#crime vs. personal is a FALSE dichotomy!!!!

[notaschoolblog]

Social Media Governance (Week 10)

Due to the rapid growth and development of digital communities, spaces such as social media do not satisfactorily govern and regulate the speech of their userbases. Especially due to curated communities like subreddits and the increasing usage of algorithms to feed users agreeable content, the prevalence of ‘self-serving echo chambers’ (Maloney 2019, p. 9) seems to be increasing and opening gateways for real-life harm against marginalised communities.

The subreddit r/gaming is a prolific example of this. As a very ‘masculinised social space’ (Maloney 2019, p. 3) (see my Week 9 post) predominantly used and moderated by men, it has become a notorious hotspot for misogyny. As an echo chamber, ‘the predominately male userbase feels relatively comfortable engaging in transgressive, indeed often offensive, ways’ (Maloney 2019, p. 6): they know even their extreme opinions will be supported there.

Despite how specified these communities are, they are in no way few-and-far-between. The existence of the manosphere—especially the recent overwhelming influence of Andrew Tate (Rich & Bujalkagence 2023), and harassment campaigns such as #GamerGate (which has its own subreddit) have created a ‘networked harassment’ (Marwick & Caplan 2018, p. 547) of women online.

Importantly, this behaviour is not a new phenomenon, as similar groups like the Men’s Rights Activists, which was popularised in the 1970s, began as reactionary to contemporary feminist movements. The shared outlook between the MRA and the manosphere is not that women are fighting for equality against patriarchy to improve society, but rather that ‘the failings of [Western] culture’ (Bean in Marwick & Caplan 2018, p. 546) are the fault of so-called misandrists seeking to destroy the ‘holy’ Western society via diversity. This idea eerily echoes purist nationalist talking points, as these men position themselves as victims who must be on the side of ‘revalorizing masculinity’ (Blais & Dupuis-Deri in Marwick & Caplan 2018, p. 546).

Larger governing powers do sometimes step in though. A few years ago, Reddit terminated r/incels on account of its deeply concerning threats against women, and while this made the community more inaccessible by forcing them to relocate, it also furthered their own victim mentality.

 Other movements to resist this hyper-masculine culture are social ones by other internet users. For example, the subreddit r/gamingcirclejerk intentionally counters r/gaming by relentlessly mocking them through irony (hence ‘circle jerk’) and being aggressively inclusive instead.

To be clear, the misogyny of the manosphere and gaming culture are undoubtedly examples of online hate crimes, as they are ‘motivated by hostility or prejudice against [...a protected…] group’ (Haslop, O’Rourke & Southern 2021, p. 1420). In efforts to avoid discriminatory targeting, women are ‘more likely to self-censor what they post online…to minimise the risk of experiencing further harassment’ (Haslop, O’Rourke & Southern 2021, p. 1421). Thus, a gendered ‘digital divide’ (Jane; Van Dijk in Haslop, O’Rourke & Southern 2021, p. 1420) is established, and is not being adequately governed.

The false, unequal dichotomy of misogyny vs misandry is often excused as inoffensive, personal beliefs which should be protected under ‘free-speech’—but should this really be allowed when it evidently causes so much danger for minority groups that go unrecognised in their marginalisation?

>REFERENCES ARE UNDER THE CUT<

Haslop, C, O’Rourke, F, & Southern, R 2021. ‘#NoSnowflakes: The toleration of harassment and an emergent gender-related digital divide, in a UK student online culture’, Convergence, vol. 27, no .5, pp. 1418–1438. 

Maloney, M, Roberts, S, Graham, T 2019, ‘Introduction’, Gender, masculinity and video gaming, Palgrave, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28262-2_1

Marwick, AE & Caplan, R 2018, 'Drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment', Feminist media studies, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 543-559.

Rich, B & Bujalkagence, E 2023, 'The draw of the ‘manosphere’: understanding Andrew Tate’s appeal to lost men', The conversation, February 13.

Solon, O 2017, 'Incel': Reddit bans misogynist men's group blaming women for their celibacy, The guardian, viewed 8 May 2023, <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/reddit-incel-involuntary-celibate-men-ban>. Square-Enit 2022, Evolution of gaming graphics!, 18 February, viewed 8 May 2023, <https://np.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/svijft/evolution_of_gaming_graphics/hxg2u84/>.

[bourbon-ontherocks]

Good Girls Tag Game

Tagged by @joeyjoeylee, @gild-and-fire and @medievaldarling (thank you dears! ❤️❤️❤️)

When did you start watching Good Girls?

In early March 2019 for season 1, then I binged season 2 in June when it dropped on Netflix France.

Why did you start watching Good Girls?

I think that netflix started recommending me the season 1 of this show in like December 2018 or something? I already knew Christina from Mad Men and I generally like crime-comedy, so I was like, "hmmm, maybe later" and probably added it to my list or something but didn't watch. And then at the end of January I was on the plane for my trip to Thailand (remember that time when we could hop on planes and like, go to other countries??? Wild...) and was looking for something to watch and they had GG s1 so I was like, "oh yeah, netflix suggested me that show, the trailer sounded fun, might as well give it a go!". I watched the first episode and liked it, but this freaking plane company didn't provide ANY subtitle at all (like even in English!! WTF???) so I concluded to myself that she show was worth a watch but that I'd wait to be back home to watch it properly with English subtitles so I wouldn't miss any line.

Weirdly enough restrospectively, I didn't get hooked before at least 2.02, like, I finished S1 in March and didn't even know by then that S2 was airing nor was particularly impatient, and when S2 dropped on Netflix a couple months later, I was mostly like, "oh, right, this was a cool show, there is more!". And then season 2 happened to me and ruined my life.

Who is your favorite character?

MICK

What's your favorite ship?

Beth x sleep, Beth x food, Beth x hugs

Who is your favorite secondary character?

Mary Pat

If you could give Beth one background detail what would it be?

She suffered from depression as a teen

If you could give Annie one background detail what would it be?

She keeps a dreams journal

If you could give Ruby one background detail what would it be?

She has siblings but they live in another State and she doesn't see them/speak to them very often.

What's your favorite crime related moment or storyline?

When the girls go to the drug dealers' house and Beth is on her little power trip of "oh you think you're in charge? That's adorable. See, I'm the reason you exist", and it leads to a bittersweet conclusion because sure, the girls didn't get raped in the basement but they lost their phones and wallets, sooooo...

What's your favorite personal moment or storyline?

THE. BATHROOM. BREAK. It does count as personal, right? Right?!

FMK: I got tagged three times with three different trios, so:

@joeyjoeylee this was hard, once Turner's obviously assigned, you leave me with douchebag number 1 and douchebag number 2. Do I look like some Annie to you?

Fuck: Turner (have you SEEN what the other two look like? I'm not touching that with a six feet pole!)

Marry: Gregg (I guess at least he's got money and is vaguely handsome?)

Kill: Noah. By elimination

@gild-and-fire how dare make me choose between those three lil beans???

Fuck: Turner

Marry: Mick (I’d fuck Mick too honestly but there’s no way I’d marry Turner lol)

Kill: Max (look I love him, but he's unattractive as fuck and I want to be able to buy my own tampons, soooo... Also can't kill either Turner or Mick)

@medievaldarling you really don't spare me any shame, right??

Fuck: Gayle (have you SEEN the other two?? Plus she has perfectly-sized boobs, right?)

Marry: JT (really by default honestly, I don't care about this character but there's no way in hell I'm either fucking or marrying Noah)

Kill: Noah

Bonus: Add 3 characters in the hashtags for your tagged friends to play fuck, marry, kill! (or snog, marry, avoid!)

I’m tagging quite blindly so sorry if you did it already (but please tag me so I can SEE): @whiskeyjack @00gangfriend00 @riosnecktattoo @missmaxime

[inky-duchess]

Plots and Knots: A Tale of Revenge

(why this header? This was the single best revenge moment of the decade, perhaps the century. That's why)

Revenge. A sweet, sour, complex and simple goal of any character or any story. Revenge can be chalked down to the bare bones of a character retaliating against another for a perceived insult of crime, of which the character cannot forget or forgive. So how do we write an effective revenge  story? In this post we will be looking at 4 of my favourite revenge stories: Batman, Six of Crows, Revenge (TV series) and Game of Thrones.

In the Beginning

The audience needs to understand why your characters are going down this path. Your character must face a wrong, either onto somebody close to them or onto themselves. But usually, for the audience to feel root for your character, the character in question usually has to be innocent. They have to be the innocent party in the entire mess.

Batman: Bruce Wayne watches his parents get murdered in front of him in a mugging home wrong.

Six Of Crows: Kaz Brekker watches his brother die and almost dies himself due to them being fleeced by a conartist out their last money.

Revenge: Amanda Clarke is torn apart from her father after he's  falsely accused of a terrorist act which leaves her shunned by society 

Game of Thrones: Elia Martell and her children are violently murdered by the Mountain.

The Payback

The heart of a revenge story is how your character wants to pay the villain back for their doings. The audience will need to understand your character's motives and what they want out of their plans. This is also a great way to show your character's traits and how they think. A character's blueprint for revenge doesn't necessarily have to be a long winded one or even complicated.

Batman: Bruce wants to clean up Gotham and prevent crime. To do this, he becomes the madked vigilante Batman.

Six Of Crows: Kaz wants to make Pekka understand how losing everything feels. To do this, he plans to methodically strip away everything that Pekka holds near and dear.

Revenge: Amanda wants the people who framed her father to pay for their role in his downfall and her subsequent terrible childhood. To do this she follows an elaborate plan to target every single one of the conspirators on detailed personal revenges.

Game of Thrones: The Martells want justice for their Princess and her children. To do this, the Martells want to overthrow the current Lannister regime and watch Tywin Lannister die.

The Justice Vs Vengeance Dichotomy

How far is too far? While taking revenge is frowned upon by many religions or moral communities or society it still remains one of the most desired things of all mankind. We carve an ending to things but most of us believe in balance. If your character is to be the hero of their story, they need to understand where the line between justice and vengeance stands. Beyond that line, and the hero and villain may not seem as different as they ought to be.

Batman: Bruce has a strict no killing policy. He doesn't ever kill Joe Chill (the guy who actually shot the Waynes) nor Lew Moxon (the guy behind the murder). He pays back their crimes by trying to rid Gotham of crime.

Six Of Crows: Kaz manages to disarm Pekka Rollins, taking away his status, his money, his businesses and all the while, not harming anybody Pekka cares about (he does make Pekka think he did, but in the end its a ploy)

Revenge: Amanda manages to clear her father's name yet however she does end up doing too far on multiple occasions. Frankly, how she treats Daniel and Charlotte is appalling despite them being as innocent as herself.

Game of Thrones: Years after the death of Elia, her brother Oberyn faces the Mountain in a duel which he loses. Oberyn's daughters, the Sand Snakes each want a different revenge. Obara wants to burn Oltown. Nymeria wants to kill the man who ordered the death of her aunt (which in turn led to her father's death) Tywin, his children and grandchildren. Tyene wants to spark a war between Dorne and the Iron Throne which would cost thousands of lives. Thankfully, their Uncle Doran has a better plan.

The Cycle of Revenge

Revenge begets Revenge. One wrong doesn't make a right. No revenge tale can truly end until the hero understands that the best revenge is to let the grudge die. Revenge, though cathardic, can harm a character and those around them. There has to be a human cost to revenge, a price to pay for the vendetta.

Batman: Bruce foisted his lifestyle upon on his adopted children which leads to some rifts between he and them.

Six of Crows: Kaz had a tunnel view of his revenge for quite a while which has distanced himself from his friends and love interest, he's slowly building up those relations now.

Revenge: Amanda's plans effectively ruin the lives of everyone who comes in contact with them, from the Graysons to their staff and even Amanda's own friends and family.

Game of Thrones: Ellaria Sand highlights this in her last scene in ADWD, asking whether the Sand Snakes and Doran are ready to pay the price for their plans in the blood of her children and Dorne. She reminds them that if they die, her children will feel obligated to take vengeance which could kill them too.

[max1461]

Just read Scott Alexander’s post on “conflict theorists” vs. “mistake theorists” and, hmm. I have several thoughts. First, to summarize the concept for anyone who hasn’t seen it before: Alexander links to a reddit post by user u/no_bear_so_low, who originated the idea, saying

There is a way of carving up politics in which there are two basic political meta-theories, that is to say theories about why different political ideologies and political conflict exist. The first theory is that political disagreements exist because politics is complex and people make mistakes, if we all understood the evidence better, we’d agree on a great deal more. We’ll call this the mistake theory of politics. For the mistake theorist, politics is not a zero-sum game, but a matter of growing the pie so there is more for everyone. The second theory is that political disagreements reflect differences in interests which are largely irreconcilable. We’ll call this the conflict theory of politics. According to the conflict theory of politics, politics is full of zero-sum games.

u/no_bear_so_low claims that both the far left and far right are more amenable to conflict theory than liberals are, who lean more towards mistake theory. Alexander seems to agree, though in his own post he’s speaking mainly about Marxists in particular. He summarizes the concept as follows:

To massively oversimplify:

Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects.

Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People.

In addition, Alexander subdivides the categories further into “hard” and “soft” versions:

Consider a further distinction between easy and hard mistake theorists. Easy mistake theorists think that all our problems come from very stupid people making very simple mistakes; dumb people deny the evidence about global warming; smart people don’t. Hard mistake theorists think that the questions involved are really complicated and require more evidence than we’ve been able to collect so far [...]

Maybe there’s a further distinction between easy and hard conflict theorists. Easy conflict theorists think that all our problems come from cartoon-villain caricatures wanting very evil things; bad people want to kill brown people and steal their oil, good people want world peace and tolerance. Hard conflict theorists think that our problems come from clashes between differing but comprehensible worldviews.

So what do I think about all this?

Well, it seems to me that this framework is (a) a fairly reasonable descriptive dichotomy, in the sense that, yes, a lot of people do genuinely seem to fall into one of these two camps, and (b) a horrible dichotomy on which to base any prescriptions about political meta-theory, in that these are both awful (and obviously wrong) ways to think about the world. Now, Alexander doesn’t explicitly give any such prescriptions, but he does describe SCC as “hard mistake theorist central”, and generally speaks of mistake theory in approving terms, while speaking of conflict theory in disapproving ones. I think this is bad.

At a base level, my problem with both these “theories” is that they’re, in some sense, just too optimistic.

I agree, for example, with the hard mistake theorist sentiment that the world is full of extremely challenging technical problems, that these problems can be the source of real human suffering, and that the only way to address these problems is through data collection and empirical analysis and hard technical work. And I agree that this will often produce unintuitive conclusions, that run against people’s gut sense of what the right policy might look like. I agree that the state is diseased. I do not agree that “[w]e’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure.” People, it turns out, often do have genuinely different and irreconcilable values, and genuinely do envision different ideal worlds. In addition to that fairly mundane observation, there genuinely are a lot of bad actors, who are just in the game for their own benefit. The world is full of grifters, schemers, and petty (or not so petty) tyrants; on an empirical level that’s just not something you can deny.

On the other hand, I agree with the easy conflict theorist sentiment that, e.g., “bad people want to kill brown people and steal their oil.” There’s plenty of pretty immediate proof of that to be found if you look into the history of colonialism¹, or the slave trade, or US foreign election interference in the twentieth century. Actually, just so I’m not pissing anybody off by only mentioning “western” examples, I’ll include the Khmer Rouge and the Holodomor and comfort women and uh, you get the picture. For god’s sake, the Nazis really existed, and yeah, they really believed all that Nazi shit. In retrospect they may seem like implausibly evil cartoon villains, but in fact they were real flesh and blood humans, just like the rest of us. You think that was just a one-off?

And on a much more mundane note, sometimes (actually, very very often), ordinary people just have incompatible ethical axioms. Sometimes people have genuinely different values, and there are no rational means to sort out which value-set to choose. I suspect this is at least part of the reason for the rationalist community’s skew towards mistake theorizers, in that their favored intellectual tool has more-or-less nothing to offer when it comes to selecting your values (=ethical axioms, =terminal goals, etc). I mean, of course rationality is good for diagnosing contradictions in your value set, but it can’t tell you how to resolve those contradictions. That’s the domain of intuition, empathy, and aesthetics, were data cannot light your way.

However, I do not agree with the conflict theorists’ underlying sentiment that if “the good people” were just in charge, everything would be better. After all, there are all those pesky technical problems with unintuitive solutions getting in the way, requiring all kinds of expertise and thorough empirical study and uh, plenty of them might not even be solvable.² This is a huge deal. It’s incredibly easy to have the best of intentions and still make horrible mistakes by virtue of just... happening to have the facts wrong. Not through malice, or self-interest, or even some nicely-explainable sociological bias like white fragility or whatever. Just because problems are hard, and sometime you will fail to solve them. Even when people’s lives and livelihoods are at stake.

Here’s a handy latex-formatted table for your comprehending pleasure:

lol, we live there.

So this all sounds a bit pessimistic and, well, I suppose it is. I think we have a responsibility to acknowledge the gravity of our situation. We could, conceivably, live in a world that was structured according to either the conflict theorist’s vision or the mistake theorist’s vision, but we don’t. We live in a much scarier world, and if we don’t face that terrifying reality head-on, we’re not going to be able to overcome it.

Now, in general, I’d say I spend a lot of my internet-argument-energy-allowance trying to persuade [what I perceive to be] overly conflict-theorizing leftists in the direction of a greater recognition of the genuine technical difficulty of the problems we face. It's probably worth making a separate post about why I think a “denial of unintuitive solutions” is so common on the left, but I’ll just mention here that I think it relates to what I once jokingly called the “Humanistic gaze”. That is, the bias to view everything quite narrowly through the lens of the humanities, and to view all problems as fundamentally sociological in nature. When the world is constructed entirely by humans and human social relations, there’s a level at which nothing can be unintuitive. After all, an intersubjective world must ultimately be grounded in subjective experience, and subjective experience is literally made of intuition.

I usually don’t spend much time pursuing the dual activity (trying to argue liberals out of [what I perceive to be] an overly mistake-theorizing perspective). This is largely because, well, I think the optimistic assumption that mistake theorists make —that most people have basically compatible goals, and that relatively few people are working out of abject self-interest or hatred or whatever— is so obviously false that it doesn’t warrant as much genuine critique as it warrants responding with memes about US war crimes. The principal of charity is best extended to ideas, not people or institutions. You can take the neocons’ arguments seriously without extending charity to the neocons as agents.

The post concludes with Alexander writing

But overall I’m less sure of myself than before and think this deserves more treatment as a hard case that needs to be argued in more specific situations. Certainly “everyone in government is already a good person, and just has to be convinced of the right facts” is looking less plausible these days.

And uh, yeah. Indeed.

So, in conclusion: is politics medicine, or is it war? No, it’s politics.

There are disagreements, and conflicts of interest, and coalition building, and policy-wonkery, and logistics. There is, as with anything involving the state, the implicit threat of violence. (That’s where the state’s power comes from, remember? Whether it’s their power to tax, or their power to enforce individual property rights to begin with. Their power to regulate or build infrastructure or legally construct corporate personhood or whatever. There’s more than a bit of game theory involved, sure, but the rules of the game are set through the armory.) Every scholarly technocrat with double-blind peer reviewed policy suggestions still ultimately just decides who the guns get pointed at, if at several layers of abstraction. Every righteous people’s vanguard is still bound by the mathematics of production and the dynamics of a chaotic world. There are no easy solution, not conceptually easy nor practically easy. And unless we recognize that on a very deep level, we have no chance of fixing anything.

[1] I’d quote my go-to example here, of the truly ghastly stories relayed to linguist R. M. Dixon by the Dyirbal people of Australia about their subjugation at the hands of white settlers, but unfortunately I don’t have his book with me at the moment. Also this post would require several additional trigger warnings.

[2] I mean, after all, there are only countably many Turing machines, and the set of all languages with finitely many symbols has cardinality 2^(aleph_0)!

[warmbeebosoftbeebo]

wanted to pick your brain to some q’s about this situation. don’t mean to play 20 questions w you but I would rather read an intelligent and thought out answer than listen to the insufferable trolls on twitter.

- do you think this decision has been coming or was it made recently?

- do you think zck was blindsided by the demotion because he had always gotten away with stuff before?

- why do you think z was only was only demoted instead of being fired/terminated?

- will it affect b/sarah’s friendship with kala/z? (maybe not because they were just together for kala’s birthday)

- how difficult do you think the decision/conversation w zck was for b?

- do you think this will weaken b/zck friendship?

- will b ever realize how toxic this friendship is and walk away? or will they always have a friendship in some form?

i think it’s been in the works a while.

i bet he’s surprised that he got consequences.

he’s been b’s friend for 15 years, (a) best friend even for much of that time, and i think he’s one of the guys that b changes who he is around to the point where parts of that become him (the mask, at some point, becomes who you are). i also think b really rebels against being told what to do, as he’s said before, so anything that goes against that mormon upbringing, he runs towards, and zack generally represents the antitheses of it to him (it being forbidden by the church, makes it desirable to him). (the false but omnipresent dichotomy, esp in the states, of religiosity vs hints of the vegas strip as a kid/porn/liberalism, a particular view of sexual and other freedom based in snubbing one’s nose at religion when said view of sex is actually based on/dependent on religion’s vision, paring down and definition of sex is related heavily to this and plays out with b i think eg porn must be good because it’s a fuck you to religion, when really, porn looks as it does precisely because of religion.)

kala, zack, b, and sarah are all friends and that would make things even more awkward if they fired him outright to boot. 

there’s been posts on nicole’s, kala’s, etc instagram of them still hanging with him through this summer so... i’m not sure it did. it’s hard because there is a massive rumour mill going around with diff celebs this summer and so i think it reached the point where there’s automatic distrust for anonymous drive-by and delete allegations (which frankly, should be subject to factchecking were possible and not automatically believed if anon shortlived accounts are all/almost all there is). there’s also the massive pileon on b that started about a month after firezackhall/dismisszackhall did, which was mostly taking things out of context, very very implausible sexual assault & harassment allegations, & as things went on, more and more flat out false or made up out of nothing (there’s been several accusations that i have no idea where they come from eg that ggb is about him wanting to “turn” a lesbian straight, him using the word dyke as a slur, forcible rape, regularly exposing his genitals on stage, etc)

with zack, it mostly wasn’t anonymous, but it was still more obscure twitter accounts (eg we don’t know the real life person behind the account even if it is an account that’s been around a while), aside from breezy, dallon, and in recent days, ian (and his sister, two ex girlfriends also said their experiences with zack were unpleasant to him being insulting about ian to sexist/harassing of them). i got the niggling feeling that b’s stream brushed aside b, d and i’s disclosures (focused clearly on fan disclosures/experiences), but that may have been because he’s addressing them privately/in person/one on one.

i think it was really difficult for him. i also think some of the things brought in weren’t... bad and i think muddled the process too (eg him pushing the girl that was running full tilt at b was justified imo and shouldn't have been used to say he should be fired, even how the one where b and zack were mobbed at the airport while b had a panic attack was used... inappropriately?, some of the stuff was just his brusque humor and not bigoted, i thought what he said about taylor swift was ok and not this big predatory “he’s a danger to her how could b let him be in the same room with her” thing, the fact he said that fan drawing wasn’t good but could only get better was fine by me not him being this big meanie).

i also think that second society article from nov 2 was really unethical and gross. and i don’t like zack overall (breezy, zack, ian, some of his tweets eg the drawing saying that girls control males from toddlerhood through our vaginas/vulvas, his use of nonconsensual porn inc screenshotting fans nudes on instagram and turning them into nonconsensual porn by saving them and reposting them/making the wallpaper, calling that poor girl blow job girl not just once, but telling others and calling her it again). but it was a hit piece and really inappropriately used his criminal past of over 20 years ago, including when he was a homeless teenager, most of which were poverty-driven crimes (theft, larceny, break and enter, driving violations, he’s also admitted to drug dealing/consumption, and he also drove/bodyguarded women in escort prostitution, although based on what he said, this wasn’t pimping aka taking a large portion eg 40% plus of their earnings) and not directly violent against others. there is one assault charge that we know of, from over 20 years ago, and we don’t know the context. shameful even of them to use his past like that.i would also like to remind people going after zack for this past and thinking it reveals something dreadful and evil about him that *brendon* used to not only use (hard drugs too), but be the delivery boy for weed, and later deal drugs (eg percocets). (b’s talked about this for years, most recently on twitch, and zack’s discussed his past on kala’s podcast.)

most of what zack’s done and been accused of (as in, while with panic, the sexual harassment, mocking disabled people, sexualized misogny, etc) is within the realm of normalized, widespread male behaviour. finding fault with his behaviour with/treatment of others would mean finding fault with most men and aggregate (average/overall) male behaviour. including in what some of what b has done (some of which is speculative on my part, some of which is known eg violent sex comments, misogynist slurs, online porn consumption). 

i don’t know the inner workings of their relationship, and am only going on some hints. what breezy said in that comment months ago (that zack is a bad influence on b, has cost b good friendships) says a lot to me and she liked a post recently where another expressed shock/anger at b still being friends with zack. but i don’t know if i would consider b a victim of zack  he does seem to be gaslighting him to a degree, although it also has to do with what i said above about it being in the realm of normal and him being drawn to what zack is and represents (rebelling against shoulds and oughts and mustn’ts... eg swearing is bad according to the parents and church, so all "bad words” must really be good/desirable/said). he’s also got anxiety, depression disorders which play into fears, isolation, plus the covid lockdown of this year which isolates him even further. i do believe the four of them (b, zack, sarah, kala) are living together now with the lockdown? correct me if i’m wrong; i’d have to rewatch lockdown streams. 

the fact ian also came out about zack on top of breezy and dallon has me wondering why b was and is such good friends with him. why does he like him so much? i admit, i used to like him a lot of the time in streams even when he was an acquired taste (eg he jokes around a lot, is rarely serious, a lot of sarcasm, being sardonic, deadpan, honesty and not lying but to the point where it can be a little much), some of his twitter but considering what those three alone have said... does he feel that isolated without him? the fact zack is bisexual may also play a role in their friendship (eg he has other nonstraight male friends, esp when he was younger i don’t think b had many straight male friends and had more female friends), but that’s speculative and i don’t think that’d play a big role. 

i’m not sure what b has taken in/seen, what he knows from before, what he knows now, what he knows to be true, what people have told him directly and is credible, so i don’t know if this will change things/make him see him in a different light. like what did he know about zack’s dynamic with and treatment of dallon and breezy before? what did he think of it then? what does he know now? what did breezy and dallon tell him at the time? did they tell him anything recently? show him?

[rafa-starkiller]

You know, I grew up during the Harry Potter generation, and saw lots of adults left and right, especially my religious fanatic mom, accuse Harry Potter of promoting satanism, witchcraft and immorality, and saying it was brainwashing children. And for all of my life I laughed at that, thinking it was just boomers being boomers and getting mad at shit kids like lke they’ve been doing since rock n’ roll was invented. But nowadays I’m starting to wonder if they weren��t somewhat right in Harry Potter being a bad influence on children.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about satanism or any of the crazy fundie shit they were concerned with. I’m talking something things that moral crusaders like my mom actually enjoyed about this series: the black and white morality.

My generation grew up reading a story about a boy wizard who was not like other boy wizards. He was special. The Chosen One. The Boy Who Lived. And that special boy was engaged in an eternal duel with Voldemort, an ugly villain in black who was evil to the bone, and the Death Eaters, his equally cartoonishly evil lackeys.

There was no grey area; only Harry and his heroic friends, and Voldy and his evil minions. Villains had no humanity, no motivation other than evil, no reasonable motive to choose the obviously evil snake man who kills babies over the heroes. The only exception was Snape, and he only gets a deeper personality because he’d become a good guy in the end (or better yet, was Good All Along). Likewise, Harry and his buddies were the embodiment of goodness in all of their actions.

At first that doesn’t seem like a problem. Kids need to learn what’s good and what’s evil, right?

Problem is, the real world isn’t as clear cut as the wizarding world. Villains in the real world aren’t as obviously evil as the guy in black robes who kills babies. They’re more often than not led by motivations as noble as any fictional hero’s. What makes them so dangerous is precisely that: their good motivations serve as a mask to hide the true evil behind their actions. With a noble enough goal, even genocide is justifiable.

And the real life “heroes” are flawed as well. And I don’t mean clumsy or get angry sometimes. I mean shit like Gandhi sexually abusing his niece. People forget that fighting evil does not necessarily make one good.

Even World War II and Nazism, the inspiration for Harry Potter’s plot, wasn’t so black and white. Hitler wasn’t a stereotypical bad guy; he knew how to make his ideals appealing, how to convince Germany that he was the hero. People who followed the Nazi Party did so believing it was the right thing to do. Meanwhile, the Allied Nations were led by FDR, a racist who sent American citizens to actual concentration camps for having Japanese ancestry, Winston Churchill, an imperialist who was oppressing the Irish, Indians and Africans while preaching freedom from fascism, and let’s not even get started on Josef Stalin. Hitler’s good ideals didn’t make him less of a monster, neither did the crimes of his enemies.

We grew up watching black and white stories of good vs. evil, and this has clouded our minds with a false dichotomy between us, the heroes, and them, the villains. We no longer see our political adversaries as people, just characters as irredeamable as the Death Eaters. As a result, lots of us have become the very bad guys we feared, and were unable to see it because we were so convinced we’re the good guys.

[milquetoast-on-acid]

False Pretenses, A Reactionary Post

Major Crimes S2xS02, Episode Review Who's the Baddest Bitch in Town?

What this episode is about: Dear Rusty Rusty's Terrible Music Sharon v Emma with Taylor as the monkey in the middle Sharon's Mind vs Taylor's Mind Provenza & Amy Dude Ranch Emma + Roland Jennings Sharon outsmarts the fox Andy's Health Problems Andy's Juice The Magic of Greg LaVoi Taylor + His Suit The Couples & How Greg LaVoi dresses them Red: Julio + Emma Purple: Sharon + Andy

That beginning is so beautifully shot. Just look...

Dear Rusty

Here's a plot line that follows through to the end of the season. The first thing that Emma suggests is to relocate Rusty. While both Sharon and Rusty are not for that option. The letter is scary but perhaps not alarming enough for them to move him. You certainly get the sense that because Rusty is settled. And his mom has abandoned him for good and his father turned out to be an abusive asshole. He's got Sharon and that's where he wants to stay. Where they both want him to stay. He should have police protection though.

"I want a writing sample from Rusty." As ridiculous as it is to think that Rusty wrote that letter that would put his living situation with Sharon in jeopardy - Emma is right. It is a base that needs to be covered.

"Don't be concerned about this witness protection business. It's not gonna happen." "Okay I won't worry about it then." I love this little conversation. Words to try to sooth both of them but words that both of them don't truly believe in. Sharon is so determined to not have Rusty gone. But if push comes to shove and there are no options left. Sharon will send Rusty away in order to keep him safe. And as we later know Rusty will not think about anything else. His comment on being grounded until the trial = the rest of his life. OH so dramatic Rusty.

Rusty's Terrible Music It's not surprising that Rusty would listen to some terrible emo music. I mean it fits his whiny self and his teenage angst very well. But it's still terrible... Check out these lyrics: "I just want you to feel something." "Feel something." Oy.

Sharon v Emma with Taylor is the monkey in the middle (How Sharon's mind works verses how Taylor's mind works) Both women make their case to Taylor. Both women bring up some great points. Emma is right that Stroh is smart and has committed so many different crimes before he's gotten caught. Note that she even addresses Taylor by his first name. I don't recall anyone ever using his given name. But the thing is...Sharon knows how Taylor's mind works. And that’s where she ends up having the upper hand. And while Emma talks about the severity of the criminal involved  and tries to use her personal connection with Taylor to her advantage. She almost convinces him...but then Sharon ends up playing a better card.  

"You had me at money, my dear." Sharon knows that one of Taylor's biggest things as Assistant Chief is pinching those pennies. And spending what you have wisely.

"That's all the time I have to spend on Rusty Beck." And on that note...

Sharon's mind vs Taylor's Mind "Can you tell me why we are still working on this murder/suicide?" "Because it's not closed." "Of course it is. It says so right here on this press release that you had me put out for the 11 o clock news in tomorrows paper." Does Taylor never ever think of stragedy of any kind? How the hell did he outsmart criminals as a Captain in Robbery/Homicide if he can't think outside of the box? Did this guy ride his partners and the detective's under his coat tails? 

I really can't wait for awkward Taylor who's sometimes an ass that lets Sharon do her thing and works with her instead of against her. Than this Taylor here who has no idea how her strategies work and has absolutely no faith in her. I suppose Taylor is the sort of guy that is the 'glass half empty' type and you have to prove to him time and time again who and what you are before you seem to  make any head way with him. He doubts you if he cant see what you see right away. Have some faith, take a chance you may just be surprised.

Provenza & Amy

"I figured I'd let her cool off some." This guy has got such a violent temper and Amy doesn't cottle him. I love that Provenza doesn't let the guy explode. And does bloody fantastic job of defusing him by throwing that water in his face. The last thing Provenza wants is for Amy to get punched in the face by this douche bag. "You heard the Captain, Sykes. Please just do it." Sharon and Provenza have come so far. Either Provenza is on the same track as Sharon is or He's learning to have some faith in Sharon's plans whether she talks about them or not.

Dude Ranch Let's talk about MC's version of Grinder. 

Ride the range. 

"Mike, what are you doing?" "I'm downloading Dude Ranch." I love this exchange. And Andy just keeps going. 

Both Andy and Mike’s face at the suspects muscular chest. 

Mike's profile name as Mr Clean I love it all.

Emma + Roland Jennings

I can't believe I never noticed this before! These looks they give the other. 

This explains more as to why Emma is so oblivious to Julio huge puppy dog act around her. I mean Emma is partially oblivious because she doesn't see people but Julio isn't her type.

Sharon outsmarts the fox In this episode Sharon ends up outsmarting Emma, Taylor, their Suspect and Roland Jennings. Emma is so used to being the smartest woman in the room and getting her own way. That she has such a hard time with another strong woman who also has strong opinions and also thinks she's right. But Sharon isn't afraid to adjust her thinking when she realizes she's wrong. I really love that Sharon always tries her best to work with people instead of against them. Even if she can't stand them. 

One thing that makes Sharon a really great cop, is that she really and truly understands how people work. She uses that to her advantage by outsmarting them and also nurturing the potential that see sees in them. It's how she gets Taylor to work with her instead of against her. You'd think that Taylor would be attempting to figure out how to work with her. But it's the other way around. 

Also her idea of making their suspect feel that he got away with it made him get too comfortable. Because he didn't think that they were looking at him for murder just for the robberies, he thought he was getting a better deal. But in fact admitting to the robberies establishes his MO, as well as sneaking that stolen gun in there also establishing that he was in position of the murder weapon.

Andy's Health Problems

This episode continues Andy's health issues that was brought up in the previous episode and continues...well it still continues. 

What I love about this plot line is that health problems are something that plague so many people and as you get older the harder they hit you. We have (up until now) not seen any of that. So it's nice to have a thread about it, especially since the majority of the cast is over 50. I always wondered why Provenza doesn't seem to have as many problems as Andy. But then it occurred to me that perhaps the reason why Andy has so many issues is most likely related to his alcohol abuse when he was younger. And Provenza could just have some great genes. 

"Actually it's caffeine we should do without. It's a drug. Seriously."

I love the look on Mikes face when Andy says that. But he's not wrong. Caffeine is a drug and if you drink enough of it on a regular basis you can end up having withdrawals if you stop drinking it. 

Andy's Juice You really should be looking at labels to see what's in your drink. But Poor Andy, thinking he'd found some really great juice that gave him lots of energy and none of the bad stuff. You have give Andy some credit for trying new things though.

The Magic of Greg LaVoi

Taylor + His Suit

It's interesting the type of clothing that LaVoi chooses for the characters and what is says about them. And I've always thought that Taylor's clothing on MC really fits his character. And that's why I prefer to see him in his suits instead of the uniform. I just think it fits him as a character more. Professional and kind of flashy although not as flashy as the used to be (on TC).

The Couples & How Greg LaVoi dresses them

I find it really interesting that both Sharon/Andy and Julio/Emma are standing next to each other and both couples are matching colors. And that the colors are different. And what those colors say about them.

Red: Julio + Emma

I had forgotten completely forgotten this storyline between Julio and Emma. Actually, I think I forgot about Emma. Anywho the point I'm making is that Emma is just another person in Julio's life that ends up punching him in the gut.  I like to think they choose Red as their color here because of Julio's rather obvious infatuation. 

Red is energizing. It excites the emotions and motivates us to take action. It signifies a pioneering spirit and leadership qualities, promoting ambition and determination. It is also strong-willed and can give confidence to those who are shy or lacking in will power. Being the color of physical movement, the color red awakens our physical life force. It is the color of sexuality and can stimulate deeper and more intimate passions in us, such as love and sex on the positive side or revenge and anger on the negative.

Julio's infatuation is rather extreme. He's beyond obvious of his feelings for Emma. She seems to have lite a fire under Julio we haven't yet seen before. Unfortunately on the other side we have Emma who doesn't even know who the hell Julio is. Emma is really not someone that sees people or their feelings.

Purple: Sharon + Andy Purple is a color we very often seen Sharon and Andy wearing. So why do they wear it so often? 

Purple embodies the balance of red’s stimulation and blue’s calm. This dichotomy can cause unrest or uneasiness unless the undertone is clearly defined, at which point the purple takes on the characteristics of its undertone. With a sense of mystic and royal qualities, purple is a color often well liked by very creative or eccentric types.

That right there. Purple is a mixture of the colors blue and red. Sharon has a 'blue' personality and Andy has a 'red' personality. This is signifying the two personality working in harmony together. At their best the two are in sync, following the other's train of thought, being supportive of the other as well as their own personalities balancing out the other's extreme qualities. 

One of the great things about their relationship is their balancing act. Sometimes they are balanced extremely well and sometimes not so well. As the years have gone by we (while they are still the same people) see Sharon's calm personality temper Andy's anger more and more. And we see Andy's humor bring out a fun side of Sharon we are seeing more and more of. 

For both couples in this scene we aren't seeing anything significant here. But rather this is really the start of their romantic storylines. Their are some distinct similarities between the couples but I won't address that until my roundup and possibly a separate post. I would rather wait because this really the beginning of the two couples and we haven't yet seen much from them.

What I didn't like: Emma still not seeing people. I feel like that may have been advice to her as a lawyer but I also feel that it's a huge part of her own personality. She's kind of like Rusty in that regard. Both of them have a tendency to not see other's feelings.

What I liked: Seeing Provenza throw a drink at their suspect's face. Provenza is now defending Amy. Who in the first season would rather see the back of. Provenza is the perfect example of 'jerk with the heart of gold' trope. He may grumble all he likes but deep down the guy truly cares much more than he lets on. Seeing Sharon the smartest woman in the room. She knows just what buttons to push with Taylor on how to get him to disagree with Emma and putting Rusty in the Witness Protection Program. All Sharon has to do is mention money and the guy is putty in her hands. Seeing this here shows us how much Sharon truly knows the human condition and just how right she is in her place among the Major Crimes detectives. A great cop should know how people work. And not only does Sharon know people very well but she knows how to use their personalities in her favor. She's not unlike Brenda in that regard.

[oumakokichi]

What exactly is this "Hope's Peak remember light"?

It’s not an exact name so much as it’s a phrase I’ve coined to describe the remember light that Tsumugi uses in Chapter 5 specifically. It’s unarguably the most important remember light in the entire game, as it manages to singlehandedly kickstart the killing game back into action again after Ouma’s attempt to grind the game to a halt.

In Chapter 6, Saihara’s exploration of the classroom where the remember lights are made confirms the fact that the remember lights are fake, and that information on them can be decided at will by the person creating it. There are multiple options for memories to be input on the computer setup, and many of those memory options contradict one another. Since there can be only one truth, the existence of multiple conflicting “memories” proves the fact that the “memories” they’ve been receiving all the way from Chapter 1 and onward are, in fact, lies.

Tsumugi uses many of these remember lights to provide the characters with motives and inspiration to keep them going throughout the killing game, both in order to make the game more exciting and to present them with incentives for trying to get back outside. However, no remember light was more extreme or over-the-top in presenting fake information than the one she creates in Chapter 5. She pieces together a remember light in a very short amount of time and leaves it in secret on one of the cafeteria tables for one of the other group members to find.

Presumably she guessed Maki would be the one to find it, since Maki was the one least affected by “the truth of the outside world,” because she was already fairly desensitized to death and loss from a young age. And she wasn’t wrong—Maki is the first one to find the remember light, and after doing so she rounds the rest of the group out, even though Saihara and the others don’t even want to come out of their rooms. Himiko even point-blank asks if Maki will just kill her and put her out of her misery, to which Maki gives an agreeable, “sure, but at least we should watch this remember light first.”

The contents of the remember light are as follows: that all the characters are actually students of Hope’s Peak Academy, that they were chosen not only as the “last 16 survivors of humanity” but also as “the last hope of humanity,” and that even though the rest of humanity might be dead and gone, they still need to carry that “hope” on in the future. The remember light causes them to “remember” that Ouma is actually the “leader of the Remnants of Despair,” an acolyte “following in Junko’s footsteps” who worshipped and idolized her. Convinced that Ouma represents “despair” and is, quite literally, the embodiment of “Junko 2.0,” the rest of the characters step into their role of bringing “hope” to the world even more willingly.

All of this information we know to be 100% false. Regardless of whether Hope’s Peak did or did not exist in the ndrv3 universe, Ouma’s existence is nonetheless pretty solid proof that the ndrv3 cast have nothing to do with Hope’s Peak academy. The only two characters who don’t use this “Hope’s Peak remember light” in Chapter 5 are Ouma and Momota—because they weren’t present to use it in the cafeteria at the time, since Ouma had Momota holed up with him in the machinery bay. Consequently, the only two characters who know absolutely nothing about Hope’s Peak, Enoshima Junko, the Remnants of Despair, or even the entire “hope vs. despair” dichotomy are also Ouma and Momota.

When Maki barges into the machinery bay to kill Ouma, she uses a slow-acting torture poison to attempt to glean information from him first. She questions him about being the leader of the Remnants of Despair, but he quite literally has no idea what she’s talking about. Similarly, during the Chapter 5 trial, Momota reads off lines from a script prepared for him by Ouma—but there’s absolutely nothing about Junko, the Remnants, Hope’s Peak, or anything along those lines in his script. Momota, posing as Ouma, even repeats lines like “Enoshima…?” and “Hope…? Despair…?” when such words come up at the trial. He and Ouma had no clue what any of the rest of them were talking about.

Finally, Ouma’s motive video in Chapter 6, discovered in his own bedroom, puts the final nail in the coffin and proves that Ouma had absolutely nothing to do with the Remnants of Despair, and that their “memories” in the remember light were therefore fake. Ouma’s so-called “secret evil organization” is nothing more than a band of 10 other pranksters, called DICE, and they ran around committing “laughable crimes,” with their most important motto being “we don’t kill people.” Saihara uses these facts to piece together the fact that Ouma was not actually associated with the Remnants or with Junko during the Chapter 6 trial—about 5 hours and 15 minutes into Chapter 6. Yes, I counted. Yes, it really took that long for them to catch on.

The Hope’s Peak remember light is important to the plot because Saihara notes in the Chapter 5 post-trial just how conveniently things worked out for the real ringleader because of it. Due to the things they all “remembered” as a result of that remember light, Maki herself admits that she was spurred into action. What she thought was a course of action of her own choosing was actually her being manipulated once again, used as a tool in order to kill Ouma the same way that she’s been used as a tool for killing her whole life in her in-game backstory.

Without the remember light, she certainly would’ve still hated Ouma, and thought that he was the ringleader—but she wouldn’t have made the conscious decision to eliminate him from the game. Specifically because she thought he was a Remnant of Despair and following in Junko’s footsteps, she decided that she had to be stopped. This outcome was exactly what Tsumugi wanted, and it did eventually lead to Ouma’s elimination from the game. So really, the Hope’s Peak was a brilliant counterattack to Ouma’s attempts to stop the game. Ouma tried to crush everyone’s willpower and grind the killing game to a halt by making them “despair” at the state of the outside world. And Tsumugi’s counter to that plan was “hope” itself.

I hope this helps explain it better! No one in-game actually refers to this specific remember light as the “Hope’s Peak remember light,” but I do so on this blog just to make it easier to know which remember light I’m referring to! There are other important remember lights, particularly the slow-acting flashback one that Monokuma uses at the end of the Chapter 5 post-trial, but I’d say the Hope’s Peak remember light is still easily the most important and plot-relevant of the bunch.

Thanks for asking, anon! I hope I could answer your question!

[baileymarie1793]

Beware your public persona

Social media is an amazing tool.

You can connect with friends and strangers from all over the world. You can learn and share all kinds of knowledge, thoughts and opinions.

However, with the rise of prominent profile-based platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, comes the debacle of public vs. private personas.

You can truly be anyone you want to be online - whether or not that’s who you actually are in reality.

A song by country star Brad Paisley (from 2009) summed it up pretty well:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE6iAjEv9dQ

But, aside from the jokes about living in your mom’s basement, the public vs. private persona issue is one that doesn’t get talked about enough.

In my childhood, we were constantly warned about the “dangers of the internet:” falling victim to scammers and predators, not sharing too much private information, etc.

It got to the point that to “protect” your private information - birthday, address, age, so on - my middle school friends were creating profiles that listed themselves as 99 years old living in California. Now, we ALL know that wasn’t true. Anyone seeing the profile image of a brace-faced tween wearing too much Aeropostale clothing and glitter eyeshadow could tell you that the age details and such were NOT accurate. But that was considered harmless - an act of privacy protection.

But what was once seen as a funny effort to keep birthdays and hometowns off social media, morphed into something more: portraying a different persona entirely. 

Now, I’m not going down the rabbit hole of posting overly edited and doctored photos to look younger, skinnier, more attractive... I’m not talking about making entirely false profiles to catfish others... I’m referring to posting and sharing things that are in conflict with one’s character.

It’s an interesting dichotomy and one I’ve only noticed more and more in my work and daily life.

I’ll use myself as an example: I am a multimedia journalist for a local weekly newspaper. I’m very active on my public Twitter account for things pertaining to my work: retweeting stories, sharing photos and videos, live tweeting sporting events, etc. I also have a Facebook account and Instagram account, however, I keep those private. My Facebook and Instagram are limited to only close friends and family members.

My Facebook and Instagram are meant for connecting with people I know personally, sharing photos of my cats and big life events. My Twitter is for sharing information with anyone who seeks it, from breaking crime news to heartwarming stories. It’s meant to be as unbiased and factual as possible.

On my Instagram, I’ll happily like images bashing rival sports teams. On Facebook, I’ll gladly share my opinions on music or movies or jokes. On Twitter, I am careful what I like and retweet, because it can be viewed as an endorsement. I’m not fearful of how what I say and do could affect things, I’m conscious of how it could be viewed.

I wasn’t taught this in school. I learned this as common sense.

But common sense is apparently not so common...

In addition to my personal and public accounts, I am the social media/web manager for the newspaper where I work. I monitor our website, Twitter and Facebook present nearly 24/7. I create and share the content, manage postings and oversee the analytics and comments.

Imagine my surprise when I came across one of the upper management heads of our company (which owns more than a dozen papers and magazines in multiple states) sharing a post from our newspaper’s account. I initially took it as a compliment of a job well done - something worthy of getting noticed by a CEO. Then that joy turned to immediate concern as I viewed that person’s account...

There was little effort to obscure who they were. The account is not private. The location is not hidden. The profile picture is not altered or of someone or something else. The full name is not blatantly obvious (though the handle is a combo of this person’s first and last name) nor is the job title listed, but the 5,000 person following and very active media presence shows there’s no fear of being found out.

I scrolled through months of tweets, replies and retweets... watching as cussing, racial/sexist “jokes,” political libel and more was endlessly shared over and over again. 

Was I shocked at the opinions I found? Not really. Was I shocked someone of this person’s professional status and industry would share things so openly without a second thought? Absolutely.

It was most alarming to me how unafraid this person seemed of any implications. As a female employee less than half this person’s age and considered nearly the bottom of the totem pole by job standards, I’m sure I could be quickly and easily fired for sharing just one-tenth of that type of tirade.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but you are never free from the actions, reactions and consequences of those opinions. 

It’s not a matter of whether this person can have these thoughts and opinions. It’s not a matter of whether or not the information this person shares is accurate. It’s a matter of professionalism. It’s a matter of recognizing the time and place and type of information shared and how it could be portrayed and what it could convey. 

It’s about who you are showing the world you are via your public persona.

Maybe I’m crazy, but I think we should hold both of our personas to a higher standard. I was always told, “if you wouldn’t say this to your grandma, you shouldn’t hit post.”

[just-sort-of-happened]

love backwards is evol (evil) ammo backwards is omma (the omen, about the antichrist) ~ some thoughts on love and its opposite

The Omen & The Exorcist

I think that one of the reasons for the exchange between Mary and John about Rosie being possessed by the devil vs the child of the devil is to tell us that Mary is, despite appearances, bad.  Basically how can Rosie be both (possessed by) the devil and also the spawn of said devil?  Because Rosie is two people, there are two Rosamund Marys: mother and child.  If Rosie can’t both be the devil and the chid of the devil, then maybe they can be one each.  Since Rosie Jr is the daughter or Rosie Sr then we can give her the, ‘spawn of satan’, role leaving us with Mary as actual satan.  (I got a post about this plus Mary has devil horns here).

Love vs Bitterness

So, as of ASiP we have love being a vicious motivator.  Let’s see baby Sherlock tell us that, 

So, the show establishes a dichotomy early on between, ‘love’, and, ‘bitterness’.  So, the opposite of love is bitterness.  

Vivian is accused of leading a life of crime because of, ‘jealousy’.  We can see that as form of bitterness, a type of resentment.  Except as I’ve discussed here, this is a misnomer: what Sherlock is describing in her case is actually, ‘envy’, not, ‘jealousy’.  But, who may have been motivated by jealousy in shooting Sherlock in HLV?  (*eerie HLV whisper*) Mary.

So, things that are the opposite of love according to the show: bitterness, envy, jealousy.  And maybe bitterness is not such a paralytic after all.

Mary has been established as John’s false romantic lead and also a type of Sherlock facsimile, like the Vermeer in TGG: a very close copy but a fake.  

Amo

Now, we see Vivian and Mary closely associated to, ‘amo’, either one of them might have been, ‘the english woman’, who betrayed AGRA.

Here we’re told that Vivian is amo,

But, during the rescue in Georgia it really seems like Mary might be amo.  The ambassador implies she has something up her sleeve: amo.  Then Mary gets there, gives her an outstretched hand and the ambassador gives her a smile and implies she’s been waiting for her.  Sure, there’s ambiguity as to whether she was just waiting for a rescue but to me it seems like there’s a bit of emphasis on a possible connection between them.  Is there recognition in the ambassador’s eyes?  Is she specifically waiting for Mary/amo?  Does Mary know her and is there to save her for personal reasons?  Ones that trump her loyalty to AGRA?  Is amo Mary’s personal code to betray AGRA?  Is it a more essential identity than the R in AGRA?

Mary’s love

Something that’s been discussed in fandom tons is whether on not Mary loves John.  Does she love him?  Is she in love with him?  Is she capable of love?  Or does she love him in her own special sick way: with a possessive love, not a kind love.

What if Mary’s love for John is an unkind type of love that’s like the opposite of love?  Her love is backwards, it’s selfish, it’s evol (evil).  It’s oma, something evil, like in the movie The Omen that John references in TST.  

(Mary as the antichirst, the anti-Sherlock was discussed here, yesterday).

Love is the ammo: it keeps you going, it gives you the power to fight, to survive

Now, love can be a vicious motivator meaning that it’s the thing that motivates you, the thing that fuels you.  It’s the ammo you have against adversity, the raison d���être for us all.  (But, it can also be used as ammo against you as we’ve seen with Moriarty’s threats against Sherlock’s heart and with Magnussen’s pressure points system).  

We have seen Sherlock survive torture in Serbia in TEH (all for the promise of returning back to Baker Street/John) and we’ve seen him will himself to live after flatlining in HLV.  All because amo is his ammo.

Your love is the ammo others use against you: caring is a disadvantage

If you don’t love anybody nobody has any love ammo to use against you.  This is a fine argument for Mary not really loving John or having any true affectionate bonds: it creates too much of a weakness for a spy.  Maybe this is exactly the type of lesson that Mycroft has been trying to teach Sherlock his whole life: if you don't have any amo people won’t have any ammo against you.  Or love makes you weak.

AMO is A’s M.O.

The idea of a modus operandi or M.O. is brought up by Sherlock in HLV.  It’s a reference to Magnussen's pressure points power system.  Now if, ‘amo’, is someone’s M.O., conceivably it cold be the m.o. of someone whose first initial is a.  

Now, who’s A?  Well, we’ve thought of Mary as, ‘Agra’, for a long time now.  Mary said those were her initials in HLV, after all.  So, Agra’s M.O. seems to be, ‘we die’, aka, ‘I die’.  It also seems to be similar to Magnussen’s: using other people’s love against them/to manipulate them.

Mycroft

Now why Mycroft appears with the word, ‘omma’, written next to him opposite Sherlock’s image with the word, ‘ammo’, is not really clear to me.  Is it about Sherlock becoming the anti-Mycroft?  Mycroft tells Sherlock that he’s becoming sentimental and Sherlock’s like, ‘yeah, so what?  That’s me’.  That’s quite a breakthrough.  

Also, if Sherlock is the good guy and Mycroft is forced to work for Moriarty (as per @loudest-subtext-in-tv‘s m-theory) then we could see these two top images as representing Mycroft and Sherlock eventually coming to fight against each other.  It’s been foreshadowed already in HLV, ‘if you go against Magnussen then you will find yourself going against me’. 

[dhgfashe]

           Through their training, scientists are equipped with what Sagan calls a “baloney detection kit” — a set of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against penetration by falsehoods:    

                   The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.            

           But the kit, Sagan argues, isn’t merely a tool of science — rather, it contains invaluable tools of healthy skepticism that apply just as elegantly, and just as necessarily, to everyday life. By adopting the kit, we can all shield ourselves against clueless guile and deliberate manipulation. Sagan shares nine of these tools:    

Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”

Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.

Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.

Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.

If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.

Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.

Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

           Just as important as learning these helpful tools, however, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. Reminding us of where society is most vulnerable to those, Sagan writes:    

                   In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.            

           He admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones — many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity — with examples of each in action:    

ad hominem — Latin for “to the man,” attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously)

argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia — but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out)

argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn’t, society would be much more lawless and dangerous — perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives)

appeal to ignorance — the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist — and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we’re still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don’t understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don’t understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — each in their own way enjoined to heroic measures of loving kindness and compassion — to have perpetrated so much cruelty for so long? Special plead: You don’t understand Free Will again. And anyway, God moves in mysterious ways.)

begging the question, also called assuming the answer (e.g., We must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime. But does the violent crime rate in fact fall when the death penalty is imposed? Or: The stock market fell yesterday because of a technical adjustment and profit-taking by investors — but is there any independent evidence for the causal role of “adjustment” and profit-taking; have we learned anything at all from this purported explanation?)

observational selection, also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g., A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers)

statistics of small numbers — a close relative of observational selection (e.g., “They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly.” Or: “I’ve thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can’t lose.”)

misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e.g., President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);

inconsistency (e.g., Prudently plan for the worst of which a potential military adversary is capable, but thriftily ignore scientific projections on environmental dangers because they’re not “proved.” Or: Attribute the declining life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but never attribute the high infant mortality rate in the United States (now highest of the major industrial nations) to the failures of capitalism. Or: Consider it reasonable for the Universe to continue to exist forever into the future, but judge absurd the possibility that it has infinite duration into the past);

non sequitur — Latin for “It doesn’t follow” (e.g., Our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was “Gott mit uns”). Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities;

post hoc, ergo propter hoc — Latin for “It happened after, so it was caused by” (e.g., Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: “I know of … a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive] pills.” Or: Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons)

meaningless question (e.g., What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? But if there is such a thing as an irresistible force there can be no immovable objects, and vice versa)

excluded middle, or false dichotomy — considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g., “Sure, take his side; my husband’s perfect; I’m always wrong.” Or: “Either you love your country or you hate it.” Or: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”)

short-term vs. long-term — a subset of the excluded middle, but so important I’ve pulled it out for special attention (e.g., We can’t afford programs to feed malnourished children and educate pre-school kids. We need to urgently deal with crime on the streets. Or: Why explore space or pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?);

slippery slope, related to excluded middle (e.g., If we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant. Or, conversely: If the state prohibits abortion even in the ninth month, it will soon be telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception);

confusion of correlation and causation (e.g., A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or: Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore — despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearer, more massive planet Jupiter — the latter causes the former)

straw man — caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., Scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance — a formulation that willfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn’t. Or — this is also a short-term/long-term fallacy — environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people)

suppressed evidence, or half-truths (e.g., An amazingly accurate and widely quoted “prophecy” of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but — an important detail — was it recorded before or after the event? Or: These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions against oppressive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people?)

weasel words (e.g., The separation of powers of the U.S. Constitution specifies that the United States may not conduct a war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand, Presidents are given control of foreign policy and the conduct of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting themselves re-elected. Presidents of either political party may therefore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and calling the wars something else — “police actions,” “armed incursions,” “protective reaction strikes,” “pacification,” “safeguarding American interests,” and a wide variety of “operations,” such as “Operation Just Cause.” Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, “An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public”)

           Sagan ends the chapter with a necessary disclaimer:    

                   Like all tools, the baloney detection kit can be misused, applied out of context, or even employed as a rote alternative to thinking. But applied judiciously, it can make all the difference in the world — not least in evaluating our own arguments before we present them to others.