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canmom · 5 years

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thinking about the weird, convoluted chain of events that led to people arguing about the translation of that one line in eva...

to grab just a few, the ongoing occupation of palestine, the formation of groups claiming solidarity with palestinians and their understandings of what would supposedly help, the schisms and ideological currents in the Japanese and “international left” (the JRA were Maoists among other things so we could just, drop the entire history of, say, China and the Soviet Union here), the American occupation of japan and the effects it had on its media culture and society more broadly

and then more proximally, you have the sarin gas attacks in 1995, anno (or whoever wrote that episode’s script) using the idea of terrorist attacks while filling out a background detail in a tv show airing in the same year, all the dynamics of cults and so on that produced those attacks - filtered through the way they might have appeared to a very depressed animator and the team working for him, all trying to speak to his present and future

and more than 20 years later, the role of the abe government, the renewed attempts to rewrite history as the survivors of wwii slowly die out, the creation of external and internal ‘enemies’ to justify repression

and elsewhere, the development of a massive western anime audience, the accumulation of a load of capital in video streaming and netflix’s attempts to get more and more involved in the anime industry; their power to determine what people watch and talk about in this part of the world, what constitutes the ‘shared culture’ or ‘conversation’. (i saw few people talking about evangelion until a week or two ago, now it feels like i’m surrounded by it and a bunch of my friends are watching for the first time)

not to mention the development of peripheral fandoms and the trade in figures and so on, sustaining evangelion and building its status as a ‘classic’; a young medium’s need for respectability and a ‘canon’ of more ‘artistic’ works and its uneasy tension with the most nakedly capitalist aspects of its industry; the traumas and common experiences that lead people to find value in evangelion in the first place. the influences that created the mecha genre before that.

and there’s this creepy asshole translator guy, and the things that must have shaped him: e.g. the reactionary politics of imageboards etc., the increasing(?) political polarisation of media consumer subcultures across the board... (idk, i’m speculating here, i know very little about this guy and don’t super care to find out)

all of this structured by broader dynamics: gender (and therefore homophobia, csa, etc.), capitalism, imperialism (however you theorise it), the friggin cold war, whatever factors drive people to form cults and sects and police their boundaries...

all of that context, and this barely scratches the surface, you could follow any of these threads so much further... all of that behind every translation & localisation decision. or act of communication in general. everything causing everything else.

i think a lot about a line in a song by daniel kahn - “every pair of pants and grain of rice/contains a horror story in its price/a story about factories and fields/a story of the power people wield”. sometimes... i end up trying to think of the story hiding behind the commodity, often when walking back from the supermarket with groceries. and it’s just... a lot.

(to pick just one strand in all this, I wonder what anime fandom is like in palestine anyway. obvs. would depend where you go and who you ask, just like anywhere. google just finds western anime fans talking about palestine, mentions of japanese directors talking about palestine, or articles about israeli anime conventions on the other side of the border walls. i guess there won’t be a lot written in english language, but still. there’s been a couple of animated films made in palestine/by palestinians, that’s as close as i have gotten.)

#not sure what the point of this post is exactly... just brain offloading

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canchewread · 6 years

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Editor’s note: Originally, I was going to save this quote until Bernie Sanders declared he was running for President in 2020, but I think there’s enough evidence that he’ll eventually declare now to confidently proceed with this write up - if he chickens out, I guess I’ll just have to deal with this post being thrown in my face for a while.

Today’s quotation comes from Matt Taibbi’s 2016 US Presidential election campaign book, “Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus” - a volume that mostly consists of essays Taibbi released over the course of the entire campaign (Primaries and General Election) with some glue in the introduction and concluding portions of the book, to tie the whole thing together.

As those of you who regularly read my work here on Can’t You Read are no doubt already aware, I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi’s writing - both in terms of style and the value of the content he provides. While nobody who can effectively work in mainstream media for over a decade should be trusted completely, I think it’s fair to say that Taibbi is, by the comparatively poor standards of his industry, an honest, rational observer of an institution (U.S. politics) that is anything but honest and rational. He is also, despite the numerous attempts to smear him, a fundamentally decent human being and that still matters a little bit in the world of American politics - although, maybe not as much as it should.

As for the book itself - Insane Clown President is ultimately a frustrating collection of writing; while two thirds of the book represents Taibbi at the absolutely height of his powers and easily ranks among his best work, the remaining third feels like a bunch of social media posts and fan mail cobbled into something resembling a narrative, then inserted into the book to fill out the page count. For example, while hashing out the rules of the GOP debate drinking game and conducting unofficial primary polls was probably a lot of fun for Taibbi’s followers on Twitter, it simply doesn’t translate into an enjoyable experience when transported onto the written page - the effect is actually quite jarring and somehow manages to detract from the rest of the extremely high-quality analysis Matt brings to the table.

The upshot here, are of course passages like the one quoted above, from a chapter appropriately and presciently titled - “June 9th, 2016: Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons from Their Brush with Bernie.” It is in moments like these that Taibbi seems to have his finger directly on the pulse of the class conflict between the voting public and the political elite (of which the mainstream media is effectively a public relations arm) in the United States. Unfortunately, despite Matt’s incisive analysis of the problems that would eventually define the entire 2016 election, the author’s (somewhat myopic) attachment to a liberalized ideal of previous editions of the Democratic Party, ultimately prevents him from drawing the obvious conclusion his own writing exposes throughout the book - that Trump is going to win, because American politics and its political media, are both fundamentally broken.

Despite these issues however, Insane Clown President’s most important contribution to understanding the current US political environment is Taibbi’s ability to recognize both swine emperor Trump and Bernie Sanders as symptoms of a populist insurgency waged not against internal factions within the normal framework of U.S. politics, but in opposition to the entire elite American ruling class and its institutions - our “establishment” if you will.

Before I go any further into what this means for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination race however, I’d like to talk a little bit about the false media narrative that the left wing populist movement behind Bernie Sanders is somehow “the same” as the revanchist, reactionary right wing movement that propelled Herr Donald to the White House in 2016 - a narrative which is, in a word, bullsh*t. While both political phenomenon are motivated to some degree by a mistrust of, alienation from and even outright loathing of the U.S. establishment and its institutions, the reasons for that mistrust, the overall end goals and the origin point of these respective insurgencies are totally different.

The far right “populist” movement that Trump was able to usurp during the 2016 Republican primaries, has its roots in Paleoconservatism and the largely AstroTurf, billionaire-funded conservative “Tea Party movement.” It is a fundamentally reactionary movement, created by the rich to blame America’s ills not on deregulated capitalism and an absurdly greedy ruling class, but instead on the proverbial “other” - brown-skinned immigrants, Muslims, the gay and transgender community, women, African Americans, the Jewish left, political correctness, big government and most of all, the dreaded “socialists, communists and liberals.” At its core, what we now call “Trumpism” is a revanchist Frankenstein’s Monster; the result of decades of weaponized and fetishistic worship of American exceptionalism, white supremacy and the absolute rule of capital - the only problem for the architects of this movement is that Trump managed to hack the code and establish his own mini-cult of personality by being more explicitly fascist and hateful than they were.

The movement propelling Sanders to the forefront of American politics by contrast is a genuine, grass roots endeavor. Although it’s easy enough to make the argument that the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, anti-fracking activists, and the Black Lives Matter protests have all provided inspiration and ideological underpinnings for this democratic socialist wave, the fact is that there is no unseen hand at work here; no billionaire backers, no guerrilla marketing wunderkinds, and no AstroTurf corporate media campaigns can claim responsibility for the phenomenon Sanders has helped embody in American politics. I say helped, because this too represents a key difference between the DemSoc wave and Trumpism; as a policy-focused movement, this new American left isn’t just about Bernie Sanders and already we’ve seen inspiring young leaders like Lee Carter, Rashida Tlaib, and especially Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez step to the front with their own democratic socialist message.

Finally, unlike Trumpism, this Sanders-inspired DemSoc insurgency is a movement whose policy proposals match their rhetoric; striving for economic equality, environmental protections, universal health coverage, increased educational opportunities for all, a restoration of democratic rights, better jobs with improved working conditions, the right to collectively bargain, affordable housing, ending mass incarceration, women’s rights, civil rights, and yes, despite what you’ve heard in corporate media owned by rich white people - ending racism and injustice against all marginalized people. Indeed, particularly on the issues of supporting Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid and ending American imperialism abroad, the movement Sanders helped to inspire appears to be driving him further to the left on the political spectrum; although not as much as some, myself included, would like.

In short, if Trumpism is about dragging the country back to a more explicitly white supremacist era, the movement Sanders helps represent is about establishing a fairer, more compassionate and more democratic America than the world has ever known - even under FDR.

There is however, one potential analogue between these two insurgencies and this is where I think the above quote from Taibbi’s book comes in; while there are no real similarities between Trumpism and the Sanders movement, there are a great deal of similarities between the ways both established U.S. political factions and their media minions have responded to an insurgent voter’s revolt.

In 2012, and fresh off the heels of a traumatizing insurgent Tea Party revolt within the party, the Republican establishment put all its chips down on making Barrack Obama a one term president. Expending what would turn out to be the last of their political capital, the GOP establishment managed to force through the Butcher of Bain Capital, “center-right” candidate Mitt Romney during the GOP primary process - a choice distinctly divorced from the anti-elite sentiment (if not reality) of a Tea-Party base now openly indulging in Birtherism and starting to warm up to, you guessed it, Donald Trump. It was the type of calculated bet the party elite would only have been prepared to make if they were sure Romney would win the 2012 presidential election, because they were essentially gambling that deposing the hated Obama would quell the rage their reactionary base felt at being betrayed by the GOP elite, embodied in the form of Romney.

In retrospect, it seems obvious now that when (despite all of Karl Rove’s rosy projections) Romney went down in flames, the GOP establishment was fatally fractured; having demonized Obama as literally an enemy of the American people, when the Republican brain trust failed to deliver his head on a platter that morning in 2012, they effectively lost the revanchist right who’d powered their surge back to political relevance only two years before.

From the outside however, this was not immediately apparent; the Republican leadership quickly announced an election autopsy and soon enough the same people who’d failed Republican voters in 2012 were offering their prescriptions for how to win the next one in 2016. Putting their mighty heads together, these elite GOP power brokers came back with arguably the only candidate more Republican establishment than Romney, Jeb Bush.

It was as we now know, a drastic miscalculation but one that should have been recognized long before Trump won the GOP nomination. When Party leaders lacked the ability to preemptively weed a wild and opportunistic seventeen candidate Republican nomination field, including, incredibly, a credible “center-right” candidate from anointed establishment GOP champion Jeb Bush’s *own* state - the writing was already on the wall for a party leadership group that was only keeping up appearances after exiting 2012 essentially politically bankrupt and broken.

Moving the timeline forward four years, it’s extremely difficult not to see strong parallels on the Democratic side of the ledger. Here too we see a party that barely staved off a radical insurgency by expending an enormous amount of political capital to ram through a highly-unpopular candidate, all the while dismissing the growing outrage from the left wing portion of their base as irrelevant because Hillary Clinton would definitely be the next President of the United States. After losing the 2016 election, the Democratic establishment quickly conducted an autopsy, made some vague platitudes about listening to the angry left-wingers that backed Bernie Sanders and ultimately decided to keep doing the same things they’ve always done before; just like the Republican Party in 2012. Yet, as the 2020 Democratic Party race opens, it is clear that the liberal establishment no longer has enough control over the party to weed the field, and prevent more than a dozen nearly-identical centrist candidates from splitting a vote that would otherwise be united under one candidate, preordained to fight off Bernie Sanders once again.

Can a broken, politically bankrupt Democratic Party hold off Sanders a second time doing essentially the exact same things that failed to hold off Trumpism on the GOP side of aisle?

I wouldn’t bet on it - as beloved American author Samuel Clemens is often (and perhaps falsely) reputed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

- nina illingworth

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mideastsoccer · 5 years

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Israeli soccer club’s anti-racism echoes Israel’s political divide

By James M. Dorsey

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon and Castbox.

Storied and crowned soccer club Beitar Jerusalem was for decades a pillar of the Israeli right-wing and an often-extreme symbol of Israel’s lurch towards the right as well as its`` ever more uncompromising attitude towards an equitable peace with the Palestinians and approach towards its Israeli Palestinian minority.

Today, in an anti-cyclical development, Beitar Jerusalem, with its acquisition by technology entrepreneur Moshe Hogeg, is at the forefront of the fight against racism, including anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia.

Beitar Jerusalem and La Familia, the mostly working-class militant segment of the club’s fan base, long prided themselves on the fact that the club has never hired a Palestinian player even though Palestinians have long been among Israeli soccer’s top performers.

La Familia still does. Raucous, fiercely loyal and menacingly racist, La Familia fans, dressed in the yellow and black colours of Beitar Jerusalem with the words La Familia stitched on their shirts, were clearly visible and vocally audible at matches in Jerusalem’s Teddy Kollek stadium.

Their anti-Arab and anti-Muslim chants accompanied by drums resonated throughout the stadium. Typical of La Familia chants, supporters often sang:

“Witnesses are stars in the sky,

For racism that is like a dream.

The whole world will testify

There will be no Arabs in the team!

I don’t care how many and how they are killed,

Eliminating Arabs thrills me.

Boy, girl or old,

We’ll bury every Arab deep in the ground.”

However, in the words of singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, the times they are a changin’.

“I have zero tolerance for racism. Absolutely zero. And my reaction towards racism is not proportional. You shout one racist comment and I will sue you for a million dollars," Mr. Hogeg, the club’s new owner, said in a recent BBC interview.

Mr. Hogeg has backed up his threats with deeds. The club has accused fans who expressed racist or discriminatory sentiments in the stadium of damaging its reputation and threatened them in letters with lawsuits that would force them to pay large sums to lawyers hired to defend them.

For Mr. Hogeg, reforming Beitar is not just about the image of his newly acquired trophy.

It’s about Israel that under prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu, boosted by US President Donald J. Trump’s support for annexationist policies, has steered a course that increasingly precludes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and risks either compromising the Jewish character of the state or turning it into a civilizationalist entity whose democracy is undermined by the need to repress the other.

"I'm not trying to ruin anyone's life, I'm not trying to be their father and their mother, I'm not trying to educate them - it's not my job. But when you bring it to the stadium and you act in that way it reflects badly on all of the crowd and on our nation, so I can't take this," Mr. Hogeg said who has in the past suggested that he supports Israel’s right wing.

Mr. Hogeg’s uncompromising approach is producing results as it taps into a desire among Beitar’s broader fan base for a politically and racially less charged atmosphere in the stadium.

A majority of Beitar fans, who long were uncomfortable with La Familia’s aggressive support for the club, have voted with their feet. Families that stayed away from matches have returned and sponsors are expressing new interest.

The number of racist incidents has dwindled. There were only two incidents during the last season and none so far in the current season.

“It’s amazing. Hogeg has turned the club around. La Familia is lying low and has turned silent,” said a supporter of Beitar’s Jerusalem upcoming rival, Hapoel Katamon.

Mr. Hogeg further drove his point home with the acquisition in November of Ali Mohammed, a Nigerian Christian who quickly became one of the club’s top, if not its top player.

La Familia initially demanded that he change his Muslim name yet has since joined the chorus in celebrating him after he scored his first goal – a huge step for a group that long insisted in keeping the club “pure forever.”

Israeli soccer scholars acknowledge Mr. Hogeg’s success but doubt that La Familia will back off permanently.

"There's no doubt Moshe Hogeg has made a difference. But the fans at Beitar are unpredictable. It's like a ceasefire which is helped because the team are doing well,” said sociologist Yair Galily.

Added Mati Suleimani, an 18 year-old member of La Familia: “Moshe Hogeg thinks he can come in and tell us how to live our lives, like he knows better than us because he makes more money… He is mistaken.”

The litmus test of Mr. Hogeg’s effort will be if, and when he decides to hire an Israeli Palestinian player, defying a core La Familia slogan, Death to the Arabs.

Mr. Hogeg’s moves are about reputation management and inter-communal relations, not big political issues like Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Yet, they are significant as a statement against the backdrop of a discourse that has become progressively more discriminatory and racist.

The significance is enhanced as deadlocked Israeli politics move towards an election in March, the third in a year, in which the main contenders, Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud and hawkish Benny Gantz’s Blue and White, differ more in tone and language than in policy.

Said former defense minister Avigdor Lieberman, a potential kingmaker in the post-election formation of a new government: “In my opinion it can be Benjamin Netanyahu or Benny Gantz. There is no essential difference between them.”

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture

#soccer #football #Sports #sport #Israel #Palestine

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trendingnewsb · 7 years

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Mr. President, target the Iranian deep state, not the Iranian people

Rouhani slams President Trump over Iran nuke deal

Iranian president responds to Trump’s U.N. address, claims country is following agreement; senior correspondent Eric Shawn reports from the United Nations

On Wednesday, we saw Iranian President Rouhani at the United Nations state that if the U.S. reneges on the nuclear deal, America will pay a high cost.

This statement is a clear indicator of what the Iranian regime thinks of the so-called nuclear deal: they are huge fan of it. And why wouldn’t they be? It gives them exactly what they have wanted all along: Regime Preservation. It single handedly removed crippling sanctions allowing them to increase their financial resources to do what they do best, export terrorism — or, as they like to tell themselves internally: self-defense.

For us however, the deal isn’t worth the paper that it’s printed on. Does that mean it should be scrapped? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Here’s why.

President Trump said during his UN speech at the General Assembly that it is one of the worst deals he has seen, “an embarrassment to the American people.” I have no doubt he probably believes this even more since he took office and reads the regular intelligence reports in his daily brief showing Iranian groups smuggling illicit materials globally to Shia-backed groups and further exporting terrorism as a result. Most people will never know the extent of these reports.

When the president wakes up he sees a different picture than most Americans. The truth is to those of us who have been in the intelligence community, the world is a scary place. The threats we face daily as Americans are so great that I learned over time that it’s a good thing most of us don’t know about them. It’s why we sleep well at night but our leaders are tossing and turning. He sees the daily intelligence reports telling him exactly what the Iranians are up to around the world. The Iranian regime will be President Trump’s most difficult battle yet.

We shouldn’t be fooled, however, by these reports into categorizing the interests of Iranians as a whole. The destabilizing actions described are those of a small faction of hardliners hell bent on protecting the principles of the 1979 Islamic revolution. These hardliners are masters of deception, and they have been playing us all along. Every time we’ve threatened sanctions against the country, the hardliners have gained more legitimacy

The problem that we are seeing is not the majority-moderate Iranian regime or even the Iranian people. With nearly 70 percent of the Iranian population under the age of 40, the truth is the nation and its people could be our biggest strategic ally in the region. The majority want peace. The majority want a better relationship with the West. The majority want to connect with the rest of the world. Heck, didn’t you notice, when the television cameras cut to the Iranian delegate at the UN, he was using an iPhone while listening to the president? The irony of that photo is not lost on me.

Here is the nub: The Iranian nuclear deal was not for this faction of hardliners. The deal, as terrible as it was, was for the good of the Iranian people. It was a symbol to all of them that the U.S. wants a better relationship. In the end, the people are the decision-makers and they will be the reason for regime change. Yet, unfortunately, our current policies are still hurting them the most.

The real problem is the Iranian hardliners who refuse to let go of their history, and are secretly playing us against one other on the world stage. These are the hardliners who will always choose anti-imperialism pride, anti-American sentiment, and Islamic revolution values over pragmatism. They are the Iranian leaders from the 60s, 70s, and 80s who convinced themselves that America can never be trusted. Regime preservation dictates their actions. They are the Iranian version of the “deep state.”

And this, coupled with the Saudis and the Israelis lobbying President Trump to get more aggressive with Iran against our better interests, creates a recipe for disaster.

The hardliners on both sides of the Middle East are pushing each other’s buttons in order to increase the divide between Iran and the U.S. It’s playing out on the world stage like a scene from the movie “Sum of All Fears,” where rogue elements get us to nearly attack each other by making us believe it’s in our best interest. Since I’m also a former intelligence analyst by trade, I guess that would make me Jack Ryan in this equation.

If President Trump scraps the nuclear deal in October, the hardliners in Iran will use this to consolidate power in their own country. The decision would work in their favor, in other words. They will use the outcome to turn to their moderates and say “I told you so,” thereby winning support from their local populations, who are regularly told the West is the reason for their problems.

The hardliners are trying to position the U.S. as materialistic and oppressive to the general population, and themselves as the caretakers of the Iranian people. Unfortunately, our actions over the years continue to help them do so.

Recent examples of this include travel restrictions on Iranian students, entrepreneurs, and artists. Apple recently removed Iranian apps from the app store. Even Google shut down Google Analytic accounts from operating. These business services were stopped out of fear of violating sanctions. These are the services that help young pro-Western entrepreneurs, civil society and the private sector. These small things collectively are slowly giving the hardliners the chance to be proven right.

The Iranian’s haven’t reneged on the deal. The hardliners have, fueling the fire of anti-American sentiment and intent. We need to target them.

What we truly need is a fresh tactical restart of our Iran policy. The focus shouldn’t be on scrapping the Iranian nuclear deal at all, but rather covertly targeting the small factions within the country that are causing others to believe it’s falling apart while supporting the new generation of Iranian moderates at the same time. It should be the carrot and stick approach. The carrot should be empowering the Iranian private sector by encouraging American investments and allowing Iranian people to engage with the rest of the world through trade, exchange, and travel. The stick should be military action targeting Iran’s national security and radical establishment at odds with the next generation of Iranian leaders ready to take over.

More specifically, we need to target the group that allows the hardliners to carry out their tasks: The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Force (IRGC). Much of the turmoil we see around the world is a result of their actions. They are covertly at war with us, but we are not at war with them.

When we hear about Iran teasing our naval forces with attack boats in the Persian Gulf, or flying one of their drones low enough around our warships for us to see them watching – that’s the IRGC in action.

Even further, within the IRGC, everything seems to point to a small branch of rogue elements known as the IRGC-“Qods Force,” led by none other than Major General Qasem Soleimani, who (as much as I despise him) is one of the greatest military minds of our generation. His mind, though, is being used for evil instead of good. He has been directly responsible for the deaths of American soldiers, he has directed attacks against the West, and he works for the Ayatollah, who is really pulling the strings.

We need to unleash our covert action against the Qods Force, targeting their covert actions more aggressively around the world. We need to make clear rules of engagement, stating that we will respect the Iranian national interests, but we will strike any of their units we find upsetting the stability of the region.

At the same time, we can show respect to the Iranian majority who want better relations by investing in the country, with Americans leading the charge. The biggest nightmare of the hardliners is an Iran that’s open and an Iranian population that is no longer locked in and isolated from the rest of the world. We should attempt to reduce the burden on international banks still too afraid to transact there despite sanctions that have been lifted. Empowering the private sector in Iran and allowing for Iranian people to engage with the rest of the world through trade, exchange, travel is the best strategy to weaken the IRGC. The more we help open the country, the less powerful their influence will be.

The efforts to weaken the hardliners/IRGC coupled with efforts to empower moderates in the regime and the private sector will allow for peaceful and gradual change in the nature of the government to one that is more cooperative in regional affairs and much more accepted by the people.

Reducing IRGC’s power and supporting the Iranian people directly may just be the drastic approach needed for us to win the long war.

Brett Velicovich is a U.S. Army veteran and former military intelligence analyst with 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta. His brand-new memoir is Drone Warrior.

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