#madman that doesn’t understand economics

[socialjusticeinamerica]

🤦🤦‍♀️

[thelastyetfabolousmidwestmadman]

That One Fanfic Idea I Had That Was Too Fucked Up For Me

So picture this.

Your watching Highschool DXD with your mother. It’s weird I know but my mom has done much more disgusting stuff so it seems rather normal in comparison... 

No? You Don’t want to picture it?

Kay, now stop picturing it, cause you’re either squicked out or have issues so imagine just watching alone, with a friend, or if good fortune strikes you the best girlfriend/Boyfriend ever.

But lets talk about YOU.

You are a lonely depressed coed, who straight out of high school suffered one of the most painful experiences of your life. The one you love the most just broke up with you for reasons you don’t understand or can comprehend at the time. 

For brevity’s sake I won’t tell the cause of what happened between me and my ex. I think some things should remain private and everyday I’m regretful for how I acted and wish that things could have gone differently. That is the past now and it should only be revisited to show how much you changed for the better.

You present yourself a mask of happiness when in reality you are in so much pain you are genuinely considering suicide but in a attempt to keep your mind off the pain, you listen to music that you never liked before because what you loved reminds you of them, and most importantly you watch shows that you previously had no interest in due to a desperate attempt to feel something, anything.

Its been nearly four years since that happened and some things are better but the scars still bleed deeply in the sides of my cerebrum. Today while I still have many issues and I wont pretend to have them together, but with the passing of time wounds become less salted and eventually will heal. Parts of myself I lost I’ve regained and that has made me proud but in other ways my trauma made myself break in two more then shatter. I may never be the same again but that doesn’t mean I could be something new or better.

Some of you might me wondering, “Why Madman, why are you talking about this now.” Well if there is one positive thing I can say about what happened is that it made ma a better writer. I now take my time, and don’t stress out about due dates. Since I experience one of the worst experiences of my life, I could greater write and understand the pain, sadness, and fears the characters I adapted experienced. I guess talent increases through suffering and struggle. I guess the best I can say was before I wrote like a child who hears a song and only focuses on the feelings in their simplistic form while now the adult who has life experience and sense the greater meaning.

But even now I still have so much to learn, and improve from! Sometimes I look at both my ongoing and old work with a equal measure of fondness and disappointment knowing what I know now. Even after the tragedy, I wrote in stasis for a while and works like Goodbye Innocence could have started less like a soup opera and be better for it. But suddenly I had a ephinany. I couldn’t allow myself to keep my writing at this level with the lackadaisical attitude I had before. I had to try harder! And that meant  updating less and taking my time to get back in touch in why I loved writing so.

Then it hit me. The childish magic and wonder I got from writing hasn’t left me at all, even at my lowest most pathetic moments. There are people better then me and instead of repeatedly getting down on myself, I accepted my limitations and regained my enthusiasm that I thought lost. 

But briefly over a period of twenty months my mind sorta went to a dark, bitter place and I sorta gave in into nihilism and despair. I kept thinking about Deconstructionism in general and what it could be applied. As you could guess, my mind landed on one show in particular.

So I kept stretching out my mind, in a rather feverish pace, thinking about how could I turn Highschool DXD dark? I mean the show is literally nothing but fanservice and tame ultraviolence how can anyone possibly make that edgy? Even without Funimation’s help the show is so ludicrous how could anyone take a dark fic seriously?

Well... Unfortunately for my sins, I came up with one.

I thought about Issei when I got to the Diadora Asteroth part. I thought about how hypocritical he could be at times considering how he tried to influence Gasper into stopping time in order to fondle unknowing women, which is pretty much beyond comedic anime perversion and more Diadora levels of sexual predation. 

Granted, I’ve long since learned that if you spend all the time thinking about the unfortunate implications of jokes, plotlines, and character arcs, particularly in politically astute context like myself, you’re quickly drive yourself crazy and be unable to enjoy any work of fiction ever. There are some that are admittedly more egregious than others but author’s intent, values dissonance/resonance, and alternative implications are important to examine as well. Life is too short to turn into a zealot and their are other social-economic problems that require requisitely radical solutions like Medicare For All, Reparations, BDS, etc that are more important to focus on then minor shit like this but anyway why the fuck am I rambling, you didn’t read this far to hear me pontificate on politics, back to the point.

TRIGGER WARNING from this point onwards

So the idea goes like this. The girls of Rias’s harem fall in love with Issei just like in canon. But what if said love is only due to Ddraig’s influence? What it Issei now had a excuse and means to justify his perversions and channel them into outright sexual and emotional abuse?

Yeah I don’t particularly feel like going further into what I entailed other than saying that it got really graphic and disturbing. So why you may ask, why would someone who was infamous for his rape fics be unable to write this of all things?

I couldn’t stomach it.

The amount of talent required at the time was beyond me and I think it’s beyond me even now but lets pause for a second and really think about this. This is something that I have no experience but sadly too many people do. IF I got even the most single fact wrong, I simply wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.

Even worse, the part that I would be at most knowledgeable about, the emotional aspect of abuse, would bring up memories that I would rather not think about.

You don’t like fics like this out of passion or joy, you write them out of sheer artistic conveyance to a particular issue. You write them cause you are in pain. You write them to punish yourself. You write them to reveal a dark part of yourself you suppress with thousands of years of civilization and morality. It would be an all around miserable experience for everything.

And why would I do that to myself and others? That is not the sign of a healthy mindset and it is counterproductive to the reason I write dark fics in general.

So I am happy to toss this idea in the bin. I can’t stop anyone from doing this idea, all power to you, but I don’t want to read it. Perhaps my curiosity would get to the better of me.

Either way, I say goodbye to this fic, and hopefully this painful period of my life.

Peace.

[realityhelixcreates]

Dance of the Spheres Chapter 4: Venusian Vogue

Chapters: 4/?

Fandom:  Marvel Cinematic Universe

Rating: PG 13

Warnings: drugging, kidnapping, forced marriage

Characters: Loki(Marvel),

Additional Tags:  Loki Goes Overboard, But When Doesn’t Loki go Overboard, Mature Reader, Disabled Reader, Political Intrigue

Summary:  

Images of broken light Which dance before me like a million eyes They call me on and on across the universe.                   Across the Universe-The Beatles

“I am Loki.”

“I asked for a bride.”

The declarations smashed into you like fists and took your breath with them.

There was a ring on your finger. Silvery, plain, simple. Why hadn't you noticed it before?

This was clearly Loki. Sunken eyes, and onyx hair, and refined bones. Exactly like the pictures. Why hadn't you noticed?

Too many things all at once. Too much. A fearful whine escaped your teeth, as you tugged on the ring. It didn't budge.

“You're supposed to be dead.” You whispered.

His face fell the instant you spoke.

“You know. I sometimes think that myself. Yet somehow I remain. Take it as a reassurance: you will not lose me to battle, or accident. I will never leave you. I suppose that is something that new brides must worry about, especially human ones. You may put that fear to rest.”

“That's not what I'm-” You clamped your mouth shut. You were in a bad position, worse than you'd ever been, maybe. You were completely alone here; you could contact no one for help. You weren't even sure where exactly 'here' was-no one knew where Asgard was located.

You were trapped in a room with a madman. A prince among his own people, who had proven himself capable of the mass murder of humans like you. Yet claiming you were his bride.

No one would come to your aid.

Did anyone even know you were missing?

You glanced at the ring once more. Its twin rested proudly on his own left hand. What choice did you have?

You had to play along. At least until you found some way out of this. Stay on the madman's good side, as much as that was possible.

“Why me?” You asked, fighting down your panic. Just gather information for now. “I'm literally nobody.”

“I don't understand either.” He sat down on the bed, just a little closer to you than arms length. “This was supposed to be a chance at reconciliation. I willingly gave myself up in a symbolic act of unity. Sacrificed my own freedom.”

You side-eyed him hard. Gave up his freedom? In what capacity? He wasn't the one kidnapped and married without any knowledge or choice!

“This isn't an uncommon arrangement.” He continued. “Your species has done this since time immemorial. From kings all the way down to commoners, uniting families, uniting fortunes, uniting entire lands. Surely your...leader...understood what was to be gained. Yes, I did a terrible thing to your people, but this should have forged a new alliance. A promise that not only would I not do such a thing again, but that my formidable prowess would be for your people, rather than against them. Was this not enough? This should have opened the way for trade, for treaties...And you! Why do such a thing to you? One of his own people?”

“Oh, I'm not his.” You said. “I voted against him. I march in protests against his shitty policies. I oppose him in any way I can. I'd say 'maybe that's why', but it really can't be. I'm nowhere near important or influential enough for the government to pay any attention to me. They're too busy trying to kill me through austerity. Or through the cops.”

Loki's face darkened. “I should find that officer and flay him. Make you a bodice of his skin.”

He'd been reaching for your shoulder, but you flinched away.

“Okay see? That right there? That's why people might not want to ally with you.” You pointed out.

“He shouldn't have hurt you.”

“That's true. That doesn't mean you can use my pain as an excuse to rampage on Earth!”

“I shan't!” He protested. “Never again, I promise you that.”

But how good was the promise of government? Politician or hereditary ruler, it was all the same. How good was the word of a murderer? How many promises had he already broken?

“How do you feel?” He asked. “You seem...lively. Whatever you were drugged with, is it having a lasting effect?”

“I'm a little disoriented, but I'm awake.” You said. “The food and water helped.”

“Yes. About that. Ah. Would you like to see your rooms? I've been anticipating your arrival-well, someone's arrival-for some months now, and I've had chambers created that befit your new station.”

The big unknown outside. Beyond this room was nothing but uncertainty. But you would be the first human being to see this new Asgard. You told yourself it was a perk.

“Um...” You mumbled. “My clothes...” You weren't going out there in a flimsy hospital gown, that was for sure.

“Being cleaned and mended.” Loki informed you. “I have a simple gown that I believe should fit you. Here.” Wit a sweeping gesture, he produced a voluminous, forest green garment out of seemingly nowhere.

You scooted away. “How did you do that?” You demanded.

“Magic, of course.” He said. “You...don't know about the magic...?”

You shook your head and took the robe from him. It felt real enough, smooth and soft, with fur trim and pin tucks. This was simple?

“What do you know about me, my dear?” He asked.

“Not much. Just what...turn around!” Sheepishly, he turned his back so you could change. “Just what was on the news. And the approximately three million conspiracy websites that popped up afterwards. You might be shocked by how many people think you were an inside job.”

“A what?”

“That's not even counting all the cults. You and Thor really got the radicalization machine cranking them out. White supremacists, nationalists, doomsday cults...thanks a lot. Not as if we didn't have enough problems cleaning up the mess you left behind.”

“That...was not my intention. Were you...?”

“I was not part of any cults. I was also not part of the celebration of your death, either.”

The news broadcast had interrupted every television, lit up every phone. A tired and battle-worn Thor, looking not one inch the hero the world knew him to be, as he towered over the reporter. He gave only a short statement: His brother Loki was dead, perished in honorable battle, in an effort to protect the galaxy from an ancient enemy.

People had trusted him. They'd seen the destruction that enemy had caused, in their quest to destroy everything. The odd teleportation anomalies in England that had dominated youtube for a long time. The leaves in your bathroom, the foreign plants in the park. Exotic, even alien creatures being spotted.

People threw parties at the news of Loki's demise. You'd gone out, gotten yourself exactly one drink, and then stayed home for the weekend. It didn't seem right, not after seeing Thor so hollowed out. You didn't really get on with celebrating the death of your enemies anyway, only the success of your causes.

“Oh. Well. Thank you.”

“But yeah, all I really know is that you attacked us out of the blue, and brought an army with you. You caused billions in damages and cost hundreds of lives. Thousands more lost everything. The economic blow is still with us, and led to some of the problems I've been marching against. And then you died. Except not, obviously. Was Thor lying to us?”

“No. He truly believed me dead. I did too, until I woke up. So you know nothing of me. I feared that might be the case. I am no warlord, not truly. I am the foremost sorcerer of Asgard. My magic has many applications, one of which is that I am rarely found without what I need.”

“So magic is real?” Why not? Aliens were real. Gods were apparently real.

“Yes, very. When times were...better, I used to tutor younger students. I might go back to doing that, once we are more established. Once we are safe.”

Safe? From what? Was whatever it was that had destroyed Asgard still out there? Thor had said otherwise, before the radio silence, but he had also thought that Loki was dead, and he was wrong about that, so...

“May I look now, dear?”

“Oh...yeah. I'm dressed.” The gown did fit, though mostly because it was a shapeless, oversized thing that was closed around you with ties. Still, it was luxurious, and made you feel like you were actually pretty-as long as no one looked at you too closely. Was this what a princess wore? You shouldn't allow yourself to get too used to it. As soon as you found a way out, you were out.

“Delightful. Even such a simple gown enhances your beauty. Will you come with me, dear? Let me show you our grand achievements.”

You didn't really want to be exposed to the people of Asgard, but this room was no safer than anywhere else right now. Loki hovered, and you stood, and managed a few wobbly steps before you overbalanced. He caught you instantly.

“Don't worry.” He murmured. “I'm here.”

As if that wasn't the problem in the first place.

“So, while you were carrying me off...I mean, when you, uh, received me, did you notice a cane lying around?” You asked. “I had one. Did the guys who brought me give it to you?”

“I'm afraid not.” He said apologetically. “They seemed strangely eager to quit the area.”

“Yeah, well. They had just committed a felony.” You griped. “They probably had orders to disappear. And they probably didn't want to hang around and witness what a warlord was gonna do to me.”

He winced. “I promise you, that's not what I really am.”

“Sorry.”

He held out his arm for you. “I don't have your cane, but I can support you. We will have another cane made for you. There should have been an Artificer and an apprentice Healer in here at some point, to measure you for a new prosthetic.”

“Uh, there were. I, uh, kinda told them to piss off.”

“Ah. I suppose I cannot blame you, now that I know of your situation. But they are here at your service, as is all of Asgard.”

He helped you limp along, somehow maintaining his dignified stride, even as you wobbled along like a penguin. The hallways were as bland and labyrinthine as a human hospital, if somewhat more softly lit. Again the light source was obscured behind thin panes of cloudy crystal, which diffused the light, giving everything a comforting, if slightly mysterious atmosphere, which the general emptiness of the area only enhanced.

There were few people here, but for some reason, you had been placed in a room far within the hospital complex. Maybe they wanted to hide you away, so that no one knew you were here until they were ready to introduce you to Asgard. Or until they were certain you were going to survive. It might cause a scandal if the prince's bride just up and died upon arrival.

Or perhaps it was to protect you. There were plenty of reasons why a human bride might not be accepted by the Asgardian populace; everything from nationalism, to someone wanting to make a bid for that crown themselves.

There were still no windows to be seen, and everything was made of stone, just like in the hospital room. Out here, in the halls and waiting rooms, the desks, chairs, and tables all seemed to be joined to the walls and floor, as if the whole place had been carved from a single, solid piece, like the rock-cut architecture of the fabled city of Petra. Here again were the creamy grays and oranges lining the walls, though a smooth black also made an appearance.

Eventually, you came to what must have been a foyer, with a high ceiling, complex stone mosaics, and huge, gorgeously carved double doors, but still no windows.

“We will be going outside now.” Loki said. “This facility is within the palace complex, and is not far from your special chambers, but we will have to cross a few halls and courtyards. There are plenty of places to sit, so if you need a rest, simply say so.”

He opened the doors for you, and you stepped out into a world of stone.

Everything was stone, stone or metal. Before you was a wide open courtyard, clearly unfinished, but spacious. At regular intervals were stone towers supporting open pillared hallways in a multiple storied, vaguely Roman courtyard style. The towers shot up, and up, and up...you climbed them with your gaze, following them to the heights to which they had to buttress each other with thin struts of stone, higher still, where they joined with an impossibly high ceiling.

There was a roof over the courtyard, so tall that your couldn't fathom how it had been built. Beyond the courtyards stacked walkways-six full stories-you could see the tips of other towers, lined with lights, merging with this high rise ceiling. Was the entire palace built under this massive shelter?

Clearly the sun did not reach into the palace. To offset this, the crystal-paned, inset lights were everywhere, creating complex patterns that mimicked the intricate knotted carvings that chased up the towers and pillars. The corbels glared down at you, fierce masks of bearded men, wolves, dragons and birds, lights in their eyes.

Combined, it was not as bright as sunlight, but not dim either. The softness of the glow made shadows diffuse, made the stone look soft and fake, and even shimmery in places, like the set pieces in eighties fantasy movies. If not for the pain in your bruises, you'd have thought the dreamy atmosphere was just that, and that you were about to wake up from this absurd dream any moment now.

But the pain was there, and denied that simple, hopeful wish. And Loki was there, gently urging you forward like he was a real gentleman, instead of a heinous war criminal. There were a few other people out here as well; walking the courtyards pillared halls, resting on stone benches, carving hollows into the ground.

There was no soil here. All stone. As you crossed the courtyard, you noticed black, and gray, and cloudy crystal inlaid into the ground in a shape reminiscent of a compass rose, decorated with silvery wire knotwork in bird and serpent shapes.

There were troughs and niches being carved into the ground that looked to you like they were meant to be flower beds...eventually. You had seen no dirt here yet, no grass or growing things at all. Maybe once you finally got outside. But for now, it felt as if you had left a building, only to exit into another building, that was in turn, within another building.

It was a bit suffocating.

Loki led you across several courtyards, each with a different pattern inlaid into their bare floor, and through vaulted hallways that still contained no windows. Many of these hallways intersected in large, circular domes, and few of them had any distinctive markings. Soon you were completely lost. With any luck, you would be able to get your hands on some paper, and create a map-otherwise, any escape attempts would be doomed from the word go.

But maybe that was the point.

Your staggering steps echoed down a particularly tall and wide hallway, almost completely devoid of people. You were almost at the end of your physical capabilities, and while there were places to sit, you felt like you must be close to your destination. You really wanted to be in a room whose dimensions you could be certain of. A space you could comprehend.

Loki brought you to a stop in front of a pair of carved wooden doors. As the first piece of architecture you had seen here that was something other than stone, you found them more beautiful than anything you'd seen all day. They were something almost normal, almost like something you would have at home. If you were insanely rich, or your dad was a carpenter or something. They were a warm terra-cotta color, carved with a dizzying array of knotwork, framed with blackened, riveted iron. The handles were iron serpents.

“We imported some things from your homeland. This redwood lumber is one such thing. From what I hear, these trees are emblematic of your country.”

“Er...” How to politely say, 'not really, even though most people who live there do know what a redwood is'. They weren't very important to anyone who didn't live near where they grew. They weren't what you would call 'quintessentially American'. There wasn't anything you could really call that. The place was just too damn big.

“We couldn't bring too much, not yet anyway.” He continued. “It is expensive, unfortunately, and we only have one ship. It can only carry so much, and it takes about three days to transport. Things are moving slowly, but our construction projects are moving along speedily. There's little else to do right now, save build.”

He opened the doors for you, and led you into a fairy tale.

[iol247]

Flashback: Unabomber Publishes His ‘Manifesto’

Ted Kaczynski was a madman who killed and maimed innocent people – but did some of his worries for the future come true?

By 2017 standards, a bearded man ranting in his manifesto about how “one of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism” might, at best, have a chance ending up name-checked by Alex Jones. Most likely, he’d become the hero of a thousand faceless message board posters. His 35,000-word diatribe against technology titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” might be suitable for a personal blog, but a national newspaper? Surely not.

Of course, more than 20 years ago, when Ted Kaczynski mailed out what would come to be known as the “Unabomber Manifesto,” it was huge news. After over a decade spent living as a recluse without electricity or running water in a cabin in Montana – sending mail bombs to university academics and corporate airline executives – Kaczynski sent letters to the New York Times and the Washington Post demanding they publish his manifesto and agree to print an annual follow-up for three years. If they did, the bombings would cease. If not, the Unabomber hinted at more bombings to come. 

It had started in May of 1978, when a package exploded and injured a Northwestern University security officer. A year later, another bomb was sent to the same college, injuring a graduate student. Also in 1979, Kaczynski snuck a bomb into the cargo hold of an American Airlines flight. It went off mid-flight, causing an emergency landing and afflicting 12 passengers with smoke inhalation. In 1985, he switched things up, and sent a shrapnel-loaded bomb to a computer store in Sacramento, California, claiming the owner as his first victim. By the mid-1980s, the Unabomber had become a real-life American boogeyman. A killer who would strike without warning, and without much reason. Why was he doing what he did – and when would he do it again?

The publication of the manifesto would end up being his undoing. Members of Kaczynski’s family had a slight suspicion Ted could be the person behind the terror campaign. His brother David was one of the thousands of people who called the FBI tip-line after the manifesto was published and a million-dollar reward was offered for information leading to the capture of the Unabomber. After a long search, FBI agents arrested an unkempt Kaczynski in his Lincoln, Montana cabin on April 3rd, 1996. They found bomb making components, over 40,000 journal pages and the manifesto’s original typed manuscript.

There’s no defending the actions of a person who mails bombs with the intent to do serious harm. But Andrew Sodroski, executive producer of the new Discovery mini-series, Manhunt: Unabomber, thinks there is plenty to take away from Kaczynski’s words. As he said in a phone conference with reporters leading up to the show, “What the manifesto has to say about our relationship with technology and with society is more true right now than it was when Ted published it.”

Not many domestic terrorists convicted of murder get called prophetic by television producers – and there are scholars from different sides of the political spectrum who agree that the the Unabomber’s anti-technology stance was ahead of its time. “His work, despite his deeds,” wrote Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team, “deserves a place alongside Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and 1984, by George Orwell.” Ray Kurzweil, noted author, computer scientist and futurist, quoted a passage from the manifesto in his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. Some believe he’s a murderous modern-day Henry David Thoreau, while others say he’s a genius and a prophet. So what, exactly did he get right?

Kaczynski opens his manifesto with, “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” The technology he goes on to rail against, keep in mind, was mid-1990s – before smartphones, before Twitter, before “Likes” on Facebook and algorithms helped pick out things for you to buy and experience. Although the word “dystopia” never shows up throughout the essay, Kaczynski believed (and you have to assume still does so from his prison cell) that the future wasn’t some Philip K. Dick or Handmaid’s Tale scenario; the dystopian future started happening a long time ago. Computer networks, the mass-communication media, the modern health care system, pesticides and chemicals, all products of the Industrial Revolution, are destroying the planet, he writes. As one portion of the manifesto is sub-titled, “The ‘Bad’ Parts of Technology Cannot be Separated From the ‘Good’ Parts.” 

In point number 49 the manifesto, Kaczynski writes, “In the modern world it is human society that dominates nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change.” One of the big problems, he believed while writing his manifesto, was the inevitable growth of artificial intelligence and how humanity will cope with it. “First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them.” As one Wired article explained in 2015, “A manufacturing device from Universal Robots doesn’t just solder, paint, screw, glue, and grasp – it builds new parts for itself on the fly when they wear out or bust.” From checking you out at the grocery store to flipping burgers, robots are being designed to integrate into the labor force and cut costs.

He goes on to write in point number 172, “In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.” When Kaczynski’s thoughts were published, we were still dealing with the Terminator version of the robots overtaking humanity and destroying it – it was a nightmare scenario, fiction. But Kaczynski wasn’t writing speculative fiction; he was stating, from an academically-trained point of view, where he saw technology headed.

Technology overtaking humanity was only one of the scary possibilities. The rise of the “one percent” super rich and corporations controlling everything, was another. “Human freedom mostly will have vanished, because individuals and small groups will be impotent vis-a-vis large organizations armed with supertechnology and an arsenal of advanced psychological and biological tools for manipulating human beings, besides instruments of surveillance and physical coercion,” he wrote. 

Tech companies have untold amounts of data on every person that logs online for everything from shopping for cat litter to ranting on Twitter. How to understand that data – and what to use it for – is an industry in itself. Could it be used to manipulate us? See the 2016 U.S. election and the rise of fake news spread through Facebook. “Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate,” as one 2016 BuzzFeed article put it, showed up in feeds even if the people didn’t follow those groups. Some of the false news was spread the old-fashioned way, through word of mouth; but, as John Herman of the New York Times explained, misinformation on the social media service thrives or dies, “at least in part, on Facebook’s algorithm.” As Kaczynski believes, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. All of this seemed farfetched when Kaczynski’s words were put in front of a mass audience. In 1994, audiences were being told suave cyberterrorists like the ones in the movie The Net were the ones looking to steal your information online and do whatever they please with it.

After all this, however, calling Kaczynski a prophet might be a stretch. He’s a highly intelligent person who wanted to try and stop where he saw humanity headed by any means necessary – including murdering people. Yet he routinely points out throughout his manifesto that there very well might be no stopping the inevitable. The entire point of his manifesto, as he states, is revolution, anarchy: “Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.” Kaczynski, who has stated admiration for the eco-anarchist movement (“but I think they could do it better,” he also said in an interview in 1999), takes aim at both leftists, including “socialists, collectivists, ‘politically correct’ types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like”). He also writes, “conservatives are fools,” and that they’re, “just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business.” Kaczynski even engages in some gaslighting: “Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.”

All of this reiterates the point that Kaczynski is no hero whatsoever. The person who wrote “Industrial Society and Its Future,” is a fanatic. And as is sometimes the case, fanatics can take things to the tragic extreme. Yet there is something to be taken away from his words if you read closely; it’s that we give up a piece of ourselves whenever we adjust to conform to society’s standards. That, and we’re too plugged in. We’re letting technology take over our lives, willingly. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t take a madman dressed up like a prophet to tell us; it’s all too evident. Kaczynski, to steal a phrase from the tech world, was just an early adopter of these thoughts. Yet his warning will probably forever go unnoticed because of the horrific deeds he carried out to get his message across.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/flashback-unabomber-publishes-his-manifesto-125449/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

[mlleedom]

White Frights - The Villains and the Fall Guys

White Frights - The Villains and the Fall Guys

February 2002

I don't know what it is, but every time I see a white guy walking towards me, I tense up. My heart starts racing, and I immediately begin to look for an escape route and a means to defend myself. I kick myself for even being in this part of town after dark. Didn't I notice the suspicious gangs of white people lurking on every street corner, drinking Starbucks and wearing their gang colors of Gap turquoise or J Crew mauve? What an idiot! Now the white person is coming closer, closer - and then - whew! He walks by without harming me, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

White people scare the crap out of me. This may be hard for you to understand - considering that I am white - but then again, my colour gives me a certain insight. For instance, I find myself pretty scary a lot of the time, so I know what I'm talking about. You can take my word for it: if you find yourself suddenly surrounded by white people, you better watch out. Anything can happen. As white people, we've been lulled into thinking it's safe to be around other white people. We've been taught since birth that it's the people of that other colour we need to fear. They're the ones who'll slit your throat!

Yet as I look back on my life, a strange but unmistakable pattern seems to emerge. Every person who has ever harmed me in my lifetime - the boss who fired me, the teacher who flunked me, the principal who punished me, the kid who hit me in the eye with a rock, the executive who didn't renew TV Nation, the guy who was stalking me for three years, the accountant who double-paid my taxes, the drunk who smashed into me, the burglar who stole my stereo, the contractor who overcharged me, the girlfriend who left me, the next girlfriend who left even sooner, the person in the office who stole cheques from my chequebook and wrote them out to himself for a total of $16,000 - every one of these individuals has been a white person. Coincidence? I think not.

I have never been attacked by a black person, never been evicted by a black person, never had my security deposit ripped off by a black landlord, never had a black landlord, never had a meeting at a Hollywood studio with a black executive in charge, never had a black person deny my child the college of her choice, never been puked on by a black teenager at a Mötley Crüe concert, never been pulled over by a black cop, never been sold a lemon by a black car salesman, never seen a black car salesman, never had a black person deny me a bank loan, and I've never heard a black person say, "We're going to eliminate 10,000 jobs here - have a nice day!"

I don't think that I'm the only white guy who can make these claims. Every mean word, every cruel act, every bit of pain and suffering in my life has had a Caucasian face attached to it.

So, um, why is it exactly that I should be afraid of black people?

I look around at the world I live in - and, I hate to tell tales out of school, but it's not the African-Americans who have made this planet such a pitiful, scary place. Recently, a headline on the front of the Science section of the New York Times asked Who Built The H-Bomb? The article went on to discuss a dispute between the men who claim credit for making the first bomb. Frankly, I could have cared less - because I already know the only pertinent answer: "It was a white guy!" No black guy ever built or used a bomb designed to wipe out hordes of innocent people, whether in Oklahoma City, Columbine or Hiroshima. No, friends, it's always the white guy. Let's go to the tote board:

· Who gave us the black plague? A white guy.

· Who invented PBC, PVC, PBB, and a host of chemicals that are killing us? White guys.

· Who has started every war America has been in? White men.

· Who invented the punchcard ballot? A white man.

· Whose idea was it to pollute the world with the internal combustion engine? Whitey, that's who.

· The Holocaust? That guy really gave white people a bad name.

· The genocide of Native Americans? White man.

· Slavery? Whitey!

· US companies laid off more than 700,000 people in 2001. Who ordered the lay-offs? White CEOs.

You name the problem, the disease, the human suffering, or the abject misery visited upon millions, and I'll bet you 10 bucks I can put a white face on it faster than you can name the members of 'NSync.

And yet, when I turn on the news each night, what do I see again and again? Black men alleged to be killing, raping, mugging, stabbing, gang banging, looting, rioting, selling drugs, pimping, ho-ing, having too many babies, fatherless, motherless, Godless, penniless. "The suspect is described as a black male... the suspect is described as a black male... THE SUSPECT IS DESCRIBED AS A BLACK MALE..." No matter what city I'm in, the news is always the same, the suspect always the same unidentified black male. I'm in Atlanta tonight, and I swear the police sketch of the black male suspect on TV looks just like the black male suspect I saw on the news last night in Denver and the night before in LA. In every sketch he's frowning, he's menacing - and he's wearing the same knit cap! Is it possible that it's the same black guy committing every crime in America?

I believe we've become so used to this image of the black man as predator that we are forever ruined by this brainwashing. In my first film, Roger & Me, a white woman on social security clubs a rabbit to death so that she can sell him as "meat" instead of as a pet. I wish I had a nickel for every time in the past 10 years that someone has come up to me and told me how "horrified" they were when they saw that "poor little cute bunny" bonked on the head. The scene, they say, made them physically sick. The Motion Picture Association of America gave Roger & Me an R [18] rating in response to that rabbit killing. Teachers write to me and say they have to edit that part out of the film, if they want to show it to their students.

But less than two minutes after the bunny lady does her deed, I included footage of a scene in which police in Flint, Michigan, shot a black man who was wearing a Superman cape and holding a plastic toy gun. Not once - not ever - has anyone said to me, "I can't believe you showed a black man being shot in your movie! How horrible! How disgusting! I couldn't sleep for weeks." After all, he was just a black man, not a cute, cuddly bunny. The ratings board saw absolutely nothing wrong with that scene. Why? Because it's normal, natural. We've become so accustomed to seeing black men killed - in the movies and on the evening news - that we now accept it as standard operating procedure. No big deal! That's what blacks do - kill and die. Ho-hum. Pass the butter.

It's odd that, despite the fact that most crimes are committed by whites, black faces are usually attached to what we think of as "crime". Ask any white person who they fear might break into their home or harm them on the street and, if they're honest, they'll admit that the person they have in mind doesn't look much like them. The imaginary criminal in their heads looks like Mookie or Hakim or Kareem, not little freckle-faced Jimmy.

No matter how many times their fellow whites make it clear that the white man is the one to fear, it simply fails to register. Every time you turn on the TV to news of another school shooting, it's always a white kid who's conducting the massacre. Every time they catch a serial killer, it's a crazy white guy. Every time a terrorist blows up a federal building, or a madman gets 400 people to drink Kool-Aid, or a Beach Boys songwriter casts a spell causing half a dozen nymphets to murder "all the piggies" in the Hollywood Hills, you know it's a member of the white race up to his old tricks.

So why don't we run like hell when we see whitey coming toward us? Why don't we ever greet the Caucasian job applicant with, "Gee, uh, I'm sorry, there aren't any positions available right now"? Why aren't we worried sick about our daughters marrying white guys? And why isn't Congress trying to ban the scary and offensive lyrics of Johnny Cash ("I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die"), the Dixie Chicks ("Earl had to die"), or Bruce Springsteen ("I killed everything in my path/I can't say that I'm sorry for the things that we done").

Why the focus on rap lyrics? Why doesn't the media print lyrics such as the following, and tell the truth? "I sold bottles of sorrow, then chose poems and novels" (Wu-Tang Clan); "People use yo' brain to gain" (Ice Cube); "A poor single mother on welfare... tell me how ya did it" (Tupac Shakur); "I'm trying to change my life, see I don't wanna die a sinner" (Master P).

African-Americans have been on the lowest rung of the economic ladder since the day they were dragged here in chains. Every other immigrant group has been able to advance from the bottom to the higher levels of our society. Even Native Americans, who are among the poorest of the poor, have fewer children living in poverty than African-Americans.

You probably thought things had got better for blacks in this country. After all, considering the advances we've made eliminating racism in our society, one would think our black citizens might have seen their standard of living rise. A survey published in the Washington Post in July 2001 showed that 40%-60% of white people thought the average black person had it as good or better than the average white person.

Think again. According to a study conducted by the economists Richard Vedder, Lowell Gallaway and David C Clingaman, the average income for a black American is 61% less per year than the average white income. That is the same percentage difference as it was in 1880. Not a damned thing has changed in more than 120 years.

Want more proof? Consider the following:

· Black heart attack patients are far less likely than whites to undergo cardiac catheterisation, regardless of the race of their doctors.

· Whites are five times more likely than blacks to receive emergency clot-busting treatment after suffering a stroke.

· Black women are four times more likely than white women to die while giving birth.

· Black levels of unemployment have been roughly twice those of whites since 1954.

So how have we white people been able to get away with this? Caucasian ingenuity! You see, we used to be real dumb. Like idiots, we wore our racism on our sleeve. We did really obvious things, like putting up signs on rest-room doors that said WHITES ONLY. We made black people sit at the back of the bus. We prevented them from attending our schools or living in our neighbourhoods. They got the crappiest jobs (those advertised for NEGROES ONLY), and we made it clear that, if you weren't white, you were going to be paid a lower wage.

Well, this overt, over-the-top segregation got us into a heap of trouble. A bunch of uppity lawyers went to court. They pointed out that the 14th Amendment doesn't allow for anyone to be treated differently because of their race. Eventually, after a long procession of court losses, demonstrations and riots, we got the message: if you're going to be a successful racist, better find a way to do it with a smile on your face.

We even got magnanimous enough to say, "Sure, you can live here in our neighborhood; your kids can go to our kids' school. Why the hell not? We were just leaving, anyway." We smiled, gave black America a pat on the back - and then ran like the devil to the suburbs.

At work, we whites still get the plum jobs, double the pay, and a seat in the front of the bus to happiness and success. We've rigged the system from birth, guaranteeing that black people will go to the worst schools, thus preventing them from admission to the best colleges, and paving their way to a fulfilling life making our caffe lattes, servicing our BMWs, and picking up our trash. Oh, sure, a few slip by - but they pay an extra tariff for the privilege: the black doctor driving his BMW gets pulled over continually by the cops; the black Broadway actress can't get a cab after the standing ovation; the black broker is the first to be laid off because of "seniority".

We whites really deserve some kind of genius award for this. We talk the talk of inclusion, we celebrate the birthday of Dr King, we frown upon racist jokes. We never fail to drop a mention of "my friend - he's black..." We make sure we put our lone black employee up at the front reception desk so we can say, "See - we don't discriminate. We hire black people."

Yes, we are a very crafty, cagey race - and damn if we haven't got away with it!

I wonder how long we will have to live with the legacy of slavery. That's right. I brought it up. SLAVERY. You can almost hear the groans of white America whenever you bring up the fact that we still suffer from the impact of the slave system. Well, I'm sorry, but the roots of most of our social ills can be traced straight back to this sick chapter of our history. African-Americans never got a chance to have the same fair start that the rest of us got. Their families were willfully destroyed, their language and culture and religion stripped from them. Their poverty was institutionalized so that our cotton could get picked, our wars could be fought, our convenience stores could remain open all night. The America we've come to know would never have come to pass if not for the millions of slaves who built it and created its booming economy - and for the millions of their descendants who do the same dirty work for whites today.

It's not as if we're talking ancient Rome here. My grandfather was born just three years after the Civil War. That's right, my grandfather. My great-uncle was born before the Civil War. And I'm only in my 40s. Sure, people in my family seem to marry late, but the truth remains: I'm just two generations from slave times. That, my friends, is not a "long time ago". In the vast breadth of human history, it was only yesterday. Until we realize that, and accept that we do have a responsibility to correct an immoral act that still has repercussions today, we will never remove the single greatest stain on the soul of our country

© Michael Moore, 2002.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/30/features.weekend

I read this excerpt from Moore’s book at an open mic night at a coffee shop shortly after the book release in 2002. Moore has been labeled contentious and divisive. He was at the cutting edge in helping those impacted by the water crisis in Flint, MI. I can relate to this piece as I have never been harmed by a black person and what I have seen in the media throughout my 4+ decades has been a complete disconnect. 

[gerryconway]

Paul Ryan either doesn't understand insurance, or he's lying about it. As we struggle to understand the so-called Republican "health care" plan, which seems to have little to do either with health or care, it may be useful to review the underlying concept of that thing called "insurance," which many in the GOP, particularly Paul Ryan, seem to have trouble understanding. Among people with a basic high school education, it's common knowledge that English civilization began expanding dramatically into the Americas in the mid-1600s. There are of course many explanations for this; among Christians, a favorite is the notion that colonists came to America to escape religious persecution. There's some mild truth in that, if the only colonists you're concerned about are the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, but the greater truth is, most colonists and the companies that financed their colonies established themselves in America for one reason-- to make money. Trade was the reason for developing and expanding the American colonies; shipping was the method by which trade was made possible; and insurance was what made England's shipping trade profitable, turning a small island into a great ship-building empire that within a hundred years had colonies and dominions across three quarters of the globe. The key to all of this, the reason America exists, the reason there was a British Empire, was insurance. Specifically, the concept of shared risk, in which the costs of individual disaster could be spread among many, for the benefit of all. Ever hear of Lloyd's of London? It's the world's oldest insurance underwriter, and in a real sense, it's the reason Britain ruled the waves. Before the mid-1600s, mounting a colonial expedition to the New World was so risky a proposition that only governments could afford to do it. Spain, of course, had a New World colonial empire a hundred years before England did-- but despite the benefits in gold and precious metals, in many ways the colonial experience was a drain on the Spanish Empire, an extractive enterprise with all the diminishing returns of every extractive enterprise. (In the long run, extracting resources from a colony ends up costing more than the value received, which is one reason the South American colonies were eventually abandoned by the Spanish and Portuguese, or left to flounder under disengaged administration.) In the mid-1600s, in England (and more or less simultaneously in the Netherlands) that reality began to change. Thanks to insurance. In a coffee house in London, owned by a man named Lloyd, a group of wealthy merchants came together to pool their resources in a mutual insurance fund. The situation was simple: an almost-predictable number of colonial expeditions were certain to fail, and an almost-predictable number of ships were going to be lost at sea in any given period of time. The problem was, despite all of a merchant's best efforts, there was no way to know which expedition and which ships would fail or be lost. Any merchant who financed a ship was as likely (or unlikely) to lose his investment as any other merchant. You couldn't know in advance, which meant there was no way to mitigate the risk of your investment by yourself. Potentially your entire livelihood was in danger on a single roll of the dice. Only a madman would take such a risk (which is why most early colonial expeditions were led by madmen or religious cults). However... if a group of merchants, each with his own expedition or his own ship, could be persuaded to pool their individual risk exposure, and to share the risk, what was potential financial suicide for an individual would become a reasonable loss spread across a group of individuals. Shared risk made individual investment and national expansion possible. Insurance empowered trade; trade created profits; profits created wealth; wealth created opportunity for individuals and the nation alike; individuals flourished and the nation became an Empire. True, rational conservatives know this. Insurance-- that is, shared risk across a group to protect the individual against predictable dangers-- is a fundamental building block in business and finance. The Republican party, supposedly the party of responsible business, knows that insurance is a vital component in business, and, by extension, in life as a whole. So why do they lie about it? Why would Paul Ryan, in his defense of the indefensible Trumpcare anti-insurance bill presently before Congress, describe the basic premise of insurance as "the fatal conceit of Obamacare"? This is what Paul Ryan said: "The fatal conceit of Obamacare is that we’re just going to make everybody buy our health insurance at the federal level, young and healthy people are going to go into the market and pay for older, sicker people. So the young healthy person’s going to be made to buy health care, and they’re going to pay for the person, you know, who gets breast cancer in her 40s, or who gets heart disease in his 50s . . . The people who are healthy pay for the people who are sick. It’s not working, and that’s why it’s in a death spiral." Paul Ryan, the supposed policy expert who supposedly understands economics and business, is describing the basic premise of insurance-- insurance, which made possible the world we currently live in-- as a "fatal conceit." Either Paul Ryan is an idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about, doesn't understand Business 101, doesn't know even high school economic theory-- or he's a mendacious liar playing to the ignorance, greed, and prejudice of the Republican base. My bet's on the later. Shared risk is the basis of business investment; it's at the root of every modern economy; it is the DEFINITION of society. Universal health insurance isn't an imposition on individual freedom: it's a guarantee of individual freedom, a recognition that what might destroy us as individuals can be borne easily by all of us as a group. It empowers the individual to take risks he or she would otherwise never consider. It strengths the group by sharing a common burden. It makes nations into Empires.

[itsfinancethings]

February 28, 2020 at 08:37PM

It’s hard to believe that the newest version of The Invisible Man, in theaters Feb. 28, hasn’t been made before. The first adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel premiered in 1933, during the heyday of Universal Studios’ monster movie boom, and the Invisible Man stood as a scary specter alongside Frankenstein and Dracula. The very R-rated Paul Verhoeven version starring Kevin Bacon, Hollow Man (2000), similarly framed the titular Invisible Man as the protagonist.

But writer-director Leigh Whannell’s new movie turns the camera, for the first time, on the Invisible Man’s victim. It’s such an obvious setup for a great thriller — the Invisible Man wreaking havoc on his victim’s life as a metaphor for gaslighting and abuse — but perhaps one the male-dominated film industry wasn’t ready to take on before the #MeToo era.

We meet Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) on the night she decides to flee her abusive tech tycoon boyfriends’ fortress-like mansion. We learn later that he has manipulated her, isolated her, physically abused her and — it’s later strongly insinuated — repeatedly raped her. After the soon-to-be Invisible Man (his name is Adrian Griffin, a nod to the Griffin of Wells’ novel) fakes his own death and dons a suit that renders him invisible (he made his millions in the field of optics, convenient for a sociopathic stalker), he deploys the same methods to try to bring Cecilia under his control again. Invisibility suit aside, these aren’t the arbitrary actions of a fictional madman but rather very real strategies that abusers use to control their victims, ones that Whannell incorporated into the script after conducting interviews on the topic of domestic abuse with experts and with women in his life.

Whannell was well aware that he needed to tell this story from a woman’s point of view, one which he’d need to seek outside of his own life experience. He interviewed two domestic violence counselors at Peace Over Violence, a domestic violence prevention center headquartered in Los Angeles. “In one story, a woman’s partner put a lock on the fridge to control when she could eat,” he says. “Only he had the combination to the lock. I was so shocked by that. It started to dovetail neatly into this character I was creating.”

He then spoke with female friends about their experiences with sexism and finally enlisted Moss to sit down with him over the course of several three-to-four-hour sessions and review the script with him. “He fully recognized that there was a female perspective that needed to be listened to, and I could help in providing that,” Moss says. “That’s of course exactly what he should have done, but not every director creates that open space.”

Whannell was shocked when the women in his life all separately shared the same anecdote of walking to their cars with their keys between their fingers, to use as a weapon if needed. It’s a common practice for women, and its revelation to Whannell serves as a reminder that while men can make excellent films about the topic of domestic abuse (last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary Minding the Gap is perhaps the gold standard), men who tell women’s stories must commit to listening to women in order to adequately capture the female experience.

Recent depictions of domestic abuse have faced criticism: Big Little Lies portrayed a husband (Alexander Skårsgard) beating his wife (Nicole Kidman) as a sort of sexual kink — until it wasn’t — and the casual brutality in Margot Robbie’s Tonya Harding movie I, Tonya felt jarring in the context of an otherwise comical film. Filmmakers often feel the need to maximize the drama of violence rather than trust the audience to understand that it existed and caused significant damage.

In The Invisible Man, Whannell has restraint enough not to show this physical abuse onscreen, focusing instead on the psychological consequences it has on its protagonist, Elisabeth Moss’ Cecilia, after she leaves her relationship. “In movies and TV shows, we’ve seen physical violence depicted many times before,” says Whannell. “But I felt I had not seen the emotional abuse and manipulation as much.”

Mark Rogers/Universal Pictures. Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) and Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) in “The Invisible Man,” written and directed by Leigh Whannell.

Those emotional abuses at the center of Invisible Man may be harder to render in cinema, but they are equally as real. The film finds ways to illustrate this manipulation, beginning with the titular abuser driving Cecilia’s friends and family away. Isolating someone from their social network — whether physically or emotionally — is a way to keep the abused person from fleeing the relationship. And, according to the counselors with whom Whannell spoke, without a support network victims tend to blame themselves for their situation. “They emphasized to me how the most important part of their jobs is to tell people they’re not alone, and that it’s not their fault,” he says.

Cecilia’s ex also tries to leverage the promise of millions left to her in his will (much of which Cecilia promised use to pay for a friend’s education) into yet another means of control. Some 99% of all domestic abuse cases involve financial abuse, which includes restricting a woman’s daily spending, stealing money from her, preventing financial account access and sabotaging employment and education opportunities, according to the Purple Purse, a foundation dedicated to empowering women financially to escape abusive homes. It’s the top reason women stay in abusive relationships and why they return even if they’ve left. Such financial manipulation can block a victim from leaving her abuser or leave her homeless, jobless or unable to pay her bills if she does manage to escape, according to a study by Angela Littwin, who conducted the first major study on what she calls “coerced debt” in 2011.

Finally, the Invisible Man threatens to sabotage Cecilia’s reproductive choices in an attempt to have a baby and effectively tether them together forever. Abusers routinely use children in order to manipulate their partners and force them to stay in the relationship. A 2007 study out of Michigan State University, the first of its kind, found 88% of women who had faced domestic abuse reported their assailant using custody battles over children to keep in touch with their victims, interrogating children about their mothers’ whereabouts in order to stalk or manipulate them or even using visitation with the children in order to continue the physical and emotional abuse of the mother. The victims surveyed said that the fathers of their children often threatened to harm or abduct the offspring in order to coerce the mother, who tended to prioritized the children’s safety over her own, into doing their bidding.

As her ex taunts her, Cecilia begs her family and friends to believe that he is still alive. Nobody believes her, a resonant notion in the #MeToo era when claims of abuse are still dismissed as “he said, she said” cases. If you can’t see it, the logic goes, then it must not be real.

“Even as women, we can be quick to judge and go, ‘Why is she staying?’” says Moss. “‘If he’s hitting her or emotionally abusing her or the relationship is toxic, why doesn’t she get out?’ And as the victim, that makes you feel like you can’t talk about it, like you don’t have a safe place to go.”

Ultimately, the movie cannot resist transitioning into a revenge fantasy, which, while emotionally satisfying, is not true to life. Cecilia’s initial escape from her abuser signals the exceptionalism of this story. As is often the case with Hollywood depictions of domestic violence, the victim is a privileged white woman with the economic means to leave her abuser, an unrealistic outcome for most women who find themselves in a similar position.

The movie also builds to an inevitable physical confrontation between Cecilia and her husband, as these kinds of films so often do (think: Jennifer Lopez’s Enough or Julia Roberts’ Sleeping With the Enemy). But confronting one’s abuser often puts women’s lives in danger. Abusive relationships can be life-or-death: 2017 saw 2,237 homicides by intimate partners, according to the New York Times, a 19% increase since 2014. And as a recent headline-making case proved, women can also suffer legal consequences for defending themselves.

Art may be the one realm where we can conjure stories of vengeance and justice that simply do not exist in the real world. “It’s interesting doing these interviews with the [conviction of Harvey] Weinstein in the news this week,” says Moss. “You just hope that offers something, some closure, to the victims. But you can’t make it go away.”

[newstechreviews]

It’s hard to believe that the newest version of The Invisible Man, in theaters Feb. 28, hasn’t been made before. The first adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel premiered in 1933, during the heyday of Universal Studios’ monster movie boom, and the Invisible Man stood as a scary specter alongside Frankenstein and Dracula. The very R-rated Paul Verhoeven version starring Kevin Bacon, Hollow Man (2000), similarly framed the titular Invisible Man as the protagonist.

But writer-director Leigh Whannell’s new movie turns the camera, for the first time, on the Invisible Man’s victim. It’s such an obvious setup for a great thriller — the Invisible Man wreaking havoc on his victim’s life as a metaphor for gaslighting and abuse — but perhaps one the male-dominated film industry wasn’t ready to take on before the #MeToo era.

We meet Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) on the night she decides to flee her abusive tech tycoon boyfriends’ fortress-like mansion. We learn later that he has manipulated her, isolated her, physically abused her and — it’s later strongly insinuated — repeatedly raped her. After the soon-to-be Invisible Man (his name is Adrian Griffin, a nod to the Griffin of Wells’ novel) fakes his own death and dons a suit that renders him invisible (he made his millions in the field of optics, convenient for a sociopathic stalker), he deploys the same methods to try to bring Cecilia under his control again. Invisibility suit aside, these aren’t the arbitrary actions of a fictional madman but rather very real strategies that abusers use to control their victims, ones that Whannell incorporated into the script after conducting interviews on the topic of domestic abuse with experts and with women in his life.

Whannell was well aware that he needed to tell this story from a woman’s point of view, one which he’d need to seek outside of his own life experience. He interviewed two domestic violence counselors at Peace Over Violence, a domestic violence prevention center headquartered in Los Angeles. “In one story, a woman’s partner put a lock on the fridge to control when she could eat,” he says. “Only he had the combination to the lock. I was so shocked by that. It started to dovetail neatly into this character I was creating.”

He then spoke with female friends about their experiences with sexism and finally enlisted Moss to sit down with him over the course of several three-to-four-hour sessions and review the script with him. “He fully recognized that there was a female perspective that needed to be listened to, and I could help in providing that,” Moss says. “That’s of course exactly what he should have done, but not every director creates that open space.”

Whannell was shocked when the women in his life all separately shared the same anecdote of walking to their cars with their keys between their fingers, to use as a weapon if needed. It’s a common practice for women, and its revelation to Whannell serves as a reminder that while men can make excellent films about the topic of domestic abuse (last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary Minding the Gap is perhaps the gold standard), men who tell women’s stories must commit to listening to women in order to adequately capture the female experience.

Recent depictions of domestic abuse have faced criticism: Big Little Lies portrayed a husband (Alexander Skårsgard) beating his wife (Nicole Kidman) as a sort of sexual kink — until it wasn’t — and the casual brutality in Margot Robbie’s Tonya Harding movie I, Tonya felt jarring in the context of an otherwise comical film. Filmmakers often feel the need to maximize the drama of violence rather than trust the audience to understand that it existed and caused significant damage.

In The Invisible Man, Whannell has restraint enough not to show this physical abuse onscreen, focusing instead on the psychological consequences it has on its protagonist, Elisabeth Moss’ Cecilia, after she leaves her relationship. “In movies and TV shows, we’ve seen physical violence depicted many times before,” says Whannell. “But I felt I had not seen the emotional abuse and manipulation as much.”

Mark Rogers/Universal Pictures. Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) and Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) in “The Invisible Man,” written and directed by Leigh Whannell.

Those emotional abuses at the center of Invisible Man may be harder to render in cinema, but they are equally as real. The film finds ways to illustrate this manipulation, beginning with the titular abuser driving Cecilia’s friends and family away. Isolating someone from their social network — whether physically or emotionally — is a way to keep the abused person from fleeing the relationship. And, according to the counselors with whom Whannell spoke, without a support network victims tend to blame themselves for their situation. “They emphasized to me how the most important part of their jobs is to tell people they’re not alone, and that it’s not their fault,” he says.

Cecilia’s ex also tries to leverage the promise of millions left to her in his will (much of which Cecilia promised use to pay for a friend’s education) into yet another means of control. Some 99% of all domestic abuse cases involve financial abuse, which includes restricting a woman’s daily spending, stealing money from her, preventing financial account access and sabotaging employment and education opportunities, according to the Purple Purse, a foundation dedicated to empowering women financially to escape abusive homes. It’s the top reason women stay in abusive relationships and why they return even if they’ve left. Such financial manipulation can block a victim from leaving her abuser or leave her homeless, jobless or unable to pay her bills if she does manage to escape, according to a study by Angela Littwin, who conducted the first major study on what she calls “coerced debt” in 2011.

Finally, the Invisible Man threatens to sabotage Cecilia’s reproductive choices in an attempt to have a baby and effectively tether them together forever. Abusers routinely use children in order to manipulate their partners and force them to stay in the relationship. A 2007 study out of Michigan State University, the first of its kind, found 88% of women who had faced domestic abuse reported their assailant using custody battles over children to keep in touch with their victims, interrogating children about their mothers’ whereabouts in order to stalk or manipulate them or even using visitation with the children in order to continue the physical and emotional abuse of the mother. The victims surveyed said that the fathers of their children often threatened to harm or abduct the offspring in order to coerce the mother, who tended to prioritized the children’s safety over her own, into doing their bidding.

As her ex taunts her, Cecilia begs her family and friends to believe that he is still alive. Nobody believes her, a resonant notion in the #MeToo era when claims of abuse are still dismissed as “he said, she said” cases. If you can’t see it, the logic goes, then it must not be real.

“Even as women, we can be quick to judge and go, ‘Why is she staying?’” says Moss. “‘If he’s hitting her or emotionally abusing her or the relationship is toxic, why doesn’t she get out?’ And as the victim, that makes you feel like you can’t talk about it, like you don’t have a safe place to go.”

Ultimately, the movie cannot resist transitioning into a revenge fantasy, which, while emotionally satisfying, is not true to life. Cecilia’s initial escape from her abuser signals the exceptionalism of this story. As is often the case with Hollywood depictions of domestic violence, the victim is a privileged white woman with the economic means to leave her abuser, an unrealistic outcome for most women who find themselves in a similar position.

The movie also builds to an inevitable physical confrontation between Cecilia and her husband, as these kinds of films so often do (think: Jennifer Lopez’s Enough or Julia Roberts’ Sleeping With the Enemy). But confronting one’s abuser often puts women’s lives in danger. Abusive relationships can be life-or-death: 2017 saw 2,237 homicides by intimate partners, according to the New York Times, a 19% increase since 2014. And as a recent headline-making case proved, women can also suffer legal consequences for defending themselves.

Art may be the one realm where we can conjure stories of vengeance and justice that simply do not exist in the real world. “It’s interesting doing these interviews with the [conviction of Harvey] Weinstein in the news this week,” says Moss. “You just hope that offers something, some closure, to the victims. But you can’t make it go away.”

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Some people wake up on the wrong side of the bed I want you to pay your Dues Jack shirt. He is so negative. Unless he’s laughing at someone. He is always angry! Obama pulled us out of a terrible economic crisis! The GOP has added substantially to the national debt from the tax cut! You know don’t you get tired awaken every morning with that behavior problem of Donald Trump he knows he’s lousy and he criticized everything he can get because it all comes back to you Real Americans let’s remember this when he shuts down the government next week he really doesn’t care it is all about Donald Trump it’s pathetic isn’t it.

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Nearly everything he says is a lie so when he accuses someone of something he is usually talking about his own behavior. He is insane, ignorant of how government works and refuses to admit how Republicans treated Democrats and their nominees! It’s sad that we have this guy in the White House and he doesn’t know how to do his job! Such delusions of grandeur. Obama was successful despite Republicans obstructionism. The economy is booming due to the hard work and regulations put in place by the Obama administration. Trump is a sad, unhappy person. He must need to have relations with another porn star.

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[robgrayofficial]

GOOD AFTERNOON PATRIOTS!!!!WELCOME TO YOUR WEEKLY RECAP! This is /u/Ivaginaryfriend here and today I'd like to start things off a little differently...Today I went back in time to check out this day last year too see how far we've come, and boy oh, BOY has it been a journey! If you'd like to take a trip back in time, or just wanted to catch up on any past recaps, you can check them out here!So, on this day, September 22nd of 2017, our glorious GEOTUS sent out the most tremendous tweet heard around the world:Kim Jong Un of North Korea, who is obviously a madman who doesn't mind starving or killing his people, will be tested like never before!sooo.fucking.spicy.*I won't keep you waiting any longer, on to the recap!Sunday, September 16th:SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Police: Woman Faked Story About Trump-Related Hate CrimeJohn Kerry tells students what he thinks of Iraq veterans. “You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” The Deplorables.Joe Biden refers to 63 million Americans who voted for President Trump as "dregs of society"Accuser comes forward doesn't remember who owned the house, how she ended up there, and admits to drinking, but is 100% sure it was Kavanaugh. She just happens to be a flaming liberal professor..🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:It's a pretty important difference.now that the A-OK sign is out, I have located the sooper sekret sign chart for the rest of the WP symbols!Trump announced Kavanaugh on July 9th and it took 2 months for a woman to notice the name and recall a traumatic experience?#TrumpTimeMonday, September 17th:TODAY'S ACTION:Presidential Memorandum on the Support for National BiodefensePresident Trump Hosts the Hispanic Heritage Month CelebrationPresident Trump Meets with the President's National Council for the American WorkerPresident Trump and the First Lady Meet with the President of the Republic of Poland🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:“A lot of small & medium size enterprises are registering very good profit, sometimes record profits-there stocks are doing very well, low income workers are getting big raises. There are an awful lot of good things going on that weren’t during Pres. Obama’s Watch.” Peter MoriciTariffs have put the U.S. in a very strong bargaining position, with Billions of Dollars, and Jobs, flowing into our Country - and yet cost increases have thus far been almost unnoticeable. If countries will not make fair deals with us, they will be “Tariffed!”Our Steel Industry is the talk of the World. It has been given new life, and is thriving. Billions of Dollars is being spent on new plants all around the country!“Lisa Page Testimony- NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION BEFORE MUELLER APPOINTMENT.” @FoxNews by Catherine Herridge. Therefore, the case should never have been allowed to be brought. It is a totally illegal Witch Hunt!Immediately after Comey’s firing Peter Strzok texted to his lover, Lisa Page “We need to Open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy (McCabe, also fired) is acting. Page answered, “We need to lock in (redacted). In a formal chargeable way. Soon.” Wow, a conspiracy caught?Americans deserve to know the lowest drug price at their pharmacy, but “gag clauses” prevent your pharmacist from telling you! I support legislation that will remove gag clauses and urge the Senate to act. #AmericanPatientsFirstJoin me in Las Vegas, Nevada at 7:00pm for a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY! Tickets:Happy Constitution Day!(Video)It was my great honor to host today’s Inaugural Meeting of the “President’s National Council for the American Worker” in the Roosevelt Room!Just met John James of Michigan. He has every single quality to be your next Great Senator from Michigan. When the people of Michigan get to know John, they will say he is a true star. Also, distinguished Military and a Combat Vet!Today, as we celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, we share our gratitude for all the ways Hispanic-Americans make our country flourish and prosper. Today, and every day, we honor, cherish, and celebrate Hispanic-American Workers, Families, Students, Businesses, and Leaders...SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Statement from the Press Secretary on FISA declassificationThere’s a post in redacted with over 7.8k likes calling for the censorship of TD. The evidence of “hate crimes” includes, I shit you not: (1) TD Calling CNN “fake news” (2) Robert Deniro saying HE will punch Trump (3) A story about a guy wearing a MAGA hat who didn’t get served by a bar. LOL!Two of Kavanaugh's former girlfriends from 30+ years ago defend him and "vouch for him completely." The dude is such a stand-up guy he can even get his EXES to back him up! Now that's impressive. This BS will backfire, and we must make the Democrats pay at the ballot booth for their malfeasance.Strzok-Page texts calling to 'open' case in 'chargeable way' under fresh scrutiny | Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) discusses the release of new text messages which reveal that others were 'leaking like mad'.BREAKING : Kavanaugh accuser had fake harassment story ready back when Mitt Romney looked like he was going to beat Obama reelection🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:POTUS Has A Message For YouHappy Birthday Constitution! Thank you for protecting my God-given rights!mfw Trump declassifies everything and BTFO the Swamp yet again🍿get the popcorn🍿UNO!Tuesday, September 18th:TODAY'S ACTION:President Trump Hosts a Joint Press Conference with the President of the Republic of Poland🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:“What will be disclosed is that there was no basis for these FISA Warrants, that the important information was kept from the court, there’s going to be a disproportionate influence of the (Fake) Dossier. Basically you have a counter terrorism tool used to spy on a presidential... ... ....campaign, which is unprecedented in our history.” Congressman Peter King Really bad things were happening, but they are now being exposed. Big stuff!China has openly stated that they are actively trying to impact and change our election by attacking our farmers, ranchers and industrial workers because of their loyalty to me. What China does not understand is that these people are great patriots and fully understand that..... ... .....China has been taking advantage of the United States on Trade for many years. They also know that I am the one that knows how to stop it. There will be great and fast economic retaliation against China if our farmers, ranchers and/or industrial workers are targeted!Happy 71st Birthday to our GREAT United States Air Force!Right now, everybody is saying what a great job we are doing with Hurricane Florence – and they are 100% correct. But don’t be fooled, at some point in the near future the Democrats will start ranting... ... ...that FEMA, our Military, and our First Responders, who are all unbelievable, are a disaster and not doing a good job. This will be a total lie, but that’s what they do, and everybody knows it!Thank you to our great Coast Guard for doing such a tremendous job - thousands of lives being saved!Today, I took action to strengthen our Nation’s defenses against biological threats. For the first time in history, the Federal Government has a National Biodefense Strategy to address the FULL RANGE of biological threats!Today, it was my great honor to welcome @prezydentpl Andrzej Duda of Poland to the @WhiteHouse!(Video)The Supreme Court is one of the main reasons I got elected President. I hope Republican Voters, and others, are watching, and studying, the Democrats Playbook.Kim Jong Un has agreed to allow Nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations, and to permanently dismantle a test site and launch pad in the presence of international experts. In the meantime there will be no Rocket or Nuclear testing. Hero remains to continue being........ ... ...returned home to the United States. Also, North and South Korea will file a joint bid to host the 2032 Olympics. Very exciting!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:NEW Project Veritas video! Unmasking the Deep StateLiberal tears incoming: FORT TRUMP permanent military base potentially coming to Poland!Jeff Flake to vote "NO" on Kavanaugh because he's so woke. People of Arizona, do not make this mistake again.Alex Jones Wins Info War, Site Traffic Soars In August🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:How cute they’re talking about us.Rose has accused Jack of sexual assaultSums it up nicely.Well they dared him...Wednesday, September 19th:TODAY'S ACTION:President Trump Delivers a Statement Upon DeparturePresident Trump Participates in a Briefing on Hurricane Florence in North CarolinaPresident Trump Participates in a Briefing on Hurricane Florence in South CarolinaA Message from President Trump on Hurricane FlorencePresident Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate Personnel to Key Administration Posts🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:"The recovery got started on Election Day 2016. It took Trump’s Tax Cuts and Regulation Cuts to get the economy booming. Before that it was the worst and slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression. It took just 6 months for Trump to get to 3%, even though they said..... ... ...it was impossible - and then already it’s over 4%, and I expect it’s going to grow faster and faster. We’re just getting started here.” Peter Ferrara, former advisor to President Reagan. @foxandfriends“North Korea recommits to denuclearization - we’ve come a long way.” @FoxNews“President Donald J. Trump’s Administration is Providing Support to Those Impacted by Hurricane Florence”Just returned to the White House from the Great States of North Carolina and South Carolina where incredible work is being done on the ongoing fight against hurricane Florence. Tremendous talent and spirit!Great new book by Jason Chaffetz appropriately called “The Deep State.” Very interesting indeed!(Video)SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:BREAKING PROJECT VERITAS VIDEO - Deep State Unmasked: Leaks at HHS; DOJ Official Resists "From Inside" and "Can't Get Fired"Republican Flips Texas State Senate Seat In Runoff After Being Held By Democrats for 139 Years! Huge Upset!President Trump visits with young volunteer from Temple Baptist Church in New Bern, NC as they hand out meals to storm survivors.REDACTED talks more about Trump than a subreddit made about Trump, despite their non-partisan name. When will the obvious platform bias stop?Karen Monahan releases medical record showing that she told her doctor about Keith Ellison abusing her.FBI, Justice Dept plan to redact Russia documents despite Trump order for full declassification: report🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Lets play Where In The World is Anderson CooperLiberal Students Admit: Trump Helping EconomyHOW ABSOLUTELY DARE YOU SIR?!!It all makes sense nowThursday, September 20th:TODAY'S ACTION:President Trump's Message on TradeExecutive Order Authorizing the Implementation of Certain Sanctions Set Forth in the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions ActPresidential Proclamation on National POW/MIA Recognition Day, 2018🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Financial and jobs numbers are fantastic. There are plenty of new, high paying jobs available in our great and very vibrant economy. If you are not happy where you are, start looking - but also remember, our economy is only getting better. Vote in Midterms!We protect the countries of the Middle East, they would not be safe for very long without us, and yet they continue to push for higher and higher oil prices! We will remember. The OPEC monopoly must get prices down now!“We can’t secure the Border because of the Democrats historic level of Obstruction. The Presidents fed up with this. His agenda is working. The economy is growing at twice the rate it did under Obama. We’ve nominated and confirmed 68 Federal Judges, 26 Court of Appeals Judges.... ... ....The thing that’s lacking is we can’t properly secure the Border because of the Democrats historic level of Obstruction.” Senator David Perdue of Georgia.I want to know, where is the money for Border Security and the WALL in this ridiculous Spending Bill, and where will it come from after the Midterms? Dems are obstructing Law Enforcement and Border Security. REPUBLICANS MUST FINALLY GET TOUGH!S&P 500 HITS ALL-TIME HIGH Congratulations USA!.@JayWebberNJ is running for Congress in the 11th District of New Jersey. He is outstanding in every way. Strong on Borders, loves our Military and our Vets. Big Crime fighter. Jay has my Full and Total Endorsement!Congratulations to my good friend Prime Minister @AbeShinzo on his HUGE election victory in Japan. I’m looking forward to many more years of working together. See you in New York next week!🇺🇸🇯🇵Army Master Sgt. Charles H. McDaniel, 32, of Vernon, Indiana, and Army Pfc. William H. Jones, 19, of Nash County, North Carolina, are the first American remains from... ... ...North Korea to be identified as a result of my Summit with Chairman Kim. These HEROES are home, they may Rest In Peace, and hopefully their families can have closure.(Video)On my way to Las Vegas, Nevada. Look forward to seeing everyone tonight! #MAGA(Video)Landing in Las Vegas now for a Make America Great Again Rally supporting @DeanHeller and @DannyTarkanian. Also doing interview there with @seanhannity live on @FoxNews. Big crowd, long lines. Will be great! #MAGAMAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!Thank you Las Vegas, Nevada - I love you! #MAGA🇺🇸AMERICA IS WINNING AGAIN!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:BREAKING PROJECT VERITAS VIDEO: Deep State Unmasked: U.S. GAO Employee Admits “I Break Rules Every Day”ProgressBusted!!! Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen tweets, then deletes tweet praising himself for reportedly cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, in an apparent mistake that was intended to be tweeted from an anonymous account.US GAO Issues Statement following Deep State Unmasked Video of Auditor saying, "I break rules every day".Leah Barkoukis - RNC Reaches $252 Million Fundraising Mark For Midterms, Blowing DNC Out of the Water---“Enthusiasm for President Trump and his successful agenda is fueling our record-breaking fundraising and energizing our grassroots supporters,” said RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel.PRESS BRIEFINGS, INTERVIEWS, RALLIES:WATCH PARTY: President Trump Rally - Las Vegas, NV - 9/20/18🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:BREAKING: New damning evidence shows that Brett Kavanaugh admitted to assaulting Christine Ford!Oh, you're a Democratic Socialist?Lining up in Las Vegas to see our glorious God Emperor. Make Nevada Red Again!Whoa... He wore that to school?I think im tired of winning... (pause) NAAAAAATFriday, September 21st:TODAY'S ACTION:President Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate and Appoint Personnel to Key Administration PostsPresident Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Appoint Personnel to Key Administration PostsPresidential Proclamation on National Hunting and Fishing Day, 2018"Consumer Sentiment Hit Its Highest Level in 17 years"President Trump Participates in a Signing Ceremony🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a fine man, with an impeccable reputation, who is under assault by radical left wing politicians who don’t want to know the answers, they just want to destroy and delay. Facts don’t matter. I go through this with them every single day in D.C.I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!I will Chair the United Nations Security Council meeting on Iran next week!The radical left lawyers want the FBI to get involved NOW. Why didn’t someone call the FBI 36 years ago?(Retweeting America First) (Picture)(Retweeting America First) (Picture)I met with the DOJ concerning the declassification of various UNREDACTED documents. They agreed to release them but stated that so doing may have a perceived negative impact on the Russia probe. Also, key Allies’ called to ask not to release. Therefore, the Inspector General..... ... ....has been asked to review these documents on an expedited basis. I believe he will move quickly on this (and hopefully other things which he is looking at). In the end I can always declassify if it proves necessary. Speed is very important to me - and everyone!Senator Feinstein and the Democrats held the letter for months, only to release it with a bang after the hearings were OVER - done very purposefully to Obstruct & Resist & Delay. Let her testify, or not, and TAKE THE VOTE!Throughout American history, the men and women of our Armed Forces have selflessly served our Country, making tremendous sacrifices to defend our liberty. On National POW/MIA Recognition Day, we honor all American Prisoners of War: http://bit.ly/2pvFHNW Kept for our GREAT Veterans!(video)Remarks by President Trump at the Signing of H.R. 5895Thank you Missouri - I love you!Thank you Missouri - Together, we are MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!GOD BLESS THE U.S.A.!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:CNN asked women if they believe Judge Kavanaugh. This was not the response they were expecting.Breaking...Senator Grassley Calls For a Kavanaugh Vote For Monday. 10pm deadline for accuser.This is the tweet that got James Woods banned for “ misleading information and potentially impacting an election”.White House Drafts Order To Look Into Google, Facebook PracticesThe PurgePRESS BRIEFINGS, INTERVIEWS, RALLIES:WATCH PARTY: President Trump MAGA Rally - Springfield, Missouri - 9/21/18🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:The Onion: ‘New York Times’ Announces Appointment Of Anonymous Source As Editor-In-Chief 😂😂They are totally lost9/21 Springfield MO Rally - Just look at all these Russian bots!20,000 Trump Supporters Had To Be Turned Away At Missouri Rally It Was So BigSaturday, September 22nd:🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:New Economic Records being set on a daily basis - and it is not by accident!(Video)SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:FITTON:MONSTROUS Corruption:Rosenstein plotting against Trump, Kavanaugh confirmation mess, and President Trump's declassification moves. GIANT Judicial Watch update"You're not being censored! You can go create your own platform! There's no conspiracy against you here!" - PayPal bans Alex Jones for, literally, not breaking the rules. Declaring his "content" is bad but he didn't break a specific rule.Shareblue deletes OWN fake thread to try and blame Reddit and create a Streisand Effect over their lies about T_D. Gets caught out and then tries to claim they actually deleted their thread over "death threats" by Russians. Then brigades Conspiracy to try and cover it up. Buahahaha.Nigel Farage - "The day after Trump got elected, the biggest internet search engine, the most powerful, important tech company in the world… effectively declared war on the whole populist revolt that was happening across the West"🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:OUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT SHOWING THE WORLD THE SIZE OF ANTIFA BICEPS!The Ford Trail - Play this exciting card game where it takes literally forever to get to your destination.MRW I look for all the racism and Russian propaganda on T_D that Reddit keeps complaining about.WEEEW LAD!Without further ado, some tunes to get you jamming through all this WINNING:Crooked SmilePink & WhiteTalk is CheapAgainWet DreamzGoldMAGA ON PATRIOTS! #robgray

[spidaman]

Respond to North Korea with Balloons

The recent missile and thermonuclear tests that North Korea have been conducting raised a specter of terror I haven’t felt since the cold war era; the narrative that the whim of a madman could be bring widespread radioactive devastation and suffering to the U.S. homeland permeating our media is dark and disturbing. And there’s this sense of helplessness about it. The artillery that the North Korean military has targeted at South Korea effectively takes any possibility of a  pre-emptive military strike off the table; the great powers of the United States are held in check by the gun pointed at the hostage’s head. Even the Grim Reaper himself has admitted that there’s no viable military solution.

What about diplomatic solutions?  Are there any economic sanctions, moral appeals or outside exertions of influence that will motivate the North Korean regime to pursue nuclear disarmament?  

Nope.

As long as Kim Jong-Un has threatening the United States, Japan and South Korea as his last resort for self-preservation, he’ll clutch to his nukes and missiles with the greatest affection. Kim’s a young man, he’s not at the dusk of his reign like Jambyn Batmönkh was at the end of his regime. Kim doesn’t want to die a prison cell like Slobodan Milošević. He knows how things ended for Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi; none of them got a golden parachute. Kim doesn’t give a shit about the Korean people, he is interested in self-preservation, period.

The long-standing conventional wisdom that the U.S. government just hasn’t leaned on China hard enough is foolish.  The leadership in Beijing doesn’t want a bloody conflict on the Korean peninsula.  They don’t want swarms of starving North Koreans on their doorstep.  A flood of Korean refugees would be very destabilizing for Beijing.  As far as China is concerned, a new Korean war or a decapitation would bring strife spilling over the border they share with North Korea, so the status quo and a strategy of containment is just fine.

So what can be done to dislodge Kim Jung-Un?

More than Kim fears the great power of the United States, he fears his own people.  His cult of personality is entirely dependent on their reverence, worship and fear.  A non-compliant populace that is questioning Kim’s authority would be a disaster for him. And were that to infect the ranks of the military apparatus around him, it would be his downfall.  How can we, on the outside of the regime, help encourage a non-compliant populace and military apparatus? 

Foster a yearning.  

There are, no doubt, many North Koreans who look upon South Korea with suspicion and contempt.  The decades of war and hostilities have rubbed out much of the memory of the time when there was an identity that spanned across the Korean peninsula. But rekindling an acknowledgement of the historical, cultural and familial ties shared between North and South Korea can create a yearning. Raised awareness of the relative prosperity in South Korea can nurture that yearning. Whispers in the shadows will make that yearning grow.  

But communications and media are very tightly controlled in North Korea, how can that happen under the grip of the Dear Leader’s iron fist?

Balloons. Lots and lots of balloons.  Thousands of them. Millions of balloons!

Not the kind wielded by clowns with bad teeth in a Stephen King flick.  The kind that gracefully float in the air, lofted by the breezes that flow off the Sea of Japan across the terrain of North Korea.  The kind that lose their buoyancy and settle down in cities and towns, in the military bases and ports and elsewhere in North Korea.  At the other end of the ribbon attached to balloon will be a simple payload.  An SD card or a USB stick with data.  Not necessarily western agitprop.  In fact, that would probably be counterproductive.  The data should acknowledge the death and misery brought by American forces in past conflicts. Acknowledge the extent to which any of what the regime’s narrative to its populace resembles the truth.  But then also tell the rest of it that the regime has kept hidden from its media and education. Let the truth ring out. Remind North Koreans of their commonalities with their South Korean cousins. Highlight cultural opportunities that have been repressed by the Kim regime. Showcase the abundance and variety of food available outside of North Korea. Reveal the influence South Korean industry has had globally with the successes of Samsung, LG, Kia and Hyundai. And it doesn’t have to be all “business”, sure, load ‘em up with k-pop and old episodes of Friends too.  

This should really be a non-governmental effort.  U.S. policy should stay the course of containment, deterrence and sanctions.  No stupid dick wagging. No “fire and fury” bluster.   Externally driven “regime change” rarely ends well.   Trump should just shut the fuck up about that which he understands little (which appears to be most policy issues) and let the grown-ups drive a containment strategy.  

In the meantime, ordinary citizens should regularly release balloons. Flash media, rubber balloons and helium are so cheap now (at least in the U.S.).  And the awakening this can summon amongst the North Korean populace, particularly amongst the rank and file within the party and military apparatus, will stoke a yearning.  And that will, in turn, incite an internally driven movement for regime change that will be durable, won’t precipitate a refugee crisis and will bring North Korea out of the dark ages.

Breaking the barriers of repression down isn’t a new idea, none of this is original. I’m just raising it as a way to deal with my own alarm over the bluster traded between Kim and Trump.  So, yea. Ballooning North Korea is not a new idea. Folks have been using balloons and drones to send media over the DMZ for a while now. “Flash drives for Freedom” is an initiative with Silicon Valley roots. The North Korea Strategy Center put it this way, “Today, for unification, turn on the candle of information.”  There are many obstacles to overcome. Launch sites for balloons have to take winds into account.  The North Koreans could just chase them down, which is why the balloons should be released in batches of hundreds and at night to give them time to penetrate deep into North Korean territory. Some devices in North Korea can only read media that are signed by official encryption keys (see “signature system”); I haven’t been able to research this exhaustively but I think the Arirang phones and Samjiyon tablets may fall in that category. Apparently Notel devices have a significant penetration and may be capable of accessing unsigned media, someone more knowledgable of the device technologies prevalent in North Korea should write about this definitively.

Regardless of the obstacles, ballooning should not be a U.S. government sponsored activity.  If the NSA wants to share the North Korean encryption key (you guys have cracked it, haven’t you???) that’s fine.  But this should be a people driven effort to foment a movement amongst the North Korean people.  Exposing the North Korean population to the truth will spur internally driven regime change more effectively than anything that can be externally driven.  And this is how we, as ordinary citizens, should respond to the threat from North Korea.

[seanmeverett]

Diary of a Madman, Page 55

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So Many Questions: a question and answer format section where you can zoom straight to the questions you likely already have banging around your head.

Going Deeper: a way to keep on learning smart shit, super quick.

Download it to your phone or computer to take it with you on the go, print it out to mark it up, or buy copies and gift them to friends and family who have no idea what the fu&k all this Bitcoin stuff is about.

Economics and Money Supply putting you to sleep? Cryptocurrency and ICOs sound too scary to contend with? Not quite sure what to even type into that search bar on Google? Other, 300-page books making you feel like you’re learning nothing? Then, this book is for sure for you and your learning style.

If you’d like to stay up to date on future book releases in the series, the latest news in Emerging Tech, or insights on where our world is going, you can sign up for our newsletter. We won’t bombard your inbox. Because that shit is super stupid. But we will keep you updated on crazy new knowledge and everything What The Fu&k.

Read What The FU&K is Bitcoin?

II. Featured Emerging Tech Analyses

How Your Brand Can Execute With Video [Sean Everett]: video trends for your 2018 roadmap, including branded content for influencer marketing, with an updated MarTech knowledge database.

The Mission News August 7th [The Mission]: the last one we decided to do for the time being, is also one of our best.

These 6 Steps Will Help You Protect Your Data [Larry Kim]: detecting and avoiding phishing scams.

Cancer Evolves & So Must The Treatment [RebelBio]: four alternative approaches to battling the most insidious of diseases.

The Truth About How Gut Instincts Really Work [Melissa Chu]: whenever we feel conflicted about someone we meet, we hear the same thing over and over: “Trust your gut.”

III. Dear Diary: T-Shaped Versus Tic-Tac-Toe-Shaped

There days, the HR department is looking for something called T-shaped people. It means someone who has deep technical expertise in a single vertical (e.g., automotive) and wide across horizontal industries (e.g., software and tech). It means you have 10 years of experience in the automative OEM industry and another 10 years building software and apps for a variety of people.

This way, someone can look at a resume and go, “yup, you know where we’ve been and you’ve had the experience to take us where we need to go”.

The problem is that doesn’t really exist, by its very nature. If you spent 10 years in automotive, by definition you wouldn’t have spent that same 10 years building software across a different industry set. You can only do one or the other. So being prepared for self-driving (even though there are small departments inside these companies that have been working for years) is almost impossible.

Now take it to another level. Be H-shaped, or what I like to call, tic-tac-toe shaped.

You go deep in multiple industry verticals, you work across different horizontal areas (marketing, software, products, finance, investing).

How many people in the world are tic-tac-toe shaped?

Probably very few.

But the HR and recruiter bots don’t understand that. They’re looking for specific key words. They’re trying to hone in on a very specific type of experience and cross-over trait. By doing that, they’re missing the forest through the trees.

So these valuable people fall through the cracks. It’s only by actively searching and talking to people do you find them. By listening to their process of thinking and learning do you find them. It’s not captured in the resume itself. But rather the narrative that ties the weird experiences, educations, skills, and accomplishments together.

In a world of nice, neat boxes, these people make multi-dimensional hypercubes. In order to discover them, you’ve gotta take a step back, or up, to a different dimension.

In short, be careful what you think you value. You might miss the most valuable stuff. And people.

— Sean

Read The Rest

Page 54, 53, 52, 51, 50, 49, 48, 47, 46, 45, 44, 43, 42, 41, 40, 39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Humanizing Tech is a premium technological think tank for building humanity’s future. It covers autonomous robotics, self-learning AI, superhuman augmentation, personal hedge funds, editable DNA, SAAS space platforms, personal power stations, and video as an app. It recently joined forces with The Mission. This newsletter is a peek inside the Editor’s mind.

Diary of a Madman, Page 55 was originally published in Humanizing Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

from Stories by Sean Everett on Medium http://ift.tt/2wYmMNM

[phogenson]

The Dark Knight Review: Epilogue

This review shouldn’t need to be written for another Nolan movie, but there is the recent release of The Dark Knight Rises to be considered. The new movie isn’t so surprising considering Nolan’s previous work. In fact with only a few minor things the themes and approaches I expected to be most prevalent were. The Dark Knight Rises is not a particularly good movie, in fact The Dark Knight is probably the better film in the Nolan trilogy, but rather than being quick to only deride this film I will start with some positives.

First, Catwoman is a really enjoyable addition to Nolan’s movies. In fact she is very nearly a break from Nolan’s usual characters and particularly his usual women characters. The simple fact of the matter is that Catwoman is just more fun. Anne Hathaway isn’t doing much, she’s mostly easy on the eyes, but I can appreciate the joy and vigor of her character. It’s so refreshing to have a character who is different in the pleasure she gets from what she’s doing put next to all these stone-faced weirdos. Again, watching Anne Hathaway be that character could literally be a national pass time--she has thigh-high boots with 6 inch heels and a tight suit.

The only other characters in Nolan’s previous movies that actually have a vague notion of pleasure in what they do are always the most refreshing. This was the case with Maroni in The Dark Knight. Every time Eric Roberts was on screen it was obvious how content and pleasing the experience of being a mobster was to the character and to the actor. His flippant lines like “I thought the DA just played golf with the mayor” break up what is the monotony of that movie’s character interactions. Nolan doesn’t seem to take pleasure in his characters, neither do his characters seem to take pleasure in their lives. The Prestige, Memento, Inception, The Dark Knight they’re all about all these tortured souls and his characters get to the point of be really unrelenting and perverse. I really don’t care for such a trying gauntlet of character all the time, and it really shows Nolan’s limitations as a writer/director.

The second most positive thing about The Dark Knight Rises, and probably also the most unexpected, was having Bane as a physical equal to Batman. Bane is this unknown villain, and there aren’t any expectations for him rather shoes to fill. He really delivered, though, in only one department and that was as this physical equal to Batman. Basically Batman never has a fair fight, in terms of ass-kicking units Batman is unmatched. Until Bane shows up. I fully expected Bane to break Batman’s back, but having them fight was vastly more interesting because they were some obviously well matched. Nolan does deserve credit in this area, the ball could have been dropped and the fights not have been as hard hitting. I’d like to stress at this point that Bane as Batman’s physical equal is basically the extent of my appreciation for the character.

One final positive note I have for this movie was the revivalist angle of the first hour. I was amazed by how old fashioned some of the scenes seemed until Batman made his return to crime fighting and the movie took a turn for the overwrought and altogether worse. Some of the wit and antics around Catwoman, having Wayne manor with a more reclusive billionaire-genius, and most importantly an underground lair with worthless minions banging rocks together all contributed to an enjoyable viewing experience. I was ready for a black turtleneck that proclaimed "HENCHMAN" and I shouldn't have been so optimistic.

Bane’s minions and subterranean lair were far and away the most satisfying and illustrative revivalist qualities. For a little while The Dark Knight rises felt like an unlikely throw back to some of the more kitschy approaches of earlier iterations. Gordon goes down a sewer and stumbles upon a clandestine army of mindless workers banging rocks together and living in fear of their mysterious leader. It called to mind the classics such as Dr. No. It seemed in that moment with nameless, faceless, fearful technicians running about that if Nolan had gone with the Penguin instead of Bane he wouldn’t have shortchanged his audience on a submarine and avian mind-control plot. I really wanted to see just how far Nolan would go with that approach. Unfortunately not far enough.

It’s difficult to tell in The Dark Knight Rises if Nolan was trying to be a little less serious and relish in an amount of absurdity and extravagance or if he really just overstepped the line and made this movie way to big. How much more Nolan had to do with the characters and in what degree is a bit of a mystery. The fact of the matter is that this movie is so epic, ridiculous in every way to the film’s detriment that either Nolan was being cavalier with caution and recognizes that this movie isn’t as serious as his other works try to be, or he thought that this was indeed a fitting end to what I think is a bit of a baffling phenomenon of a trilogy.

Here’s the thing, Batman is the savior of Gotham--I know that--but in this movie he actually has to save Gotham. Batman has to save 12 million people from a bomb and a madman. And he has to climb out of a bottomless pit in Asia with a broken back to do it. And the problems are so obvious I don’t think it comes down to a matter of the literal logic, the philosophical underpinnings of the characters that are making this a lesser film.

Bane proclaims that he is returning Gotham to the people by holding the entire city hostage and setting up a guerrilla police state. I think that the League of Shadows angle is more legitimate and interesting than the nihilism that was so dominant in The Dark Knight, but Bane’s plan seems pretty counter intuitive to his allegiance and ideology. His investment and maintenance of the populist anarchy is a little comical. Consider, after fifty days of looting and riots in a people’s Gotham if 6,000,001 of Gotham’s 12 million hostages filed a petition with Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy) saying that they wanted to rebuild one of the bridges or even contact the US army in favor. Bane would likely have no choice but to put his bomb away.

But what is more painful to watch here is the absurdity of the scale--millions of lives at stake, a literal war on the streets, a nuclear bomb--compared to the minimalism of the response. The army is on the bridge and they don’t move in. Batman is Gotham’s only hope; thematically sound but outrageous on this scale. All of Gotham’s police are trapped underground for 80 days, and although people on the outside are dropping notes down drains to talk to them, they can’t get them out. Blake’s plan to evacuate Gotham--a handful of savvy orphans spread the word block by block. I was laughing at all the wrong things.

The rest of the movie’s plotting is altogether topical. This movie will do well because it speaks to people now. Occupation uprisings, economic terrorism, pre and post “war time” drivel--Nolan turns to topical filmmaking once again not realizing the inconsistency with the previous film. The Dark Knight I’ve said was a Post-9/11 work, I knew that The Dark Knight Rises would be very Post-Economic-Crisis. We’ve been here before and movies always reflect the time they were made. The Dark Knight Rises is far from the first of this movement, but I think that Bane’s posturing and preaching on the subject will ring less true than the timely but clear writing of Margin Call, a movie that is literally about the financial crisis as it happened.

It is so irritating that Nolan sweeps people up on an all-time bandwagon with such timely themes. I would urge him to reflect more on the ultimate rather than proximate in his movies but he has a clear obsession with what is happening around him that has little to do with uncovering something more about people or the world in a more than topical way--why we still read The Grapes of Wrath after the depression. Moreover I think I’d urge audiences to really understand Nolan’s movies and not read into them the ultimate notions that aren’t present. This iteration of “Gotham’s reckoning” will be less potent the next time something bad happens on a national scale.

I’d like to make one final point on the subject of The Dark Knight Rises. On the condition of many of the most popular movies these days in general, really. And though I’d like to distinguish my final point from the safe-Hollywood-crap-machine argument I’m often confronted with, the fact is people have seen everything about The Dark Knight Rises before, it’s been sold to the populace before, by the same people for the same price. Unlike The Godfather which was a financial, critical, and awarded success when it came out--a truly visionary work--the practice in movies right now doesn’t seem to reward real vision so much.

Warner Brothers has reaped the bounty of Harry Potter for the past ten years. A usually good and always successful franchise. Unfortunately it was ultimately limited by the number of books there were. It could really only be stretched the one extra movie and one extra dimension when all was said and done. Warner Brothers milked it for every penny, rolling out a campaign based on urgency to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 when in withDVDs and streaming there is no such thing as real urgency to see a movie. Needless to say, it worked for them. The only other money maker Warner Brothers had besides Harry Potter was the Nolan Batman movies. And they have thus bought their audience through a remarkably similar campaign. Like the plutocrats in The Dark Knight Rises, Warner Brothers is trying to make bankroll to cover their ass until the next big thing comes along.

[itsfinancethings]

It’s hard to believe that the newest version of The Invisible Man, in theaters Feb. 28, hasn’t been made before. The first adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel premiered in 1933, during the heyday of Universal Studios’ monster movie boom, and the Invisible Man stood as a scary specter alongside Frankenstein and Dracula. The very R-rated Paul Verhoeven version starring Kevin Bacon, Hollow Man (2000), similarly framed the titular Invisible Man as the protagonist.

But writer-director Leigh Whannell’s new movie turns the camera, for the first time, on the Invisible Man’s victim. It’s such an obvious setup for a great thriller — the Invisible Man wreaking havoc on his victim’s life as a metaphor for gaslighting and abuse — but perhaps one the male-dominated film industry wasn’t ready to take on before the #MeToo era.

We meet Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) on the night she decides to flee her abusive tech tycoon boyfriends’ fortress-like mansion. We learn later that he has manipulated her, isolated her, physically abused her and — it’s later strongly insinuated — repeatedly raped her. After the soon-to-be Invisible Man (his name is Adrian Griffin, a nod to the Griffin of Wells’ novel) fakes his own death and dons a suit that renders him invisible (he made his millions in the field of optics, convenient for a sociopathic stalker), he deploys the same methods to try to bring Cecilia under his control again. Invisibility suit aside, these aren’t the arbitrary actions of a fictional madman but rather very real strategies that abusers use to control their victims, ones that Whannell incorporated into the script after conducting interviews on the topic of domestic abuse with experts and with women in his life.

Whannell was well aware that he needed to tell this story from a woman’s point of view, one which he’d need to seek outside of his own life experience. He interviewed two domestic violence counselors at Peace Over Violence, a domestic violence prevention center headquartered in Los Angeles. “In one story, a woman’s partner put a lock on the fridge to control when she could eat,” he says. “Only he had the combination to the lock. I was so shocked by that. It started to dovetail neatly into this character I was creating.”

He then spoke with female friends about their experiences with sexism and finally enlisted Moss to sit down with him over the course of several three-to-four-hour sessions and review the script with him. “He fully recognized that there was a female perspective that needed to be listened to, and I could help in providing that,” Moss says. “That’s of course exactly what he should have done, but not every director creates that open space.”

Whannell was shocked when the women in his life all separately shared the same anecdote of walking to their cars with their keys between their fingers, to use as a weapon if needed. It’s a common practice for women, and its revelation to Whannell serves as a reminder that while men can make excellent films about the topic of domestic abuse (last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary Minding the Gap is perhaps the gold standard), men who tell women’s stories must commit to listening to women in order to adequately capture the female experience.

Recent depictions of domestic abuse have faced criticism: Big Little Lies portrayed a husband (Alexander Skårsgard) beating his wife (Nicole Kidman) as a sort of sexual kink — until it wasn’t — and the casual brutality in Margot Robbie’s Tonya Harding movie I, Tonya felt jarring in the context of an otherwise comical film. Filmmakers often feel the need to maximize the drama of violence rather than trust the audience to understand that it existed and caused significant damage.

In The Invisible Man, Whannell has restraint enough not to show this physical abuse onscreen, focusing instead on the psychological consequences it has on its protagonist, Elisabeth Moss’ Cecilia, after she leaves her relationship. “In movies and TV shows, we’ve seen physical violence depicted many times before,” says Whannell. “But I felt I had not seen the emotional abuse and manipulation as much.”

Mark Rogers/Universal Pictures. Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) and Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) in “The Invisible Man,” written and directed by Leigh Whannell.

Those emotional abuses at the center of Invisible Man may be harder to render in cinema, but they are equally as real. The film finds ways to illustrate this manipulation, beginning with the titular abuser driving Cecilia’s friends and family away. Isolating someone from their social network — whether physically or emotionally — is a way to keep the abused person from fleeing the relationship. And, according to the counselors with whom Whannell spoke, without a support network victims tend to blame themselves for their situation. “They emphasized to me how the most important part of their jobs is to tell people they’re not alone, and that it’s not their fault,” he says.

Cecilia’s ex also tries to leverage the promise of millions left to her in his will (much of which Cecilia promised use to pay for a friend’s education) into yet another means of control. Some 99% of all domestic abuse cases involve financial abuse, which includes restricting a woman’s daily spending, stealing money from her, preventing financial account access and sabotaging employment and education opportunities, according to the Purple Purse, a foundation dedicated to empowering women financially to escape abusive homes. It’s the top reason women stay in abusive relationships and why they return even if they’ve left. Such financial manipulation can block a victim from leaving her abuser or leave her homeless, jobless or unable to pay her bills if she does manage to escape, according to a study by Angela Littwin, who conducted the first major study on what she calls “coerced debt” in 2011.

Finally, the Invisible Man threatens to sabotage Cecilia’s reproductive choices in an attempt to have a baby and effectively tether them together forever. Abusers routinely use children in order to manipulate their partners and force them to stay in the relationship. A 2007 study out of Michigan State University, the first of its kind, found 88% of women who had faced domestic abuse reported their assailant using custody battles over children to keep in touch with their victims, interrogating children about their mothers’ whereabouts in order to stalk or manipulate them or even using visitation with the children in order to continue the physical and emotional abuse of the mother. The victims surveyed said that the fathers of their children often threatened to harm or abduct the offspring in order to coerce the mother, who tended to prioritized the children’s safety over her own, into doing their bidding.

As her ex taunts her, Cecilia begs her family and friends to believe that he is still alive. Nobody believes her, a resonant notion in the #MeToo era when claims of abuse are still dismissed as “he said, she said” cases. If you can’t see it, the logic goes, then it must not be real.

“Even as women, we can be quick to judge and go, ‘Why is she staying?’” says Moss. “‘If he’s hitting her or emotionally abusing her or the relationship is toxic, why doesn’t she get out?’ And as the victim, that makes you feel like you can’t talk about it, like you don’t have a safe place to go.”

Ultimately, the movie cannot resist transitioning into a revenge fantasy, which, while emotionally satisfying, is not true to life. Cecilia’s initial escape from her abuser signals the exceptionalism of this story. As is often the case with Hollywood depictions of domestic violence, the victim is a privileged white woman with the economic means to leave her abuser, an unrealistic outcome for most women who find themselves in a similar position.

The movie also builds to an inevitable physical confrontation between Cecilia and her husband, as these kinds of films so often do (think: Jennifer Lopez’s Enough or Julia Roberts’ Sleeping With the Enemy). But confronting one’s abuser often puts women’s lives in danger. Abusive relationships can be life-or-death: 2017 saw 2,237 homicides by intimate partners, according to the New York Times, a 19% increase since 2014. And as a recent headline-making case proved, women can also suffer legal consequences for defending themselves.

Art may be the one realm where we can conjure stories of vengeance and justice that simply do not exist in the real world. “It’s interesting doing these interviews with the [conviction of Harvey] Weinstein in the news this week,” says Moss. “You just hope that offers something, some closure, to the victims. But you can’t make it go away.”

[seanmeverett]

Diary of a Madman, Page 28

9,000 people peering inside. Don’t get trapped.

I. This Week’s Analyses

An interesting week, this. A mixture of robotics, trading, product mechanics, and foreign affairs.

Transforming the Stock Market into a Game: product mechanics in search of an aspiring entrepreneur who wants to build a startup around it.

The Real Truth Hidden in Snap’s S1: marketing is powerful, be careful you don’t confuse a company’s value with what you like, or dislike, about their product.

How to Live in London Until Trump’s Impeachment: get a 5-year Visa lickity split, on the cheap.

ROS 2.0 Update, January 2017: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple don’t yet have their hands in this. Wreaks of opportunity and undervalued-ness.

Object Libraries for AR Apps are the Future of Video: comment of the week on The Information

The Fountainhead Movement: New for Members Only

How You Can Create Every Day

Innovation Model of the Future

Earnings Release Season

Why Robotics Manufacturing is the Next Gold Rush

Rules of Mankind Versus Laws of the Universe

Join The Fountainhead Movement for $9/month before the price goes up again.

II. Global News Pointing To Our Theses

Bookmark the 12 Tech Theses if you haven’t already.

Video as an App: major airlines are doing away with seat-back entertainment. Bring your own device powered by Piksel Voyage. Tim Cook: “More things coming for Apple TV” meaning original content and access point for consumer relationships. Netflix still 2nd fiddle to Apple TV hardware. Facebook getting into OTT original content, saying they’re replacing the News Feed with Video Channels. Movie theaters aren’t dead yet.

Music as a Control Mechanism: Apple Music API, suggested music from your emotion.

Biologic Intelligence Disrupting AI: cortical columns, penguin’s behavior keeps self-driving cars safe, Biologic Intelligence that encrypts itself using Biologic Intelligence. So strong not even quantum computers can crack it. AI Awards are out, Biologic Intelligence won for Best AI in Robotics.

Space as a SAAS Platform: NASA’s space mining mission, did you know that one rich asteroid could make every precious metal as cheap as gravel? Some asteroids are that valuable. Private space stations. Watch Luxembourg closely.

Automatic Health Optimization: Reiki.

Personal Hedge Fund: +72% return in a year. 550 CEOs listed the recession, technology, and cybersecurity as their top 3 worries. Facebook’s Economic Profit is now +14% (16% ROIC — 2% WACC). Nike: 23%, Apple: 19%, Nvidia: 13%, Amazon: 8%, Tesla: -15%. What if Apple’s stock price growth prospects have nothing to do with hardware products: 1. Services, 2. Share Buybacks. TheBaseCode.com.

Personal Power Stations: Tesla no longer is just about “motors”, removing the last part of their name after the combination with Solar City. Charge your phone from across the room without wires.

Self-Organizing Biorobotics: roadmap for US robotics, which had the highest CAGR of any sector over the last 10 years, opportunities are everywhere; artificial cells that build themselves.

Autonomous Internet of Things: Humans have created a form of matter where time loops back upon itself, in perpetuity. You can’t tell me magic isn’t real. Apple has 1 million CarPlay users, that’s a pretty decent marketing list for the upcoming Apple Car ($35K car * 1 mil users = $35 trillion revenue). Not much real driving is happening in the self-driving industry.

Reality Retail: Gen Z retail arbitrage against AI fashion stylists, Amazon accounts for 50% of all online sales growth, new Tiffany & Co CEO.

Interstellar Sports Wearables: We almost got hit by another asteroid and nobody is talking about it. 25x bigger and we’re toast. We need to get on this, folks.

Superhuman Modifications: new material conducts electricity, but not heat. Important for implanting electronics into the human body.

III. Philosophy of a Mad Man

Venture Capital: The ones whose job it is to think differently, often don’t. You can’t get a PhD in something that’s never existed before, by definition. You can’t understand the future using analogies from the past. The question, then, is what to do about it if you’re a startup who’s invented something never before created by mankind. You go straight to the LPs, of course, and cut out the middle man. Younger generation VCs, however, seem to get it, faster.

LPs: Softbank’s $100B fund is actually Private Equity, not VC. Taken with the above, are we on the verge of a new startup fundraising trend?

Robotics & AI: Did you know the average round size for a Series A robotics or AI startup that raised capital from 2015 to 2017 was $10M?

Stats: Xbox Live has 55M MAUs.

Valuation: So if TIDAL is worth $600/sub at 1M subs, then Apple Music at 20M subs = $12B biz just for streaming service & MRR, which doesn’t include Beats. Apple paid $3B for Beats, which means they already have a 4x return not including value of Beats hardware.

Jobs: Piksel is hiring all over the world, Head of Product

M&A: put together an investment brief for a very undervalued gym chain a few years back. Might share the brief and write about it in light of Bloomberg’s latest article.

Prediction: Sheryl Sandberg is going to be named Facebook’s new CEO soon. If not, she’ll move to Disney to be Iger’s successor (she’s on their Board).

Country of the Week: Malaga, Spain. Incredible talent and culture that won’t break the bank. You can help bring the economy back. We already are.

New Skills: You can get your pilots license with only 40 hours of flight time. 8 hours gets you a solo stick. Amazing.

Research: search engine for your investigative journalism.

Quote:

The Mechanics of Magic are real. You think it. It becomes reality. Another human is affected by it.

I will, one day, write the how-to book aptly titled, “The Mechanics of Magic Are Real: how to transform desire into reality”.

— Sean

Read The Rest

27, 26, 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Join The Fountainhead Movement for exclusive access to bleeding edge think pieces and technological inventions.

Humanizing Tech is a premiere technological think tank for building humanity’s future. It covers autonomous robotics, self-learning AI, superhuman augmentation, personal hedge funds, editable DNA, SAAS space platforms, personal power stations, and video as an app. This newsletter is a peek inside the Editor’s mind.

Diary of a Madman, Page 28 was originally published in Humanizing Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

from Stories by Sean Everett on Medium http://ift.tt/2ke2QAq