entirety of the region, but it simply would never have existed if not for our time spent living in L'Aquila. In a way that we acknowledge to be unearned and shallow, we considered L'Aquila our second home. 

It was surreal also to see and hear L'Aquila and Abruzzo, overlooked places well off Italy's touristed path, be for a time a topic for the local, national, and international press. A place that we'd tried to promote - at Le Virtù, with culinary tours, by producing TV shows for Comcast and PBS, by bringing musicians to the U.S.- was suddenly, albeit briefly, in the public eye. But for all the wrong reasons. Journalists flocked to the city and its environs without knowing anything of what these places had been like before the event, what had been lost, or what was at risk.  And for as long as there was spectacle to report - bodies and survivors pulled from the debris, images of pain and devastation, the occasional uplifting story about the courage of first responders and defiant civilians who'd thrown in immediately following the event - L'Aquila was news. And then, as invariably happens, the world moved on.

But the losses continue and the risk - to a centuries-old culture, ancient ways of life, unheralded architectural and artistic treasures, intrinsic things without calculable price - remain. Things that are soul-nurturing, essential, that have sustained a people and could offer much to the 21st century but have gone largely unnoticed by the rest of the world, struggle to survive and, in places, diminish. The area around L'Aquila, like much of Abruzzo, contains precious but  undiscovered things: stunning parkland where sheep and goat herding continue, cattle forages free-range, and wolves and bear roam wooded solitudes; small farms producing heirloom vegetables and fruits, ancient grains, the finest saffron in Europe; artisanal cheese and salumi makers; tiny medieval villages with singular culinary customs and vernacular architecture; ancient religious rites that predate the Romans; jewelry making, stone- and wood-carving, and other craft traditions; and obscure artistic masterworks. The culture of shepherds and farmers persists and informs daily life. Most of the world is blithely unaware of what's at stake. 

Le Virtù exists solely because the Abruzzo in its entirety had so inspired and moved us. When we opened, we were true neophytes with no real restaurant experience, ignorant in ways that now seem ridiculous and frightening. But we believed that the region had something important to offer, not only to Philadelphia's culinary discussion, but also - if we honored Abruzzese values of generosity, quality, and humility, and fostered a convivial environment - to the local community. If we've succeeded, it's owed to our commitment to Abruzzo's culture, not to our unique creativity and invention. It's painful to see our roots in L'Aquila in peril.

________

The earthquake that struck Amatrice and surrounding towns (in Lazio, Umbria, Marchè, and Abruzzo) had eerie similarities to the L'Aquila event. It occurred at 3:36 am (L'Aquila shook at 3:32 am), and we again learned of it towards the end of dinner service at Le Virtù. Amatrice was part of Abruzzo until 1927, when Mussolini redefined the region's boundaries with Lazio. It's a mountain village with a pastoral tradition and culture that would be very familiar to anyone who has traveled Abruzzo. It’s best known, however, as the birthplace of spaghetti all'amatriciana, its namesake pasta dish of tomatoes and guanciale (cured pig's cheek). Most people experience that dish in Rome, however, and all'amatriciana is usually lumped in with the capital city's cuisine. It shares this misidentification with pasta alla griscia (from the village of Grisciano, also near Amatrice) and carbonara (most likely from eastern Lazio and western Abruzzo, or possibly Napoli). Amatriciana was also popular in nearby L'Aquila. 

Reports on the earthquake often made reference to the pasta dish or discussed the town as a summertime getaway for Romans. Most of the reporters going to Amatrice and the other affected towns were seeing them for the first time, and had no idea of what they'd been like before the quake. It was understandably hard for them to provide context or even understand the profundity of the event. Amatrice had only just been added to the Borghi Piu Belli d'Italia, a loose association of "the most beautiful villages in Italy." And now much of it was rubble. 

Recent history tells us that the world will probably move on pretty quickly from this disaster, if it hasn't done so already. And, if history stereotypically repeats itself, it will do so without assuring that Amatrice or the other towns are restored to their former state and that their ways of life and culture can survive. In fact, it will probably do the bottom-line calculus and decide that rebuilding isn't a worthwhile use of resources, that there'll be too little return. It did this in the Irpinia region of Campania in 1980 (after a quake which also impacted Molise). And it seems to be doing this in L'Aquila. I fear that they'll be a new "Amatrice," a conglomeration of modern housing with designated shopping malls that doesn't foster community or acknowledge the ancient culture: an Amatrice amputated from its soul.  

But there are some who refuse to accept this. 

When Germana awoke the morning after the Amatrice quake, she drove from her Paganica home (a converted garage) to Amatrice to help with the relief efforts. She came home, slept for four hours, had a shower and drove back. She repeated this for several days. Her ancestral home is still behind chain-link fence. She fights a daily battle against bureaucracy, apathy, resignation, and indifference. And she continues to remind us of what's at stake, what truly matters. 

In the days after the quake, she made many posts from and about Amatrice. The most moving for me was a film of street musicians made before the quake. Young and old musicians play a salterello, an Abruzzese form of dance music similar to a tarantella. The music is played on bagpipes and tambourine. A crowd has gathered around the musicians. One player passes the tambourine to an older man in the crowd who without pause perfectly continues the traditional rhythm.  

It seems unreasonable to me that we would ever allow this music to be silenced.

[bulgarianmermaid]

There are places you know you will miss from the first moment you set your eyes on them. Those places feel like home without you even having thought of visiting them let alone living there before. Deep into the Caucasus Mountains, where Georgia ends and Russia begins, at the top of Cross Pass outside Gudauri, you can still find high mountain peaks, desolate roads, rugged landscape, and unexplored wilderness that make my heart sing. High up there, where >5000m peaks kiss the bright blue sky and most people lose their breath, that is where I get found. The wilderness speaks directly to my soul, it calls my wild heart, it urges me to explore. It calms me down, I sleep without a single worry, nothing matters and all our “modern” concerns seem like “first world problems”.

The real Georgia in winter is cold and snowy, rough around the edges, wild and untamable, high in altitude and strong in liquor content. Just how I like my destinations (and my men) ❤ A few places in the American West had such a profound effect on me, an effect so strong I didn’t want to leave, let alone go back to the city. The Caucasus Mountains remind me of the San Juans in Southwest Colorado high up Red Mountain Pass from Ouray to Silverton – a place where I camped without a tent at 12000ft elevation and that experience was the best birthday present I could have ever asked for ❤

Gudauri is the largest ski resort in Georgia hidden deep in the Caucasus Mountains on Georgia Military Road almost all the way to the Russian border. Gudauri Ski Resort‘s base is at >2000m, its highest chair lift reaches 3200m, so with a vertical drop top to bottom on a ski run 1200m, it will surely make your legs shake 🙂 All 75km of groomed ski runs in Gudauri sit above tree line facing the sun and grant you the view of a lifetime every single chair ride. In terms of snow conditions, terrain quality, lift services and variety of ski runs, Gudauri can rival any ski resort in the Alps and the Rockies. Gudauri just added 4 new chair lifts this season and opened a whole new valley on the back side (Kobi) to off piste skiing and riding. Yet you can still have the whole resort to yourself and ski right behind the snow cat on empty slopes during the week.

Since I was in Gudauri for 2 weeks with IntotheWild.bg, we could choose what to do each day depending on the conditions and we rode off piste every time we got a foot of new snow. On the days when Ullr didn’t deliver overnight freshies, we basked in the sun and rode soft groomers. Because when you go to the Caucasus Mountains you get equally spoiled by fresh snow and freshly groomed slopes! Gudauri Ski Resort offers 3 valleys with lift serviced terrain for off piste skiing/riding. In addition, there are multiple backcountry and ski touring routes if you are willing to take a hike for an hour or two and earn your turns.

PC: @intothewild.bg

PC: Veselin Dochev

On our days off from skiing (2 in total for two weeks), we checked the Russian baths in Gudauri (Tsar Bani) for an authentic experience at the highest steam baths in the world and took a shuttle to the village of Kazbegi to visit Rooms Hotel for its signature view which overlooks Mt Kazbeg and Gergeti Trinity Church from the balcony. Only later did I find that Mt Kazbeg (>5000m = >16000ft) is a dormant volcano, no wonder I fell in love with it at first sight!

In Gudauri I recommend staying at Quadrum Hotel (under $100 for a double room, breakfast with a view included). Brand new and built only with natural materials in simple and modern Scandinavian style, it offers a spa and swimming pool, as well as daily yoga classes to meet all your post-skiing / hiking needs and soothe your sore muscles. There is a bar and restaurant on site as well where you can grab dinner as you’ll be exhausted after a day of skiing and unwilling to look for a place to eat down the road in town at night.

  In Kazbegi Rooms Hotel (over $100 for double room, breakfast with a view included) gets my vote for fantastic design, superb amenities, fusion cuisine and incredible service. You’ll notice there are many cheaper options in Georgia but as with every developing country, you get what you pay for, so be careful how excited you get about a budget room, especially if your budget can accommodate a comfier experience 🙂 Remember to book both hotels well in advance as they usually sell out during the main season.

    Considering my obsession with high mountain passes, Georgia Military Road deserves its own blogpost but I’ll try to give it enough attention here before I return to explore it further in summer. Georgia Military Road is one of ONLY 2 passes that connect Georgia with Russia over the Caucasus Mountains. Being a major road artery, the pass is usually well cleaned after a snow storm (or completely closed during one) and is quite busy with semi truck traffic. The highest point is Cross pass (Jvari Pass) right outside Gudauri Ski Resort at 2379m (7815ft). In winter the road works only in one direction in 2 hr intervals as the “tunnels” (actually avalanche barriers) are too narrow for two trucks to pass at the same time. There is a separate lane for summer that allows two way traffic but it is closed in winter as it is too dangerous to drive on that sliver of asphalt on the cliffside with no barriers and vertical drops at most places.

The never ending “tunnels” between Gudauri and Kazbegi are probably the most freakish roads I have ever passed (and to think I was considering hitchhiking there…) There is no light inside, no road markings or directions, the tunnels curve and are very narrow (remember…one way traffic). If I told you there would be light at the end of the tunnel (literally), would you follow me high up in the Caucasus Mountains in the middle of a snow storm, on windy one-lane roads through pitch-black avalanche barriers? And if you did the reward would be one of the greatest views of Mt Kazbeg you’ve ever seen (and a cocktail in the swanky bar at the posh Rooms Hotel Kazbegi)

    Georgia may seem far and off the beaten path to the weekend traveler, yet there are multiple flights daily from Europe to Tbilisi and Kutaishi. We opted for budget travel and I’m SO glad we did! The bus-shuttle-plane-taxi experience gave our trip such a good and authentic start. Since we were coming from Bulgaria, we took the bus to Turkey (6hrs overnight from Plovdiv to Istambul in the coldest night of the year), schlepped our luggage from the bus station to the airport with a shuttle (which took another 1.5hrs), then jumped on a flight to Tbilisi (2.5hrs of crammed leg space) and finished our trip with a taxi to Gudauri (add 2 more hours where we were so exhausted the taxi driver could have taken us anywhere and I wouldn’t have cared as long as he let me sleep 🙂

  The travel was very oriental and interesting, safe, cheap, and by no means difficult. Culture shock abound for my Western friends every step of the way – squat toilets with no paper at the Bulgarian-Turkish border (yes, we had to cross the border on foot at night in the middle of a rainstorm), perfumed alcohol in the bus to disinfect your hands, having to haggle for your bottled water (because you have to haggle for everything in the Middle East), et all. Since we were coming from a place with no snow and going thru a place with no snow, everyone was really interested in us and where we are going with all this snowboarding gear. Some people had never seen snow, most couldn’t even perceive the idea that we were taking a bus to a shuttle to a plane to a taxi to a winter resort in Georgia almost on the border with Russia.

    To get from Tbilisi to the mountains you have to experience the famous Georgian driving on steep and windy mountain roads. My recommendation is to hold on tight and not look at what the driver is doing…prayer also helps 🙂 You thought Istambul driving was crazy, wait till you see Georgia. If you don’t abide to above rules, you’ll die of heart attack WAY before you actually crash. Locals drive these roads every day, your shuttle driver is well aware of what he is doing, save him your backseat driver speech 🙂

    The capital of Georgia – Tbilisi (aka ТиБилЛиСи in Bulgarian) is also called Tiflis in Turkey where I almost missed my flight not being able to find Tbilisi on the dashboard. And while the US has Facebook and Russia has V Kontakte, Tbilisi has Balcony.ge. People observe and share everything from their balconies 🙂 There is balcony architecture, balcony culture, balcony parties, basically “Welcome to the Land of Balconies!”

    Having covered skiing and travel in Georgia, now onto food and wine! What should you try from the famous Georgian cuisine? Basically everything…more than once – Kachapuri (homemade cheese and egg “pastry”), Khinkali (meat or veggie dumplings), Shashlik (meat skewers), breads, yogurt, cheeses, jams, jellies, soups, pickled veggies, spices!!! Based on the cuisines I had tasted before, I found Georgian dishes to resemble a mix of Armenian, Turkish, Russian, and Eastern European flavors but maybe those countries borrowed their spices and intricate preparations from Georgia, who knows…

    Georgia produces both red and white wines grown in a special viticultural region. The red is served hot and spiced on the slopes – a must for this apres-ski loving gal! Two other beverages to try are cognac and chacha. Georgia produces some of the best cognac in the world, I recommend the 5 or 8 yrs old aged varieties. And don’t forget to buy some as gifts for home! Chacha is the local name for homemade vodka / raki / moonshine. It is made from different fermented fruits. Drinking chacha is a Georgian tradition – don’t you dare refuse a toast – and resembles tequila tasting in Mexico. You will get drunk, for sure!!! The supermarket varieties go up to 55 proof while home-made chacha can be all the way up to 85 proof. I was super lucky to try a 65 proof persimmon homemade chacha aged in oak barrels on the slopes. You bet I brought some home 🙂

Last but definitely not least, I couldn’t get over was how sweet, kind, and hospitable the locals were, everywhere! Georgia is still very real, rural in places and rough around the edges at times, but that just adds to its local charm. Go visit while it is an up and coming destination, affordable and a developing tourist market and not yet full of foreigners and skiers. There is just SO MUCH to see and explore in Georgia, I only went to Gudauri and the Kazbegi Region but I will definitely be back in summer to hike the Caucasus Mountains, visit the wine region and experience the famous Tbilisi nightlife!

Svaneti in Summer – PC: @zermatterhorn

Gudauri Ski Resort, Georgia – A Gem Hidden Deep in the Caucasus Mountains There are places you know you will miss from the first moment you set your eyes on them.

[jmrphy]

Feminism and the problem of supertoxic masculinity

I just watched a documentary film about John McAfee, creator of the famous McAfee Antivirus you will remember from every PC in the 1990s. I didn’t know anything about this man before watching this film. I want to make a point that requires me to give you a brief summary of the story, so here is a plot-spoiling recapitulation. Basically, after he gets rich off McAfee Antivirus, McAfee has a couple of failed business ventures before proceeding through a brazenly aggressive, daring, manipulative, controlling, arrogant, violent, and ultimately murderous course of affairs.1 After a few years as a yoga guru preaching peace and wellness from a retreat center he funded, there’s some indication that he becomes disillusioned with his efforts toward egalitarian community (he suggests something to the effect that others were taking advantage of him, but this is not examined deeply). So he buys a house in Belize, hires an idealistic biologist from the US to run an alternative medicine laboratory, recruits the toughest gangsters he can find to build an in-house private security force, donates to local police equipment worth millions of dollars, and effectively purchases several poor, local women as long-term girlfriends. When he had the time to also get two gnarly tribal tattoos was unclear to me.

Just to round out the psychological and behavioral profile here, note that he rarely, if ever, had sex with his girlfriends; he rather liked to defecate in their mouths while lying in a hammock. When the biologist expresses concern about their business relationship, he drugs and rapes her that evening, according to the biologist’s testimony in the film. McAfee’s vicious guard dogs roamed freely on the public beach around his house, so a neighbor poisoned the dogs. Then, the film suggests, McAfee promptly hired a man to kill the neighbor. This murder allegation becomes global news, and McAfee embarks on an international fugitive escape adventure. He gets into Guatemala, where he avoids extradition back to Belize by faking a heart attack, and thereby engineering his deportation back to the United States. He then promptly runs for President in the Libertarian Party, where he comes in second place.

Now, it is striking enough that the winner of the 2016 Presidential election is an icon of ignoring feminist ethical expectations—at a time when feminist expectations are more culturally ascendant than ever. But perhaps that was a fluke. The McAfee story is profound because it shows in stunning, horrifying detail how the hyper-masculine drive to dominate really works in contemporary culture: when cranked sufficiently high, it rapidly and easily trounces any quantity of moral outrage and/or legal constraints, in a direct line toward the zenith of the global dominance hierarchy.

Moderate misogyny can get you exiled from contemporary public culture, often for good reason, but hyper-misogyny in an intelligent and driven male appears to give you sovereignty over public culture. It seems to me that, if feminism today has one genuinely catastrophic problem to be rightfully alarmist about, it might just be the small number of males who will not be domesticated through social-moral pressure.

First, a premise of my argument is that SJW culture is genuinely quite effective at minimizing the nastier masculine edges of large numbers of men, because most men are decent people who want to be liked and approved by most others. This is not an empirical article so I won’t go into it, but if you doubt there’s been a general cultural pacification of male aggression just watch a random film from the 1950s and then watch a random film at your local cinema. Anyway, people on the left and right disagree about what to call this trend, but its existence is attested by all. Feminists see this as men learning to be less violent and oppressive, and feminists celebrate women’s long-term positive effect on the civilizing of violent patriarchies; others see this as a kind of female totalitarianism and evidence of civilizational decline. But the fact that feminist cultural politics have exerted notable and widespread effects of generally reducing the expression of masculine aggression in public culture seems hard to dispute.

The hypothesis I would like to advance is that this social domestication of masculine tendencies has made our society more vulnerable to the rare cases of men who escape the filter of social opprobrium. The life of John McAfee is a case study of this problem.

Why would the social pacification of once popular, moderate masculinity empower more virulent forms of violent masculinity? Many lefties think that pacifying the larger mass of men will shift the whole distribution of male behavior, lowering the ceiling of how bad the worst men may become. I would say this is the dominant mental model of most SJWs, because it’s the basic picture that comes out of liberal arts education today (that our images of the world shape what we do in the world, hence the emphasis on media and “representations”).

The problem is that when the baseline of masculine dominance expression is held below it’s organic tendency, defined simply as what men would do in the absence of cultural campaigns to defang it, this increases the potential payoff to those who dare exercise it, as there are more resources to dominate precisely to the degree that other men are not contesting them. Not only does it increase the rewards available, it decreases the risk of competing for them, as the chance of being defeated by an equally aggressive male, or even just the chance of encountering costly competition at all, is lower than it would be in a world of much but minor, local masculine excess. We might also adduce a “rusty monitor” effect: Through the domestication of men over time, most people become blissfully forgetful about what genuinely dangerous men are capable of, decreasing the probability or the speed with which domesticated males might awake from their slumber.

Another reason the over-domestication of moderate masculinity is dangerous is that it makes it too easy for ethically lax “bad characters” to win all of the large number of local hierarchies that would typically have the function of imposing humility and modesty on cocky boys coming of age. If you’re a highly intelligent, confident, and driven young man, the complex difficulty of having to navigate multiple distinct local hierarchies (among other highly driven males themselves sometimes prone to dangerous excess) from a young age, teaches you very quickly that you cannot ever be the best at everything. And that if you cut corners anti-socially you will be destroyed by other males invested in the maintenance of sociality. Examples of local hierarchies are sports competition, dating, ethical honor or “character” in the neighborhood or religious community, or even just fleeting micro-social competition such as battles of wits in social gatherings. All of these things will function as negative feedback mechanisms tempering genuinely dangerous anti-social ambitions in young boys coming of age, but only if the other males are equally able and willing to play all of these games to the best of their abilities.

If you’re overzealous or immodest or you cheat or you ignore your standing in one local hierarchy to dominate another—all of these things tend to get constrained by other males of equal will and ability, who are also sometimes dangerous and who have an interest in knocking all wiley characters down a few notches. What’s happened in recent decades is that a non-trivial portion of the West’s most intelligent and ambitious males pursue cultural careers predicated very specifically on the strategic under-display of their will to power. Take someone like the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—he’s the leading politician of a whole country, so nobody can deny that this is a man with a substantial will to rise to the top through a whole series of competitive filters. But he is one of the best examples of how, today, the path to power for all “decent men” consists in a deeply deceptive competition to appear maximally unthreatening. One reason you get the John McAfee’s of the world is because they went to high school with the Justin Trudeau’s of the world. In all of the little, local hierarchies they encountered throughout life, people like John McAfee and Donald Trump learned that they could be as anti-socially ambitious as they pleased and no other intelligent and able men would check them (because those men were opting for the cultural capital that accrues to being feminist). A serious challenge for feminism is to see that someone like Justin Trudeau is seriously complicit in the production of the McAfees and Trumps of the world. And if your a cheer-leader for the former, you’re an objective supporter and producer of the latter.

I also think that people like McAfee and Trump learn early in life that if you are ostracized from social groups for exceeding moral expectations, then you can just channel your anti-social intelligence to making money all the more efficiently. That is, another key problem is that in secular, advanced capitalist countries such as the U.S., if you are smart and driven enough it is a feasible life path to accept absolute social exile by converting all of your energy into economic capital accumulation, and then build up a new social cosmos for yourself. The interesting thing is to see that this is really only psychologically and materially feasible in a very late stage of advanced western capitalism where non-economic criteria of value have all but disappeared. Whereas above we saw one reason for the emergence of the McAfee’s and Trump’s of the world is that there wasn’t enough local masculine aggression to check them throughout their life, here we note the specific problem that secular society lacks any effective adjudicator of human character other than economic prowess. In this particular dimension we see that the contemporary correlation of anti-capitalism and secularism/atheism is ultimately an untenable loop, because you never have an effective basis for anti-capitalist cultural change if you cannot submit to the possibility that values come from a place higher than practical reality. Of course people pretend they value other criteria, but those criteria don’t operate in the selection of who ultimately wins attention, esteem, and power in society as a whole. There was no person, and no entity, in the entire life of these men who could credibly convey that there exist things in life more powerful than money, for the simple reason that hardly anyone believes this anymore. And so the most toxically ambitious males become the very first to realize that one can very well quit the entire game of socio-moral respectability and shoot to the top of everything via radically unreflective capital accumulation.

Another reason why the constraining of moderate masculine toxicity may increase the power of supertoxic masculinity is that males may become more pathologically power hungry from lacking opportunities for healthy satiation. Once upon a time (for better or worse), masculine prowess promised a fair number of immediate satisfactions. The best football players received the genuine interest of the most desired girls in high school, say. But even from my own observations growing up, it was easy to see that as my cohort aged from about 10 years old up toward about 17 years old, conventionally masculine prowess became less and less effective at winning immediate social rewards. By the end of high school, the most desired girls were more interested in—I kid you not—a nationally competitive business role-playing team. What this suggests to me is that, aside from perhaps an early bump at the very beginning of adolescence, dominance hierarchies rapidly stop rewarding conventional masculine expressions of dominance behavior in favor of the capacity to elegantly dissimulate dominance behavior. Today all of the basic evolutionary machinery of mating and dominance competition remains in full operation, but it’s mind-bogglingly confusing because increasingly females select for males who can most creatively and effectively hide their power. What this means is that precisely the most over-flowingly aggressive males may be less and less likely to receive the basic, small doses of love and esteem that every human being requires, in their early socialization experiences. Combined with the previous point about the ultimate power of money, it’s easy to see how and why the feminist inversion of which males get selected by females (defining dominance as the dissimulation of dominance), has the direct consequence of leaving the most irrepressibly narcissistic and power-hungry males to seek unbridled social domination via capital, as a basic requirement for psychological self-maintenance.

John McAfee and Donald Trump are the types of whom it can be said, literally, that they are capable of making the entire world conform to their whims. They can do this repeatedly and sustainably, even when a large number of interested opponents see what they are doing, even when it publicized to the moral outrage of the entire respectable, cosmopolitan world. What is genuinely frightening and dangerous about powerful males is precisely that their power is real, i.e. absolutely impervious to the wishes, interests, and indignant words of less powerful people.

It seems to me that, broadly, there are two possible ways to dealing with this problem. The method popular activist culture has adopted is to work toward a state of zero dominance expression in all possible local and global hierarchies, with this leading to a substantially higher risk of psychopathic males going straight to the top of the megamachine, for all of the reasons I’ve laid out. Now, to be fair, I see one way you might still find this method preferable: if you believe that psychopathic male drives for dominance could possibly be socialized out of our biology altogether in some kind of long-term evolutionary engineering process. If that’s your model, then I suppose you could defend the now popular approach as a risky but radical plan to eliminate violence forever, or something like that. Personally, I find that hard to believe, but that would require a different essay. In the meantime, I suppose we all have to make our wagers as we see fit.

Of course, the second solution is simply to permit or even encourage small amounts of masculine dominance behavior in a large number of local hierarchies (with some margin greater than zero for dangerous excesses), leading to a low likelihood of psychopathic males rising to the top of the megamachine.

A final point about the role of higher education in all of this. In a contemporary liberal arts education, the primary educational experience is coming to feel the power of words. This is a real and important insight because in modern societies the symbolic order exerts extraordinary if diffuse effects, and I benefitted from gaining this kind of awareness in my own liberal arts education. This feeling is also exciting and empowering because we all have the capacity to produce words. But for this reason—combined with the fact that direct violence in wealthy Western societies is atypically low in long-run historical perspective—a very large number of well-meaning lefty folks today have genuinely forgotten that there exist forces more powerful than words. We have forgotten that the whole, horrifying, tragic, and very real problem of power is precisely that those who have enough of it may ultimately do exactly what they please. Many lefties today seem to be living on the genuine belief that enough people, saying enough words, is a viable method for constraining anything whatsoever. It’s not.

The McAfee documentary is an extraordinary lesson of how no amount of moralizing can solve the fact that unequal distributions of raw human power exist across society; no amount of “awareness” or information-sharing or even law-making will ever be able to stop the will to power wherever it sneaks through the cracks of social inhibition. One of morality’s dirtiest and most harmful little secrets is that it only constrains power where power is already weak for other reasons. Contemporary SJW-styled feminism will make the large mass of beta bro’s marginally more polite. It may, for short- to medium-term intervals, suppress the brutality of alpha types who may indeed be prone to some abusive behaviors. But it will also ensure that wherever the male will to dominance arises in it purest form, it will wreak more havoc, more rapidly, more unpredictably, more completely, and at a higher socio-political level than it ever could have without feminist “moral progress.”

Of course, I am assuming the film’s narrative is to be trusted. I haven’t fact-checked anything. Whether the film is perfectly accurate or fair is probably not crucial for the larger point I will make here. ↩

from Justin Murphy http://ift.tt/2tN7s7M

[pope-francis-quotes]

4th February >> Pope Francis' Full Address while speaking to participants of a meeting to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of Economy of Communion. Associated with the Focolare Movement.

(The project sets up businesses that follow market laws, but pool the profits in communion) (Vatican Radio) The full text of the Pope’s prepared remarks is below: Dear Bothers and Sisters, I am pleased to welcome you as representatives of a project in which I have been genuinely interested for some time. I convey my cordial greeting to each of you, and I thank in particular the coordinator, Prof. Luigino Bruni, for his courteous words. Economy and communion. These are two words that contemporary culture keeps separate and often considers opposites. Two words that you have instead joined, accepting the invitation that Chiara Lubich offered you 25 years ago in Brazil, when, in the face of the scandal of inequality in the city of São Paulo, she asked entrepreneurs to become agents of communion. She invited you to be creative, skilful, but not only this. You see the entrepreneur as an agent of communion. By introducing into the economy the good seed of communion, you have begun a profound change in the way of seeing and living business. Business is not only incapable of destroying communion among people, but can edify it and promote it. With your life you demonstrate that economy and communion become more beautiful when they are beside each other. Certainly the economy is more beautiful, but communion is also more beautiful, because the spiritual communion of hearts is even fuller when it becomes the communion of goods, of talents, of profits. In considering your task, I would like to say three things to you today. The first concerns money. It is very important that at the centre of the economy of communion there be the communion of your profits. The economy of communion is also the communion of profits, an expression of the communion of life. Many times I have spoken about money as an idol. The Bible tells us this in various ways. Not by chance, Jesus’ first public act, in the Gospel of John, is the expulsion of the merchants from the temple (cf. 2:13-21). We cannot understand the new Kingdom offered by Jesus if we do not free ourselves of idols, of which money is one of the most powerful. Therefore, how is it possible to be merchants that Jesus does not expel? Money is important, especially when there is none, and food, school, and the children’s future depend on it. But it becomes an idol when it becomes the aim. Greed, which by no coincidence is a capital sin, is the sin of idolatry because the accumulation of money per se becomes the aim of one’s own actions. When capitalism makes the seeking of profit its only purpose, it runs the risk of becoming an idolatrous framework, a form of worship. The ‘goddess of fortune’ is increasingly the new divinity of a certain finance and of the whole system of gambling which is destroying millions of the world’s families, and which you rightly oppose. This idolatrous worship is a surrogate for eternal life. Individual products (cars, telephones ...) get old and wear out, but if I have money or credit I can immediately buy others, deluding myself of conquering death. Thus, one understands the ethical and spiritual value of your choice to pool profits. The best and most practical way to avoid making an idol of money is to share it with others, above all with the poor, or to enable young people to study and work, overcoming the idolatrous temptation with communion. When you share and donate your profits, you are performing an act of lofty spirituality, saying to money through deeds: ‘you are not God’. The second thing I would like to say to you concerns poverty, a central theme of your movement. Today, many initiatives, public and private, are being carried out to combat poverty. All this, on the one hand, is a growth in humanity. In the Bible, the poor, orphans, widows, those ‘discarded’ by the society of those times, were aided by tithing and the gleaning of grain. But most of the people remained poor; that aid was not sufficient to feed and care for everyone. There were many ‘discarded’ by society. Today we have invented other ways to care for, to feed, to teach the poor, and some of the seeds of the Bible have blossomed into more effective institutions than those of the past. The rationale for taxes also lies in this solidarity, which is negated by tax avoidance and evasion which, before being illegal acts, are acts which deny the basic law of life: mutual care. But — and this can never be said enough — capitalism continues to produce discarded people whom it would then like to care for. The principal ethical dilemma of this capitalism is the creation of discarded people, then trying to hide them or make sure they are no longer seen. A serious form of poverty in a civilization is when it is no longer able to see its poor, who are first discarded and then hidden. Aircraft pollute the atmosphere, but, with a small part of the cost of the ticket, they will plant trees to compensate for part of the damage created. Gambling companies finance campaigns to care for the pathological gamblers that they create. And the day that the weapons industry finances hospitals to care for the children mutilated by their bombs, the system will have reached its pinnacle. The economy of communion, if it wants to be faithful to its charism, must not only care for the victims, but build a system where there are ever fewer victims, where, possibly, there may no longer be any. As long as the economy still produces one victim and there is still a single discarded person, communion has not yet been realized; the celebration of universal fraternity is not full. Therefore, we must work toward changing the rules of the game of the socio-economic system. Imitating the Good Samaritan of the Gospel is not enough. Of course, when an entrepreneur or any person happens upon a victim, he or she is called to take care of the victim and, perhaps like the Good Samaritan, also to enlist the fraternal action of the market (the innkeeper). I know that you have sought to do so for 25 years. But it is important to act above all before the man comes across the robbers, by battling the frameworks of sin that produce robbers and victims. An entrepreneur who is only a Good Samaritan does half of his duty: he takes care of today’s victims, but does not curtail those of tomorrow. For communion one must imitate the merciful Father of the parable of the Prodigal Son and wait at home for the children, workers and coworkers who have done wrong, and there embrace them and celebrate with and for them — and not be impeded by the meritocracy invoked by the older son and by many who deny mercy in the name of merit. An entrepreneur of communion is called to do everything possible so that even those who do wrong and leave home can hope for work and for dignified earnings, and not wind up eating with the swine. No son, no man, not even the most rebellious, deserves acorns. Lastly, the third thing concerns the future. These 25 years of your history say that communion and business can exist and grow together. An experience which for now is limited to a small number of businesses — extremely small if compared to the world’s great capital. But the changes in the order of the spirit and therefore of life are not linked to big numbers. The small flock, the lamp, a coin, a lamb, a pearl, salt, leaven: these are the images of the Kingdom that we encounter in the Gospels. And the prophets have announced to us the new age of salvation by indicating to us the sign of a child, Emmanuel, and speaking to us of a faithful ‘remnant’, a small group. It is not necessary to be in a large group to change our life: suffice it that the salt and leaven do not deteriorate. The great work to be performed is trying not to lose the ‘active ingredient’ which enlivens them: salt does not do its job by increasing in quantity — instead, too much salt makes the meal salty — but by saving its ‘spirit’, its quality. Every time people, peoples and even the Church have thought of saving the world in numbers, they have produced power structures, forgetting the poor. We save our economy by being simply salt and leaven: a difficult job, because everything deteriorates with the passing of time. What do we do so as not to lose the active ingredient, the ‘enzyme’ of communion? When there were no refrigerators, to preserve the mother dough of the bread, they gave a small amount of their own leavened dough to a neighbour, and when they needed to make bread again they received a handful of leavened dough from that woman or from another who had received it in her turn. It is reciprocity. Communion is not only the sharing but also the multiplying of goods, the creation of new bread, of new goods, of new Good with a capital ‘G’. The living principle of the Gospel remains active only if we give it: if instead we possessively keep it all and only for ourselves, it goes mouldy and dies. The economy of communion will have a future if you give it to everyone and it does not remain only inside your ‘house’. Give it to everyone, firstly to the poor and the young, who are those who need it most and know how to make the gift received bear fruit! To have life in abundance one must learn to give: not only the profits of businesses, but of yourselves. The first gift of the entrepreneur is of his or her own person: your money, although important, is too little. Money does not save if it is not accompanied by the gift of the person. Today’s economy, the poor, the young, need first of all your spirit, your respectful and humble fraternity, your will to live and, only then, your money. Capitalism knows philanthropy, not communion. It is simple to give a part of the profits, without embracing and touching the people who receive those ‘crumbs’. Instead, even just five loaves and two fishes can feed the multitude if they are the sharing of all our life. In the logic of the Gospel, if one does not give all of himself, he never gives enough of himself. You already do these things. But you can share more profits in order to combat idolatry, change the structures in order to prevent the creation of victims and discarded people, give more of your leaven so as to leaven the bread of many. May the ‘no’ to an economy that kills become a ‘yes’ to an economy that lets live, because it shares, includes the poor, uses profits to create communion. I hope you continue on your path, with courage, humility and joy. “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Cor 9:7). God loves your joyfully given profits and talents. You already do this; you can do so even more. I hope you continue to be the seed, salt and leaven of another economy: the economy of the Kingdom, where the rich know how to share their wealth, and the poor are called ‘blessed’.

[scienceblogtumbler]

Teleworking is here to stay – here’s what it means for the future of work

Coronavirus response measures have accelerated the transition to telework, with the proportion of Europeans who work remotely shooting up from 5% to 40%, and this is unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels, according to experts. But beyond eliminating commutes and water cooler moments, how will this reshape the way we work?

Remote working has exploded in 2020, with estimates suggesting that almost 40% of people employed in the EU started teleworking fulltime as a result of the pandemic. ’What appeared to be an underlying trend that was slowly happening has been accelerated over a very short period of time,’ said Xabier Goenaga, of the EU’s in-house research service, the Joint Research Centre, and co-author of a 2019 report on the changing nature of work and skills in the digital age.

Prior to this year, about 5% of people in the EU worked regularly from home, a figure that had not changed much since 2009. And some sectors had more experience with teleworking than others. It is more prevalent with highly-skilled workers, where the highest rates were found among teachers, ICT professionals and managers.

There are regional disparities too. In 2019, remote working was more common in northern European countries such as Sweden, Finland and Denmark – and these countries have also seen the biggest proportion of workers begin to telework during the pandemic. It’s partly because there are more jobs in sectors conducive to remote work. However, according to Goenaga, cultural differences are at play too since many workplaces are still set up in a more traditional way in southern Europe.

‘They may not be organised for remote work because they don’t trust their employees to the same level as some companies in the north of Europe,’ he said. ‘I think that’s going to change substantially in the future as a result of the pandemic.’

A switch to working from home could have advantages for employees. By doing away with daily commutes, they may gain more leisure time and a better work-life balance. And evidence suggests that in normal times, productivity isn’t affected and can even be enhanced.

However, there are risks to address as well. A recent report suggests that people may work longer hours and take fewer breaks than recommended by EU guidelines when at home, since it is harder to monitor working hours. And social isolation may be an issue too.

‘We have observed that people are feeling lonely and depressed and need social interaction to have a more balanced life,’ said Goenaga. His team is currently researching the issue to see what can be done to help.

During the pandemic, remote working has often had to be juggled with childcare due to school closures, where these multiple roles are often taken on by women. A recent survey conducted in France found that mostly women reported that teleworking had a negative impact on their mental health. It is attributed to the extra family responsibilities they have shouldered during the pandemic.

‘We should collectively address that and see what kind of measures we need to take so that (women) are not penalised again due to their gender,’ said Goenaga.

Post-pandemic

However, once the pandemic ends, remote working is likely to continue. Tech companies such as Google have already announced that their employees will work from home until the summer of 2021. According to George Tilesch, a global AI consultant and author of Between Brains, a book about the present and future impact of artificial intelligence (AI), small companies will soon follow suit.

Teleworking is appealing to businesses since it cuts costs. A survey has shown that some employees would even be willing to take a pay cut if they can work from home. ‘I think human nature has a tendency for sticking to one thing after they realise that it works,’ said Tilesch.

Many companies may turn to AI to help with the transition to teleworking, particularly through real-time systems that can monitor remote employees. Surveillance technologies that keep track of what workers are doing, such as monitoring emails and who is accessing and editing files, already exist. But they could become more sophisticated and widespread.

Companies will have to rethink cybersecurity too. During the pandemic, many employees were using external video conferencing platforms to communicate and some were found to be prone to hacking. ‘Organisations have to be careful in their choice of video conference facilities used by teleworkers so that they minimise the risk of hacking and loss of sensitive information,’ said Goenaga.

‘I think human nature has a tendency for sticking to one thing after they realise that it works.’

– George Tilesch, a global AI consultant

Digital skills

Retraining is also an issue since many people don’t have the skills needed to work remotely. A recent EU report, for example, found that one third of the EU labour force has very limited digital skills or none at all. However, the majority of jobs in the future will require at least moderate computer skills.

Big companies are already stepping forward to help unemployed people acquire digital skills. In June, Microsoft launched a Covid-19 recovery programme that will partner with LinkedIn to identify jobs that are in demand and the skills needed for them. They will then provide free access to relevant learning materials to anyone interested.

‘These kinds of initiatives of industry taking the first step and hopefully being joined by government is the way the future will go,’ said Tilesch.

Goenaga thinks the EU will also start to provide training over the next 18 months as part of their coronavirus recovery efforts. ‘I think there will be many programmes targeting the reskilling of the unemployed and upskilling of the working population,’ he said.

If remote working is here to stay, it could have a profound impact on the regional distribution of jobs. Currently, there are many more high-paying jobs in capital cities compared to other regions in a country. But Goenaga thinks that teleworking could result in a reversal of this trend. ‘Many people within companies may decide that they can do their jobs from a more remote location, which could be rural,’ he said.

Companies may also decide to scale down their office space. Since lockdowns have eased, office capacity has been reduced by 30% to 50% in some cases. Although current restrictions have largely been put in place to follow social distancing guidelines, companies may realise that they can permanently reduce the number of employees that work in-house. According to Tilesch, offices won’t disappear altogether but will only need enough space for about 30% of their employees to be there at once.

In the long run, adapting to remote working should be an advantage if another health emergency, or comparable situation, arises. ‘Organisations that have already introduced massive teleworking are going to be prepared to introduce them again even more efficiently and effectively,’ said Goenaga.

Xabier Goenaga and George Tilesch will be speaking at a panel to discuss the future of work at the European Research and Innovation Days conference which will take place online from 22-24 September.

Originally published on Horizon magazine.

source https://horizon.scienceblog.com/1418/teleworking-is-here-to-stay-heres-what-it-means-for-the-future-of-work/