#noah berlatsky

[thatstormygeek]

The casual cruelty with which Columbia administrators rushed to do the bidding of their reactionary masters in Congress provides a quick lesson in who actually is the elite, and who is not. The students at the fancy college, it turns out, do not in fact run the fancy college. The university doesn’t treat them as bosses, and barely even as stakeholders. Instead, it treats them as subjects to be disciplined—and in disciplining them, it has a wide range of tools. Students are a kind of indentured employee; they are dependent on the university for housing, for health insurance, for the next steps in their career and life plans. If the university decides they are not sufficiently docile, it is trivially easy for the university to destroy their lives. Everyone pretty much knows that young people have few resources and few levers of influence. We’re all aware that even supposedly rich kids don’t actually have control of their parent’s bank accounts and can be cut loose with nothing on a whim. We all know that young people have few connections and little influence compared to Congresspeople, administrators, and angry donors. And it is because people know that college students have little power that they become enraged when college students attempt to organize or demand some say in institutional or (god forbid) national policies.

Young people are “elites” not because they actually have power, but because the spectacle of them asserting autonomy in any way is at odds with the way things are supposed to be. They are pretentious for the same reason that women or LGBT people or Black people are considered pretentious elites when they contradict their supposed betters. When the right people have power; that’s natural; when the wrong people, marginalized people, have power—that’s an unbearable imposition. It's easy to make light of college student activism, and to insinuate that people attending a swanky university can’t really have anything to protest about. But young people engage in activism for the same reason other marginalized people engage in activism; they have firsthand experience of inequality and injustice, and because they are treated unequally, they don’t have a lot of other ways to demand accountability or change. The vitriol directed at young people is not because young people are powerful; it’s because they aren’t, and so their assertions of autonomy are seen as a threat to established hierarchies.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice:

The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday held a lengthy oversight hearing to badger Attorney General Merrick Garland and push the GOP’s false narrative about President Biden weaponizing the DOJ against Donald Trump. Even though the hearing was conducted in obvious bad faith, it was in some ways successful, at least in the limited sense that Republicans grabbed a lot of headlines and forced Garland to spend a day on the defensive. Virtually every major news outlet it extensive coverage, ranging from the New York Times to MSNBC to Newsmax.

The hearing meant that for at least a day, everyone talked about whether the DOJ is treating Trump unfairly, rather than about, say, whether Trump should step aside from the GOP presidential nomination given his felony convictions, or whether Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito should recuse himself after an insurrectionist flag was flown over his house. Congressional oversight hearings give Congress a chance to focus the national conversation on what members want to talk about. It gives them a chance to pressure executive branch officials to adopt congressional priorities, or to explain and potentially embarrass themselves. In contrast, Democrats in the Senate have been bizarrely reluctant to use hearings to advance their agenda. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has refused to hold hearings to investigate egregious evidence of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas receiving gifts from far right billionaires, or to demand answers from Alito about his apparent embrace of the insurrection. Instead, he’s posting weak statements on social media meekly calling for right-wing members of the Court to do a better job policing themselves. [...]

Senate Democrats need to get a clue

Democrats have of course decried the House hearings on Garland as nakedly partisan nonsense. Garland himself pushed back forcefully against (baseless) Republican claims that the Justice Department had somehow been behind the successful New York state prosecution of Trump on charges of falsifying business records related to hush money payments. Garland described the claim the Justice Department was involved as a “conspiracy theory” and an “attack on the judicial process itself.”  Forceful rejection of Republican lies is a good thing. But there are limits to playing defense. And Democrats have good reason to launch their own judicial investigations not of the Biden Justice Department, but of the Supreme Court. This year, after an extensive investigation, ProPublica determined that Clarence Thomas has for 20 years received lavish gifts, including vacations and loans, from billionaire Republican donors like Harlan Crow. More recently, the New York Times reported that in the days after the January 6 insurrection, an upside-down flag — a symbol of support for Trump’s coup attempt — was raised over the home of Justice Samuel Alito.

Thomas and Alito have shown clear evidence of corruption and/or bias. The Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to provide oversight for the judiciary and monitor ethical standards and practices. This seems like a great opportunity to hold hearings on the far right Court and demand accountability. Or so you’d think. Durbin has been weirdly but consistently timid. He has not called Thomas to appear before the Judiciary Committee, claiming that Thomas would just refuse to show up. In the case of Alito, Durbin has called on him to recuse himself from cases involving Trump and the 2020 election — including the Court’s current case on whether Trump has immunity from prosecution from his role in January 6. But Alito has refused to recuse, and Chief Justice John Roberts refuses to meet with Durbin and his committee to discuss the matter. The Court has also failed to adopt even the minimal toothless, unenforceable ethics standards that Durbin has been haplessly pushing for years. So, if Alito and Roberts say they won’t cooperate, is that that?

Of course not. Congress has a lot of power. Durbin could subpoena Alito and Thomas and threaten to hold them in contempt if they don’t appear at hearings, just as the House has threatened to hold Garland in contempt. The spectacle of Supreme Court justices lawlessly rejecting subpoenas to even talk to Congress would in itself be a huge story. It would generate media headlines and bringing pressure to bear on Thomas and Alito to recuse themselves from cases involving Trump. The Senate Judiciary Committee could also subpoena others involved in undermining the integrity of the court. The committee has actually approved subpoenas for Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, key figures in the Thomas bribery scandal. But Durbin has refused to issue those subpoenas, for unclear reasons. Similarly, the Senate Judiciary Committee could hold hearings on the insurrectionist flags flying outside Alito’s home (yes, there was more than one). Alito claims his wife was responsible for the flags, and he himself had nothing to do with them. The committee could call Alito’s wife, Martha Ann, and ask her to explain why she flew the flag and explain the justice’s involvement. [...]

Why won’t Durbin act?

The advantages of using the power of the Senate, including hearings and subpoenas, is pretty clear. Alito and Thomas have shown themselves to be corrupt, biased, and arrogant. Despite massive conflicts of interest, they refuse to recuse themselves, much less resign. That undermines the integrity of the Court, undermines the rule of law, and threatens the Constitution and democracy itself. If there was ever a case for oversight, this is it. And oversight can be effective. Focusing the media on a huge scandal can lead to more reporting, more revelations, more public pressure, and political gain. The threat of subpoenas, and the exposure of hearings, can force justices to look for ways to defuse criticism — and recusing from cases where they are compromised is a pretty obvious step. Durbin’s sad tactic of just begging the justices to do better has not worked. Why won’t he use the tools he has? It’s unclear; his explanations (like arguing Thomas wouldn’t show up anyway) don’t make a lot of sense. Maybe he’s conflict averse. Maybe he’s leery of undermining the legitimacy of the court. Maybe he’s afraid of GOP backlash.

This Noah Berlatsky column in Public Notice is 100% spot-on: Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin needs to stop acting like a potted plant and start conducting hearings into SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito’s compromised ethics. It is time for the Democrats to play on offense instead of being perpetually on defense.

[hero-israel]

Now 30 years after "Schindler's List" came out, I give you the worst article ever written about it.

Join me for a wallow in the depths of Extremely Online lefty pseudointellectualism and Awareness Raising.

"For all its pathos and earnestness, the movie is too glib in its handling of the Nazis. The concentration camp commandant, Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), is a sadistic monster who performs cinematic and dramatic acts of brutality to signal to the viewer that he is pure evil."

Yes, the movie sure was unfair to Amon Goeth. It's not like there was historical evidence of him doing exactly what they showed.

"In real life, when Nazis and their ilk are trying to gain power, they often lie about their motives or their goals, and use dog whistles to rally support. They talk incessantly about black crime rates, or, in the Nazis’ case, about Jewish crime rates, in order to create a consensus for strong-arm law-and-order policies."

The Nazis were just a warm-up act for the REAL threat: Republicans!

And, just like with Goeth, I guess this movie doesn't actually show what Nazis were like in real life. I guess when Adolf Hitler promised in 1922 that he would exterminate all the Jews, that wasn't real life, that was a wandering variant from "Across the Hitlerverse." And speaking of superhero movies:

"But you don’t need to deconstruct Nazi ideology or understand racist dog whistles to condemn the Nazis in “Schindler’s List.” You just need to watch as Goeth takes up a sniper position and shoots anyone in the camp who happens to pause for a rest. It’s no harder than rooting against Lex Luthor or the Joker."

This drivel was published 5 years ago, so the author had to have been like 17 at the time and is just barely out of college now, right? Right??? (*checks*) NO WAY, HE'S 52, ARE YOU FOR REAL??!

"The Jewish people in the film don’t try to resist or kill their German oppressors. They don’t even express much in the way of hatred or resentment... Jewish people are always object lessons, never conscious teachers. No Jewish character criticizes or explains the evils of Nazi propaganda. These Jews never talk about how they experience prejudice, or what they would need to fight it.... the Jews around Schindler only beg him to save their relatives, or praise him for his bravery. They never insist on their rights."

Well, there was that Jewish architect in the camps who talked back to Goeth for a second about how the barracks would collapse and he immediately had her killed. The movie is about people having been ALREADY ghettoized by a for-real genocidal regime once the genocide program is under way. Where was there supposed to be a dramatic lecture? And what Jew would have given one, to which Nazi, in which fucking ACTUAL GHETTO?

Again and again, this screen-addled, zero-life-experience baby WHO IS SOMEHOW 52 YEARS OLD WTF fails to confront the horrors of true Jewish history because his only frame of reference has been Twitter arguments about how sleeping with a mattress is secretly white supremacy.

"The targets of fascism are the people best able to express what is happening to them, and what they need to fight it. But “Schindler’s List” presents victims as supplicants. It doesn’t model any way to show support for journalist Jemele Hill, who fell out with her network for saying that Trump is a white supremacist. It doesn’t push you to show solidarity when anti-racist activists demand that Confederate monuments be taken down. It doesn’t tell you that anti-fascist actions are important — even when they disrupt someone’s meal. The virtuous victims in “Schindler’s List” never protest. Because of this kind of representation, it’s easy for people to claim that protesters aren’t virtuous."

.........Or! OR! Hear me out here. Or maybe, just maybe, there could be another reason why the Holocaust doesn't look like a good match for someone being fired from ESPN, or for well-fed comfortable people protected by the rule of law yelling at a White House press secretary. Without checking - without doing even a five-second Google search - I am willing to declare as an absolute immutable fact of the universe that Noah Berlatsky considers Sarah Huckabee Sanders to be more dangerous, more fascist, and more Nazi-like than he does Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The overall mentality is that real life must be a screenplay - according to Berlatsky's written cues. Real life must be cinematic - according to Berlatsky's direction. And anything that differs from Berlatsky's internal script - "AOC uses the Infinity Gauntlet to stop voter ID laws which are the new Nazism" - is simply not credible as real life, as real history, and must be discarded and replaced by more of what he saw on Twitter.

After a long lecture, of course.

[ohfugecannada]

But for Morrison that's not what superhero comic are about. The point isn't the resolution with the villain in jail, but rather all the loopy ideas along the way – a genius talking ape in love with a disembodied brain; a world full of talking chairs; a Satan who gets upset when you criticize his singing. Comics aren't necessarily about reinforcing the status quo or overturning the status quo, but about opening up a space to imagine somewhere else – a place where even the police get to take LSD trips and the ugly and the weird and the other don't need to be fixed. As the last line of Morrison's run says, "There is another world. There is a better world. Well, there must be."

Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol: The Craziest Superhero Story Ever Told - Noah Berlatsky

[aronarchy]

https://twitter.com/nberlat/status/1374226903431778306

One of the problems with talking about the power parents have over children is that people are like, “so what do you do” and the answer is… there aren’t good solutions.

Basically our whole society is set up around the nuclear family as an ideal and giving parents pretty much unquestioned power over kids. There’s some law enforcement policing of the worst abuses, sometimes… but LE is also incredibly abusive and dangerous for kids.

Really addressing these power imbalances would require sweeping social changes that would make society pretty much unrecognizable. The power disproportion between parents and children is just fundamental to our social life.

There are some things we could do! End laws allowing teachers and parents to hit kids. Abolish the voting age. Make college free. Provide no questions asked housing to young people. Provide a UBI for young people.

I think that would all help to some extent in various ways. But the fact that even surface efforts to ameliorate this problem aren’t on the table is a good sign of just how entrenched and difficult it is.

And so people are like, well not worth talking about then.

But you can’t even begin to solve a problem if you won’t admit it’s a problem.

People like the idea that parents are good and will not harm their kids, too. Even though there’s just tons of evidence that that is not true. (Anyone given huge amounts of power is likely to abuse it in some ways.)

Wrote about this at greater length here.

[narrativestringtheory]

On Comics: Growing Old with the X-Men

by Noah Berlatsky

[ed. note: a prior iteration of this article appeared as “Growing Old With the X-Men” on Patreon in 2022]

A friend lent me The Uncanny X-Men #160 (Marvel, August 1982) when I was at summer camp in the early 1980s. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly haunted me ever since. But it disturbed me at the time, and it stuck with me as a confusingly nightmarish story—a gratuitous exercise in disempowerment and decay.

Reading it again some forty years later through the power of digitization, I’m more aware of its weaknesses. Writer Chris Claremont’s endless exposition eats up text bubble after text bubble. Penciller Brent Anderson struggles with pacing the convoluted script—moments of grotesque horror (like Kitty Pride’s skeleton literally being removed from her body) are weirdly shrunken into a series of smaller panels so you can barely see them. I’d thought some of my fuzzy memories of the comic were a result of time and distance. But it turns out that a lot of scenes just aren’t drawn in a way designed to stick in memory. 

At the same time, it’s, clearer to me now why I found the comic so unsettling then, and why, as an adult, it still retains some power. Claremont, in his clumsy, gauche way wrote a comic about the clumsy, gauche process of getting old. The innocuously named “Chutes and Ladders” turns out to be a story about decay, death, and failure. When I read it as a twelve-year-old, I was looking through a dimensional portal to the more jaded, (somewhat) hideously transformed me reading it now.

The plot starts out on the X-Men’s new island base. Storm, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Kitty, and Colossus are participating in one of those Danger Room training battles with which Claremont was endlessly fascinated. Illyana, Colossus’ six-year-old sister is fascinated too; she’s watching eagerly, which positions her as a stand in for the audience. At the same time, she herself is being watched through a kind of interdimensional television by a mysterious figure with ominously long fingernails. 

That obscured figure is a Satanic stand-in named Belasco, and his realm is Limbo.  He’s a devilish demiurge for Claremont himself, setting the story in motion and summoning the reader deeper. He reaches into Illyana’s mind, whispering, “Tell no one, Illyana. Just follow my voice…to paradise.” The creepy child abduction connotations foreshadow the story’s obsessions with corruption, as Ilyana wanders off (clutching a Fozzie Bear doll). Kitty—the youngest member of the X-Men—notices Illyana’s gone and heads after her.

Illyana seems to vanish, and then Kitty is also zapped away. This sequence is presented as unpleasant in a way that is far out of proportion to what we see or what actually seems to be happening. Kitty is frozen in a circle of light and completely panics: “What’s happening?! I feel—No! Oh no!” She doesn’t sound like a superhero, but like a child facing her worst fear. 

The older heroes figure out the kids are gone eventually; they follow and inevitably vanish. They all find themselves, or lose themselves, in an ill-defined gothic cavern-like realm—again, called Limbo, though it looks more like Hell.

The real horror here isn’t the décor, nor even the monstrous Sy’m, who talks incongruously like a 1920s gangland thug. (“So tell me boss—who do you want killed?”) The real horror is age.

The X-Men aren’t just visiting a different realm, but their future selves. Thanks to time displacement and cosmic comic book woo, our heroes learn that they were already in Belasco’s realm years or decades past, when they had been easily and gruesomely defeated. Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton lies in Belasco’s throne-room. Colossus apparently lived for some time, but he too was eventually killed; his aged corpse hangs on a wall. Or at least, Claremont says Colossus was an old man when he died. Anderson’s art doesn’t really show it, which is no doubt in part simply technical insufficiency, but which also suggests that age can’t be imagined; it’s a horror beyond visualization, even when it’s hanging there in front of you. 

Worst of all is Nightcrawler. Our gallant, high-spirited Kurt didn’t die. He was instead turned into a corrupted parody of himself, a lecherous giggling monster matching his demonic appearance. When Kitty meets old, gross Kurt he gropes her, in an extremely unpleasant sequence. (Anderson’s pencils again don’t let you see clearly what’s going on, though this time it’s obviously intentional; Kurt’s hands when he gropes Kitty are off panel.) The sexual implications echo Belasco’s quasi-seduction of Ilyana at the comic’s opening; growing up here is shadowed with violence. 

Elder Ororo’s fate is less grim than death or corruption. But time has still taken her on. After watching her friends die horribly, she reached some sort of détente with Belasco.  As she aged, she lost her elemental powers, but studied sorcery instead. She uses her latter-day magic and her knowledge of the workings of the teleport circles to help the younger X-Men avoid the mistakes of the dead by urging them to run away.

They do so, but Belasco manages to grab Illyana’s hand. Kitty loses her grip on the girl for a second, but then gets hold of her again and pulls her back to our world—only to discover that in that blink of an eye when their hands were separated, Ilyana aged seven years, and is now thirteen. 

That lost moment, in which a whole life happens between panels, is the part of the comic I remembered best. I’d sometimes over the years wonder what happened to Illyana, that same impenetrable gap fixed there as I got older, doing whatever I was doing. Time passed for me around that panel as it passed for Illyana inside it. You’re always getting older in that white gutter between then (further and further ago) and an ever more decrepit now.

The jump disturbed Colossus too. “How can I face our parents?” he wonders, and in a further internal monologue he muses on his sister’s tragic fate. “Childhood should be the happiest of times—and in a stroke, Illyana has lost that forever. Worse she has now spent half her life in Limbo […] should I welcome her, comfort her, love her…or fear her?” Belasco, though, gets the last word, cackling about Illyana’s glorious destiny while clutching her Fozzie Bear doll, a symbol of youthful innocence lost. 

Contra Colossus, childhood isn’t always a happy time, as “Chutes and Ladders” is aware. Kitty’s outsized fear upon being transported into limbo, coupled with Nightcrawler’s advances, suggest that the comic is in part about sexual abuse. Belasco is grooming Illyana for his own purposes (further explicated in a Magik mini-series, which I still haven’t read). He’s an evil father, with elder Ororo, who dabbles in dark magic, as a compromised, also-abused mother figure. Colossus is grappling with the fact that aging can be imposed by adults in ugly ways; the comic is in part about how children like Kitty may be forced to contemplate their own skulls before they should have to.

The comic isn’t just about children though, which is part of what made it memorable for me when I was a child. To some degree, Claremont was writing for twelve-year-olds. But he was writing for those twelve-year-olds about what it’s like to grow up. Part of the superhero empowerment fantasy is that the characters never grow old; Colossus is still in his prime now, in 2023, just as he was in 1982. But also somehow in 1982, in that one comic, he was vaguely old, in a way difficult to visualize, and defeated and dead.

Belasco is evil, but he’s also age personified, and evil and age, intertwined, beat the X-Men, not once, but twice. They grow weak, they die. They are frozen and terrified. They betray themselves in grotesque ways and in smaller ones. They harm their friends (Sy’m uses Wolverines severed claw to pierce Colossus’ armor.) They fail to protect their loved ones. They run away. But wherever they run, time comes after them.

I vaguely understood when I was a kid that—through Anderson’s vague outlines and Claremont’s endless text—the comic was speaking to me about my own future. It was teleporting me forward in time to an older, tireder, heavier, more defeated me. And here I am, looking back. I could tell my 12-year-old self to run, I suppose, but it wouldn’t do much good. Back there, somewhere, I put the comic down and went off to swim more efficaciously than I can now. When, like Kitty recapturing Illyana’s hand, I picked the book up again, I liked it less, and, alas, understood it better.

[thebooky]

Why Sci-Fi Keeps Imagining the Subjugation of White People

APRIL 25, 2014

By Noah Berlatsky

Science-fiction "contemplates possible futures." So says a new Smithsonian article, and it doesn't seem like a particularly controversial thesis. As the piece says, sci-fi tries to think about what’s to come for civilization. "The future is a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in," as Ursula K. Le Guin says.

But it's worth remembering that in sci-fi, the future actually isn't safe or sterile at all. On the contrary, with its alien invasions, evil empires, authoritarian dystopia, and new lands discovered and pacified, the genre can look as much like the past as the future. In particular, sci-fi is often obsessed with colonialism and imperial adventure, the kind that made the British Empire an empire and that still sustains America’s might worldwide.

The link between colonialism and science-fiction is every bit as old as the link between science-fiction and the future. John Rieder in his eye-opening book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science-Fiction notes that most scholars believe that science fiction coalesced "in the period of the most fervid imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth century." Sci-fi "comes into visibility," he argues, "first in those countries most heavily involved in imperialist projects—France and England" and then gradually gains a foothold in Germany and the U.S. as those countries too move to obtain colonies and gain imperial conquests. He adds, "Most important, no informed reader can doubt that allusions to colonial history and situations are ubiquitous features of early science fiction motifs and plots."

The iconic example of colonialism-inspired sci-fi is that most important of sci-fi stories, H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. As Rieder says, Wells begins his book with an explicit comparison of the Martian invasion to colonial expansion in Tasmania. "The Tasmanians," Wells writes,

in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"

Here the Martian conquest is presented as analogous to, and even as just retribution for, Britain's colonial genocide. As has been visited on them, so shall it be visited on us.

With Wells in mind, it’s easy to see colonial metaphors throughout the sci-fi that followed him. In many cases, as with Wells, these works flip the racial dynamic that characterized the most influential imperialist ventures of the last few centuries. In such stories, sci-fi is about “them” (a non-white, foreign civilization) doing to us (Western, largely white powers) as we did to them. Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Into Darkness, for example, imagine a non-white antagonist who preaches the colonial ideology of eugenic culling against the less biologically perfect, Western-ish protagonists.

Even works in which the invaders are white can come off like historical fiction envisioning an inversion of Anglo hegemony. Take Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, about a totalitarian Britain conquered and occupied by Germany, in which native English people are second-class citizens. From Brazil, it's only a brief hop to 1984, which, as I've pointed out here at The Atlantic, can also read as a reverse colonial parable. Rather than seeing the novel as a riff on Hitler and Stalin's brand of totalitarianism, as it’s usually interpreted, you can instead think about it as inspired by the repressive state in which Orwell served—British-controlled Burma.

Even the Terminator films fit pretty easily into a colonial narrative. At first, they may seem far afield from geographic conquest; the plot, after all, hinges on time-traveling robots, not invading aliens. But Rieder points out that for Wells, the War of the Worlds was a battle not only across space, but across time. Wells's Martians, with their giant craniums and atrophied bodies, were meant to be a warning of our own evolutionary future, just as the Tasmanians were generally viewed by Westerners as preserved, primitive living remnants of the evolutionary past. Thus, the computers in Terminator can be seen as not-fully-evolved colonial servants, who eventually evolve into more-advanced colonial masters.

So what to make of this colonial obsession? What does it mean that all of these novels and films, from War of the Worlds more than 100 years ago to Into Darkness in 2013, are powered by colonial inversion, a dream of Western imperial violence inflicted upon Westerners?In some instances, it's clear that sci-fi reverse colonialism is anti-colonial. In others, it's a justification for imperialism.

To some degree, and in some instances, it's clear that sci-fi reverse colonialism is anti-colonial. Again, Wells uses the Mars invasion to directly criticize European colonial practices.  Similarly, Gwyneth Jones in her 1994 book North Wind imagines an alien race, the Aleutians, who are almost-but-not-quite exactly like humans. When they take over the earth, they nonchalantly decide to sheer off the top of the Himalayas to improve the planet's climate. Despite worldwide protests (which confuse the Aleutians; why would anyone object to sheering off the mountains, they wonder?) the Aleutians go ahead with their plan, and accidentally destroy most of earth's farmland (as we see in the follow up novel, Phoenix Café.) The depiction of bland imperial arrogance directed, specifically, at the subcontinent, is an obvious satire of Britain's own history of empire—and of the intertwined violence of Western expansion and environmental devastation more generally. In a similar vein, Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy, told from the perspective of a family of black humans who survive and thrive after an alien invasion, cannily inverts and crosses identities of colonized and colonizers, self and other.

Reverse colonial sci-fi don't always have to be anti-imperialist, though. Ender's Game, both film and book, use the invasion of the superior aliens not as a critique of Western expansion and genocide, but as an excuse for those things. The bugs invade human worlds, and the consequence is that the humans must utterly annihilate the alien enemy, even if Ender feels kind of bad about it. Olympus Has Fallen runs on the same script, as a North Korea with impossibly advanced weapons technology lays sci-fi siege to the White House, giving our hero the go-ahead for torture, murder, and generalized carnage. In Terminator, as well, the fact that the robots are treating us as inhumanly as we treated them doesn't exactly create any sympathy. Instead, the paranoid fear of servants overthrowing masters just becomes a spur to uberviolence (as shown in Linda Hamilton's transformation from naïve good girl to paramilitary extremist). The one heroic reprogrammed Terminator, who must do everything John Connor tells him even unto hopping on one leg, doesn't inspire a broader sympathy for SkyNet. Instead, Schwarzenegger is good because he identifies with the humans totally, sacrificing himself to destroy his own people. Terminator II is, in a lot of ways, a retelling of Gunga Din.

On the one hand, then, the reverse colonial stories in sci-fi can be used as a way to sympathize with those who suffer under colonialism. It puts the imperialists in the place of the Tasmanians and says, this could be you, how do you justify your violence now? On the other hand, reverse colonial stories can erase those who are at the business end of imperial terror, positing white European colonizers as the threatened victims in a genocidal race war , thereby justifying any excess of violence. Often, though, sci-fi does both at once—as, Rieder argues, Wells does in The War of the Worlds, which both sympathizes with the oppressed and suggests that survival-of-the-fittest colonial exploitation is natural, inevitable, and unstoppable (there is, after all, no talking to the Martians—or, therefore, to the Tasmanians?).

The fact that colonialism is so central to science-fiction, and that science-fiction is so central to our own pop culture, suggests that the colonial experience remains more tightly bound up with our political life and public culture than we sometimes like to think. Sci-fi, then, doesn’t just demonstrate future possibilities, but future limits—the extent to which dreams of what we'll do remain captive to the things we've already done.

“The fact that colonialism is so central to science-fiction, and that science-fiction is so central to our own pop culture, suggests that the colonial experience remains more tightly bound up with our political life and public culture than we sometimes like to think.”

— The Atlantic discusses the link between science fiction and colonialism. (via ceeturnalia)

[filosofablogger]

This 'Man' Is NOT A Hero!!! -- An Update

I am reprising this post from May 18, 2023 with an update from yesterday.  The man you are about to read about, a man, Daniel Penny, who killed a homeless Black man without cause on a subway last year, went to trial this week.  The charge was 2nd degree manslaughter, a crime for which he could have received up to 15 years in prison.  But the jury was deadlocked.  The judge sent them back to…

[squareblind]

Loop Hero – why do gaming gods do bad things?

By Neil Merrett Loop Hero, released on Nintendo Switch in 2021, Developed by Four Quarters Loop Hero charges players to be a god-like being that does bad things in order to make a good hero.  It turns out that a theological exploration of why we seek to make meaning out of traps and spider-pits can also make a pretty entertaining rogue-like adventure. The ‘god sim’ was a term coined in the…

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

John Darków, Columbia Missourian

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 10, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 11, 2024

Hurricane Milton made landfall yesterday evening as a Category 3 storm just south of Sarasota, Florida. Before the hurricane hit, thirty-eight tornadoes swept across thirteen counties in the state, putting about 1.26 million people under a tornado advisory. With the hurricane came high winds and water, including ten to twenty inches of rain in the Tampa area. And, although it was not the worst-case scenario people feared, eleven people are dead and about three million are without power because of the storm. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been on the ground since before the storm hit. 

In election news, today, The Atlantic endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. This is only the fifth time since its founding in 1857 that The Atlantic has endorsed a presidential candidate. It is the third time it has endorsed Trump’s opponent. It also endorsed Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964 when he ran against extremist Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. And in 1860 it endorsed Abraham Lincoln. 

The Atlantic’s endorsement of Harris echoes its earlier endorsement of Lincoln, not only in its thorough dislike of Trump as “one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history”—an echo of its 1860 warning that this election “is a turning-point in our history”—but because both endorsements show a new press challenging an older system.

In Public Notice today, Noah Berlatsky listed the many articles claiming that Harris is avoiding the press, including most recently a social media post from Politico’s Playbook that read: “After avoiding the media for neigh [sic] on her whole campaign, Kamala Harris is…still largely avoiding the media.” Berlatsky pointed out that Harris has taken questions from reporters as she campaigns and has sat down with the National Association of Black Journalists, CNN, Spanish language radio station Uforia, and Action News in Pennsylvania, and did a presidential debate with ABC News. Earlier this week, she appeared on 60 Minutes.

With Trump refusing to participate in another presidential debate, Vice President Harris today accepted CNN’s invitation to a live, televised town hall on October 23 in Pennsylvania. In the announcement, Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon noted that Trump has confined his recent appearances to conservative media.

Indeed, Trump backed out of a 60 Minutes interview and has appeared only on the shows of loyalists. And yet, Berlatsky points out, he is not receiving similar criticism. Indeed, observers note that Trump has tended to get far more favorable coverage than his mental slips, open embrace of Nazi racism, fantastical lies, and criminal indictments deserve. 

In a piece today, Matt Gertz of the media watchdog Media Matters reports that five major newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post—produced nearly four times as many articles about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2016 in the week after then–FBI director James Comey announced new developments in the story than they did about the unsealing of a new filing in Trump’s federal criminal indictment for alleged crimes related to the January 6 insurrection earlier this month. 

“None of the papers ran even half as many Trump indictment stories as they did on Clinton’s server,” Gertz wrote. “Indeed, every paper ran more front-page stories that mentioned Clinton’s server [than] they did total stories that referenced Trump’s indictment.” “The former president continues to benefit from news outlets grading him on a massive curve,” Gertz wrote, “resulting in relatively muted coverage for his nakedly authoritarian, unfathomably racist, and allegedly criminal behavior.”

On Tuesday, October 8, Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter of the Columbia Journalism Review outlined Trump’s longstanding attack on the U.S. media as “fake news,” an attack that is ongoing and obvious. (Just today, he threatened CBS and “all other Broadcast Licenses, because they are just as corrupt as CBS—and maybe even WORSE!”)

Bassin and Potter note that in his attacks on the media, Trump is following the pattern of authoritarians like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who attacked media critics with audits, investigations, and harassment until he “drove independent media from the field.” They also note the observation of Timothy Snyder, a scholar of authoritarianism, that power is often freely given to an authoritarian in anticipation of punishment, what Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.” 

And yet, in the past in the U.S., when the media has appeared to become captive to established interests, new media have begun to give a voice to the opposition. In the 1850s, when elite enslavers stopped the circulation of newspapers and books calling for abolition, they prompted an explosion of new media that expressed the sentiments of those opposed to the expansion of human enslavement. Editor Horace Greeley led the way with the New-York Tribune in the 1840s. He was keenly aware of the importance of the new press and, as an early convert to the Republican Party, led his paper to become the anchor of a string of new Republican newspapers across the North—including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times—that spread the party’s ideology. 

The Atlantic Monthly’s endorsement of Lincoln in 1860 was part of that movement, and poet James Russell Lowell, who wrote the endorsement, mocked the idea that the press should avoid causing trouble. “We are gravely requested to have no opinion, or, having one, to suppress it, on the one topic that has occupied caucuses, newspapers, Presidents’ messages, and congress, for the last dozen years, lest we endanger the safety of the Union…. In a democracy it is the duty of every citizen to think.”

Harris has nodded to established media, but as Berlatsky points out, there is very little payoff for her in focusing on those venues, since those audiences are generally already quite attuned to politics and are looking for new developments and scandals. In contrast, winning in 2024 means turning out new voters by finding new venues that offer them a political voice. Harris has recognized that media shift by focusing her media appearances on podcasts like Call Her Daddy, radio shows like Howard Stern’s, and television shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The View. 

Campaign staffer Victor Shi noted that, based on averages, Harris’s appearance on Call Her Daddy reached 5 million people, The View, 2.45 million; Howard Stern, 10 million; and Stephen Colbert, 3.2 million—in all, 25 million or more people that traditional media do not reach. (Shi also called attention to the fact that on October 9, the campaign live streamed an Arizona rally by Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz on the World of Warcraft Twitch stream.)  

The Atlantic nodded to the free thought on which the magazine was founded in 1857 when it came out strongly for Harris today. It is endorsing Harris, it said, because she “respects the law and the Constitution. She believes in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all Americans. She’s untainted by corruption, let alone a felony record or a history of sexual assault. She doesn’t embarrass her compatriots with her language and behavior, or pit them against one another. She doesn’t curry favor with dictators. She won’t abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it. She believes in democracy. These, and not any specific policy positions, are the reasons The Atlantic is endorsing her.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[thatstormygeek]

For a huge, wealthy nation like the US, framing spending as a series of trade-offs rarely makes sense. The US does not have to choose between (for example) pulling people out of poverty and making sure everyone is vaccinated. It can and should do both—not least because disease can push people into poverty and poverty can be an incubator for contagion.

The question for spending for the US should be, “Does spending on this advance public welfare? Will this increase abundance and flourishing? Or will it cause harm?”

The $8.7 billion for Israeli aid is bad because you should not provide military aid to a country committing war crimes. But that $8.7 billion did not deplete US resources. It did not prevent Biden from sending disaster aid; it did not prevent him from spending $27 billion on climate change. Arguing that it did is simply false. It’s a lie. And lies do not help the Palestinian cause. They simply make you look like a liar who can be dismissed. More, this particular lie is a reactionary right-wing talking point that has been deployed for decades to kneecap progressive priorities, at home and abroad. ... When the GOP says they care about deficits, what they mean is that they hate spending on things they don’t like and want more spending on things they do like. “Responsible budgeting” just means, “Republican spending priorities.” The GOP has absolutely zero interest in balancing budgets—which is why deficits consistently spike under Republican presidents. It’s hard to control the deficit if you change the meaning of the term “deficit” to mean “spending I don’t like” and change the term “balanced budget” to mean “spending priorities I like”.  For purposes of the war on budgeting, Republicans pretend that the US is poor or struggling financially. They argue that we can’t afford to forgive student loans, lift people out of poverty, provide free healthcare to all, and pay for the nation’s defense. So, they argue, we should just pay for bombs.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice:

Just three days after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Harris has already secured enough delegates to be the presumptive Democratic nominee. The speed with which the party came together around her is inspiring. Harris has been endorsed by almost everyone who matters in Democratic politics — senators, governors, key organizations, unions. She’s also raised some $100 million and counting from more than 880,000 small donors, more than 60 percent of whom hadn’t contributed before this cycle. If anyone was on the fence about whether Biden stepping aside was the right move, they probably aren’t now.

The past three days have been a remarkable display of Democratic consensus and unity after a bitter intra-party argument over whether Biden should be the nominee. The rush to support Harris also indicates that the party believes she can beat the Republican candidate — giant orange fascist blight Donald Trump. New Harris-Trump polling started trickling out yesterday, and it contained good news for Democrats. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken entirely after Biden announced his decision to step aside showed Harris up two points nationally (and up four points when RFK Jr. is included). Another poll showed Harris and Trump tied. Given that Harris just had her first rally as the presumptive candidate yesterday, we’ll need more time to figure out exactly how the race has changed. But there are already a number of reasons to be hopeful about her prospects of winning this November.

Unifying looked easy. It’s not.

The first indication of Harris’s strength is … well, pretty much everything that’s happened since Sunday. Harris has been pilloried over the last four years as a middling politician, largely on the grounds that she suspended her 2020 presidential campaign before Iowa. The reliably confused Pamela Paul at the New York Times, for example, argued this week that “Harris is a fundamentally weak candidate” who “fizzled out” in the presidential race. As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein points out, though, Harris’s candidacy didn’t fizzle out. She had solid endorsements and decent polling — but she figured out that Biden was too far ahead to beat in a very crowded field and dropped out early. That allowed her to stay on good terms with party actors and put her in a position to get the vice presidency. That’s not losing. It’s winning.

[...]

Harris and abortion rights

Harris is also well positioned to run on some of the central issues of the election. In particular, she’s a good voice for the party on abortion, which has been an especially energizing issue since the Supreme Court gutted abortion rights in its Dobbs decision in 2022. The Dobbs decision was hugely unpopular and remains so, even in Republican strongholds — anti-abortion measures in deep red states like Ohio and Kentucky have gone down to defeat. Democratic strength in the 2022 and 2023 off-year elections have been attributed by most analysts to the electorate’s support for abortion rights. Democrats are fighting to get abortion referendums on the ballot in November in states like including Arizona, Nebraska, and Florida. Despite Democratic successes under his watch, Biden has always been an imperfect messenger on abortion rights. A devout Catholic, he started his career by arguing that the Roe decision protecting abortion rights “went too far.”

Biden is now solidly pro-choice, and his administration has of course defended abortion rights, most recently winning a Supreme Court case defending abortion pills. But his ambivalence lingers. Even in 2023, after Dobbs, Biden was careful to note his own personal discomfort with abortion procedures, stating in one speech, “I happen to be a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion.” Immediately following the Dobbs ruling, Biden’s administration struggled to come up with a strong rhetorical or policy response. He’s also been weirdly reluctant to even say the word “abortion” in speeches. Harris has no such reticence. She visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in March; she’s believed to be the first president or vice president to ever visit a clinic providing abortion services.

[...]

Harris the prosecutor

On Monday, in her first big speech after Biden’s endorsement, Harris emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and said it put her in a strong position to make the case against Trump. “I was a courtroom prosecutor,” she said. “In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type.” She hit the same theme yesterday during her first campaign rally as the presumptive Democratic nominee. It was so well received by her audience in suburban Milwaukee that the crowd broke out in “KA-MA-LA! KA-MA-LA!” chants.

The contrast here is glaring. A jury found Trump liable for sexually assaulting writer and journalist E. Jean Carroll; he’s been accused of sexual assault and harassment by numerous other women. He was convicted of fraud for misvaluing assets in New York. A jury convicted him of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments before the 2016 election. He also faces charges involving mishandling of classified documents and illegally attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

Harris got her start in politics, as she says, as a prosecutor. As San Francisco’s DA and California’s AG, she went after fraudsters engaged in Trump-like scams. She obtained a $1.1 billion judgment against for-profit Corinthian College for fraud (Trump, for his part, agreed to a $25 million settlement after his so-called Trump University was sued for deceptive practices). She also won an $18 billion settlement against large banks for foreclosure misconduct. (Trump is promising massive deregulation of Wall Street.) Parts of Harris’s record in California are controversial with progressives. She threatened to prosecute parents of chronically absent children. No one was actually sent to jail, but as a policy, using prisons to threaten struggling parents is not a great precedent. Her record has also been criticized by sex workers and by drug law reformers (she prosecuted 1,900 people for marijuana violations). But Harris’s background as a prosecutor isn’t as much of a problem for her today as it was when she was running for president in 2019 — before covid, the George Floyd murder, and the ensuing spike in crime across the country. She’s also no longer running against Democrats — she’s running against Trump, whose criminal justice policies are nightmarish.

Project 2025, the Heritage Project blueprint for a Trump second term, is rabidly anti-sex worker; it proposes criminalizing porn as a step towards criminalizing trans and LGBT people (whose very existence the right considers pornographic). And Trump wants to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, a massive undertaking that evokes histories of police states and concentration camps.

Noah Berlatsky wrote in Public Notice about how Kamala Harris has united Democrats in her short time as the presumptive nominee.

Harris’s robust defense of abortion rights and her prosecutor record are her biggest assets this election.

[hero-israel]

There was a Shoah movie where the Jews fought back: Defiance, and everyone HATED IT because they projected some kind of judgment onto the Jews who "went quietly to their deaths" when that wasn't the message of that movie at all. So it doesn't really matter whether the Jews resist their genocidal oppression or not, it'll get criticized and problematized and thinkpiecified no matter what.

I also find it funny that Schindler's List has nothing to "teach" because it is literally a Hollywood structure of the Hero's Journey. Oskar Schindler has to learn about Jewish suffering and to value Jewish life, and use every tool in his arsenal to try to save the people he grows to care about. Several Jewish characters lecture him on their plight and he goes from dismissive to never being able to bear the psychological weight of not getting just 1 or 2 more Jews out.

It's a movie about the man who has everything to gain from exploited Jewish labor and suffering, who is barely moved by the oppression he sees, to being horrified by the dehumanization and slaughter taking place, who risks everything to rescue as many people as he can. It's a parable of what it is the average person's responsibility to do. The message is clear: If you find yourself being an Oskar Schindler in times of oppression and genocide, your duty is to become the kind of person he became.

Like sorry I won't stand for Schindler's List slander!

SL is in very rare company, if not unique, in being a Holocaust film that is historically accurate, artfully made, and - this term seems really inappropriate - "watchable." I've watched it twice and could see myself watching it a third time someday, likely when my kids are old enough. It has legitimate educational, historical value.

It also has shortcomings. It sets viewer expectations to normalize Gentile saviors, grateful Jews, quasi-happy endings. It is very, very much the exception to the rule of those years. A more fair, representative movie about the Holocaust was "The Gray Zone." Relentlessly bleak, tortuously painful, the Jews do scrape together an uprising, then they all die anyway. It's really what history classes should be watching, I'm sure most teachers wouldn't dare, and having watched it once myself I'm sure I can't sit through it again.

[floral-ashes]

Read my latest interview with Noah Berlatsky on Parker Molloy’s The Present Age!

[azspot]

Poverty can lead to trauma, anxiety, stress, and counterproductive coping mechanisms. But the cause of poverty isn't some moral failing. The cause of poverty is not having enough money. Human beings are imperfect; everyone has moral failings—me, you, even J.D. Vance. But some people have a trustfund safety net to catch them when they fall, and others don't. It's not Bob who's the moral monster, here. It's a system that expects endless, grinding work from those on the bottom, and gives the profits to folks who barely have to lift a finger, much less a tile, over the whole course of their lives.

Noah Berlatsky