#doesn’t mean that social media is inherently bad. but declaring that it isn’t a problem at all and that the media is misrepresenting it is

[buck-yyyy]

anyways i’m still a little upset about that one tumblr post i saw ages ago that said social media was almost never a factor in teenagers developing an eating disorder. edblr was not the cause of mine but it fucking fueled that shit like pouring gasoline on a wildfire—and i never even interacted with a single person there. pinterest is barely even a social media, but i saw enough people on there that were unhealthily thin and beautiful that it made me want to starve myself.

and i’m not the only one. do you know how many people on edblr alone are teenagers? a lot.

so many of my friends have had social media cause body or health insecurities that led to disordered eating. social media is a huge factor in teenagers developing an eating disorder. linking a singular study done through a poll (not a tumblr poll, but regardless) to your post does not fucking change that.

[talenlee]

The Johnlock Conspiracy Conspiracy

First of all this is going to be building off a point first cast into relief for me by Sarah Z’s video on The Johnlock Conspiracy. She is both directly connected with the experience of this space and did the research into the actual history of the people involved, a sort of on-the-spot observer recounting her experiences ethnographically. If you want a longer form deep dive on what The Johnlock Conspiracy is, check out that video. I will be providing a quick summary.

I’m also going to talk about fanagement, which I wrote about last year, which is about the way that fan engagement was seen as being a thing that corporate entities could deliberately engage for commercial ends. Fanagement isn’t necessarily an inherently evil or corrupting thing, but it’s something to know about as something that exists, and knowing it exists can colour your relationship to the media created in response to fanagement.

There’s this idea of ‘The Johnlock conspiracy.’

In the agonisingly mediocre BBC mystery drama Sherlock that ran from who cares to also who cares, starring in the loosest sense of the word Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (a man ‘renowned’ for this, The Office and the Hobbit trilogy, on a scale of poisonous influence to actual outright evil), as a modern day re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson that has some interesting ideas that it absolutely does not use well, mysteries that are not interesting and a relationship tension that was making itself up as it went along. Much ink has been spilled about how this series is not very good, and that’s good, because it’s a very expensively made bad series that banks on the reliable draw of the same fistful of boring privilege.

Part of what made it popular, sort of, was the tension of the relationship between John and Sherlock. See, they were both men, you see, and what if they kissed.

Now, tumblr is, by volume, mostly connections to other parts of tumblr. If you make something popular, it becomes amplified and exploded and brought to the attention of others and curated into lists. Content that gets shared is the very sinew of what Tumblr is, which means that doing things people share around is a strange form of primacy on the site. Making content is powerful, heady, druglike. Commanding curation where you determine what does and does not get shared is even moreso. It is a space for an audience that is engaged deeply with the concept of being engaged, and in this space, fandom happened.

There’s not a lot of Sherlock. There were big gaps between the seasons. When a season came out, it did not explain itself or deliver on its promise at all. It is, as I’ve said, bad. But it was well made and used actors you’d heard of and was treated as being prestigious and so, when the show came out, and because people liked the idea of what it could be, fandom struck on a conspiracy:

What if this terrible show is secretly great?

And I understand the impulse. It’s heart to a lot of fandom. I can’t possibly have spent this time and energy on something I don’t like, it must be that the thing I like is secretly this thing I really like. And so scaffolding comes out to buttress the idea. We’re not taught that fandom is right – we’re taught that fandom is something that justifies itself by being right. If you have a story in your heart about a Dark Fuckprince and his soft bean injured Watson, that story is real and right, and doesn’t need the official endorsement of the BBC to be good.

Without that armour of love, though, instead the fandom turned into this endless oroborous of hostility centered around three people, who seem to just be total dickheads, great job you. This resulted in the blossoming of what was known as ‘the Johnlock Conspiracy,’ where through thousands of pages of well intentioned fumes, these fans huffed themselves into believing that Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis were secretly building up to exactly what they wanted, and they were the smartest people ever for noticing it. The lack of payoff of their beliefs and the active hostility Moffat had to their ideas and positions in person, that was all part of the conspiracy.

Oh, by the way, that idea – conspiracy – is when you have an unfalsifiable conjecture. If you can’t prove it false, no matter what, that’s when you’re dealing with a conspiracy theory.

The dramatic conclusion to all this was the series ended, their conspiracy was wrong, they theorycrafted themselves a few more months of content, and then most people let it drop.

But what if I told you there was a conspiracy?

Because there was. It just wasn’t the conspiracy they thought.

See, a conspiracy is a real thing: it’s a secret plan to do something harmful. And the BBC, since they published the work that Matt Hill described in Torchwoods Trans-Transmedia: Media Tie-Ins and Brand Fanagement, worked with the parameters of their experiment aggressively.

The idea, as I outlined in my article about Fanagement was that making the program so it could engage fans directly, and give fans feelings of creative ownership over the work would drive viewership and the kinds of engagement they liked (like, paying for things). Fanagement sought to make media ‘gifable’ – low saturation backgrounds with cuts of under a second so you could break a scene apart easily and conveniently. It wanted to make fan media easy to make, and to minimise hard declarative statements.

The lessons learned from this paper included things like ship teasing as a deliberate task – and I do mean teasing, with the idea that you had to do it in deniable and ambiguous ways. Making things definite wouldn’t get you as much fan engagement as keeping things ambiguous, because fans would make an inference based on what you show them, talk about it, then other fans would watch it again to make sure they could argue with you about it.

A mystery show like Sherlock was perfect for this kind of treatment. Treating the series as if there was some really deep, thoughtful question at the heart of it meant that there was always a reason to keep from ‘revealing’ the secret of the story, to string the audience along, like they’d believe or tolerate it, if it was all in service of a clever explanation. You get it, right? After all, we gave you all the clues.

The toxic fandom of Sherlock did not form as much as it was fostered.

A lesson from this experience, a lesson easily escaping notice, is that it’s not that ‘fandoms are all the same.’ They really aren’t. They are wildly varying in the terms of their problems and those problems root causes. What they tend to have in common is dynamics, but those dynamics are expressed in a lot of different ways. It’s not that ‘fandoms’ naturally become toxic and awful. There are fandoms that are generally, quite nice, and they tend to be that way because of the values of the central movers and shakers and the conscious willingness of people who perceive themselves as part of the fandom as taking care of it. The dynamic is the same – you have common nexuses of community that people interact with – and the kind of behaviour that’s acceptable and reasonable is filtered through them. If the idea of asking people to modify their behaviour or respect people’s boundaries is seen as unreasonable, then you can get a toxic space.

Also, as I talk about ‘toxic fandoms,’ understand toxicity is relative. There is, after all, a very real, very unironic Hitler Fandom, and they are probably one of the worst fandoms out there. Being a mean lawyer on the internet is bad, and I’ve no doubt the fandom curators known now as the Powerpuff Girls absolutely wrecked some teenagers’ lives – like, there are definitely people with, I am not joking or being hyperbolic, some PTSD triggers about (say) Tumblr or whatnot, based on the kind of social force these people were leveraging.

And then remember that holding that lever at the high end, right at the top with the most power over it was a company that made TV shows that was trying to make sure you watched their shows.

Also: The tools for doing this are available to all the companies that read the paper.

My advice? Exhort and uplift queer creators. Be positive about it, not negative. Don’t make your time about attacking other people’s dark fuckprince. Bring what you like to life, and bring that life into the light. Share and love each other, rather than find reasons to be mad at one another for how you’re all playing with toys a corporation wants you to treat with respect and only play properly. And as always, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept – so make sure your fandom circles aren’t putting up with some Powerpuff Girls.

Originally posted on my Blog.

[arcticdementor]

Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart.

DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American Education. Students aren't learning. The country is falling behind. Only tough no-excuses policies, standardization, and innovative reforms like charter schools can save it, as shown by their stellar performance improving test scores and graduation rates.

He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.

…

For decades, politicians of both parties have thought of education as "the great leveller" and the key to solving poverty. If people are stuck in boring McJobs, it's because they're not well-educated enough to be surgeons and rocket scientists. Give them the education they need, and they can join the knowledge economy and rise into the upper-middle class. For lack of any better politically-palatable way to solve poverty, this has kind of become a totem: get better schools, and all those unemployed Appalachian coal miners can move to Silicon Valley and start tech companies. But you can't do that. Not everyone is intellectually capable of doing a high-paying knowledge economy job. Schools can change your intellectual potential a limited amount. Ending child hunger, removing lead from the environment, and similar humanitarian programs can do a little more, but only a little. In the end, a lot of people aren't going to make it.

So what can you do? DeBoer doesn't think there's an answer within the existing system. Instead, we need to dismantle meritocracy.

DeBoer is skeptical of "equality of opportunity". Even if you solve racism, sexism, poverty, and many other things that DeBoer repeatedly reminds us have not been solved, you'll just get people succeeding or failing based on natural talent. DeBoer agrees conservatives can be satisfied with this, but thinks leftists shouldn't be. Natural talent is just as unearned as class, race, or any other unfair advantage.

One one level, the titular Cult Of Smart is just the belief that enough education can solve any problem. But more fundamentally it's also the troubling belief that after we jettison unfair theories of superiority based on skin color, sex, and whatever else, we're finally left with what really determines your value as a human being - how smart you are. DeBoer recalls hearing an immigrant mother proudly describe her older kid's achievements in math, science, etc, "and then her younger son ran by, and she said, offhand, 'This one, he is maybe not so smart.'" DeBoer was originally shocked to hear someone describe her own son that way, then realized that he wouldn't have thought twice if she'd dismissed him as unathletic, or bad at music. Intelligence is considered such a basic measure of human worth that to dismiss someone as unintelligent seems like consigning them into the outer darkness. So DeBoer describes how early readers of his book were scandalized by the insistence on genetic differences in intelligence - isn't this denying the equality of Man, declaring some people inherently superior to others? Only if you conflate intelligence with worth, which DeBoer argues our society does constantly. It starts with parents buying Baby Einstein tapes and trying to send their kids to the best preschool, continues through the "meat grinder" of the college admissions process when everyone knows that whoever gets into Harvard is better than whoever gets into State U, and continues when the meritocracy rewards the straight-A Harvard student with a high-paying powerful job and the high school dropout with drudgery or unemployment. Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".

DeBoer isn't convinced this is an honest mistake. He draws attention to a sort of meta-class-war - a war among class warriors over whether the true enemy is the top 1% (this is the majority position) or the top 20% (this is DeBoer's position; if you've read Staying Classy, you'll immediately recognize this disagreement as the same one that divided the Church and UR models of class). The 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world; the 20% are the "managerial" class of well-off urban professionals, bureaucrats, creative types, and other mandarins. Opposition to the 20% is usually right-coded; describe them as "woke coastal elites who dominate academia and the media", and the Trump campaign ad almost writes itself. But some Marxists flirt with it too; the book references Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Theory Of The Aspirational Class, and you can hear echoes of this every time Twitter socialists criticize "Vox liberals" or something. Access to the 20% is gated by college degree, and their legitimizing myth is that their education makes them more qualified and humane than the rest of us. DeBoer thinks the deification of school-achievement-compatible intelligence as highest good serves their class interest; "equality of opportunity" means we should ignore all other human distinctions in favor of the one that our ruling class happens to excel at.

So maybe equality of opportunity is a stupid goal. DeBoer argues for equality of results. This is a pretty extreme demand, but he's a Marxist and he means what he says. He wants a world where smart people and dull people have equally comfortable lives, and where intelligence can take its rightful place as one of many virtues which are nice to have but not the sole measure of your worth.

…

I'm Freddie's ideological enemy, which means I have to respect him. And there's a lot to like about this book. I think its two major theses - that intelligence is mostly innate, and that this is incompatible with equating it to human value - are true, important, and poorly appreciated by the general population. I tried to make a somewhat similar argument in my Parable Of The Talents, which DeBoer graciously quotes in his introduction. Some of the book's peripheral theses - that a lot of education science is based on fraud, that US schools are not declining in quality, etc - are also true, fascinating, and worth spreading. Overall, I think this book does more good than harm.

It's also rambling, self-contradictory in places, and contains a lot of arguments I think are misguided or bizarre.

…

At the time, I noted that meritocracy has nothing to do with this. The intuition behind meritocracy is: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.

The above does away with any notions of "desert", but I worry it's still accepting too many of DeBoer's assumptions. A better description might be: Your life depends on a difficult surgery. You can hire whatever surgeon you want to perform it. You are willing to pay more money for a surgeon who aced medical school than for a surgeon who failed it. So higher intelligence leads to more money.

This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper. More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.

…

I think DeBoer would argue he's not against improving schools. He just thinks all attempts to do it so far have been crooks and liars pillaging the commons, so much so that we need a moratorium on this kind of thing until we can figure out what's going on. But I'm worried that his arguments against existing school reform are in some cases kind of weak.

DeBoer does make things hard for himself by focusing on two of the most successful charter school experiments. If he'd been a little less honest, he could have passed over these and instead mentioned the many charter schools that fail, or just sort of plod onward doing about as well as public schools do. I think the closest thing to a consensus right now is that most charter schools do about the same as public schools for white/advantaged students, and slightly better than public schools for minority/disadvantaged students. But DeBoer very virtuously thinks it's important to confront his opponents' strongest cases, so these are the ones I'll focus on here.

…

These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he's willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that's failed every time it's tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that's succeeded at least once? There are plenty of billionaires willing to pour fortunes into reforming various cities - DeBoer will go on to criticize them as deluded do-gooders a few chapters later. If billions of dollars plus a serious commitment to ground-up reform are what we need, let's just spend billions of dollars and have a serious commitment to ground-up reform! If more hurricanes is what it takes to fix education, I'm willing to do my part by leaving my air conditioner on 'high' all the time.

…

DeBoer spends several impassioned sections explaining how opposed he is to scientific racism, and arguing that the belief that individual-level IQ differences are partly genetic doesn't imply a belief that group-level IQ differences are partly genetic. Some reviewers of this book are still suspicious, wondering if he might be hiding his real position. I can assure you he is not. Seriously, he talks about how much he hates belief in genetic group-level IQ differences about thirty times per page. Also, sometimes when I write posts about race, he sends me angry emails ranting about how much he hates that some people believe in genetic group-level IQ differences - totally private emails nobody else will ever see. I have no reason to doubt that his hatred of this is as deep as he claims.

But I understand why some reviewers aren't convinced. This book can't stop tripping over itself when it tries to discuss these topics. DeBoer grants X, he grants X -> Y, then goes on ten-page rants about how absolutely loathsome and abominable anyone who believes Y is.

Remember, one of the theses of this book is that individual differences in intelligence are mostly genetic. But DeBoer spends only a little time citing the studies that prove this is true. He (correctly) decides that most of his readers will object not on the scientific ground that they haven't seen enough studies, but on the moral ground that this seems to challenge the basic equality of humankind. He (correctly) points out that this is balderdash, that innate differences in intelligence don't imply differences in moral value, any more than innate differences in height or athletic ability or anything like that imply differences in moral value. His goal is not just to convince you about the science, but to convince you that you can believe the science and still be an okay person who respects everyone and wants them to be happy.

He could have written a chapter about race that reinforced this message. He could have reviewed studies about whether racial differences in intelligence are genetic or environmental, come to some conclusion or not, but emphasized that it doesn't matter, and even if it's 100% genetic it has no bearing at all on the need for racial equality and racial justice, that one race having a slightly higher IQ than another doesn't make them "superior" any more than Pygmies' genetic short stature makes them "inferior".

Instead he - well, I'm not really sure what he's doing. He starts by says racial differences must be environmental. Then he says that studies have shown that racial IQ gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty, because the gaps remain even after controlling for these. But, he says, there could be other environmental factors aside from poverty that cause racial IQ gaps. After tossing out some possibilities, he concludes that he doesn't really need to be able to identify a plausible mechanism, because "white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it's irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it", no matter how many studies we do or how many confounders we eliminate. His argument, as far as I can tell, is that it's always possible that racial IQ differences are environmental, therefore they must be environmental. Then he goes on to, at great length, denounce as loathsome and villainous anyone who might suspect these gaps of being genetic. Such people are "noxious", "bigoted", "ugly", "pseudoscientific" "bad people" who peddle "propaganda" to "advance their racist and sexist agenda". (But tell us what you really think!)

…

This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

…

That last sentence about the basic principle is the thesis of The Cult Of Smart, so it would have been a reasonable position for DeBoer to take too. DeBoer doesn't take it. He acknowledges the existence of expert scientists who believe the differences are genetic (he names Linda Gottfredson in particular), but only to condemn them as morally flawed for asserting this.

But this is exactly the worldview he is, at this very moment, trying to write a book arguing against! His thesis is that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among individuals, because that would make some people fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - but those voices are wrong, because differences in intelligence don't affect moral equality. Then he adds that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among ethnic groups, because that would make some groups fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - and those voices are right; we must deny the differences lest we accept the morally repugnant thing.

Normally I would cut DeBoer some slack and assume this was some kind of Straussian manuever he needed to do to get the book published, or to prevent giving ammunition to bad people. But no, he has definitely believed this for years, consistently, even while being willing to offend basically anybody about basically anything else at any time. So I'm convinced this is his true belief. I'm just not sure how he squares it with the rest of his book.

…

"Smart" equivocates over two concepts - high-IQ and successful-at-formal-education. These concepts are related; in general, high-IQ people get better grades, graduate from better colleges, etc. But they're not exactly the same.

There is a cult of successful-at-formal-education. Society obsesses over how important formal education is, how it can do anything, how it's going to save the world. If you get gold stars on your homework, become the teacher's pet, earn good grades in high school, and get into an Ivy League, the world will love you for it.

But the opposite is true of high-IQ. Society obsessively denies that IQ can possibly matter. Admit to being a member of Mensa, and you'll get a fusillade of "IQ is just a number!" and "people who care about their IQ are just overcompensating for never succeeding at anything real!" and "IQ doesn't matter, what about emotional IQ or grit or whatever else, huh? Bet you didn't think of that!" Science writers and Psychology Today columnists vomit out a steady stream of bizarre attempts to deny the statistical validity of IQ.

These are two sides of the same phenomenon. Some people are smarter than others as adults, and the more you deny innate ability, the more weight you have to put on education. Society wants to put a lot of weight on formal education, and compensates by denying innate ability a lot. DeBoer is aware of this and his book argues against it adeptly.

Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever.

…

I try to review books in an unbiased way, without letting myself succumb to fits of emotion. So be warned: I'm going to fail with this one. I am going to get angry and write whole sentences in capital letters. This is one of the most enraging passages I've ever read.

School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.

I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT SENDING PEOPLE TO SCHOOL FOR THE SAME REASON.

I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.

I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.

School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of vital social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.

If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.

When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

[anniekoh]

elsewhere on the internet: talking about racism

This set of articles has been languishing at the back of the queue for three years! 

Political Correctness Wanted Dead or Alive: A Rhetorical Witch-Hunt in the US, Russia, and Europe

Anna Szilagyi (2016, Talk Decoded)

Possibly the most common way of attacking political correctness, is to label it “tyrannical”. Covert speech strategies may also support this construction. For instance, anti-PC politicians often utilize adjectives for fear (including “afraid”, “frightened”, “scared”, “terrified”) to describe how PC affects the behavior and feelings of people. The former leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage claimed: “I think actually what’s been happening with this whole politically correct agenda is lots of decent ordinary people are losing their jobs and paying the price for us being terrified of causing offence.” Suggesting that the British are “terrified” because of political correctness, Farage urged his listeners to think of PC in terms of intimidation.

At the same time, the fearsome vocabulary provides a background for anti-PC populists to present themselves as “brave” and “courageous” “saviors” of their “victimized” societies. The next quote by Nigel Farage exemplifies this trend: “I think the people see us as actually standing up and saying what we think, not being constrained or scared by political correctness.” In a similar fashion, Geert Wilders  declared: “I will not allow anyone to shut me up.”

Why White People Freak Out When They’re Called Out About Race

Sam Adler-Bell (2015, Alternet) @SamAdlerBell

Sam Adler-Bell: How did you come to write about "white fragility"?

Robin DiAngelo: To be honest, I wanted to take it on because it’s a frustrating dynamic that I encounter a lot. I don’t have a lot of patience for it. And I wanted to put a mirror to it.

I do atypical work for a white person, which is that I lead primarily white audiences in discussions on race every day, in workshops all over the country. That has allowed me to observe very predictable patterns. And one of those patterns is this inability to tolerate any kind of challenge to our racial reality. We shut down or lash out or in whatever way possible block any reflection from taking place.

Of course, it functions as means of resistance, but I think it’s also useful to think about it as fragility, as inability to handle the stress of conversations about race and racism

Sometimes it’s strategic, a very intentional push back and rebuttal. But a lot of the time, the person simply cannot function. They regress into an emotional state that prevents anybody from moving forward.

...

RD: I think we get tired of certain terms. What I do used to be called "diversity training," then "cultural competency" and now, "anti-racism." These terms are really useful for periods of time, but then they get coopted, and people build all this baggage around them, and you have to come up with new terms or else people won’t engage.

And I think "white privilege" has reached that point. It rocked my world when I first really got it, when I came across Peggy McIntosh. It’s a really powerful start for people. But unfortunately it's been played so much now that it turns people off.

The Language of “Privilege” Doesn’t Work

Stephen Aguilar (2016, Inside Higher Ed) @stephenaguilar

I believe that “privilege” is a sterile word that does not grapple with the core of the problem. If you are white, you do not have “white” privilege. If you are male, you do not have “male” privilege. If you are straight, you do not have “straight” privilege. What you have is advantage. The language of advantage, I propose, is a much cleaner and more precise way to frame discussions about racism (or sexism, or most systems of oppression).

... does giving up a “privilege” seem incoherent? It might, because generally privileges are given and taken by someone else. They are earned, and are seldom bad things to have.

Now try shifting your language to that of advantages. Ask yourself, “What advantages do I have over that person over there?” That question is much easier to answer and yields more nuanced responses.

Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality

Bim Adewunmi (2014, New Statesman) @bimadewunmi

“I wanted to come up with an everyday metaphor that anyone could use”

“Class is not new and race is not new. And we still continue to contest and talk about it, so what’s so unusual about intersectionality not being new and therefore that’s not a reason to talk about it? Intersectionality draws attention to invisibilities that exist in feminism, in anti-racism, in class politics, so obviously it takes a lot of work to consistently challenge ourselves to be attentive to aspects of power that we don’t ourselves experience.”

...

“Sometimes it feels like those in power frame themselves as being tremendously disempowered by critique. A critique of one’s voice isn’t taking it away. If the underlying assumption behind the category ‘women’ or ‘feminist’ is that we are a coalition then there have to be coalitional practices and some form of accountability.”

The Persecution of Amy Schumer: Political Correctness and Comedy

Teo Bugbee (2015, Daily Beast)

We have developed highly advanced ways of recognizing and articulating when we feel offended, but very few ways of making something productive out of our own hurt feelings.

I’ve questioned if my choice to overlook what’s hurtful in Schumer’s comedy for the sake of what’s insightful is a sign that I’m complicit in the faults of white feminism, not valuing the importance of others’ feelings on this matter enough. This argument of apathy gets used often on social media to raise awareness around issues of race, sex, gender, and other topics surrounding justice and a need for change, and it is often useful, but it can also be a blunt instrument. Where I’ve landed for the moment is that not all marginalized people feel the same way about every issue—even on social media, but especially outside it—and asking everyone to respond in the same way to the same joke takes a simplistic view that flattens the complexity of marginalized communities just as much as it does the white, cisgender mainstream.

However, if we’re going to ask audiences to keep in mind the multiplicity of responses that a person might have to a work of art before they attempt to control someone else’s opinion, then it’s only fair that comedians follow the same rule.

What’s Wrong (and Right) in Jonathan Chait’s Anti-P.C. Screed

J. Bryan Lowder (2015, Slate)

One of the main problems with the constellation of leftist ideas he bemoans is that many of the people who use them most loudly do so out of context. Concepts like “microaggressions,” “trigger warnings,” and “mansplaining” originally had specific meanings and limited uses, often within the academy. They described or were meant to address specific situations or phenomena, and more important, they were intended to function as diagnostic tools of analysis, not be used as blunt, conversation-ending instruments. Believe it or not, most of these “PC buzzwords” are actually useful from time to time:  “Straightsplaining” is a real (and very annoying) thing, and it’s often a productive way of thinking about an interaction. But it’s also not always a useful or fair way to characterize a disagreement between a queer person and a straight interlocutor. Precision is what’s needed.

Additionally, though it is impossible to say this without sounding condescending myself, a lot of the abuse of PC rhetoric comes from young college students who have not yet grasped the difference between a measuring tape and a sledgehammer. Of course, given that contemporary mainstream politics offers little for those hopeful souls who want to make truly radical change in the world, you can’t really blame them for gravitating toward a mode of critique that at least feels somewhat empowering. Here, first-year, is a framework by which you can reveal the (screwed-up) hidden structures of the world and use your newly honed textual close-reading skills to mount offenses against those structures—go for it. What works on a novel doesn’t necessary translate to a complicated, changeable human being, though, so it’s no surprise that the deployment of microaggression and cissexism and other social justice lingo can sometimes come off as strident and simplistic. It often is.

But then, so is crying that only Reason can save us from the illiberal wolves waiting in the wings of our great system, which has a “glorious” history on social justice, by the way.

Want To Help End Systemic Racism? First Step: Drop the White Guilt

Sincere Kirabo (2015, thehumanist)

The point of identifying and exposing inconsistencies within the social systems and cultural norms of the United States isn’t to make whites feel guilty, but to garner greater empathy that will inspire change. The main problem with white guilt is that it attempts to diminish the spotlight aimed at issues germane to marginalized groups and redirects the focus to a wasteful plane of apologetics and ineffective assessment.

This is why some don’t like discussing racism, as those more sensitive to these matters sometimes allow guilt to creep into their thought processes, effectively evoking pangs of discomfort. This can lead to avoidance of the primary issues altogether, as well as the manifestation of defense mechanisms, including denial, projection, intellectualization, and rationalization.

Many are acquainted with the concept of Catholic guilt. Catholic doctrine emphasizes the inherent sinfulness of all people. These accentuated notions of fault lead to varied degrees of enhanced self-loathing. I liken white guilt to Catholic guilt: both relate to a sense of inadequacy emanating from misguided notions. Though the latter is anchored in an imagined source, they both speak to feelings of remorse and internal conflict that does the individual having them no good.

Keep in mind that the call to “recognize your privilege” does not translate to “bear the blame.”

[alluratron]

What’s wrong with VLD?

This is gonna be a two-parter post expressing all my various frustrations with VLD, and highlighting exactly where I think it went wrong (all of them. yep). I’m going to keep it ship-neutral because ship discourse has a tendency to blind people and make them belligerent (myself included, I can admit that) however I will be discussing the canon relationships. This isn’t ship hate by any means - in fact I like all the canon relationships (or at least I like what they could’ve been) - but I think it’s pretty undeniable that VLD did not do them justice, and in fact took the worst possible route with them.

That said, let’s dive in.

(sorry to those on mobile, this is RIDICULOUSLY long.)

“Voltron: legendary defender” is a show that began with a whole lot of promise. Off the back of the (widely regarded as) almost faultless storytelling in A:TLA and the much celebrated queer ending of LOK (which resulted in a lot of writing issues being brushed under the rug but I digress), VLD was heavily anticipated, tapping into these shows loyal fanbase(s) - as a show produced by their alumni - as well as the market of older viewers, nostalgic for the Defenders Of The Universe cartoon they grew up with. It always had a lot to live up to, and when it dropped in summer 2016, it seemed to live up to the hype.

I personally didn’t join the voltron bandwagon immediately. In fact, I wasn’t even aware of it until around November of 2016. I was late to the LOK and A:TLA hype (very late actually. I first watched LOK around October 2016 and then doubled back to watch A:TLA) but got deeply invested and quickly followed several blogs with these interests. Through following these blogs, I kept happening upon the word “voltron” but didn’t pay it much mind.

Until I came across a post titled “HERE’S WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH VOLTRON.”

I decided to give it a read. The 4 key points of this post were:

A diverse main cast, with 3/5 of the main characters being confirmed POC, and a dark-skinned princess.

Focus on character and team dynamics, reminiscent of the A:TLA found family spirit.

Possibility of queer representation as suggested by the EPs, whom both worked on LOK, as well as the freedom of the Netflix platform.

Beautiful animation thanks to Studio Mir.

(Only one of those things ended up delivering in a convincing, satisfying manner. Hint: it’s the animation.)

These 4 points were enough to pique my interest enough to delve into the show and, after watching the first season in late November 2016, I was won over. I thoroughly enjoyed the characters, burgeoning dynamics and light hearted tone interspersed with deeper moments. Was it perfect? No. It was a little goofy. But that was ok, it had time to grow and settle. I joined the fandom and excitedly awaited the release of season 2, which came in January 2017.

This is where it started to go bad.

I will admit that, with the benefit of hindsight, season 2 is not as bad as I initially felt it to be. It struggles with pacing and balancing of the 7-character core cast, with several characters reduced to more one-note figures (namely Pidge, Hunk and Lance, although Pidge’s note as a genius is more flattering than the latter two). But story-wise, it is a solid season. The biggest problem of the season comes from the poor handling of the conflict between Allura and Keith over his galra heritage.

Allegories for racial discrimination are always tricky, especially in children’s media. They’re storylines that should only be tackled upon input from people that have experienced such discrimination, so that they may be handled with tact and grace. VLD season 2 did not do this.

What we got was several scenes designed to frame Keith as the victim of Allura’s aggression and intolerant nature. Bear in mind that Allura is a genocide survivor, whose entire race was (at the time of the season) believed to have been eradicated by Zarkon and the galra, whom had previously been her allies. Her emotional response is entirely justifiable and yet, through the framing of the conflict, the narrative was able to manipulate viewers into seeing her as the offending party, with many fans taking to social media to call out her “racism”.

To add to this, Allura is, in design, a black woman. Black women are often portrayed as harsh and aggressive, and VLD played into this to further sway support to Keith’s side of the conflict. He - a light-skinned boy of unspecified ethnicity - was often seen looking hopefully at Allura or looking down dejectedly. Allura, however, was shown glaring, ignoring and turning away from him. We are given an episode (Belly of the Weblum, S2E9) in which Keith talks to Hunk about Allura’s “hatred” for him, but we never see Allura expressing her hurt to a companion (ideally Coran as a fellow genocide survivor) or even lamenting alone. In fact, the only time we hear Allura’s side of things is when she is apologising to Keith (Best Laid Plans, S2E12).

More still, the entirety of BotW has Keith on the receiving end of several microagressions from Hunk. Microaggressions are “slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership”. Hunk’s prodding about Keith’s heritage, initial discomfort about being alone with him and joking remarks (e.g. “do you guys all know each other?”) are strongly reminiscent of microagressions that POC (myself included) encounter on a daily basis. Except, voltron decided to flip the script. This time, the microagressions are directed at Keith for being part galra. Remember that the Galra are the perpetrators of oppression, colonisation and imperial rule, making them allegories for several White endeavours in human history (space nazis, so to speak). And yet, voltron has the fat, dark-skinned boy (who would ordinarily be on the receiving end of such microaggressions in our world) be the perpetrator of these microagressions against the slim, light-skinned, space-white boy.

To sum up, their handling of the arc of Keith’s discovery of his heritage was extremely tasteless at best, and insidious at worst.

And the issues surrounding the writing of the Galra don’t stop there. Though Allura was treated as in the wrong for distrusting the Galra as a whole, the story makes you question whether this should have even been the case. Throughout the length of the show, the Galra are continuously portrayed as a violent and warmongering race. Their history involves conquering all the other races that called Daibazaal home and their most prevalent salute, “Vrepit Sa”, is revealed to mean “the killing thrust” (Omega Shield, S6E1). Proponents of the Empire will often declare “victory or death”, while their counterparts in the Blade of Marmora have a mantra of “knowledge or death”. Even more pertinently, Keith is a character with anger management issues, prone to aggressive outbursts. Instead of these being treated as a character trait, something that he has to work through, it’s chalked up to his “galra side” by the EPs. When he faces Clone Shiro (The Black Paladins, S6E5) he occasionally fights with more aggression, with the clone’s remark of “that’s the Keith I remember” implying that this aggression is a trait that has been present in Keith for a long time. This comes with the animation of Keith with tinted yellow sclera, narrowed pupils, purplish skin and fangs. All of these are traits associated with his “galra side” and all of these only make an appearance when he’s fighting with more aggression.

So how is it that the narrative repeatedly shows us that the Galra are an inherently aggressive and violent race (which is such a problematic concept anyway: they’re not wild animals, they should have agency and self-control), yet also tells us that Allura was wrong for not trusting them?

It’s because the narrative was dead set on punishing Allura.

Throughout the length of the show, we see Allura put through emotional punishment time and time and time again. She is portrayed as wrong for her behaviour towards Keith in season 2 (as detailed above). In season 3, she is explicitly stated to be the “decision maker” (The Red Paladin, S3E2) then is swiftly demoted from that position (and yes, it’s a demotion, but more on that later).

In the same season, the team enters an alternate reality (Hole in the Sky, S3E4) where they find alteans, alive and well. This is especially exciting for Allura (which genocide survivor wouldn’t be thrilled to find their people alive and thriving?), but her joy is short lived when, after she helps the alternate alteans, they are soon revealed to be evil, arguably moreso than the galra in the main reality as they use technology to enslave races that oppose them by taking away their free will entirely. The comet ore that they manage to keep out of the Alteans hands to prevent them from making a second voltron is quickly snatched from them by Lotor when they return to their own reality. Allura laments that she “finally understands” why her father, King Alfor, scattered the lions: it was to prevent this reality. However, in the pilot episode (The Rise Of Voltron, S1E1) Allura spoke with King Alfor’s AI, complete with all his memories. The AI told her that she had in fact been right to want to keep voltron and fight the Galra, and he had been wrong to send them away. If he had sent them away to “prevent this reality” why didn’t the AI say that? HitS retcons Allura’s rightness in that call, further devaluing her judgment. How would Alfor have sent the lions away to prevent the reality where Lotor gets the comet ore, when Lotor wasn’t even born when Alfor died?

This tendency to punish Allura continues with Allura’s relationship with Lotor. When Lotor is first taken prisoner by team voltron (The Prisoner, S5E1) Allura doesn’t trust him at all. He asks her to see past his Galra race and, following her arc in season 2 of not seeing galra as an evil monolith, Allura eventually does. She works alongside Lotor even before discovering that he has Altean heritage. Eventually, they fall for each other and Allura is on cloud nine for a while as the war seems to be over and she is spending more and more time with Lotor, who encourages her, praises her and helps her connect more to Altea. So, of course, this doesn’t last for long. Lotor is revealed to have been manipulating Allura (and the others) all this time, using her to upgrade his Sincline ships while secretly using Alteans he found in the diaspora as batteries.

(Pictured: Lotor holding Allura’s hand in Bloodlines, S5E5. She agrees to help him search Haggar’s den and during this search, learns of his Altean blood.)

So, what was the need of this relationship? She was punished for not trusting the Galra, and then punished for...trusting the Galra. She clearly could not win. And why was it necessary to have Allura fall for Lotor, only for it to end on such a terrible note? Why did their relationship have to be romantic? Was it simply so Allura would feel the pain of his “betrayal” that much more? Because it sure comes off that way.

There are so many scenes of Allura breaking down in tears - Crystal Venom, The Red Paladin, that one episode in s8 that I can’t remember that has her crying bc Sincline was about to kill Lance, probably more - and she is constantly giving up pieces of herself and her heritage. In the very first season, she heals the balmera (Rebirth, S1E8) at expense to her own health. Through the length of the show, Allura continues to risk her life to protect others. She desperately wants to maintain connections to Altea (hence her joy at the alternate alteans, as well as her close bond with Lotor) yet she is constantly losing every connection she has. She has to destroy her father’s AI, the alteans turn out to be evil, Lotor turns out to be evil, they blow up the castle to save all of existence, she gives up the jewel from her crown (which she never took off) to save shiro, and then ultimately, she dies to save all realities (because...reasons). One would have thought that her arc would involve being less self-sacrificing, but no. Allura is tortured emotionally, loses everything she cares about and then dies.

On a similar note, while Allura was constantly put through emotional torture, Shiro was constantly put through physical torture. There are several pieces out there by people far more eloquent than myself that detail the constant use of Shiro for torture porn throughout the show so I won’t rehash them. I will say that, like Allura, his torture does not culminate in a satisfying ending that made all his suffering “worth it”. Throughout the first and second seasons, we see Shiro bond closely with the black lion. He battles Zarkon for control (Space Mall, S2E7) and almost fails, until he realises that “nobody controls the black lion” and this galvanises the lion to take action and save him, severing zarkon’s bond. In the final episode of the season (Blackout, S2E13) Shiro and the black lion connect more deeply than ever before and we are shown a montage of all their bonding moments, leading up to Shiro unlocking the black lion’s wings, which enable them to phase through Zarkon and collect the black bayard, a plot point introduced in the very first episode. After seeing Shiro work so hard to earn the black lion’s trust, forge a bond stronger than the one that lasted 10 thousand years, and triumphantly collect the bayard, his fans would be understandably excited to see him use it. But he never does. After all that hard work, Shiro never sits in the black lion’s cockpit again. His clone does for a while, but Shiro himself does not, and he never touches the bayard again. This is a huge disappointment to his fans, after 24 (technically 26) episodes of buildup to that moment.

And to add insult to injury, it’s never explained why he doesn’t. The EPs said in an interview that when Allura unmerged Shiro’s quintessence from the black lion, she also broke their bond. But this explanation comes with a number of issues. Firstly, this is never stated in canon. Viewers should not have to rely on extra-canonical material to get a full story. Extra-canonical material should be supplementary, an opportunity for eager fans to learn more about the universe and the characters. It shouldn’t be a requisite to understand the story. And, believe me, this information was. When I was watching season 7 with my (at the time) 10 year old brother, he turned to me and asked me why Shiro wasn’t flying the black lion now he was back. I shrugged and told him I didn’t know. I, in fact, did know the EPs explanation, but I wasn’t going to do their job for them. Secondly, the explanation falls apart upon the slightest examination. Say Allura did remove Shiro’s bond with the black lion (somehow...because that doesn’t even make sense). In the pilot, Allura says that “the quintessence of the pilot is mirrored in his lion” and this is why they can bond and fly together. Well, Shiro’s quintessence hasn’t changed, as Allura simply extracted and transferred it. The black lion’s quintessence hasn’t changed since nothing happened to make it change. When they first met, Shiro and the black lion didn’t have a bond. They formed and strengthened that bond upon flying together. So, why can’t they do that again? What is stopping Shiro from simply sitting in the cockpit and restoring their bond?

Short answer: Keith.

Long answer: the EPs desperate desire to have Keith in the black lion at all cost.

Keith was the leader of voltron in DOTU. This isn’t news, we all know this. Keith has also been the leader in every iteration since. This means that Keith has always flown the black lion. VLD following this trend makes sense, right?

Well, no.

Other iterations of voltron always begin with Keith in the black lion. They don’t shuffle him there later, they start with him there. Keith is always the strong, sensible, heroic figure that makes him perfect to lead the team, so he does. VLD strayed from that, and that makes all the difference. In VLD, Keith is introduced as a loner with a temper. He’s closed off from the team, only displaying affection for Shiro. This makes him unsuitable for the leadership position at the time of inception. Does that mean he can never lead? No. He can absolutely grow into leadership. But the problem is, the show already presents us with a valid position for him: the red lion. In the red lion, Keith’s fiery nature, intuitiveness and fast pace are positives. He’s allowed to stretch his legs, flying in the fastest lion and doing cool stunts, then returning to the team when necessary. He doesn’t have to change the core of who he is. Additionally, he is shown to have abandonment issues, hence why he clings to Shiro so tightly. It seems fitting then, that the lion he is matched with is the only one that comes to save their paladin so often, retrieving Keith on five different occasions (S1E1, S2E6, S2E8, S2E11 and S2E12) and even across several galaxies.

In previous iterations, the lions are not given personalities, nor do they demand unique traits/quintessence from their pilots. They’re just ships. But in VLD, Allura tells us in the pilot that the lions are meant to be piloted by these five alone. Their quintessence is mirrored in the paladins as she assigns them. They are perfect matches, just like with red and Keith. Hunk is fearful and Yellow has superior armour. Pidge is brilliant and Green is inquisitive. Lance is insecure (especially in relation to Keith) and Blue is nurturing, but more importantly, chose Lance out of all 5 pilots available (Keith visited the cave several times but blue didn’t take him. She waited for Lance). And Shiro and Black are both strong leaders that suffered from trauma and struggled for control over themselves.

Naturally, when you begin a story with a perfect fit, you want to shake things up because conflict begets growth. However, shaking things up shouldn’t cause them to end up in a worse place than they began because the question becomes: well, why don’t they just go back to where they were before? And that’s the big question in vld. Why didn’t they go back?

So, ok yeah. I think the lion swap is trash.

(Pictured: splitscreen of the paladins minus Shiro in All Good Things, S6E6. They form voltron with Keith in the black lion, Lance in the red lion and Allura in the blue lion.)

Now, like I said, you want to shake things up because conflict begets growth. And for that reason, I don’t think the lion swap was a bad concept. Putting Keith in the black lion forces him to learn to work with his teammates instead of remaining a lone wolf. Putting Allura in the blue (or any) lion brings her closer to the paladins. Lance and the red lion could have easily been the most interesting switch. In the pilot, the first major thing we learn about Lance is that he only got a spot as a fighter pilot because the best pilot of their generation had a discipline issue and flunked out. This student happens to be Keith, and Lance has a lot of insecurities about the guy, instigating a rivalry with him (mostly one-sided but Keith shoots back with his own barbs too). Coming back to the lion swap, the red lion is Keith’s old lion. There was a wide open opportunity to explore Lance’s insecurities here, as he would once again be stepping into the pilot role that Keith left behind. Lance could have felt that he would yet again be in Keith’s shadow (as Keith has now levelled up to leader) and this could’ve caused some major conflict. But nothing was done with it. Lance simply makes a comment about how Keith “probably trained it to bite my head off” and that’s the end of that. Lance then has no qualms about flying red and his Keith related insecurities (and indeed, all his insecurities that aren’t about romance) are brushed under the rug and he props Keith up as “team leader”.

Personally, I think each of the characters affected by the swap should’ve had a mini-hero’s journey. The characters start in their original lions (the castle for Allura). In their original position, they have whatever issues it is they need to tackle (Keith’s lone wolf tendencies, Allura’s self sacrificial nature, Shiro’s trauma and sense of worth, and Lance’s insecurities). When the swap happens, they struggle with their new positions, but are forced to grow. They then take this growth with them when they return to their original positions as wiser individuals (Shiro knows he isn’t a monster, Allura learns that the weight of the war against the galra isn’t entirely on her shoulders, Keith comes to trust and open up to the team and not only Shiro, Lance realises that he isn’t a discount Keith and he has his own strengths).

But the wasted opportunities aren’t the only problem with the lion swap. Arguably a bigger problem is the hierarchy it suddenly establishes. The concept of voltron is five equals coming together to form something that is greater than the sum of its parts. They cannot form voltron if even one of the lions is indisposed. So, by definition, all of the lions should be equally important. The black lion being the leader shouldn’t make it the most important, it should just be because every team needs someone to organise them and black happens to be that for the lions, just as Shiro was for the paladins. After all, of what damn use is voltron with only a head and torso? No, all lions should be equal.

But they aren’t. When Keith moves to the black lion, Lance moving into the red lion is framed as a promotion. Allura says that it is because Lance put his need for glory aside when accepting Keith as leader and this somehow passed the red lion’s test, but what about the others? Did they put their needs for glory first? Did Allura? Why was she unable to fly the red lion? The EPs said in interviews that the blue lion is the nurturing lion and is like a mother bird that pushes her baby out of the nest when the baby is ready to fly, suggesting that she pushed Lance to red because he didn’t need her anymore. They also refer to the blue lion as the “training wheels lion”, implying that those who fly the blue lion are not yet ready to fly a real lion. What does this say about Blaytz, the previous blue paladin? He was the leader of his planet, yet he spent his entire time in voltron in the training wheels lion? And, more pertinently, what does this say about Allura? It completely infantilizes her and is absolutely insulting.

Ultimately, the downgrading of the blue lion to a training wheels lion and the sudden insistence on the red lion being the right hand man to the leader establishes a hierarchy of Black > Red > Green/Yellow > Blue. Allura used to be the decision maker. In the pilot, Shiro says “Princess Allura, these are your lions, you've dealt with the Galra empire before. You know what we're facing better than any of us. What do you think is the best course of action?” From the very first episode, Shiro (who is already the leader of the paladins) defers to Allura. She was their commander, calling all the shots, superior to even the black paladin. But once she steps into the blue lion, she loses that rank. She falls to the bottom of the totem pole. Taking a dark-skinned woman and putting her in a powerful position, only to strip her of that and relegate her to the bottom (mind you, it only becomes the bottom when she gets there), is either the height of ignorance or deliberate malicious intent.

In fact, the lion swap leaves us with a very uncomfortable set up. With the establishment of the hierarchy, we know that the head is superior to the arms, which are superior to the legs. Well, the head happens to be the space white (arguably earth white too - his ethnicity was never revealed, possibly because they knew they would lose support if they countered the popular Asian Keith headcanon) male character. The arms are the white female character and the brown (but lighter brown) male character. The legs are the darkest-skinned characters.

At the end of the day, VLD was racist. Plain and simple. The characters of colour that remained in voltron were short-changed terribly, and Shiro was shuffled off onto the atlas because they weren’t allowed to kill him.

I mentioned how pretty much all of Lance’s insecurities were brushed under the rug, save for one: romance. From the very first episode, Lance displayed a crush on Allura. He flirted with her incessantly, to constant rebuffs but remained undeterred. In the 3rd season, he suddenly stopped flirting. He and Allura developed a friendly and mutually encouraging rapport. It was sweet. They were sweet. But then everything changed when the fire nation attacked Lotor arrived. Despite Allura and Lance’s continued sweet moments, Allura fell for Lotor. She didn’t shun Lance or anything, and she certainly still valued and cared for him greatly, risking her life to save him (Omega Shield, S6E1). But she didn’t see him romantically. How do we know this? Because when the mice inform her of the depths of Lance’s feelings for her (Timey Wimey ep, sorry idk the name, S6E2) she is initially surprised, but then sad.

(Pictured: Allura’s face after the initial surprise of the mice recounting what Lance told them about his feelings for her in S6E2. This episode comes before the one where she and Lotor share a kiss.)

It can be argued that she’s “conflicted” and not sad, but I personally don’t see that. I just see sad. But even if she was conflicted. Even if she did have romantic feelings for Lance by this point, her feelings for Lotor were stronger. We don’t see her torn between the two men. We see her consistently choose to spend time with Lotor and kissing him despite knowing how Lance feels about her. Whatever potential romantic feelings she may have for Lance, they weren’t enough to deter her from choosing Lotor. That is inarguable.

So after totally ignoring all other aspects of Lance’s insecurities, the narrative then validates the only one left by confirming that, yeah, he is the second choice. And I know people love to argue that just because he isn’t Allura’s first kiss doesn’t mean their relationship isn’t valid and obviously this is true. I’m not saying Allura can’t kiss more than one man in her life or she’s some sort of impure slut. Of course not. What I am saying, is that we know that Lance has insecurities pertaining to being second choice. He is insecure because he’s been told that he only made fighter pilot because Keith messed up. Well, guess what? He only became Allura’s boyfriend because Lotor messed up. He’s in the same situation all over again. Allura knew her options and made her choice. When that choice was no longer viable, she went for the other option. The narrative confirms Lance’s inferiority. There are so many other ways this could’ve been handled. For example, if Allura and Lotor had been spending a lot of time together working on the ship, and it only looked like they were dating, that would’ve been fine. Finding out about the colony would still have been heartbreaking for Allura because she trusted him. As another example, if Allura had feelings for both men but chose Lotor because she felt it was almost her duty, to secure a stronger alliance with the empire, that would’ve made the ultimate endgame with Lance more believable. Or, if the mice simply never told her how Lance felt and she didn’t know he was still into her. Or if they even had one moment after the colony reveal (The Colony, S6E4) where Lance did or said something and Allura was shown to be considering him romantically, before she walks up to him in season 7 all blushy and stammering (I don’t know s7 episode names but it’s there, I think it might be s7E10). That moment seems to come out of nowhere because all of Allura and Lance’s scenes that can be interpreted as romantic on her part occur before she kisses Lotor (and no, Lance comforting her in S6E5 doesn’t count because she’s literally crying on his shoulder over another guy. That’s not romantic. Her comforting him in S6E7 doesn’t count either because it’s essentially the same day as the colony reveal and there is no way she’s believably gotten over it that fast. Also he’s literally crying over their dead friend’s body. Nothing says romance like a corpse, amirite?) so we’re left wondering: when? When did she start liking him back? Which is a shame, because a relationship built on mutual support is a wonderful thing to show. VLD just didn’t show it well.

The buildup to relationship fails Allura just as much as it does Lance, because it appears as though she is being punished (yet again!) for making the wrong choice. She had the options of Lotor or Lance and she chose Lotor. And her reward for choosing Lotor is discovering that he neglected to mention the tiny fact that her people are not eradicated and he’s been using them as batteries all this time. A lot of heartbreak would’ve been avoided if, upon finding out about Lance’s feelings, she’d just chosen him directly instead of going through the Lotor thing first. Because she learnt nothing from that experience that required that she kiss him. There was no need for her to have romantic feelings for Lotor; after all, he needed her magical abilities so it’s not like they wouldn’t have gone to Oriande anyway. So what was the need to put her through that heartbreak When her romantic endgame was already available, willing and able? It ends up just feeling like someone working on VLD once had a crush on a girl who chose a suave bad-boy type over him, and he’s reliving it through this cartoon by showing how the bad boy type is actually just using her and she should actually have chosen him (my guess is JDS but that’s just me).

Continuing on the topic of romance, Shiro’s relationships are a mess. From the whole ordeal with Adam, his death and the 5 seconds of mourning Shiro was allowed, to Curtis’ name only coming up in captions and he and Shiro never actually having a conversation before getting married, it’s pretty clear how little effort was put into queer representation. The EPs knew how desperate the fans were to see queer rep and they played on this in interviews and at panels, stringing fans along with hope to see at least one queer main character and couple. But they never intended on fulfilling that. Several sources reveal conflicting information on how and when Shiro being queer was decided, with some sources saying it was Bex Taylor Klaus that asked for it, some saying it was a recent development and some saying they’d been sitting on it for a long time. In fact, the EPs themselves claim they’ve been sitting on the knowledge for a while, but with their awareness of the “Bury Your Gays” trope, they considered making somebody else The Rep™️ (because y’know. They wanted to kill Shiro. They have been very vocal about wanting to kill Shiro. Also The Rep™️ because heaven forbid you have representation for marginalised people in more than one character, right? Can you imagine having TWO WHOLE QUEERS? Scandalous!) but when their higher ups informed them that they were not to kill Shiro, they decided to make him The Rep™️ again. If this is true (and that’s a big if) one must ask: if they were aware of the “Bury Your Gays” trope, why did they do it anyway? And TWICE for that matter (thrice if you include Shiro’s death and resurrection. That’s right, shiro is Jesus).

They killed Adam supposedly to show the casualties of war, but we’ve only ever seen Adam once and it was during his and Shiro’s breakup scene. Of what emotional value is he to us? To show the emotional stakes, killing Sam would’ve made more sense because we’ve at least met the guy and we’ve seen how much Pidge loves her dad. Adam was barely a character. In fact, my brother didn’t even know we had ever seen the guy before when I paused during his death scene and asked him who that was (he said it was just some random pilot we’d never seen and had no idea what I was on about when I said it was the guy shiro was arguing with in the first episode). So frankly, I don’t care that Adam died. I only care that Shiro is yet again on the receiving end of the VLD stick of pain, and that a queer character was killed for no good reason. And Ezor is only alive because of the backlash after season 7 (sidenote: well done y’all. Making your voices HEARD and getting change is a beautiful thing). Yet another queer character would’ve been killed off unceremoniously if the EPs had their way.

I could go on forever about how much this show fucked up but I’m actually getting tired of thinking about it so I’m gonna summarise the next few issues in another post.

PART 2

[umangsehgal93]

Building products that track Women?

           Suppose you wake up one morning to find yourself barricaded in a hotel room in the Bangkok airport to avoid being returned to your family. That is when you had slipped away from your family during a holiday in Kuwait and boarded a plane for Thailand, but were stopped in the airport because your “male guardian” received a text message on his phone about your escape notified by the app Absher. Such was the case of Rahaf Alqunun who amongst many other women had the app impede her attempt to flee from an abusive home environment.

             What alarms human rights activists, is how male guardians can use the app to specify when and where women may travel, for how long and which airports they're allowed to go to. Alerts get triggered if a woman leaves a certain area and Absher notifies male guardians while fleeing women is arrested. It is this access to private data and location which can have women face death at the hands of their family.

             Within this controversy against the tech giants hosting this app on their respective app-stores, there’s also a famous opposition form the critics. A lot of women who want to run away have been able to use it to run away by sneaking the phone away from their guardians, and accessing the grant permissions in the app. While this is a temporary solution, one can’t ignore the Saudi monarchy’s restriction and repression on women and diverge from the kind of data being produced, what can be done with that data and where can this data be used to harm lives of abused (or innocent) women.

           While we argue that one’s privacy is a matter of context and that privacy is lost when information flows in ways that violate understood or context-based norms. The app defines privacy on a continuum, defining how it helps Saudi women understand and navigate their social lives. This difference in context-based privacy is vastly different across different countries that smudges the boundary between guardianship and gender apartheid. Despite the app not violating any rules of the respective app-stores, what becomes difficult is these definitions of government enabled apps in promoting abuse through access to data and mobility enforcement through it.

             So, what? We know that the culture there promotes Saudi men to take control of their women even without the existence of the app. Campaigns defending Saudis have detailed that the app is inextricably bound up with other features of the app like checking mail, registering vehicles, and applying for visas. It is important to realize that these power structures that are pre-built and the data being shared by the app takes it for granted that controlling women mobility is for intrinsic good.

  As the technologies integrate and interrelate, search data and social network analysis could make it even further impossible for women to be able to escape such brutality. The current perspectives from which the app is allowed to be hosted assumes that most of those people can only control mobility when a passport is scanned at the borders, which is an oversimplification of how this technology adoption can open avenue to a multitude of ways to track women both directly and indirectly.

 Rahaf Alqunun represented a very common approach to the gaming the app and planning an escape. Her escape and the adoption of this app by the two tech giants open so many avenues to challenge the state of personal privacy and challenge the surveillance model created by the government. So far, the world has debated privacy cases where people do stuff that generates data and it usually means that those who come to possess that data should be able to do whatever they want with it, but with Absher, the data is neither being generated at will and nor is it being shared at will.

 It isn’t just about regulating the information available to the “male guardians” but it’s also about how this data is made actionable at places like Airports. It’s also about how the government and authorities react or respond to certain kind of information and which brings us to the fact that privacy isn’t solely a matter of individual responsibility or preference. Rightly said, privacy is a set of conditions enacted in practice, propped up by any combination of history, laws, social norms, physical or digital structures, context, individual behavior, and happenstance. Limiting data privacy to just one of these forces (like the airport border scan) risks misunderstanding it entirely.

 When we evaluate this with reference to human rights and a desire to minimize intervention into people’s lives, another question that naturally crops up is how do we move away from just such individual-based concerns and foreground social and structural impacts that are at the root of gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia. The question extends, how do we achieve a state where we think and create more careful conditions to tackle ethical problems being empowered through these data-intensive applications?

 Finally, what is it that we as everyday programmers can learn and pay attention to from this? How do we ensure that there are algorithms in place to check for ethicality of an action before it is reported and becomes a popular media issue. In many ways, this trap is unavoidable. We as programmers are particularly skilled at one thing: optimization. But optimization alone can't tell us anything about the morality of what we are optimizing for. As the data about these women grows, the more difficult would it be to rule out cases that identify misuse of data and powers attached to it.

 Though extreme, this example proves a key point: locational tracking data alone doesn't contain the potential needed to assess the fairness or justness of a given system. In order for the tech companies to understand the misuse of this data would be by not limiting their thinking about fairness and justice to internal logic of a given system, without reference to broader social or political realities.

 According to Kranzberg’s fourth law, “Technologically ‘sweet’ solutions do not always triumph over political and social forces.” While empowering citizens with quick access to services, the app will be upholding the society’s weakness of keeping women in check.  Finally, software that is so inherently directed at the suppression of fundamental rights, such as the right to travel, must have the organizations treat it as a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While tech is neither good nor bad, its non-neutrality indicates that the problems with data originate from political dogmas.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

11 Feb 2021: Boohoo and Asos at the Arcadia pick ‘n’ mix. Vaccine websites. Internet vs Wall Street.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Insider Media]

Boohoo and Asos at the Arcadia pick ‘n’ mix

High street shopping footfall fell by three quarters year on year, and non-food sales by 22bn. Oof. Some of that will bounce back after virus restrictions lift, but some won’t. Shopping behaviour is changing permanently, and online retailers are buying up distressed high street brands, leaving their stores behind.

Online brand umbrella/retailer Boohoo bought Dorothy Perkins, Wallis and Burton from Arcadia, but not the stores. Online retailer Asos bought most of the rest of Arcadia - Topshop, Miss Selfridge, HIIT, and again the stores were left. And the week before, Boohoo bought some bit of Debenhams - the customer data and other intellectual property including the website, but not the stores. These brands obviously go online-only, there will be many unfortunate job losses, and the high street faces further challenges. (Related: Topshop: 'I haven't bought clothes in a shop for years'.)

But it isn’t quite as simple as “online versus offline” because there are other dynamics at work. Social media platforms are competing with websites to be the online place you shop (eg Tiktok). “Direct to consumer” brands were well positioned when the virus hit because they generally had a lot of online and relatively few stores, but now DTC brands are considering how to make a play in physical retail. And anyway, the divide between online and physical retail isn’t as clear as it used to be now that many retailers are both on the high street and online, which has implications for any plans around online sales taxes.

Vaccine websites

What’s happening in the world of vaccines technology? UK bosses set up IT systems to track Covid vaccine status of staff: 

“some companies announcing they would either sack or refuse to hire people who will not take a Covid-19 vaccine [...] Workday, which provides payroll and other human resources software to 1,300 companies in the UK, and BrightHR, which works with 70,000 small businesses around the world, have both rolled out monitoring tools this month.” 

USA: What went wrong with America’s $44 million vaccine data system? - the “CDC ordered software that was meant to manage the vaccine rollout. Instead, it has been plagued by problems and abandoned by most states.” Perhaps because of this, people are fed up with broken vaccine appointment tools - so they’re building their own - this seems like something the states or Federal government should be doing much better (here are some good pointers from Public Digital).

EU/UK: There’s been a simmering disagreement between UK and EU over access to AstraZeneca vaccines. So... was vaccine strategy influenced by Soderbergh film Contagion?: 

“[Hancock] would keep referring to the end of the film. He was always really aware from the very start, first that the vaccine was really important, second that when a vaccine was developed we would see an almighty global scramble for this thing.”

Big tech carbon plans

Last week we looked at the carbon plans of UK supermarkets. For comparison, here are the climate/carbon plans of some of the very big tech companies:

Apple - carbon neutral by 2030 (announcement).

Microsoft - carbon negative by 2030 (progress).

Amazon - carbon neutral by 2040, 50% of shipments net zero by 2030. (Progress.)

Google - carbon neutral since 2007, “legacy carbon” eliminated 2020, Carbon free by 2030 (announcement).

Tesla - its impact report (pdf) has lots of good reading, though it doesn’t seem to mention a carbon neutrality target. Tesla recently earmarked $150m for carbon capture projects, good! However, Tesla is also buying Bitcoins which are deeply wasteful of energy, bad! (see below).

Facebook - carbon neutral by 2030.

Microsoft, Amazon and Google run the big cloud platforms, and supply computing and data services to everyone, including the fossil fuel industry. This feels like a potential sore point in years to come.

Related: in 2020 wind turbines provided about 25% of electricity in the UK, and in EU renewable energy outperformed fossil fuels.

Bitcoin again

The speculative crypto asset Bitcoin continues to climb in value. Recently, the newsletter disliked the idea that Bitcoin is a battery. Also in the news: Tesla bought $1.5bn of Bitcoin (p23 of this pdf) for “diversifying our reserves” reasons, and may accept payments in btc too. And Bitcoin consumes more electricity than Argentina.

This from Alex Hern was a very good and entertaining read, and explains why Bitcoin (and other “proof of work” cryptos) are so energy inefficient:

“For the uninitiated, Bitcoin is secured by burning electricity. I am simplifying to the extent that people will shout at me but: every ten minutes, the bitcoin network randomly holds a lottery to let someone declare which transactions are valid, and to gift them 6.25btc, or £200,000. You get entries into the lottery by doing pointless calculations: one pointless calculation is one ticket. 

The pointless calculations cost computing power, which costs electricity, which costs real money, and so in aggregate two things happen: one is that the people who win the lottery have an incentive to accurately declare which transactions are valid, because if they lie, they'll just get overruled by the next lottery winner, and because controlling enough computing power to guarantee you win, say, ten lotteries in a row would be astronomically expensive; and the other is that the amount of electricity burned by the network levels out at about that which you can buy for 900btc, or £29m a day – the total value of all the lottery tickets every day.”

Gamestop: the internet vs Wall Street?

A week or so ago, there was a big loolah as internet users “took on” Wall Street in the stock market, bidding up the stock price of a struggling retailer and crunching some Wall Street hedge fund investors. Inevitably the price of the stock then came back down, leaving some investors with big wins and some with big losses. It was an internet lolz meme stonk vs Gordo Gecko fomomentum trading kind of thing. That is a deeply simplistic and incomplete way of describing what happened, and if you’d like to read more, here are some good links: The game never stops, and Off Wall St and off off Wall St, and a subreddit (wall street bets) taking down a multi-billion dollar hedge fund (salty language), and How Wall St Bets pushed Gamestop to the moon.

You could say that retail investing is being amplified by a combination of free stock trading, the easy availability of margin and options (which let you amplify your gains or losses with borrowed money), stimulus cheques, the need to stay at home (boredom), and investors co-ordinating online in ways that are exciting/winning/dangerous… But the newsletter wouldn’t say that investing is now democratised, or that the little retail guy has more power than the Wall Street players. However *something* was happening, and the internet was part of it.

“it is pretty obvious that the internet is rewiring social relationships in profound ways, and that we are still in the early stages of that rewiring and the even earlier stages of trying to understand it. Money and value are artifacts of social relationships; why shouldn’t their meaning change as social media warps our brains and our society?”

Adobe Flash: make it last forever, friendship never ends

Complex systems have inherent risk: you’re wary about changing them because the effects might not be predictable. And the knowledge dissipates as employees move job or retire, making the systems more opaque and brittle.

Back in 2017, Adobe announced it would deactivate Flash at the end of 2020 - Flash is a multimedia technology from 1996, a time when the Spice Girls owned the singles charts. So in January, Adobe pressed the big red button which probably did a pleasing animated click as it switched off Flash everywhere. But that broke things for some organisations: deactivation of Flash may have crippled a Chinese railroad for a day.

If you want to keep using Flash, you need to use niche web browsers. Or maybe you could persuade the South African government to treat you as a critical supplier: the South African revenue service released its own browser just to re-enable Flash support. They must have felt it would be easier to create and support a Windows-only, their-website-only browser than port some forms over from Flash to html. OK then. 

Co-op Digital news

How we improved engagement at our community of practice meet-ups - “In May last year, the delivery managers (DM) decided to make some changes to our community of practice meet-ups. We think the changes have been really positive for morale and engagement”.

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[otnesse]

Galactic Empire and Fascism, an analysis.

After cruising through TVTropes, and discovering a YMMV entry under “What do you mean it’s not political” that implicitly compared Emperor Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith to Donald Trump regarding treatment of aliens (which, for the record, we don’t have a problem with immigration and nor does Trump, rather, we have a massive issue against illegal immigration, which is simple distinction that people unfortunately seem to miss right now especially in media), I decided to make a post regarding whether or not the Galactic Empire from Star Wars was fascist or not. Honestly, I’d say it’s not, though that being said, it has been acknowledged by George Lucas that fascism did play a role in their development via design elements. However, in that case, it was more due to Lucas mistaking fascism for conservativism (similar to how the left constantly claims that Donald Trump is “a fascist” even when he isn’t under even the most basic observations, let alone close scrutiny). To solidify my point, I’ll quote one of my most hated pieces of dialogue from the disaster that was the second season of Supergirl (shame, since the first season started out with a lot of promise, and I don’t intend to watch the third season in large part because of what the writers did by overtly going into left-wing politics, not to mention certain social issues, and overall having a very bad plotline [sure, there have been some leftist bits portrayed positively in the first season, but on the other hand, it also promoted Conservative principles as well, such as the concept of family and actually treating eco-terrorism in a negative light with the Kryptonians that acted as the main villains of the arc, not to mention it actually managed to avert feminist messaging at one point by having Cat Grant actually express remorse at choosing her career over raising her own kid she had out of wedlock, and considering she actually had a kid there, it also implied she didn’t have an abortion either. And I can tell you, she if anything would have been utterly SLAUGHTERED by the feminists clique at NOW as well as by Hillary supporters for actually expressing remorse at choosing her career over being a mother. And either way it was definitely not to the extent that this season was regarding pushing politics and social issues.]. At most, I’ll probably watch the season premiere just long enough to learn the identity of the other Kryptonian baby that had that blood ritual.):

“one misattributed quote from a candidate and you put a fascist in the White House.” – Snapper Carr, Exodus.

Considering how they showered Marsden, a blatant Hillary expy, with love, I don’t you need two guesses as to which Presidential candidate he was referring to (and quite frankly, even ignoring the Trump burns, I hated that line because of its inaccuracy in its ideology and inherent meaning: Perfect attribution of quotes does not guarantee that a fascist [and by that, I mean an actual fascist and not someone like Trump], or a communist, or any particularly evil person will be prevented from becoming president. That, and Snapper Carr with that line and prior lines in the episode came across as acting more like Mike Wallace during that Ethics of America segment where he implied he’d sell American soldiers down the river in order to not ruin his objectivity when traveling with a Vietcong unit, but I digress…). And actually, this whole quote is actually pretty relevant to Star Wars and the Galactic Empire as Palpatine had in fact been based on an American president that the left hated in a similar manner to Trump for various reasons. His name was Richard Milhous Nixon, and he was needlessly demonized, including claiming he had masterminded Watergate when in reality he had absolutely no involvement in the situation and if anything was also irritated that this had happened and demanded to know who was responsible for it, not to mention falsely pinning him to Vietnam when in reality it was LBJ and even JFK’s war before it was his war, and if anything, Nixon was the reason why America actually left Vietnam as victors (yes, we actually won Vietnam. The fall of Saigon was due to our congress stabbing our allies in the back during Watergate. The loser of a war does not head and dictate the negotiations of surrender, which we did.).

Uniforms and Terms:

First, people have said that the Empire’s uniforms and their use of certain terms (ie, Stormtroopers) made them fascist. I won’t go into full detail on how the Stormtrooper Corps aren’t the same thing as the Nazis’ stormtroopers (or at least the Sturmabteilung) in even role, let alone appearance, since I kind of already did that in full detail in an earlier post. However, while Lucas I’ll admit did mention wanting a fascistic feel for the Empire when creating the uniforms, that doesn’t mean that the Empire was actually fascist, any more than calling Donald Trump a fascist must make him fascist as well, or the fact that Ho Chi Minh quoted the Declaration of Independence makes him a Jeffersonian lover of liberty. And besides, the uniforms for the Empire were derived more from German Uhlans during World War I, which predated Nazi Germany and fascism by a significant amount of time. And quite honestly, if you ask me, claiming someone is fascist just because they happen to wear that kind of uniform is just stupid, since uniforms don’t speak to one’s political ideologies. I mean, what, are we going to claim that NYPD Commissioner Frank Reagan from Blue Bloods, Prince Eric from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, or General Pepper from Star Fox are fascists just because they wore similar uniforms (heck, Eric’s wedding outfit even resembles a Grand Admiral’s uniform)? Not to mention, they’re military uniforms, and there have been plenty of uniforms within even the Allied Powers (meaning Britain and the USA) that had similar appearances to Imperial uniforms. If anyone in the Star Wars films actually resembled fascists in terms of uniforms, and more importantly ideology, it was the First Order. The Empire, on that note, does not goose step, either, which would be a surefire sign that it is fascist (its marching style, if anything, resembles that of Geldoblame’s men in Baten Kaitos’ opening when it shows Gibari).

Military buildup:

See, one of my biggest annoyances is the conflation of military buildup, even having a military at all, and going to war as automatically making someone a Nazi or fascist. It was annoying when Paul Verhoeven did it with Starship Troopers (though at least he had the excuse of growing up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands for thinking that. Lucas should know better), and it was also annoying when George Lucas and even Hideo Kojima inferred similar things. Yes, militaries can and have done attacks on neighboring countries, and also tried to conquer neighboring countries. But that’s not their sole role. They also act as a line of defense against an opposing army, not to mention also acts in the defense of citizenry and will also aid in relief efforts should things be serious, and they also are called in to aid allies if needs be. There’s a reason why a common expression for the military is that it acts as a nation’s sword and shield. The Nazis and fascists specifically intended to control at the very least Germany and its various former nation-states, if not the world, not to mention conquered countries specifically to fund their welfare programs. Building up the military is not the sign of an incoming dictatorship or the coming of fascism. America built up its military significantly after 9/11, and it’s nowhere close to becoming fascist right now.

Nationalism and nationalization:

On that note, I also get irritated when people think merely having parades for a national holiday or prominently displaying the flag in terms of national pride and love of country makes one fascist. We Americans do that, especially those of us who are patriotic. Heck, I’ve got the American flag hanging outside my house right now, and besides which, I’ve gone around seeing some houses that have the circular red white and blue flags draped over as well. My neighborhood even has an annual Fourth of July parade that I make every effort to see and we have fireworks celebrating it. The Empire’s celebration of Empire Day is not really all that different. And besides which, being fascist doesn’t mean you actually love your country. Joseph Goebbels, the infamous Nazi propagandist, actually made clear that he, if anything, held contempt to even the mere idea of nationalism or loving one’s own country (I believe his exact words were, and I quote, “the NSDAP [Nazi Party] is the German Left. We despise bourgeois nationalism.”). And based on the fact that Palpatine was perfectly willing to forfeit his own life to get Luke to turn to the Dark Side (even going as far as to goad him into murdering him), it’s pretty clear Palpatine probably had no qualms with the Empire running without him (unfortunately, the Aftermath trilogy had Palpatine try to have Gallius Rax basically blow up the galaxy at Jakku due to not being able to rule the Empire anymore, in an explicit contradiction to not only his actions in Return of the Jedi, but also Revenge of the Sith where he tried to goad Anakin to kill him in a similar manner, not to mention mentioned in a very eager tone that Vader will soon become more powerful than either Yoda or himself).

On the topic of nationalization, the only time nationalization was ever brought up was via Imperialization, and even that was largely limited to those that had either gone against the Empire explicitly or otherwise were originally of the Separatists (at least, it was the case in the former Expanded Universe). They actually left various companies that either were loyal or otherwise had no major issues with the Empire alone, and in fact, they even managed to expand the Corporate Sector to 30,000 star systems and even managed to create the Corporate Sector Authority specifically to allow for transparent mercantilism to go on unabated, only asking for a yearly tribute in return. That kind of thing would actually be AGAINST fascism and/or national socialism, as they won’t tolerate any form of free markets at all, and would in fact point to the Galactic Empire being a pro-capitalist institution (and I mean that in a good way, obviously). If anything, the Old Republic came closer to actual nationalization as we know it via the Trade Federation (which before it became its own cartel was a branch in the main government meant to heavily regulate trade and cut down on any growth of mercantilism if the former Expanded Universe materials are to be believed). And despite what Biggs Darklighter said in that deleted scene to Luke Skywalker from A New Hope, there is literally no indication that the Empire had any intention of nationalizing any farms, moisture or otherwise (especially when the Imperial Handbook doesn’t even mention anything about moisture farms or small business proprieters, let alone nationalizing them. And believe me, considering they had absolutely no qualms against mentioning speciecide as a government policy in the handbook, if they wanted to state their aims at nationalizing something like the Lars Homestead, they would have mentioned it directly within the Imperial Handbook, especially when that book was written around the time of A New Hope in-universe.). And don’t get me started on immunity spheres established by the Empire where it is forbidden for Imperial soldiers or ships are allowed to set foot in there, one of which included the Wheel, which is essentially a space station version of Las Vegas.

Ideology:

Now, let’s get into the ideology of the Empire and that of fascism, or more specifically National Socialism, in-depth. Let’s look, for starters, at the 1925 Nazi Platform:

1. We demand the union of all Germans in a Great Germany on the basis of the principle of self-determination of all peoples.

2. We demand that the German people have rights equal to those of other nations; and that the Peace Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain shall be abrogated.

3. We demand land and territory (colonies) for the maintenance of our people and the settlement of our surplus population.

4. Only those who are our fellow countrymen can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence no Jew can be a countryman.

5. Those who are not citizens must live in Germany as foreigners and must be subject to the law of aliens.

6. The right to choose the government and determine the laws of the State shall belong only to citizens. We therefore demand that no public office, of whatever nature, whether in the central government, the province, or the municipality, shall be held by anyone who is not a citizen.

We wage war against the corrupt parliamentary administration whereby men are appointed to posts by favor of the party without regard to character and fitness.

7. We demand that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood. If it should not be possible to feed the whole population, then aliens (non-citizens) must be expelled from the Reich.

8. Any further immigration of non-Germans must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who have entered Germany since August 2, 1914, shall be compelled to leave the Reich immediately.

9. All citizens must possess equal rights and duties.

10. The first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically. No individual shall do any work that offends against the interest of the community to the benefit of all.

Therefore we demand:

11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.

12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in blood and treasure, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as treason to the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.

13. We demand the nationalization of all trusts.

14. We demand profit-sharing in large industries.

15. We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.

16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class, the immediate communalization of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople, and the strongest consideration must be given to ensure that small traders shall deliver the supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.

17. We demand an agrarian reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to expropriate the owners without compensation of any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.

18. We demand that ruthless war be waged against those who work to the injury of the common welfare. Traitors, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished with death, regardless of creed or race.

19. We demand that Roman law, which serves a materialist ordering of the world, be replaced by German common law.

20. In order to make it possible for every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education, and thus the opportunity to reach into positions of leadership, the State must assume the responsibility of organizing thoroughly the entire cultural system of the people. The curricula of all educational establishments shall be adapted to practical life. The conception of the State Idea (science of citizenship) must be taught in the schools from the very beginning. We demand that specially talented children of poor parents, whatever their station or occupation, be educated at the expense of the State.

21. The State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by providing maternity welfare centers, by prohibiting juvenile labor, by increasing physical fitness through the introduction of compulsory games and gymnastics, and by the greatest possible encouragement of associations concerned with the physical education of the young.

22. We demand the abolition of the regular army and the creation of a national (folk) army.

23. We demand that there be a legal campaign against those who propagate deliberate political lies and disseminate them through the press. In order to make possible the creation of a German press, we demand:

(a) All editors and their assistants on newspapers published in the German language shall be German citizens.

(b) Non-German newspapers shall only be published with the express permission of the State. They must not be published in the German language.

(c) All financial interests in or in any way affecting German newspapers shall be forbidden to non-Germans by law, and we demand that the punishment for transgressing this law be the immediate suppression of the newspaper and the expulsion of the non-Germans from the Reich.

Newspapers transgressing against the common welfare shall be suppressed. We demand legal action against those tendencies in art and literature that have a disruptive influence upon the life of our folk, and that any organizations that offend against the foregoing demands shall be dissolved.

24. We demand freedom for all religious faiths in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or offend the moral and ethical sense of the Germanic race.

The party as such represents the point of view of a positive Christianity without binding itself to any one particular confession. It fights against the Jewish materialist spirit within and without, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our folk can only come about from within on the pinciple:

COMMON GOOD BEFORE INDIVIDUAL GOOD

25. In order to carry out this program we demand: the creation of a strong central authority in the State, the unconditional authority by the political central parliament of the whole State and all its organizations.

There's plenty other sources for Nazi or fascist ideology such as table talks, but this should suffice.

Now, let’s look at each of these tidbits, one by one, and compare them to various sources within Star Wars relating to the Empire:

1. Not sure why the Empire would even need to demand that as a manifesto. It’s pretty clear the Empire was pretty much united as it is. Heck, a majority of people actually voted IN the Empire in the first place during Palpatine’s Declaration of a New Order. And I don’t think Palpatine demanded for a specific group of people to be united, just the galaxy. In fact, Palpatine doesn’t even MENTION other galaxies in said speech, nor does the Imperial Handbook voice any plans to conquer any nearby satellite galaxies, not even the Rishi Maze which is the closest galaxy satellite to that of the galaxy the Empire was situated in.

2. Again, nowhere, in either the Declaration of a New Order OR any other policy (Imperial Handbook or Imperial Sourcebook) does it even imply that they wanted equal rights with the other galaxies. Not to mention since the Republic, the Empire’s immediate predecessor, actually WON the prior war, there’s literally nothing there that’s even remotely similar to Nazi Germany there, especially the revoking of a treaty (now, that being said, the First Order might have similarities there). Heck, the Empire didn’t even need to pay reparations either, since, again, they won the Clone Wars.

3. Okay, that might actually be a similarity (though not necessarily the demanding part, just colonization as a whole). However, even there, lots of countries at the time engaged in colonialism, and none of them were actually fascist.

4. No mention whatsoever about any restrictions against people holding citizenship due to being a separate species. Heck, as a matter of fact, the Empire accepted taxes from even the likes of the Ugnaughts if one of the Marvel Comics is to be believed, which implies that even the likes of aliens, while ultimately having second-class citizenship, nonetheless are recognized as being citizens and actually having citizenship. Oh, and at one point, the Empire actually managed to save a sentient alien species from being hunted down upon discovering said alien race was in fact sentient.

5. See 4 above.

6. See 4 and 5 above. In fact, probably the only thing that’s even remotely similar about this point is the bit about citizenry being the ones who choose the government, and even then, that just goes without saying for any nation. Even America demands that only citizens participate in the voting process, and we’re the farthest thing from a fascist country right now and for most of its history. And as far as corruption, well, yeah, even here in America, we demand pretty high moral standards of our politicians. It just goes without saying.

7. Nowhere was it even remotely implied that the Empire be mandated to kick out any aliens (well, both literal aliens the figurative term of being excluded from citizenship solely based on their race) if they fail to feed and clothe anyone.

8. Yeah, considering the Emperor allowed for Intergalactic Passports, not to mention the Imperial Senate as well, it’s highly unlikely he had any problems with immigration into the Empire so long as it was legalized.

9. Don’t recall the Empire mentioning anything about equal rights, actually, whether for or against them.

10. Doesn’t really mention much in terms of sources anything about the Empire actually mandating citizenry work physically or mentally for the benefit of all. It does mention making an effort to be loyal to the Empire, but beyond that, nothing that indicates that the citizenry engage in what is essentially slave labor (and I mean those who weren’t imprisoned).

11. Nowhere does the Empire even remotely mention anything about income relating to work or any unearned income, whether it be the Imperial Handbook or anywhere else.

12. Yeah, considering the Empire built up its military for defense of its Empire from any internal and external threats, I highly doubt the Empire would have even approved of what was essentially an anti-war statement in there, especially confiscating war profits from soldiers.

13. Other than the bit about Imperialism (which doesn’t even demand the nationalization of all firms, just those that went against the Empire), it really doesn’t match up.

14. Nowhere is it even remotely implied, even under the bit about Imperialization, that the Empire demanded that large companies share profits among each other.

15. Never commented on old age pensions at all, and considering the Empire makes clear they do not want anything except the most basic elements, I really doubt they’d support increasing old age pensions.

16. See 14 above. Also, the Imperial Handbook doesn’t even imply that the Empire intends to nationalize stuff like moisture farming on Tatooine. Nor, for that matter, does it even remotely imply wanting to communalize various storefronts or renting large storefronts to small tradesmen.

17. Again, absolutely no mention whatsoever, at least in the Legends universe, that the Empire ever wanted to do agrarian reforms or nationalize farms, not to mention making land speculation and ground rents illegal.

18. Other than the bit about traitors (which, BTW, even our constitution demands the death of any people who commit treason, so it’s just goes without saying), the Empire really doesn’t mention anything about waging any war on those people, or demanding for their death.

19. Other than the bit about having prisoners undergo slavery, it really doesn’t seem to impact prior laws at all, and it certainly doesn’t use materialism as a reason.

20. The only thing that really comes to mind regarding this point is COMPNOR, in particular the Education branch of the Coalition of Progress branch and possibly the Sub-Adult Unit, regarding education (which even that comes across as being more similar to the AFJROTC than, say, the Hitler Youth). Other than that, there’s no similarities at all to the Empire’s method of education compared to that of what was demanded here. That bullet point if anything comes closer to what the creed of the Umbrella Organization from Resident Evil, or more specifically the Wesker Children, promoted, or even the Jedi’s taking of younglings.

21. Other than maybe bits relating to the Imperial Military (and let’s face it, with any military, you need to be in pretty top shape to be in it, as otherwise, you won’t last very long), there’s little to suggest the Empire demanded an emphasis on “national health.”

22. Seriously? Do you really think the Empire would just abandon/gut its entire military apparatus in favor of what is essentially a citizen militia? There’s definitely no similarity here at all.

23. Ah, yeah, about that, even Freedom of the Press in our Constitution specifically states that slander is not covered under that inalienable right, meaning we don’t have the freedom to propagate lies.

a. Kind of goes without saying, really.

b. I don’t recall the Empire ever indicating that they had any particular problem with what language HoloNet sources were to be given in, or requiring specific permission to actually publish them in a different language.

c. Doesn’t mention anything about turning a profit in newspaper industries either, whether for or against it.

24. Regarding religion, the Empire largely maintains religious freedom, especially if it doesn’t act against the interests of the Empire. The only ones who receive any negative stigma are the Jedi, and even there, there have been Jedi who become dark side converts and become Inquisitorious. I won’t comment on the Christianity bit since that religion doesn’t even exist in Star Wars.

25. Other than maybe the bit about the Emperor’s absolute status, there’s little similarity regarding the Empire to that of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy with that point (and for the record, even with the Magna Carta, kings, queens, emperors, and empresses had absolute status at various points, in fact, probably the only ones I can think of where they didn’t have absolute status and were figureheads is with Great Britain today and Japan for most of the time barring of course Imperial Japan during World War II). Heck, even there, the existence of the Corporate Sector Authority and various immunity spheres shows the Empire doesn’t necessarily adhere to an absolute status regarding central authority. Heck, even there, the Emperor does in fact take advice from several of his officers rather than blowing it off out of some self-inflated sense of superiority.

So yeah, at most, there’s just below half that actually have any resemblance to the 25 planks, and even those that match up have also had similarities to those in countries that obviously weren’t fascist, communist, or anything like that. Also, there’s zero indication that the Empire even supports abortion towards inferiors or anything like that, or has any problems with disabled people (in fact, one of the Empire’s most loyal supporters was a cripple. And I’m not referring to Vader, or even Grand Admiral Teshik.). Not to mention, do you really think a fascist or communist, both of which are totalitarian ideologies, would so much as even THINK of creating something they would have little amount of control over such as, I don’t know, immunity spheres, or even the Corporate Sector Authority’s explicitly being a place of free trade and free market? In fact, you can find this and plenty of other information about these elements to the Empire here (http://www.galacticempiredatabank.com/RebProLies.html).

So why is the Empire considered fascist?

To answer that question, you need to go back to the time Star Wars was being created, as well as look into the background of the franchise’s creator, George Walton Lucas.

You see, George Lucas was a raving leftist, of the stripe seen during the 1960s where they viewed protests as an excuse to riot for no real reason beyond platitudes. Heck, he even admitted as much in various interviews, including a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose on CBS, where he outright admitted that he got his left-wing views from growing up in 1960s San Francisco which was a hotbed with various radical elements, including anti-Vietnam War protests as you can see here: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/george-lucas-billionaire-down-on-capitalism/ (the same interview also had him making some negative statements on Capitalism, more on that later). Oh, and he also at one point described his ideal movie making studio philosophy as being “the workers have the means of production” (Skywalking, p.246), meaning that at the very least he flirted with Marxism, and later on during another interview with Charlie Rose (you know the one: where he infamously compared Disney after the sale to “white slavers”) actually implied that Soviet filmmaking at the height of the Cold War was preferable to the American Hollywood model (ie, the Soviet filmmaking where you get a bullet in the head if you criticize the people in charge) as you can see here: http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/ken-shepherd/2016/01/04/george-lucas-soviet-directors-had-more-freedom-i-had. In fact, during the Vietnam War, he outright rooted for the Vietcong to win. Back then, leftists often denounced any conservative principles as being “fascist” or “nazi-esque”, mostly because of a misnomer promoted by the likes of Josef Stalin shortly after World War II where he denounced the Nazis as being “right-wing” both to paint actual right-wing groups in a very negative light (the Nazis and fascists in reality were part of the far-left, and they merely viewed the Communists as rivals for control over the left, not actual feuding enemies in terms of ideology), and also as a CYA attempt to deflect any potential blame from reaching Communism. An infamous example of attempts at comparing conservative principles or conservatives to Nazis or fascists was during the HUAC investigations as well as McCarthy’s investigations into Soviet infiltration and subversion of America (which, BTW, contrary to popular belief, McCarthy had no involvement in HUAC, as he was part of the Senate, while HUAC was strictly House of Representatives territory, and he had nothing to do with the Hollywood Blacklist), where quite a few people often accused their accusers as being Nazis to deflect any potential blame of being communists, even when confronted with direct evidence to their Communist ties. This sort of thing is still in existence even today, as evidenced with the aforementioned quote from Snapper Carr from Supergirl, heck, Neo/Thomas Anderson’s “Gestapo crap” comment to the agents in the first Matrix movie even. In fact, as I alluded to earlier in this post, he even had particular ire against former President Richard Milhous Nixon, where he claimed he was responsible for causing Vietnam to happen (a lie, since Vietnam occurred under JFK and LBJ’s watch), running for a third term (of which he expressed no interest in such an idea), and probably also the fact that he exposed Alger Hiss as a Communist spy and indicted him for perjury. In fact, Lucas during the 2008 election cycle even called Barack Obama a hero (and for the record, Obama's policies came far closer to actual fascism than the Empire did), and in 2012, he also indicated he was, among other things, “a dyed-in-the-wool 99%er before there was such a thing” in an unsubtle attempt at promoting solidarity for the Occupy Wall Street group (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/george-lucas-red-tails.html).

Now, taking all of that into account, let’s start with the beginnings of Star Wars. It was 1973, Vietnam was still ongoing, and Richard Nixon is embattled with Watergate. Lucas decides to make Star Wars, then-titled The Star Wars, partially due to the fact that he wanted to cover Vietnam, and partially in response to Nixon’s Watergate bit (note, Star Wars was originally planned to be the third in a thematic trilogy dealing with denouncing America’s involvement in Vietnam, with the first film being American Graffiti, and the second being Apocalypse Now [yes, Lucas was in fact supposed to make that movie]. However, while American Graffiti played and performed as well as he wanted it to, he ultimately wasn’t able to complete Apocalypse Now before Warner Bros. shut down his studio American Zoetrope due to uncertainty regarding the film as well as the previous failure of THX 1138, so he decided to make Star Wars, his planned third film, early, and specifically include elements from Apocalypse Now.).  Among the first drafts for the film included a statement on yellow sheets that detailed the theme for the film, which basically said that the Rebels, or, technically speaking, Aquilae, was supposed to be similar to a “small independent country like North Vietnam” that was being threatened with conquest, and that the Empire was supposed to be like America in 1983 (not those exact words, but he said that it was like America 10 years from when he said it, which at the time was 1973), essentially its emperor had been assassinated by “Nixonian gangsters” and elevated to power in a rigged election, and creating a total thought control police state (ironic, since the only character in the movie to actually engage in total thought control at all was Obi-Wan Kenobi with his little “Jedi Mind Trick.”), and even states that they are at a turning point, whether they support Fascism or Revolution (and based on his overall comments, I don’t think he’s referring to the American War for Independence). Although some things from that draft were changed, the overall themes based on Lucas’s later comments haven’t changed at all, which also included the whole Rebel Alliance angle. However, apparently this wasn’t enough, as when making Return of the Jedi, he decided to make the whole Vietcong promotion theme a bit more overt by having Emperor Palpatine’s best troops be taken down by what are essentially animate Teddy Bears known as the Ewoks.

Eventually, about a decade after Jedi, he decided to make the Prequel Trilogy of Star Wars, and he went even further than Return of the Jedi. Basically he made the Republic essentially a bastion of liberal-style nanny state big government, and the “Senate” was closer to the United Nation in Space, or Star Federation from Star Trek. Oh, and the government was so deeply broken, apparently not being able to enforce anti-slavery laws within what was technically its territory. The Jedi were depicted as essentially being Ivory Tower types, as well. Oh, and Supreme Chancellor Finis Valorum was specifically modeled after then-President Bill Clinton as a beleaguered man (before the infamous Monica Lewinsky scandal, I should add), which Terrence Stamp, Valorum's actor, even noted. And remember when I mentioned that Lucas’s 2012 interview with Charlie Rose had him mentioning how he was anti-Capitalist and adhered to a more Communistic approach to democracy? Well he starts showing hints at this with the Trade Federation. Speaking of which, the whole Trade Federation plotline and their invading Naboo was largely made in response to the Republican Revolution of 1994 that was made in direct response to some far-left policies Clinton was making, including tax increases as well as the NAFTA agreement, policies that were obviously unpopular among the electorate. Around this time, Newt Gingrich made a speech called Contract with America, which proposed among other things requiring a three-fifths majority before making tax increases. This all occurred around the time Lucas was on his eighth day draft-writing what would become the film. Lucas, as you can probably guess, was not at all happy with this, and decided to use the Trade Federation as being essentially strawmen for the Republican Revolution regarding motives and overall characterization (and he doesn’t even attempt to be subtle about it, either: The leader of the Trade Federation, Nute Gunray, for example, had his name being taken from two sources: The first from Newt Gingrich himself, obviously, and the second being Ronald Reagan, the latter was mostly out of revenge for SDI being labeled Star Wars, even though it was Ted Kennedy and the leftist media who called it that in the first place; and Lott Dod, the Neimoidian senator representing the Trade Federation, was named after Chris Lott, the GOP leader in 1997.).

But, oh, that’s still not far enough for him. The very next movie, Attack of the Clones, makes Lucas’s anti-war political views extremely apparent by revealing that, for the thousand years the Republic existed, or at least the thousand years since the Ruusan Reformation if we go by Legends, it turns out the Republic lacked a military of any kind at all. Worse, the film also obviously tries to paint even trying to form a military at all as being an inherently bad thing and would mean the loss of freedom and creating new fear, especially when Padme Amidala, as a clear expy of the Left’s view of Hillary Clinton here, goes to Coruscant as a Senator and tries to vote against the motion (and pre-release materials alongside the movie even goes as far as to imply that Padme may have in fact LIED to the Senate by implying heavily that the pro-Military senators were responsible for her near-assassination, when she in fact suspected that Count Dooku of the Separatists was responsible for the hit). Oh, and if the Trade Federation’s villainous role in the prior movie didn’t tip you off to Lucas’s anti-Capitalist agenda, this movie broadcasts it in a huge billboard by having the main villains, the Separatists, basically being composed of corporations, even explicitly giving their names to the cause, which besides the Trade Federation included among others the InterGalactic Banking Guild, the Corporate Alliance, the Commerce Guild, and the Techno Union. There may have also been a few hints at 9/11 being staged for a coup, especially in the ending, although given the timing, not to mention Attack of the Clones most likely entered development before 9/11 occurred, he was probably intending for that to be the Gulf of Tonkin Incident as an inspiration if anything.

Even that wasn’t far enough for Lucas, apparently, as Lucas then had in Episode III more overt Bush-bashing by essentially implying that the War in Iraq was an excuse for Republicans to take over America and turn it into a fascist Empire (really.), and overall seemed like it was pushing an anti-War viewpoint that you would expect to find on MSNBC or MoveOn.org for more indirect instances of Bush-bashing. For more direct indications, there’s Padme’s “So this is how liberty dies… with thunderous applause…” shortly after Palpatine declares himself Emperor, apparently done in relation to the Patriot Act, and then there’s the infamous instance in the movie where Vader and Obi-Wan confront each other on Mustafar. Specifically, Vader yells “If you are not with me, then you are my enemy!” in a very thinly-veiled reference to President George W. Bush’s “You’re either with us or the terrorists” line on September 20, 2001, which was directed to the United Nations, not to the American citizenry. Obi-Wan, in response, declares “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”, one of the most stupid and confusing lines in the movie, especially when it made the Jedi seem like they were the moral relativists and postmodernists, maybe even moral nihilists. Apparently this two bits had been added in fairly early on, around the time of the Iraq War, and largely because of various protests in the Bay Area against the war and Bush, in an eerily similar manner to the protests against Vietnam and Nixon before then, and apparently thought Americans would have agreed with Obi-Wan because of this, thinking they thought nuance was lost from Bush’s “black and white worldview.” Oh, and he also promoted the movie during the 2005 Cannes film festival. You might remember that particular film festival, it was most infamous for its various film moguls using the festival and the showing their films to essentially flip the bird against Bush (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sith-invites-bush-comparisons/2/). Lucas, to be fair, acknowledges that he didn’t necessarily plan on Bush being the subject of Star Wars, but that’s solely because he already had Nixon in mind before Bush was even on his radar. He nonetheless compared Vietnam to Iraq claiming the comparisons were unbelievable (well, he’s right about one thing: thinking there is any comparison between those two wars beyond our trying to stop a grave threat is pretty unbelievable), and he divulged further into his ideas of democracy turning into a dictatorship (they’re one and the same, if you ask me, and I don’t mean that in a good way for either), by basically implying that Robespierre’s France, of all things, was good or at least preferable to Napoleon’s France, or his implying something similar to the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany. Not to mention most of the comparisons don’t even work, and neither does the claim that wars make dictatorships and destroy democracy (America was forged from war against Great Britain, and we aren’t even close to a dictatorship). Heck, some Expanded Universe materials around the time of Revenge of the Sith even had references to the Triad of Evil, in an unsubtle reference to the Axis of Evil. And in the Clone Wars cartoons (the 3D animation one, not the one with the animation style that was similar to Samurai Jack) there was a character named Saw Gererra whose basis for that Marxist terrorist Che Guevera were as lacking of subtlety as Lott Dod’s basis for Chris Lott was.

Closing statements

Well, I’ve been an Empire supporter for a little over a year now. Not exactly particularly happy with this development, since I go by a rule that I never, ever root for villains, and I was forced to break that rule with the Empire. The reason I had to make that exception dealt with Lucas’s statements about how the Empire was meant to represent America (and more specifically, when How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor revealed that even the Rebel Alliance was supposed to be Vietcong expies. I don’t root for communists, because they tried to exterminate those of my religion, or any religion, for that matter, all for the sake of atheism, which I maintain is no religion due to a lack of gods or supernatural elements). Either way, I figured I’d set the record straight regarding the Empire and Fascism, because quite frankly, barring the uniforms, they really have no similarities to actual fascism (heck, they don’t even practice any socialist principles while the Old Republic seems to be more socialistic/communistic in nature). If anyone disagrees, fine by me, but I suggest you try to find any sources that definitively match up with Nazi ideology in a very precise manner, and more than just uniforms.

Author's note:

I'm basing this mostly on the Legends version of the Empire, mostly because, quite frankly, I'm not exactly fond of what's become of Star Wars under Disney, even speaking as someone who is a Disney fan.

[oblivionspeakk]

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[cinemameta]

MMFF and the Misadventures of Senator Sotto

With its era defining lineup, the 42nd Metro Manila Film Festival faced no shortage of vocal opposition. Amongst the critics of the event, possibly the biggest, is Senator Tito Sotto who even went to the extent of filing for a resolution that aims to commission a separate MMFF exclusively for indie movies while allowing the mediocre to have their annual money milking fest they call a film festival. Through his various tirades against the changes in the selection process, he armed himself with dubious concern for the others, invoked the children and bare his knowledge, or lack thereof, of moviemaking. These are 3 of his greatest hits.

"Ang original purpose is to raise funds for Mowelfund, Optical Media Board etc, hindi lang basta for art's sake."

Senator Sotto is correct to say that MMFF exists partially to raise funds for Mowelfund and other organizations that provide support to film industry workers but to relegate the event as a charity run with the film festival aspect coming second as if a mere afterthought is a callous mistake. The mission-vision statements both exert artistic excellence as the foremost aim of the celebration as it should be given that the event bears the words “Film Festival” in its name. Ever since its inception, MMFF has successfully given avenues for renowned filmmakers like Brocka and Bernal to showcase Filipino cinema at its finest while allocating substantial proceeds to Mowelfund. It’s only in recent years when both intentions are brushed to the sides in favor of a more lucrative, business centered “film festival”.

If Sotto is truly concerned with the welfare of film industry workers as he appears to be then he should worry less about raising funds and focus more on where those funds end up going to. Despite the financial success of recent blockbusters (at the expense of quality), proceeds to various organizations have gradually decreased. These last years which saw box office record-breakers like Beauty and the Bestie and My Bebe Love: #KiligPaMore, Mowelfund received only up to P6 million while during the 70s and 80s which were considered to be the second golden years of Filipino cinema, funds rose up to P16 million despite the lackluster box office performance compared to now. Reasons for such difference in allocations have ranged from rampant corruption in the industry to the constant rule changing, anomalies our dear senator should pay more attention to if he’s the savior of cinema he claims to be.

Lastly, the danger that I find with the Sotto’s last words is that the sentiment seems to openly invite art’s bastardization by capitalist hands. At the outset, it’s important that not only moviegoers but also the general public understand that film festivals are not and were never about ticket sales or long queues and such dispelling of confusion is a required step in promoting quality films over box office hits especially during an annual event where cinema is supposedly celebrated. Great films being made and shown is one thing but them being seen and enjoying their fair share of run in cinemas is another. The sooner everyone becomes aware of this, the lesser chances of us drowning in our own mediocrity.

"Quality ba yun? Hindi high-end equipment ang gamit. Hindi top quality ang video."

As much as the senator thinks this question as a rhetorical one, I find it very stupid. For the sake of discussion, let’s say there is such a thing as a universally established good or quality film. Unfortunately, the answer to the question of what makes a quality film isn’t as simple as high-end equipment or nepotism but hopefully, the senator has the capacity to stomach what lies ahead.

Insinuating that indie films are inherently bad since they don’t benefit from high-tech gears while big budget works are innately considered good is prejudicial and borderline classist. Judgment of a work should come only after when the work itself is judged. Declaring prematurely all indie films as amateur only highlights the total lack of understanding of a person on the topic of filmmaking. The present state of local movies refute this very idea with independently produced movies flourishing with artistic confidence while mainstream works suffer from overreliance on spectacles and formulaic plot. If this were true then it should also follow that works from the past are inferior to that of the present seeing as how the process of making movies have gained advancements through the years and yet they don’t call the 50s as the golden age of Philippine cinema for nothing.

Doing away with the distinction of indie or mainstream, the question now leads to “what qualifies a good movie”. It’s important to note that cinema is art and art will always be subjective but this should not be used as an excuse for us to succumb to our biases. Instead, this should encourage the pursuit of objective judgment more, opening up discussions on aspects such as acting, plot, direction, cinematography- elements of filmmaking which could help us establish agreed upon parameters of quality. Considering MMFF is a celebration of the very best, scrutiny should be doubled down in order to leave no room for objectively passable movies and unfortunately for Sotto, the movies he clearly has vested interest on are just that, passable.

With that, it’s obvious that the real attempt of the senator is not to separate the good from the bad but segregating indie and mainstream movies. He claims that the removal of “commercial viability” as a criteria for the selection of entries has given indie movies unfair advantage over mainstream productions but the truth is, it’s the other way around. For so long, it is the big companies who benefitted from the criteria utilizing nothing but big names and mind-numbing explosions in hopes to attract audience and their money. They have deprived more than deserving titles of their slots and recognition and now they act as if they’re victims of their own wrongdoing.

At the end of day, MMFF is a film festival (no shit) and high-end equipment or commercial viability is not enough to guarantee you a pat on the ego let alone save you from being average. Creating a second film fest that seeks to divide is not the answer when the problem in the first place is lack of support. Plus, the industry has enough of indie film fests struggling due to absence of promotion from mainstream media. Mainstream and indie can coexist in harmony as proved by Cannes Film Festival (ever seen Inside Out, both child-friendly AND beautifully made) only when given the chance to and only at the condition of quality.

"Na-agrabyado ang mga bata. Wala namang movie na GP (General Patronage) eh."

It’s good to know that we could rely on the senator to always keep the children in mind but considering Tito Sotto, brother of Vic Sotto whose movies have become unfortunate staples of MMFF until last year, would cry foul only now when past festival movies that employed mean spirited, poor taste jokes were the only entries children could flock to during December, I’d take his words with a grain salt. It’s true that younger demographics make up a large portion of moviegoers but what I find hard to believe is the picture of children aggravated by the MMFF lineup. Also, no GP-rated movies? Have you bothered consulting the internet, senator?

Contrary to what Senator Sotto seems to be imagining, MMFF doesn’t take up the entirety of December over the course of its run. The event runs for just two weeks and during so, even movies outside the lineup such as last year’s The Super Parental Guidance which is now the highest grossing Filipino film of all time are given permission, sometimes preferential treatment, to be shown alongside the MMFF titles. If the goal here is putting a smile on a child’s face, should it matter if a movie gets a festival committee’s stamp of approval? Exactly where this talk of youngsters being robbed of Christmas is coming from, I don’t know. If there’s one thing stolen here, it’s the children’s chance to appreciate great films.

On the contrary, consensus among the younger generations seem to indicate that they do not mind at all with the change in scenery. If anything, they seem to be enjoying it as evident by the surge of social media and online petitions calling for an extension of the festival and such willingness to expose oneself to quality cinema demonstrates how young ones should be treated nowadays, not with patronizing naivety but with the intellectual respect they deserve. Unless you’d rather keep them in the dark and feed off of their ignorance. So to our senator/self-assigned Santa Claus, maybe now you could rest easy knowing that most children are smarter than they look perhaps more so than you. As the old Helen Lovejoy saying goes, “argumentum ad passiones".

Cinema has always asserted itself as a vehicle for entertainment but more so than ever at a time of heightened paranoia, the role of cinema calls for a more serious position. Many great cinematic works of the past don’t shelter us from harsh truths instead, they hold up a mirror and force us to confront the atrocities we’ve been ignoring, drowned out by empty laughs afforded by empty pleasure. Faced with very frightening danger, human nature may tell us to look the other way and move on but great cinema reminds us never to forget.

To senator Sotto, maybe it’s just your intention to provide a good, momentary laugh, maybe you’re a crooked sibling of a money-grabber. For your sake, I give you the benefit of the doubt. In return, maybe give Filipino cinema a chance?