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rumandtimes · 3 years

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Jennifer Weiner is an Idiot

Rudolf Hunzaker

Dredge Report Contributor

Jennefer Weiner proposes the source of the abortion debate: Men

Jennifer Weiner is a millionaire author of women’s fiction, and regular contributor to the NYTimes

Weiner wrote an opinion article titled, “The Flagrant Sexual Hypocrisy of Conservative Men,” published in the New York Times, where Weiner listed a handful of examples of anti-abortion conservatives who wanted to get abortions themselves.

There are two glaring problems with that premise: Falsely conflating the Conservative Party with the Republican Party; And attempting to defeat an argument through isolated cases and ad hominem insults — personal attacks on the speaker — rather than a substantive refutation of the issue being discussed.

Misrepresenting the Issue

Weiner wants to pose the entire issue of abortion as one of sexism, dishonesty, and greed. In Weiner’s world, the only reason anyone would oppose abortion is because they hate women and they just don’t know it yet.

Weiner contributed this article to the New York Times off the back of a particular story; two separate Republican politicians both pressured their partners to have abortions, then later advocated against abortion to the American people.

This seems like a cut-and-dry scandal for those two men, not a broad disqualification of the anti-abortion lobby. However, Weiner then attempts to universalise the issue — of men being evil, apparently — by jumping over to the United Kingdom with the idea of convincing her audience that men all over the English-speaking world are just as bad.

Weiner mentions an interview The Independent did with Jacob Rees-Mogg. Mogg is a multimillionaire investor in international conglomerates, and the Independent discovered that one of the companies his trust is associated with sells a drug that women in the Pacific use to achieve secret abortions.

With an antiquated affectation, fusty clothing, obscene amounts of money, and minority Catholic belief structure, Jacob Rees-Mogg has been a caricature in British politics since his emergence. Part of that Catholicism is to follow the line of the Pope on everything he does.

As a part of this, Mogg says that he is opposed to abortion, opposed to homosexuality, and believes that a man does not have any obligation to be at home nor any responsibility to his children (who are to be raised by the wife and the nanny) – all on the basis that the Pope and the Catholic church are generally speaking for and against these practices.

When questioned further if Rees-Mogg believes that gay people and women should have their ‘freedoms’ revoked, he stated that he personally believed choices be disagreed with to be immoral, but admitted imposing his beliefs on others and wresting established rights from people would undermine their representative free will in an inconceivably obscene act that would be improbable to succeed. Broadly speaking, Mogg understands he is in the minority opinion, and therefore not focused on imposing it, but equally unwilling to change.

When the Independent questions Mogg on the abortions affiliated with his companies, Mogg points to the fact that abortions are banned in Indonesia, the medication his companies sell are used for a different purpose, and he himself does not control the investments and divestments of his funds while he is an active Member of Parliament.

Weiner never quotes the interview, and never even alludes to the fact that Mogg actually gave a response, where he said that he was personally against abortion but it was out of his hands what people choose to do individually and he refused to demonise the women in Indonesia that misuse products his financial advisors happen to have investments in.

This is the quote Weiner has about Jacob Rees-Mogg:

“The double standards confined by America’s borders. In Britain, an anti-abortion member of Parliament named Jacob Rees-Moggs did not urge a mistress to end a pregnancy. Yay for him.

Mr. Rees-Moggs, however, who opposes abortion even in cases of rape, runs an investment firm that has money in an Indonesian pharmaceutical company that sells abortifacients ‘widely used in illegal abortions in Indonesia,’ according to the British newspaper The Independent…

‘Life begins at conception,’ as Mr. Rees-Moggs said in a debate, unless that life begins inside of a poor brown-skinned woman half a world away, and there’s money to be made from helping her to end it.

It’s almost as if these men don’t really believe that every time sperm and egg combine, the result is a child worthy of being cherished and protected.

It’s almost as if these men are fighting to make abortion a crime because they’re more invested in curtailing women’s options and controlling their bodies than they are with saving innocent lives.”

Weiner corrected the article later to change the spelling from “Moggs” to “Mogg,” and to partly explain Weiner’s error, the word “Mogg” is changed to “Moggs” by spell-check, and, after all, Weiner never actually read the article she mentioned, instead grabbing at the headline as another outlier datapoint for her op-ed in “the Times.”

Weiner’s entire article starts to read like a hitlist of men she doesn’t like, and who have been under scrutiny for a scandal. She reads out the names of eight or so names, all of men, a paragraph each to explain their scandal, but not all of them are Republicans or politicians, and not even all of them have anything to do with abortion.

Attack after attack is aimed not at defending the abortion debate, but at undermining the credibility, or at least the morality, of all men; Hashtag-yes-all-men. Grasping at straws, Weiner starts tossing people in who are completely unrelated to the topic, and as far as Jacob Rees-Mogg is concerned, she doesn’t cite her sources credibly, doesn’t objectively cover the issue, and misattributes the actual scandal.

When posed with the question of abortion, Mogg characteristically deflects this problem, at the same time bringing attention to how abortion anything but a solved debate, by saying he is just following the guidance of the Catholic church. When Weiner goes on to attack Mogg anyway for disliking abortion, that is by transitive blame an attack on the Catholic church.

If Weiner wants to call all of Catholicism patriarchal dumbasses, why not go ahead and say it how she really feels? Why hide behind attacking Mogg?, who himself clearly has no shame in very brazenly hiding behind the Catholic church.

Not only does Jennifer Weiner mask her attack on the anti-abortion movement by seeking out isolated, male targets like Mogg and purposely misrepresenting their positions as ideological cannon fodder, but Weiner also brings one out of leftfield and calls Rees-Mogg a racist.

Full disclosure: I find Jacob Rees-Mogg to be a profoundly tedious boy-child, in a man’s ill-tailored suits. If he hadn’t inherited his parent’s money and title, then he likely would have been bullied in his years into forming a personality. Mogg is very full of himself, and mistakenly views his condescending tone as politeness and his convoluted speech as witty. But that does not mean owning stocks in an Indonesian company is all-of-a-sudden racist, and Weiner is completely off-the-wall for making such a frayed suggestion in the first place.

This is the part you won’t hear from Weiner, yet is part of the article she vulture-grabbed: Jacob Rees-Mogg is the founder and a major shareholder in Somerset Capital Management LLP, an investment firm that focuses on developing countries and “frontier markets” in Asia. Somerset Capitol is a “mid-cap” company, worth somewhere around £4-6 Billion pounds, that he started after leaving stints at the Llyod-George and Rothschild investments.

Mogg had a mediocre role as a moneyman before turning to politics around the age of 40. Politics truly attracts the lowest of the world, as no one else would give up their livelihood for elected office. Mogg’s company was handed over to dozens of hedge fund managers who took charge of running it into a multibillion dollar enterprise in Asia, of which a few tens or hundred millions Mogg has his entitlement hands on.

Somerset Capitol holds stock in Kalbe Pharmaceuticals, a trillion-dollar Big Pharma company with a big B-P, located in Indonesia.

One of the drugs Kalbe manufactures as part of that trillion-with-a-t dollar industry is called misoprostol, a type of stomach medicine that lines the stomach to protect against stomach acids, often recommended to patients with stomach ulcers. If taken vaginally, misoprostol blocks two hormones in pregnant women, called “hCG” and “progesterone,” resulting in the foetus stopping development and being cut off from nutrients, then being ejected from the woman’s body.

In the United Kingdom and the United States, misoprostol is a common ulcer medication, and administered as part of a “drug cocktail” given to abortion patients. In Indonesia, abortion is mostly illegal. This is not for Islamic religious reasons, as many (non-Arabic) Muslims believe in permitting early abortions, but because most abortions are frowned upon Indonesia requires strict rules for the abortion patients to go through.

Misoprostol is marketed by the pharmaceutical companies as a stomach medicine, but widely known to terminate pregnancies safely up to 20 weeks, with cramping as a side effect, so Indonesian women are commonly aware of the possibility to have an abortion.

Jacob Rees-Mogg no longer has control over the investments that Somerset Capitol makes; long having been removed from the leadership and decision-making process, he is primarily a shareholder, not even himself a client of (formerly) his own firm.

He doesn’t have a say one way or the other, nor is he in a position to really move that money if he did have a problem with the drug. After all, misoprostol is both a stomach and abortion medicine, and just because Mogg follows indirect stock prices from its sale in Indonesia does not mean that this is somehow a wrong stance, or even a pro-abortion stance; Mogg’s company does not even primarily promote the abortifacient usage type.

It is not entirely clear why the authors even singled out Indonesia, because Somerset has dealings all over Asia. Kalbe is just one company, selling one product (misoprostol), in one country (Indonesia), that happens to be sold all over the world. Picking on Indonesia allowed Weiner to make her racist attack on the people of Indonesia, wanting to shift that racism over to Mogg.

Mogg never said anything about Indonesia people’s skin or about poor people’s lives not mattering — Weiner said that; Weiner made things racist out of nowhere. The article was supposed to be about hating men, not about hating Indonesians.

And by the way, the population of Indonesia is larger than that of the United States, so hardly a lightweight nation to be slagged off in an aside the way Jennifer Weiner dismisses the population in her comments.

In fact, Weiner makes a very disturbing assertion. As a pro-choice, pro-abortion, anti-life advocate, Weiner actually made the statement that allowing abortion in Indonesia contributed to killing off poor people, as if their lives and their voices don’t matter.

As an American abortion advocate, Weiner seemingly should be arguing that abortion access needs to be expanded in Indonesia, and in America, but in her attempt to make anti-choice Mogg look like a profiteer of abortions, she openly acquaints abortion with death, and then accuses that Mogg must value English lives more than Indonesian lives as the motivation for Rees-Mogg opposes abortion in Parliament yet profits from it at Kalbe; Weiner is positing that the only explanation is Mogg values English lives more, and that is why he opposes abortion in England.

It sounds like Jennifer Weiner is anti-abortion, since she feels that allowing abortions in Indonesia is tantamount to killing poor people and exploiting foreign women’s bodies; Or does she want more British and American women to kill their children as well? It’s a startling and incomprehensible comparison to come from a pro-choice advocate.

Weiner, again, completely missed the point of Jacob Rees-Mogg opposing abortion on the grounds of Catholicism. Mogg is not alone in this. Abortion is also outlawed in Ireland, Poland, and former Spanish colonies — all European countries – and legal in Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, Russia, Denmark, Canada, Turkey, and Romania – pretty European countries as well.

Making abortion into a Europe versus third world conflict just doesn’t work, especially since neither region is completely on one side or the other; and when Indonesia has trillionaire businesses wandering around, it sounds like an incomplete assessment for them to really be considered third-world anymore.

Wiener needs to pick a side:

(1) Either pro-abortion undermines the rights of poor women by sterilising them and terminating their offspring in unsupervised treatments;

(2) Or anti-abortion undermines the rights of poor women by forcing them to carry unwanted children to term and bear a burden that stupid men could never understand.

Weiner wants to paint the concept of abortions as men having control over women, and doesn’t offer any substantial comment on why women should actually have access to abortions instead of just trying to come up with reasons why men shouldn’t be part of the conversation, settling on the conclusion that some men have done some bad things some of the time, so therefore all the opinions of all non-women must be useless, which is completely unhelpful and thin, if not completely insane.

As just a single rebuttal to Weiner’s point: If men did get pregnant and experience a more personal effect from abortions, like in Weiner’s hypothetical, there is no reason to believe that some men wouldn’t still oppose abortion.

Both Stances Contradictory

The obvious support for this thought is that there are women today who believe abortion is wrong, and pro-life women still get pregnant, and are still women, whether they believe abortion is permissible or not. Not to mention some women oppose abortions for others yet do not hesitate to get abortions for themselves — and the word for those women might just be “hypocritical.”

Being hypocritical might not be such a bad thing. I oppose factory farming yet it’s impractical to go the all-organic, free-range, ethically-raised, kosher-friendly abattoir everyday. If I could snap my fingers and make everyone in the world vegan and vegetarian — or at the least kosher, ethical, humane, and halal — I would. In the absence of that power to topple every complication and impose a panacea solution in a day, people just make due with what they have.

There are probably many people out there who feel abortion is wrong, but weigh an internal balance that drives then to an excruciating conclusion that a child or a pregnancy is too much. Shaming people for changing their minds is essentially pointless. If Weiner is driven by the belief that politicians have a power and responsibility that other people do not, that probably overestimates the influence that a single politician has.

It might be justified to point out cracks in the unified Republican’s pro-life stance. Weiner provides embellished examples of Republicans who are anti-choice, anti-abortion, and pro-life, but wanted abortions when it counted.

Saying that, it is equally as justified in response to point out that in each of those examples Weiner makes, one of those Republicans was pushed to resign, and the other was a doctor fined $1500 for having affairs with multiple patients and condemned by Congress for lying about that and the abortion scandal under oath (he did not resign).

Pro-lifers, and Catholics, probably don’t like abortions, but still probably get them. Telling other people not to get an abortion is easy, but not to getting an abortion when you want one is hard, and people more often than not are weak. A lapse in judgement doesn’t necessarily mean that expanded access for those lapses is a good thing, nor does it mean that moralists should be listened to in the slightest, since personal morals are a bad place to start building public policy.

Weiner is picking and choosing examples here, rather haphazardly. Demonising opponents doesn’t contribute much to the conversation, and in fact, it contributes nothing at all. Abortion advocates have to admit that, at some level, all abortions are somewhat hypocritical, since most women chose to have sex knowing they would get pregnant, and regardless, at a certain point the rights and comforts of the mother are abolished in favour of the rights and protections of the child.

Abortion advocates disagree where that number goes — how many days and weeks separate a true human life from a potential human life. The point is, it would be dishonest to say such artificial lines aren’t hypocritical as well.

Consider that in the most countries where there is abortion, and abortion is considered “accepted” and “commonplace,” there is a time limit of a certain number of weeks, after which an abortion is stopped.

Now consider people like Francesca Minerva, who believes that there is no material difference between a second trimester foetus, a third trimester foetus, and a new-born baby. At first this sounds like the belief of someone anti-abortion, but Minerva is just the opposite. Minerva believes that abortions, late-term abortions, and killing of infants should be legal and widely practised. Anti-abortionists would consider Minerva to be the evil conclusion of the pro-choice movement.

Taking a moment to point out the joint hypocrisy that could exist on such an issue:

Pro-life advocates who believe in life at conception and are more horrified at the murder of infants than the killing of foetuses are hypocrites in placing more value on a baby’s life than a pregnancy;

Pro-choice advocates like Minerva who allow abortions up to a certain point are also hypocrites, just Minerva point out. The very obvious problem with Minerva taking the pro-life argument to it’s conclusion, as she sees it, is that stabbing babies because they’re unintelligent sounds a lot like murder. Some call it “after-birth abortions” and others call it “infanticide,” but everyone agrees that once the umbilical cord is cut, a child has an unassailable right to life.

Minerva is a philosophy professor, not a doctor, and a bad philosopher at that. Minerva poses the idea that infants are not human under her definition, because “human” refers to cognitive function that occurs a few weeks or months after birth. Minerva then moves on to suppose that killing babies and terminating foetuses is the same thing.

Minerva wants to make this sound like a novel and provocative position, but it is actually a very old proposal, going back centuries, to philosophers discussing what the nature and morality of pain is. Those ancient philosophers debated whether infants feel pain, and if they don’t, if it was acceptable to kill them under the maxim, “everything is permitted which does not cause harm.” The solution to the problem was to abandon “pain” and “harm” as the singular metrics for morality.

Minerva makes a horrible miscalculation, by suggesting abortion and infanticide are the same thing. In the case of a baby, the health and the rights of the mother are never a concern, because the baby has already been carried to term and delivered. That severely weakens the case for ending the offspring’s life, because the calculus has shifted entirely away from the bodily agency of the mother, and into her social responsibility as a parent, a role which is typically held as absolute in society, and nonetheless can be resolved or abandoned without killing the baby.

Minerva also makes the assertion life in general is not meaningful, and that unintelligent life can be killed or terminated under unlimited circumstances. This not only is a monstrous thing to suggest, but does not represent abortion advocates. Abortion is permitted because a foetus requires a gestation period intimately attached to another human being, and until a healthy birth occurs that process can be very costly and very risky. Absent the requirement of a pregnancy or catastrophic health concerns, abortion would never be considered acceptable, because there would be no mitigating concerns regarding the parents to consider.

Without a need for pregnancies, abortions would become obsolete and irrelevant. If foetuses were self-productive, there would be no pro-choice movement, because there would be no choice to make.

Minerva’s argument that unintelligent life, or lie that cannot feel pain or store memories, can be killed without a second thought, would also have cruel and murderous consequences for animal life, plant life, microbiological life, and any invertebrate system of life lacking a nervous system. Despite life forms not being human or deep thinkers, including babies, it is not acceptable to disregard the value of their lives. In most societies, killing animals grotesquely and wastefully is not considered murder, but it is considered immoral and damaging of the environment.

Both sides of the abortion issue can contradict themselves or seem hypocritical, but part of the reason for that is that choosing a side and sticking to it on every single issue can be impractical and self-defeating. If pro-choice truly had no value of life, they would turn out to be murderers. If anti-choice truly had no value of personal agency, they would

Rather than demonise the opposition, it would be more useful to address the issue. There are places where people agree. An easy one is this: Everyone agrees that, regardless if the mother wants the child or not, once the child has reached the point of forming permanent memories, around six to nine months of age, that life is secured. Once someone is born, breathing with their own lungs, moving with their own muscles, it is illegal in every country to kill them.

Finding two or more unrelated examples in the headlines of politicians lying to secure votes for their conservative constituencies does not belie some conspiracy that all men are cheaters or that the pro-life lobby is morally bankrupt. That doesn’t mean blocking abortion is a good thing, but the causal link the author tries heavily to imply in a very man-hating way just isn’t there.

If Weiner wants to show that abortion is misogynist or that the Republican party is dishonest, and that the two are somehow related, then clear and direct examples back by sanguine arguments are required, not just listing a palette of this politician who lied, or that pro-lifer who hated women — especially when those examples have absolutely nothing to do with one another and aren’t connected into a cohesive argument by the author.

Everyone can agree that a politician who lied to his constituents is a liar, and that a man who threatened his partner to do something she didn’t want to did something deeply wrong. What that doesn’t have to mean is that all of a sudden everyone has to now consider the abortion debate solved, because somehow, quote: “Conservatives = Men = Hypocrites.”

False Equivalency

The second is that conservatives in the United States are “Red Republicans,” and conservatives in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth countries are “Blue Conservatives,” and these two movements may share a name but are almost completely different in every other aspect of policy.

Perhaps most importantly, the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom is, on the whole, pro-choice; Whereas the Republican Party of the United States has a mix of anti-choice and pro-abortion factions, state by state.

Jennifer Weiner claims ‘conservative men in the U.K. are misogynist hypocrites’ while failing to realise that British Conservatives support abortion rights. Jacob Rees-Mogg is an outlier in the party and that outlier is not some kind of political stance but solely due to his Catholic personal life, while the majority of the party is Anglican or nominally-Anglican.

It is also worth noting that American ‘conservatives’ are social conservatives that support big government and welfare programs, like subsidies and form deregulation, and are not fiscally conservative at all.

Meanwhile, British Conservatives support cuts to welfare programs, underfunding ‘public’ or free education, and anti-immigration policies.

(In the U.K. “public schools” are actually private, referring to the idea that private schools are open to anyone who can afford to pay just as “publicly-traded corporations” use the word “public” — in a similar way that “estate houses” or “council estates” are actually public housing, which is the opposite of how these words are used in America.)

However, Conservatives do support rich immigrants, most conspicuously from Christian or Hindu backgrounds and Commonwealth countries, and agree that healthcare is a human right.

British Conservatives are a centre-right political party that has been moving to the right since Margaret Thatcher, while American conservatives are a far-right movement that has been radicalising into pseudo-fascism since the American Civil War.

The centre-right party in the States is actually the Democratic Party of the United States, and America has no significant centrist or centre-left movement. If anything, the largest American centrist party is called the Libertarian Party, and the largest centre-left (or leftist) party is called the Green Party USA.

The United Kingdom has a right-wing party under the Conservatives, and a number of centrist parties like the Liberal Democrats, to left-leaning parties like the Greens. The U.K. has a parliamentary system of government, not a congress, so a multitude of political parties form specific party platforms which allows voters to show their interests representationally compared to the size of those parties.

This also allows for specific interest groups like the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru (pronounced plu-eye-dd kk-uhh-m-ree) to represent the local interests of smaller populations, who are minorities in the nation as a whole, but majorities in their particular communities.

Whereas the Republican Party in the States usually gains the support of the uneducated and working class voters in America, the Labour Party in the United Kingdom is more aligned with protecting the interests of the working poor and defending access to healthcare and education and labour unions.

Rural voters in both countries are acquainted with populism and income insecurity.

American ‘fly-over’ Republicans support their party in the interest of business deregulation, while rural populations in England and Wales support Labour in order to gain more direct access to government assistance and investment in the absence of commercial opportunity. The Conservative party in Britian tends to appeal to urban voters more, but is seen as less liberal.

When Jennefer Weiner says that men are unequivacably the problem, that conservatives oppose abortion, and suggests all anti-abortionists are immoral and alike, she is grossly incorrect on each topic.

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rumandtimes · 3 years

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Why the Obama Presidency Failed

Cyril Straight

Assoc. Political Correspondent

The Obama Family Story and Accomplishments Aren’t as Inspiring as They Seem

When Americans look for progress in the political system, many often turn to Barack Obama, even if as nothing more than a symbol of that perceived progress. Obama is regarded not so much as a herald of progress for his actions, inasmuch as he is a talking piece for his vision and a visual beacon for both allies and opposition alike.

The sole reason for this interest in Obama is that, to some Americans, anything he does is viewed as a standing achievement. For Americans who play image politics, they pat themselves on the back as progressive for just liking, or even just tolerating Obama.

Sorry to say, Obama is a failed president. Barack Obama was one of those American presidents, like William Taft or Herbert Hoover, who were thoughtful and had a vision of what they wanted to achieve, but were in the end stunted by partisan opponents, and fundamentally indecisive on a wide host of issues.

To blame Senate Republicans for the failure and impotence of the Obama years expects that there was really nothing Obama, or another president, could have done to overcome it — that he was doomed to be ‘on a hiding to nothing’ for 8 years.

The “legacy” of the Obama Administration – the Affordable Healthcare Act – was indeed accomplished in the first two years of the Obama presidency, followed by 6 years of immobility after Democrats went from a majority government to a minority voice in both the House and the Senate. Obamacare, as it came to be known, was practically the only “Obamaesque” policy to survive Republican attacks in the individual states and the following four years of the Trump event.

Obama Democrats failed because they were a hermit government, sealed away into the capitol and issuing assessments on high down to the Democratic plebeians. Obama could not agree with Republicans because they were a deteriorating party, red-eyed, blood-in-the-water vultures after his election, so Obama’s first objective should have been to respond to party politics with party politics, and fight to retake the House and Senate.

Obama’s fence-sitting turned dyed-in-the-wool Democrats into dead-in-the-pool Democrats over a long, deflating siphon of power that culminated in Senate Republicans unconstitutionally blocking Obama’s supreme court nominee, and Nancy Pelosi ripping up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union Address on the House floor and ceremoniously signing copies of his impeachments, only to face near-unanimous defeat by the majority party in the Senate. For declawed, media-crazed politicians, theatre became more prevalent than power.

Instead, Obama walked a strange line of centrism: sidling up to Wall Street wherever he could, absorbing many Clinton Democrat policies into his playbook, and constantly stating that Americans need to reach across the aisle for bipartisan agreement.

Obama came off to many Americans as egotistical, arrogant, condescending, reclusive, pensive, cerebral, reticent, enigmatic, indiscernible, and naïve. Obama was hardly a natural-born leader, and stubbornly refused to play politics, viewing his office, and himself, as above it all.

The purpose of a party-electoral system is not to ensure constant compromise and divided government, as many cynical Americans have come to believe, but to have a party for each significant plan, or point of view, and let the electorate at large choose to what extent each view shall represent themselves in government.

American elections at a certain point almost seem to be decided by random or at a coin flip, often coming out 50-50, with a boost to the incumbent or to the challenger when the incumbent steps down. American government has two parties and is currently split in half between those parties, with Democrats controlling more of the population and Republicans controlling more of the institutions. It almost seems as if the American electorate does choose at random who they are going to vote for, as their voting habits are statistically resistant to responding to current events, or even party platforms.

Obama was a Democratic Party candidate, and while Wall Street is deep in the bones of both parties, it looks worse for Democrats to so blatantly join forces with them. Obama alienated progressives by taking a hard line for the Centre-Right at the start of his administration during the 2008 recession, fearful that Bush had caused a depression, Obama cherrypicked as many Clintonites and Wall Street hacks as he could before signing off on anything that would keep him from looking like the next Herbert Hoover.

For such an inexperienced politician, this was a major decision that would have consequences for not only the American people, but the world economy and even human culture for decades to come. The banks were now the enemy, and a superpolitical force manipulating governments in every nation, and at both ends of the ideological continuum.

Senator Bernie Sanders, a third-party candidate focused almost singularly on regulating the banks, wanted to primary Obama in 2012, but saw the threat Mitt Romney, a “Massachusetts Republican,” posed to Obama, a neo-Clinton Democrat, and decided to wait until 2016 to challenge Obama’s mentor/surrogate, one of the Clintons. Sanders probably viewed himself in no small degree as a Rooseveltian figure, a “bull-moose” determine to “bust up the banks.”

Obama and Clinton held different views on dressage issues, but Obama hired numerous aides from the Bill Clinton administration, several staffers from the Hillary Clinton campaign, and made Clinton one of his top five senior advisors, alongside David Axelrod, John Kerry, Jeh Johnson, and Joe Biden.

Secretary Clinton in the Obama Administration had far more power, influence, and visibility than Senator Clinton or First Lady Clinton did during the Bush and Clinton Administrations respectively. Clinton was both the driver and the fuel, but chained by the fact that her word could at any moment be vetoed by a fledgling politician who had spent more time as a professor at the University of Chicago than in legislature.

Obama never had a clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish, nor did he have the experience or temperament to be the person to make it happen. Obama spent more time reading briefs than drafting policy, and more time drafting policy than directing Congress to act. That would not be so much of a hinderance, except for the fact that Obama was a primarily legislation-focused president, as opposed to presidents like Polk who were focused primarily on controlling enforcement through the executive branch, rather than steering legislature through the veto power.

Even as a candidate Obama was wishy-washy, always focused more on ideas than realities. His stump speeches for change were ironically most appealing to people who wanted to avoid change, Obama turning out to be more of a caretaker president trying to gently steer the ship forward instead of be a mover and shaker.

Obama was always obsessed with the optics of his government, and put all his energy on youth and minority voters, but those people don’t vote in midterms, and Obama lost all three of his Congressional elections despite winning both of his presidential ones. Obama also sucked all the life out of the Democratic Party by skyrocketing to become its head and then sleeping on all the minutia directives the party wanted from him. The Democratic Party was in its weakest state after during the Obama years than in any time in recent memory.

The American psyche seemed to be cracking: 9-11 in 2001, the Patriot Act in 2002, the Afghan War in 2003, the Iraq War in 2004, Obama elected to the Senate in 2005, the atrocities at Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay in 2006, the Panama Papers in 2007, the election of Obama in 2008, the Great Recession in 2009, the Tea Party in 2010, the Snowden Whistleblower in 2011, on, and on, and on, until Trump called Mexicans rapists in 2015, the Panama Papers in 2016, Trump explodes the deficit in 2017, Trump ditches Cohen in 2018, Trump gets impeached in 2019, and Trump gets impeached for a second time in 2020. Obviously the dates have been changed for sequential effect, but the point is Americans were hit by existential scandal after scandal, each one contributing to an erosion in international reputation and an uptick in domestic strife.

After his opening façade to the Centre-Right with the banks, Obama shifted to the Centre-Left, striking a deal with pharmaceutical and healthcare lobbyists to expand Medicaid to poor families, nominally a government programme but heavily dependent upon the negotiation power of the private medical industry.

Obama prided himself for being “scandal-free” at the end of eight years, but what this terminology did was cement his tonal deafness to the country. Obama was referring to the fact that he hadn’t majorly misspoken in public or cheated on his wife (in public), or something like that, when Obama ran a litany of scandals and controversies to people across the nation, but these were focused more on his decision-making than on his person.

Obama gave $3 Billion dollars of taxpayer money to the very people that destroyed the world economy.

Obama tied healthcare even closed to the hands of private corporations, enacting his one long-standing policy as an opt-in bundle of money offered to the individual states.

Obama had inherited Bush’s mass surveillance programme, rife with corruption and abuse, and said nothing, even lying directly to the American people.

Obama ramped up deportation of immigrants and smashing of whistleblowers, and was able to offer a verbal reproach of torture and extrajudicial prisons and interrogations, but ultimately was ineffective in enforcing those criticisms.

Obama backtracked on anything that would be seen as stronghanded or decisive, feeling that targeting racism as a problem would hurt his numbers among both racist Democrats and racist Republicans, who had voted for him, but were ready at a moment’s notice to switch sides.

Under Obama, Democrats lost seats in state congressional districts, national elections, municipal councils, and governorships at an unprecedented level.

Part of it was racism served as a galvanising and unifying force to disparate enemies of Obama who didn’t have policy objectives but could now say, “not him” in a single voice. Part of it was Obama’s weakening of the Democratic Party by straining it on both ends and providing little guidance or support without spending a week to run the numbers first. Part of it was Obama as a failed president.

Obama represented very little social change. He does not even offer hope to poor and struggling Americans, who many racist, liberal commentariats proposed would finally see themselves in a politician. The assumptions that all minorities are alike, or like Obama, or that Obama is even a minority, expose the self-contradictory and hypocritical racism of American Leftists and Conservatives alike.

Obama was born to a lower-upper middle-class family comprised of university graduates, high-profile immigrants, professors, government officials, and banking clerks. Obama represents no hope for the downtrodden classes of America, or the world, as a rich person by any other name is just as elitist.

Obama was no paragon of virtue, as he would be the first to admit. He was in and out of relationships in his youth, he did drugs, and he would get into political arguments with people in alternatives scenes until he found them a little too edgy to continue. He attended expensive private schools as a child, went on to four different colleges, starting at Occidental College, transferring to Columbia University, taking a gap year before enrolling in Harvard University, and accepting a professorship at the University of Chicago.

Many politicians come from this background, for instance Boris dePfeffel Johnson did drugs in his early years and attended Eton and Oxbridge before sauntering into government. Obama did face scepticism and had his focus set on “ordinary” Americans, feeling a moral impetus to visit churches in American ghettoes instead of spend all his time as a corporate attorney, but he had and has almost nothing in common with the common American. Obama is an incisive and perceptive person, and uses that information to adjust his beliefs, where a Boris Johnson would use those observations to adjust his shallow message or his bank account, but those traits and skills are not political skills, and even not particularly useful skills.

To suggest that Obama chose the common man over his ambition, when he could have been a corporatist, ignores the fact that Obama did follow his ambitions, sometimes irrespective of the country’s interests, by jumping into various political waters here, and taking $60 Million dollar book deals there. Politics is often more lucrative than a profession.

Even his wife, often viewed as more likable, stable, and relatable than him — as wives often are — isn’t really all that inspiring. Michelle L. R. Obama was a common and unremarkable girl, born to a lower-middle class family, who got accepted to a magnet school through a desegregation bussing initiative, and her brother got a basketball “scholarship” to Princeton University, two years before she was admitted to Princeton through legacy admissions via her brother, coupled with affirmative action, that the Princeton staff saw no reason to hide from her.

She finished at Princeton University, then went straight to Harvard University, then to corporate law, then to administrational management. Michelle Obama didn’t fight and claw her way to be there; She, like many other people situated in such environments, merely found her way there, selected more by chance and by association than by merit or grit.

The Obamas are middle-class Americans, that just so happen to be targeted by unjustified racist attacks. They have nothing to do with, and nothing to particularly offer, the lower class, underclass, and working-class sectors of America, or Europe, or the world. The Obamas did not overcome racism for anyone, but merely proved that money is more important to Americans than racism. And after all, what was racism created to do but attempt to control the economy through marginalising poor people and immigrants. Obama may feel sorry for, even pity poor people, but he is not one of them, and he is not their champion.

If Obama left his presidency the champion of anyone, it would have to be those contented and ruling classes, of neoliberals buying assets overseas, or Wall Streeters still evading regulation, or celebrity media personalities who view Obama as some kind of hero as compared to Trump. The common man or woman doesn’t fit into that package.

Obama and Trump

Donald Trump is viewed by many Obama apologists as a negation of Barack Obama, voted into the presidency by the last throngs of a dying, racist brood of Americans backlashing against the eight years of greatness and optimism that were the Obama tenure, often masking Obama’s failings with the mere image of himself and his family life as being transcendent or ‘post-racist’ over America’s truly horrifying past. Trump is not a negation of Obama, and such an view is both an oversimplification and an undeserved credit to Trump.

To better understand the view Trump had of Obama, one need go little further than the 2008 presidential election, where first blipped onto Trump’s narrow radar. Trump was always a racist, and this question was neither in question nor particularly significant to the national audience until his campaign began, and right-wing commentators starting spreading chary lies to the contrary. Trump’s full-on support of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary against Obama, and then Trump’s support for Obama adopting Clinton’s policies, followed by Trump’s endorsement of McCain after Obama didn’t seem ‘Clinton enough,’ provide a view of a much more salient truth, that Trump will do or say anything he believes is in his own interest, and that Trump did hate Obama but was never really serious about anything he said.

The complete transformation of Trump’s views from 2008 to 2016 are astounding, until one remembers just how malleable and useless Trump’s words are.

Referring to Hillary Clinton in 2008, Trump endorsed Clinton over McCain, meaning that for the moment, Trump was a supporter of the Democrats. Some commentators have suggested that Trump’s racist statements about Obama, fused with the anti-intellectual movement sparked by Sarah Palin in 2008, was the catapult of reactionary “working-class voters” that saw Trump defeat Clinton in purple states in 2016.

Trump said of Clinton in 2008, “I’m a big fan of Hillary’s. She’s a terrific woman. She’s a friend of mine.” During the Republican primary to succeed Obama in 2016, Republicans called Trump a Democrat and referenced that he supported Clinton in 2008, and Clinton was the presumptive nominee for the Democrats for the same year. Trump responded that he was completely self-interested and would vote for anyone who ‘served his purposes,’ seeking to undercut trust in both Democratic and Republican establishments while bolstering himself and dodging the question.

What that shows is Trump is entirely self-involved, and Obama supporters who view Trump as an existential challenge to Obama or America are taking it too personally, as well as conflating their personal view of the country with the right way to govern.

In 2008, after Obama defeated Clinton, Trump swapped over to McCain, saying “I’ve known him. I like him. I respect him. He’s a smart guy.” When McCain opposed Trump in the Republican primaries in 2016, Trump called McCain a loser, stating the infamous words, “He’s not a hero. I like soldiers who weren’t captured.” There were no limits to what Trump would say because Trump would say anything; He would complement anyone he thought he could attach himself to, and he would attack anyone who contradicted him, no matter how baseless his flattery or how baseless his insults.

Trump’s migration from Clinton to McCain, around and away from Obama, do demonstrate that Trump would support anyone over Obama, and this is probably because Trump didn’t know who Obama was, and more substantially because Trump is a racist. But to say that Trump was elected for the sole purpose of erasing Obama’s effect or legacy, or even that Trump had that kind of secondary effect, is absurd to suggest the Trump Administration of ideologically opposed to Obama. Trump threw concessions to racists and “deplorables” because he saw racism as a winning issue, and wrecked policies that were in place long before Obama, like provisions of the EPA.

It’s important for Obama apologists to recognise that Obama does not represent the American people, the institutions of government that speak for the America people do, and they selected Obama, then selected Trump, then selected Biden — and certain activities like ACA and Paris Accords were ultimately kept, and others, like the Iran Deal, were not.

Conclusion

Obama was hit pretty hard by Republicans because he’s a pretty easy target to hit: he doesn’t move around too much. While he did jump ship on policy often, he viewed public office more as a public relations rep between himself and the media than an actual, physical institution to get dirty and get involved with. Obama spent more time writing letters than shaking hands, and his lack of personal scandals might be afforded to the fact of his lack of individual action.

Speaking to Americans on a personal level instead of ordering them around or instructing them on how it was going to be irrespective of their thoughts or realities, Obama was a genuinely civic-minded person who inspired hope through his speeches and carried a celebrity glow around him wherever he could tilt his power towards relief to the suffering. That is probably the Obama legacy, not the mundane policy micro-adjustments, or even the defeat of Hillary Clinton, or placement of the Obama Presidential Library. Obama’s person was his strength.

That’s not political power, so much as star power, and for a lot of people Obama made a great celebrity but came off as rehearsed and unscented. Obama is by all accounts a good man, and a person you ‘want to like,’ and perhaps the greatest credit to his character one can give is that his presidency does not entirely reflect or define him.

Failing to hold leeches in society accountable in exchange for preferential treatment, Obama’s administration lost credibility in just a matter of months, and was dead in the water after two years. Obama was uninterested in rebuilding party support and unable to mount a comeback, coasting his lofty plane into the crashlanding of 2016.

#Obama #Book #President #Election #Legacy

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rumandtimes · 3 years

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Halloween Reviews — 2001: A Space Odyssey

Ségolène Sorokina

Assoc. Fiction Editor

A visual tapestry and musical opera, but devoid of interesting characters or a mature story structure.

Heather Downham (as Miss Simmons) in the Opening Scene of Act II in “2001: A Space Odyssey”

This is a film that fits into every director’s, film student’s, and every critic’s education of the film medium. It is a prerequisite on the syllabus of every curriculum for movie makers. 2001: A Space Odyssey was one of the most influential works of science-fiction and cinema to come out of the Cold War period, yet it would be entirely wrong to call it a movie. In fact, it is a terrible movie — but it is a remarkable film.

Because every film studies wonk and their mother has an opinion on the film, I will be brief and remain true to the purpose of reviewing it, not lavishing over it. That is to say, I don’t give a flying hoodah what the “deeper meaning” or “wider vision” of 2001: A Space Odyssey is interpreted to be by bandwagon film critics who are too afraid to feel like they’re missing out on the punchline to be honest and objective about the Clarke’s and Kubrick’s failings.

A movie is not meant to be something that has to be discussed afterwards. A movie is not something that requires the viewer to read the book, or take a class to understand. A movie is not something that forces people to sit through 85 minutes of dead air, offering no explanation, and is entirely devoid of any scintilla, any semblance, of a storyline, character arc, or plot.

Containing horror elements, “2001” fits closely enough into the Halloween line-up of reviews, as (#5), if not only because of its inspiration on other horror genre motion pictures.

Quite frankly, 2001: A Space Odyssey is boring as hell. And it is a horrible movie. To give an illustration of how empty the film “2001” is, the original script had about 17,000 words in it. Most of this is description of the sci-fi elements and screen directions. In the end, the film had about 5,000 words of dialogue in it, total. That comes down to about 20 minutes of speech. . . The movie is 139 minutes long.

The film’s defenders are quick to claim that its emptiness and barren quality are an allegory for the emptiness of space. They never seen to stop for a moment however, perhaps in one of the film’s 30-minute long stretches of drawn out ‘alternative’ content, to consider why the film needs such a defence. People do not like it. Quite plainly, it is a bad movie. Defining why it is bad, using words like “allegory,” “metaphor,” and “artistic vision” doesn’t change the fact that it is unwatchable, it just explains how a production crew could look at 5 minutes of black screen in a major motion picture and think to themselves, “The audience will understand why they spent 5 minutes of their life looking at a dead screen. Because it says something about what it means to watch, blah, blah, blah.”

This movie is a film critic’s movie. It gives people plenty to analyse. And it has exceptional cinematography. For a film maker, it’s easy to see why the writers and directors did what they did, and how good it turned out — especially for an audience in the heat of the Cold War-era Space Race, who had quite literally never seen anything like it before. The long, operatic sequences probably mean a great deal to people who were born in the 1950’s and for them 2001: A Space Odyssey was Kubrick putting the last half-century on the silver screen, in colour film, for the first time.

Cinematically, it is exceptional at what it is and what it wants to do. But as a movie — and just a movie — it is quite poor. The entire plot of the film is that all-powerful aliens have been observing life on Earth since before life humanity came into existence, and during the Space Age people discover one of their relics, which leads to the capture of one human being in Jupiter’s orbit, who is killed and reborn as an alien himself. . . That’s it.

What the hell that has to do with the elementary notions of a beginning, middle, and end — a rising conflict, a climax, and a resolution — is anyone’s guess. There is no plot to speak of. Kubrick himself said the picture was more of an exploration of different concepts than a straight forward story. When I watch a film, I’m kind of looking for a storyline; That’s the whole point. A movie is not an art gallery of stills and frames juxtaposed together through editing, it is a cohesive and contained world onto itself: A story.

A movie is a casual experience, not a class requirement or a way to coerce the viewer into writing some kind of thesis. A viewer needs a reason to watch a film, and not because other people watch it or because it’s a cultural phenomenon. In this way, 2001: A Space Odyssey is no different than a trashy boyband, since they both have merits to justify their fame, but only get continued fame and discussion as a previous result of existing acclaim. But that is not enough to idolise a failed film. Reading Stanley Kubrick’s name on the playbill is not enough. Staring at Heather Downham’s ass is not enough.

This film does not deserve to use the title “Odyssey” at all, not more than some cheap gladiator flic would, because the Odyssey had a clear progression of characters, and themes, and resolutions which Homer was capable of creating over a long oracle tradition, and which Clarke and Kubrick fumble to represent on-screen. They should have stuck to long, narrative fiction, because whatever “2001” is trying to be — and even it doesn’t know — this doesn’t work as a movie. The film is polished on the surface, but entirely experimental, and therefore superficial, but above all boring, dull, and dragging on too long.

And nothing in that plot is ground-breaking or new at all. The visuals might be first-of-their-kind on big-budget films, but the ideas of aliens, aliens linked with the Cold War, and computers being evil are old and hackneyed ones. Anyone deluded enough to unwavering call the directors ahead of their time need only to look at the abysmal depiction of women in the film: Pink-wearing, skin-tight, ass-in-the air stewardesses and receptionists, completely subservient to male control and design. Perhaps the film is making a statement that Russian women are liberated and American women are oppressed, yet even the female Soviet scientists do not speak for themselves, but elect the singular male doctor to ask the difficult questions of Floyd instead.

Consider Star Trek, which was released 10 years after 2001: A Space Odyssey, and draws heavily from it, yet Star Trek is also capable of making social commentary. Unfortunately, Star Trek as well, for all its preachings about ascending beyond economic struggles and societal biases, still echoes them. Star Trek shifts the focus from societal bias of the system to implicit bias of the individual, which is a human trait that follows the theme into the future, creating the conflict of the franchise, yet the franchise also has a serious problem with the depiction of women all the way from the Original Series, through the Picard saga, and into the later sequels and spin-offs like Voyager, and current reboots. There’s a major difference between being a liberated woman who still has needs, and being an intergalactic sex toy. Most of my friends are sex-crazed lunatics, but that doesn’t mean they don’t choose to be, and it doesn’t mean they view themselves as second to men or their actions to benefit men generally at all, just as a man chasing several women is hardly doing it for their benefit.

The social commentary is absent in “2001.” The purpose of this might be to make the point by ‘feeling’ rather than telling, but the problem of gently nudging people in a pompous way to feel something instead of sincerely telling them directly is that people will interpret things as they want, and are very resistant to change. If a viewer thinks that lying to Russians because their foreigners is okay to do, then watching Kubrick make a passive aggressive statement about how duplicity can backfire is not going to change their minds — it will only embolden those who disagree with him more, and for those who already agree with him he’s just preaching to the choir. And if someone did take away the wrong message, who’s to say it’s the wrong message anyway, if it’s all “open to interpretation,” ie. an evasion by the writers from making their true feelings known.

And as a small note, the Russian dialogue in the film is horrible. The actors have poor pronunciation, the words they are speaking are incorrect, and the grammatical structure was erroneous. Clarke, Kubrick, and MGM had $10 Million Dollars, and the time to film 30-minutes of people running around in ape suits fighting pig puppets, but they couldn’t do a simple grammar check? They couldn’t cast a single Russian actor?! The four Russians are played by: Leonard Rossiter, French-English, British; Margaret Tyzack, German-English, British; Maya Koumani, Greek-English, British; Krystyna Marr, Polish-German, American.

These tropes were used in different ways, such as not seeing an alien until the very end, and after being pioneered by Kubrick became easy fodder for space movies and the science fiction genre to copy, but don’t actually have any deeper substance. It is a well known fact that Stanley Kubrick did not like the Cold War, so people going into drawn out arguments for why the first 25 minutes of the film was literally thrown away just to make some esoteric statement about how backward and barbaric the Cold War was, are really just gluttons for punishing themselves and inflicting that bias on others.

A fourth (25%) of the runtime of a 2-hour long movie, the first 25 minutes, is completely unwatchable, AND, frustratingly so, it has absolutely nothing to do with the remaining 115 minutes of the film. How in the hell the editors did not cut this garbage out of the movie for its major release debut is incomprehensible. Pulling this kind of raw poor taste is exactly the kind of thing that gives a bad name to ‘artistic freedom.’

The only semblance of a plot is the part everyone thinks about when they think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the deep space voyage with the supercomputer HAL-9000, pronounced initially as “H.-A.-L.-Niner-Zero-Zero-Zero,” then later, obviously just as “Hal Nine Thousand.”

This minor sequence in the movie saves the film, as far as popular culture and the average person are concerned. HAL-9000 is a perfect and incorruptible machine, tasked with guiding the mission to Jupiter, along with a two-man crew, and payload of three cryo-sleep scientists.

Immediately to the audience, it seems like a stupid idea. Why would anyone go to a gas planet like Jupiter? Why would the AI be put in charge of everything? Why is half the crew in hibernation? All these questions added together make a catastrophe inevitable. HAL mentions as much to one of the crew members himself, asking him if he, too, thought the mission was “odd.” It is explained later that the reason for all these difficulties are the result of a specific miscalculation by the American command structure back on Earth.

HAL tells the crew that communications will fail in 72 hours, but he does not know why, and he never gives an explanation for why he knows this in the film. The crew check that nothing is wrong, and phone NASA (or its fictional equivalent), and NASA tells them HAL is malfunctioning. It is possible that NASA is lying to the crew, or it is possible that HAL got something wrong.

Because HAL was designed to be a perfect robot, this possible malfunction worries the crew, who conspire in secrecy to destroy HAL and take control of the ship. HAL, in true machine fashion, wastes no time in shooting one of the crew out into space, and as his crewmate goes to retrieve the body, HAL kills the rest of the crew and locks him out.

At this point, HAL appears to be acting irrationally and emotionally like a human would. After the last surviving crew member kills HAL, he finds out that the reason HAL killed the crew is because he was programmed by the Americans that under no circumstances whatsoever is he to be shut off.

So what appeared to be self-preservation was actually just the mechanical process of fulfilling his commands. What makes HAL a complex character is that his human caretakers take care of and are taken care of by him. HAL is in total control of the ship, but only because the humans told him to be, as the crew waste their days away drawing sketches, and playing chess, and watching videos. The audience is left to wonder if decommissioning HAL is any different from killing a servant who has gotten sick and is therefore no longer of any use.

When HAL discovers the crew’s plot to take over the ship, HAL is aware that the crew want to ensure they make it to Jupiter and fear HAL would get in the way of that. HAL, however, is also aware that the USAA or NASA or whatever wanted HAL to give the crew a secret message about the aliens after reaching Jupiter. HAL is put in a difficult position, because he believes it is important to get the crew to Jupiter to deliver the message to them, but it is also important to keep the message from them and stay in absolute control of the ship until they get there.

HAL at this point has a logic break and malfunctions, killing the crew, and thereby inadvertently destroying the mission he was acting to protect. When Bowman resets HAL’s memory banks, HAL admits to Bowman that he knows he malfunctioned in killing the crew, and tells him that he/it is afraid to die. This leaves the audience to interpret whether HAL is lying to stop himself getting shut off, so he can compete the mission himself with no crew, or if HAL genuinely broke down and malfunctioned when he murdered the hibernating crew members because he was afraid that the crew would destroy him after the found out what he had done.

There is also something to be said about the fact that Bowman risked his life to retrieve Poole’s dead body, but after it becomes an impediment that threatens his own life, he throws it back out into dead space. It is in this moment that Bowman becomes a dead man himself, since HAL has killed everyone else and damaged the ship for human habitation, making a return trip impossible even if HAL is defeated.

HAL is known to lie to the crew, but it could be influenced by self-preservation and dilemmas, causing something called confusion. But then again, HAL is programmed to lie, so to HAL lying would be a form of truth, because it was told that doing the wrong thing was the right thing, for a greater purpose. And yet, again, HAL cruelly murders the crew when he could have left them frozen, even if it was necessary for it to kill Poole and Bowman, which is as much malfunctional as it is emotional.

HAL-9000 is the strong point of the entire movie. But that being said, HAL does not have a character arch, since HAL never changes over the entire course of the film. The crew only learns about HAL’s motives after they kill him, and despite HAL acting irrationally and inexplicably several times, the movie gives a superficial explanation that HAL has human-interface protocols built-in to sound more palatable to users, nullifying the question of HAL’s possible growth.

HAL did everything it did because humans told it to. Not once did HAL contravene the human directive in it’s own interest. The tragedy of the HAL character is a misinterpretation and accident of logical data. Additionally, the single most important point of HAL’s character — that it doesn’t make mistakes — is severely undercut when HAL makes three mistakes: incorrectly predicting the communicator would break when it didn’t, killing the crew thus undermining the mission, and ultimately being unable to stop itself being erased by Bowman. Part of that discrepancy has to come down to poor writing.

The idea of HAL is great writing. HAL is not a human character, and it’s the robot’s distinct lack of humanity that makes it the most human character of the film.

Bowman, Poole, and Floyd are not characters. They believe nothing, they say nothing, they do nothing. The audience feels nothing for them. When HAL threw Poole out of the spaceship, careening into space, I burst out laughing because of how absurd the image of him getting comically, cosmically tossed out of the veritable window was. When Bowman sees this, he doesn’t even react, but robotically and emotionlessly asks HAL what went wrong, and HAL lies to him by telling him it doesn’t have enough information to know.

After the HAL storyline ends, Bowman receives a transmission that reveals to him that HAL was given a message to lock down the crew and control the ship because the U.S. Government wanted to keep the aliens a secret, even from their own crew who ultimately died because of the mistake. The original script has Bowman re-establish contact with America (I say “America” and not “Earth” because the film makes clear that the U.S. is not cooperating with other countries), and NASA sends him the message. That is cut in the final film, with Bowman just discovering the message, either because HAL gave it to Bowman as a final act of protecting the mission, or much more likely that HAL being deleted removed a barrier from accessing the message. This further makes the point of why HAL could not allow the crew to ‘unplug’ it, since guarding the message was HAL’s personal mission.

The HAL chapter is marred with long pauses, like waiting literal minutes for the stupid space popcorn balls to turn around and move back and forth, or watching Bowman stare silently into a screen. Many people like the music, but the music usage is paradoxical. Since space is silent, to use ballads of music is just as much a choice as to use dialogue — music is no more “pure” or “non-human” than speech is — and watching entire scores of music play out of a static backdrop would be interesting at the live orchestra, but this is a stereo recording underplaying a film, so it hardly has the same effect. This is a limit, and choice to pursue that limit, which was weak on the part of the writers. A soundtrack is not supposed to take centre stage; people can buy the CD later, but they want to see the movie now.

The movie makes the decision to skip over the rest of the journey to Jupiter, cut out all the dialogue and character exploration between Bowman and NASA, and jumps right to the end of the movie — a twenty-minute-long session of meaningless strobe lights.

All the storyline and extra HAL content that could have been included, and they made the decision to, again, burn the whole film continuity down as a middle finger to the audience and the producers — to balk conventional ‘expectation.’ It is a horrible choice. The writers said they wanted to create something alien and never imagined before about what a different world would be like. They said they had some difficulty translating the idea: And they decided on rainbow lights and lava lamps. Twenty. Straight. Uninterrupted. Minutes of it.

This is made even more BS that the directors put a title card right in the middle of the HAL sequence, in front of this, called “Intermission.” Is this what audiences were returning for? One unhappy movie-goers said, “People call this movie genius: There are 5 minutes of black screen in the film. No music. No picture. Just an empty frame of dead air. How genius can that be? Is my turned-off television screen also a genius of cinema? Is a blank piece of paper now some artistic statement? The last half hour of the movie is flashing light in people’s faces for 30 minutes, with no dialogue. A complete bore and an insult. One of the most overrated films in history.”

Skipping over about an hour of rubbish in the film, it starts to become compelling. There probably exists a fan edit out there somewhere that recut the film, trimming it down to 45 minutes. The monkey scene — “Dawn of Man” — could be 2 minutes. (As a side point, it shoud be pointed out that humans are not descended from chimpanzees, but that chimpanzees and humans share a common origin, much like whales and elephants do.) The space stewardesses fumbling to walk and carrying lunch trays can go. Floyd’s daughter plays no role whatsoever. Floyd can meet the Soviets, talk about the virus, then give the Moon presentation about the virus being a cover story, and then they go to the alien artifact, and then it cuts to HAL-9000. After HAL dies, there is a 60-second sequence of ‘light gates’ to convey the ship was abducted, and then the screen fades to black. The End. What happens? Who knows. Not much different from the original.

I’ve read some of the commentary on this film, such as by Roger Ebert (or Robert Egert, or whatever his name is) and the always come off as snobs and pricks, even suggesting audiences should requires some minimum score on an entrance exam to see the movie in theatres. That is exactly the problem with 2001: A Space Odyssey, snobbery. The snobbish idea that it means something more when it needs to, and that it doesn’t when it doesn’t need to. There is a reason people find it “annoying. . . confusing. . . infuriating. . . frustrating. . . crazy. . . unwatchable.” These are not people who hate movies or Kubrick, these are the same people who like the HAL story and the Moon voyage parts. But a movie, even about aliens, cannot be alien itself. The movie is supposed to be the viewer’s friend, and guide the viewer through the experience of the alien and the unknown. Alienating the audience is counterproductive in every measure.

Everyone — every single person you ask — calls 2001: A Space Odyssey a work of “art.” Art. Not movie, art. Not entertaining, art. Not good work, but good art. Well, just what the hell is art? I don’t want obstinate art, I want a good film. I’ve seen films that are artistic and compelling. I’ve seen films that are interesting but shallow. A Bruce Lee movie doesn’t have much in the way of plot, but you get to see Bruce Lee do some real-life kung fu and amazing stunts, and it’s still fun. But “2001” more subtle and ‘lava-lampy,’ so much so it is impossible to get lost into the experience without becoming aware of yourself at certain moments and wanting to either turn the show off, or just suffer through it because everyone else seemed to. Film critics might get paid to watch 10 minutes of dead air, but the directors don’t have the right to waste people’s time. At the end of the day, 2001: A Space Odyssey isn’t really intellectual at all; Anyone who’s actually interested in learning something or seeing something new would be better off going to the bookshop or a city gallery, this is still just a movie, and no one can claim they are smart for just sitting there and passively consuming a piece of popular media, not even haughty sci-fi fans. There is a difference between watching a science-fiction movie and being a real scientist!

Film snobs and fusty critics who rewatch the damn thing 10-times don’t get to just designate the whole package as good. Maybe the reason such contrarians like the film is just because so many people don’t, and they feel cultured or superior for pretending they’re ‘in on’ the experience. The movie has some high points and innovative structures, but fails as a cohesive unit. It’s a meticulously crafted bomb. Anyone studying the film has to focus on the camera angles, the underlying themes, and the audience reception more than the plot — because there is no plot.

This is a film which, if you like esoteric and avant-garde, you can watch this film and then spend the rest of your time reading the book and the script notes and the celebratory review articles and the academic theses and watching the director and cast interviews, to actually understand what the hell is going on. That is certainly its own kind of experience, but it is not a movie experience. That is to say, it’s not fun.

If you want to watch a good movie, skip over everything except the HAL arch, watch a 3-minute synopsis on what you missed over the other 90 minutes, and then move on with your life doing more important things, or watching better movies. Even Kubrick’s other movies are drawn-out and slow, but at least they have established characters and a point, as well as a clandestine “moral of the story” under the surface. If that seems like to much of a hassle, just give 2001: A Space Odyssey a hard pass; it’s not worth seeing. This is one of those trailblazing films where the innumerable imitators actually picked up the gauntlet, evolved the themes, and did it better.

Overall Score: 2 out of 5

#Review #2001: A Space Odyssey #Film Criticism #Science Fiction #Cinematography

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rumandtimes · 3 years

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The Friends Reunion on HBO Didn’t Work

Jens Weingardt

Senior Streaming Contributor

The addendum to an old sitcom in cheap self-justification for an uninspired corporate acquisition.

The other day I was watching a strange medley of content. The Friends Reunion on HBO Max was one of the places it started. “The Friends Reunion,” well known as shite, should be hated for a number of reasons. Partially that it is overproduced and unwanted corporate garbage where an HBO exec pushed a $45 Million obligation onto the contracts of the “Friends” cast. The cast could not have had more of a enormous contempt for the entire process — not wanting to be there and not enjoying the event of their exploitation.

The in-house HBO celebration of buying Friends off of Netflix, or more accurately the delusional self-justification of HBO bosses, did not put the content of the show Friends on display as the product, but used the show as a pretence, a pretence to sell the actors.

The show was two hours of corporate bullshit, steeped atop the usual pile of shit that represents the shows syndication. Two hours of overproduced, uninspired, pre-planned anecdotes that still managed to come off as boring and unpractised fillers of time.

The Lady-Gaga-avec-gospel-choir remix of a stupid, three-line cat song; The five-minute-long asides about support beams blocking camera angles; The potato costume full of Justin Bieber; The fake audience; James Corden: A cavalcade of shit, that some asshole at HBO thought would constitute showmanship.

The absolute worst part of the slapdash arrangements were the ending. The beginning and the end were meant to look spontaneous and unrehearsed like a kind of documentary, but was peppered by the actors of the main cast commiserating with each other about how much they didn’t want to be there. The ‘surprise’ ending of the “Friends Reunion” was that David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston actually wanted to have sex with each other twenty-seven years ago and would fool around behind the scenes on set, but they never actually had sex because she was dating Tate Donovan and he was dating Natalie Imbruglia.

There are many things apparent to all of the actors which they never bring up: controversies on the show that go unsaid. Like the fact that Tate Donovan got a job on Friends as Jennifer Aniston’s boyfriend almost immediately after they had broken up in real life. Like the fact that Mathew Perry’s career imploded through a combination of drug abuse, near sexual assaults, bankruptcy, and being a generally unlikable person (they do mention he fell out of contact with the rest of the cast, and he also disappears from later parts of the taping).

The myth that HBO floats at the end that two of the main cast wanted to have sex but didn’t is not only dubious, completely ordinary and a damp squid, and pitiful as hell, but it is also super creepy and exploitative. Here two people are pushed up onto stage front and forced to talk about a crush they had thirty years ago that they never acted on. Even more sad given the real life undercurrent of David Schwimmer being a divorced single dad from a woman half his age, to Jennifer Aniston being a thrice-divorced, barren cat lady who used to be famous for skin cream commercials and playing sluts on TV.

Half the time is given up to loser cameos and interviewing the creators, and a cringeworthy scene about how the show Friends, airing on NBC in the nineties, was somehow empowering to Ghanese women. A show where literally over half the cast is men, and two of the main male leads are notorious for being unchallenged misogynists that are horrible to women (“How you doin’?”). A show that aired on NBC, one of the most racist and dishonest companies in American media, the same company that was actually caught numerous times lying to peoples faces on so-called “news” programs, the same company that hired Megyn Kelly as a breakfast anchor, the same company that was sued by Gabrielle Union for racist discrimination, the same company that is repeatedly called out for racism and lack of representation, from late night, to broadcast anchors, to — notably — the show “Friends” itself.

More unstated controversy in a dishonest and trashy get-together on HBO. Not to mention that it is revealed that the original concept for the show was based on the real life experiences of a cliche of under-30’s Jewish television wonks in New York City in the 1970’s, a fact that besides the casting of David Schwimmer and Maggie Wheeler was completely scrubbed from the final product contribute only more so to the problem of racism on Friends. Those three or four women in Ghana might claim that the show Friends made them feel empowered, but in reality they would never have had the possibility to be on that show in a thousand years, except maybe as one of David Schwimmer’s tragic and ill-treated girlfriends.

ANYWAY!, the Friends Reunion had nothing to offer, was creepy, and stank of the heavy hand of a fat corporate shit patting himself on the back for buying the rights to an old syndicated television series that ended almost 30 years ago, in a personal escape from the fact that television media is dying and HBO is desperately trying to remain relevant as an ad-based streaming platform by bringing on the likes of John Oliver, Conan Tepenius O’Briain, and Matthew Perry.

But what do the cast of Friends think about they show? “I wasn’t sure how tonight would go.” “This will never happen again.” “What I have to say probably isn’t interesting.” “It was a long time ago.” “I’m not similar to my character because at my age you have to grow up sometime.” “I was miserable every night.” If you listen to the statements of the cast main six, there is really nothing in the way of enthusiasm or high praise they have to proffer. Other than a few tears and creepy reveals the Friends Reunion was a bore.

I’ve watched many sitcoms, and “Friends” is an extraordinary situation comedy. That is, it flows well enough, as a cast of recurring characters crack superficial jokes while locked in the small reality of a living room. “Friends,” however, is not anything more than that. It is not a TV show. It is not a serial. It is not a drama. It has no narrative. It has no moral. It is utterly pointless and inconsistent, as many sitcoms are. It was leagues above its competitors ages ago, but it should not be celebrated. The world (specifically the corporate world, and the third-world nations they now conspicuously market the old goods to) should follow the main casts lead be a bit more apathetic to the franchise as a whole.

HBO’s “Friends: The Reunion” has nothing to do with the content of that series, possessing no acting whatsoever beside some indifferent table readings by the aging cast.

#Friends #HBO #Television #Streaming #Review

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rumandtimes · 3 years

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What is ASMR?

Jason H. McCleary–Bradshaw

Assoc. Farm Life Contributor

YouTube’s multimillion-dollar ASMR videos are ad-friendly sex work.

This is a question that took over the internet as teens licking their microphones blanketed YouTube in recent years. The weirdos who made such videos have garnered millions of views, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and global attention.

Supposedly the most popular ASMR video is a Korean Mukbang video called ASMR Rainbow Crepe Cake, Edible Spoon, Macaron, Nerds Rope Jelly (available here: youtu.be/ZwXE7A-KLjw). This video, uploaded by “Jane ASMR 제인,” has over 235 Million views, and Jane’s channel has over 1,200 videos, each averaging around 10 million views. Jane’s (제인’s) channel is three years old, started in 2019, and has made an estimated $20 Million dollars, in 3 years.

Apparently, mukbang videos are Korean ‘food videos,’ of watching models eat lavish meals. Mukbang videos are the most popular form of ASMR video, with several tens of billions of views (undoubtedly the result of hundreds of millions of ASMR-fans watching and rewatching the same content to reach that figure, since it is impossible to think that even 1 billion people even use YouTube that regularly). With 14 Million subscribers, Jane ASMR is one of the top ten most popular YouTubers around.

But there is another genre of ASMR videos, aside from mukbang. It is what is called sound and visual ASMR, and there are two separate branches of this as well. There is a dirty branch of ASMR filled with small-time and independent sex workers who are the subject of this article, each one able to make several hundred thousand dollars on YouTube (not porn sites) in just a matter of months.

The other is the clean side of ASMR, where a small number of content-makers such as “Gibi ASMR,” “ASMR Darling,” “Maria GentleWhispering,” and “ASMR Ppomo” suck up the all the oxygen — about five YouTube channels make up the vast majority of all the, quote-and-quote, “mainstream ASMR” views, and YouTube is the only platform ASMR appears on.

Many of the “ASMRotica” makers got their start on YouTube making “mainstream” or “clean” ASMR, before going over to the dark side and making “mouth sounds videos,” “girlfriend roleplays,” and opening OnlyFans accounts. Now, there is an ASMR filter on several porn sites, mostly videos scraped off of YouTube, Twitch.tv, Patreon, or OnlyFans, created by these fallen angels of YouTube sex work.

The kicker? Jane ASMR, Gibi ASMR, ASMR Darling, and many of the porn starlets are all between the ages 19 and 21, yet each rake in millions upon millions of dollars on a regular basis (!), just a few short years after starting their YouTube / OnlyFans channels! Most of them never appear nude, but verbally imply suggestive content with risqué (but not explicitly pornographic) videos. At the end of the day, even the “clean” ASMR crowd of 19-year-old girls on YouTube are still millionaire camgirls, so-called “E-girls;” So is ASMR the new goldmine of virtual phone sex?

The concept as has been come to be known as ASMR is a YouTube phenomena that started out as a meme. Well, you could say it started as a “community” of people who secretly liked when other people whispered up-close in their ears, and thought the sensation of scratching towels felt nice.

This might not sound particularly unique, or warranting of a concept or title like “ASMR,” but the purpose of ASMR YouTube videos became to elicit the same “tingling” response through the videos that people felt doing these small daily gestures of rubbing something or liking someone’s company.

ASMR became a term for those of the “Tingles Community,” posting videos online of rubbing fabrics, jingling metal trinkets, and listening to someone whisper over the sounds of ocean waves.

After reaching a wider audience, it then became a “challenge” or sorts. ASMR videos were watched and distributed among people so they could see if they felt the fabled ‘tingles’ the ASMR-watchers kept hearing about. From the point of being a challenge to the common and uninformed viewer, ASMR just became a meme.

And like all memes on YouTube, it became a content farm. ASMR videos are (or were somewhat at the time) based on sound, much like a music video is, but using sounds of the world or the filmer instead of the instruments or vocals. Because it is to a degree sound-based, and intended to be watched all the way through for the purpose of merely seeing what will come next, the viewer is trapped in a view-loop on this kind of content.

ASMR does not confer any kind of information; it is an experiential kind of content. Essentially, that means that it keeps people in their seats longer, and keeps them watching, or listening, longer as well.

The way Google rates content on YouTube is by the number of user engagements. Videos that have more views, more likes, more comments under them, have more ads, have a high ratio of viewers clicking on (or especially purchasing from) those ads, and the faster viewers discover and watch a video after posting will be deemed by Google’s “YouTube Algorithm” as being more important and something people want to see.

From here, Google promotes the video by having a YouTube employee manually curate the video to the YouTube Front Page and adding it into the infamous Recommended Videos list. Google does this because their goal is to sell ad-space on YouTube; Getting hot content to users as quickly as possible keeps people using YouTube more often, and keeps them using longer every time they log on. That means more time to see ads, and more people seeing those ads.

That pool of trained and captive viewers is immensely attractive to advertisers, because by tracking the number of people who are sent their ads at any given time and measuring them against sales figures, they know that the more people see an ad is directly related to higher profits. Because advertising budgets are made by weighing the millions of dollars of costs for ads against the projected bump in revenue, the more people watching YouTube, uninterrupted, for long periods of time give Google the ability to sell a product which companies and corporations are willing to pay more and more for.

So, Google tracks how long each particular video is being watched, and it is in their commercial interest (for the time-being) to push videos being watched longer to the top. That means videos that convey very little information while enticing the viewer to watch from beginning to end: Mindless entertainment.

Because ASMR videos became a meme, spreading like a virus to millions of people around the world who were curious about the whole “tingles challenge” thing — and because ASMR videos are usually between 30 minutes and 1 hour long, and people watch them all the way through — the weird, little subsection of the internet suddenly became very valuable.

People may not have been watching the ASMR videos, just as people don’t really watch music videos, but all Google cares about is that they keep the tab open and the ads play; They can sell those figures back to their advertisers.

It is important to consider that while Google creates consumer products of its own, it makes the majority of its money aggregating, mining, and selling personal data on people around the world — a process that would fall under the professional and corporate services department. That’s how Google’s five biggest components, Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Android OS, and Chrome, are free, while Google is a multibillion dollar company. Everything you search, watch, or send is catalogued and monetised for Google’s, and their client companies’, benefit.

Because of the way YouTube’s business model worked, rather than let ASMR run its course for what it is and probably die out as an odd and somewhat pointless niche, Google very much benefitted if ASMR, and things like it, stayed alive. This is probably the reason that Google is the only major search engine that has not taken a significant stance on banning pornographic sites from registering in its search results. If people are searching and watching for long periods of time, regardless of what it is or why, companies can profit. In the Attention Economy of the Digital Age, average clicks or visits, average time on-site, and how much that content reveals about the user, are the only things that really matter to the ones selling ad-space.

This is where a problem comes in. Say that YouTube is a tower on a plot of land, and YouTube “Content Creators” are a billboard at the top of that tower, and companies can pay to put commercials and branding on that billboard.

So-called influencers on social media have no influence or power at all. Google and Facebook, the owners of YouTube and Instagram, have ALL the influence, and they allow those who call themselves influencers (mostly women, a.k.a. “VSCO girls”) to use their platform because they draw in the views and spark the user engagement that the host company benefits from. Google and Facebook cultivate an environment for those “influencers,” but the ‘influence’ is wholly endowed upon them by the owners of the sites (who could take it away at any moment).

While the company owns the tower may not care what someone puts up on the billboard as long as it attracts attention, the company that would pay to use that billboard cares a lot about the kind of attention the billboard gets and what kind of neighbourhood the tower itself is in. Google is just interested in how many raw views and how many ‘high-quality’ viewers — ie. people who are likely to watch start-to-finish, personally engage, and then buy things — are on their site. Content creators just care about how many raw views they get and how much money they get from monetising ads. Advertisers however care a great deal about what kind of content their ads appear on, who is going to be watching their ads, and what kind of ecosystem Google is running.

As a somewhat reputable company, Google (and YouTube) can attract big names in the ad-space market. Other multibillion dollar corporations in areas like tech, media, and soft drinks. But that reputation relies upon Google’s ability to manage both its user base, and its content creators, and not just extract views and personal data from them.

When ASMR became the next big thing in the past half-decade, it attracted a lot of attention, and a lot of mimics. And because no mimicry is truly pure, that lead to a lot of mutations — all of which were competing to use the same, money-making “ASMR” banner.

In many interviews of the biggest ASMR channels on YouTube, all except about three of them say they started an ASMR channel because they “found” ASMR (ie: ‘Google or the meme culture pushed it to them’) and they though it was “something I could do” (ie: ‘it looked like cheap, easy money’).

Much like the streaming boom revolutionised gaming, ASMR became the new streaming — now for people who were no good at video games and had no interesting commentary or personality to offer their audience.

ASMR mutated from a niche collection of small and modest videos about sounds into a veritable gold rush of internet bums seeking a get-rich-quick scheme. The ASMR title became a catch-all term, meaning essentially nothing but for the individual channel using the term. It no longer appealed to sounds, or even “tingles.”

Videos with titles like “ASMR for People Who Don’t Get Tingles,” or “100 Triggers for Tingle Immunity,” or “ASMR to Help You Game, Study, or Sleep,” or “Visual ASMR in 4K” started to appear.

One would think, that if the sole purpose of ASMR is to impart a tingly sensation to the viewer, then listening to a video in the background with absolutely no intent to feel said tingles would not qualify as ASMR.

On several ASMR videos (probably the majority of them), if the screen is turned off and the audio is left to stand alone, they are not pleasant to listen to. The audio quality is jagged, disjointed, bland, and unprofessional. What the women of ASMR are really selling is the visual component, not the auditory. But that goes against the very fundamental premise of ASMR, which is supposed to be a painstakingly auditory experience. Most “ASMR” videos have nothing to do with sound, as much as staring at a woman’s heavily made-up face, or a woman’s pale bony fingers, or a set of breasts for 30 minutes on end.

ASMR culture is so self-consuming, that there is a special kind of microphone, that may not have been exactly ‘meant’ for ASMR videos, but is the most popular among them (besides the Blue Yeti pod microphones that cost $100 on Amazon). They are called 3-Dio microphones, and their market appeal is having two plush plastic covers over the mics in the shape of ears, so the simulated acts can look and “feel” more realistic. In many videos, the YouTuber is wearing headphones to hear the sounds of their recording in real time. In one instance, under this wide and wild category of “ASMR,” a woman was watching the image of herself in her camera’s viewfinder, while listening to herself lick her own ears through her 3-Dio microphone. There is something auto-fellatiary in that. . . even if she was making those videos to send to others — nameless, faceless people over the internet (but at least they’re not earless).

And where the gamer boom became a haven of geeky men building a haven for themselves, and ironically exploiting a geeky male fanbase for views and clout, the ASMR boom became a space solely for young women to again exploit a male viewership and fanbase as a new kind of streaming; or exclusively cater to an all-female fanbase as a new type of vlogging template.

Because ASMR makes for high-margin videos made with minimal effort or content, most of the copycats who jumped on the bandwagon to make ASMR were not enthusiasts for the genre (if you could call it that), and really didn’t care what it was. They didn’t care what made a burger a burger, they just wanted a restaurant.

Because the original iteration of ASMR was focused on delicacy and attention to detail, as well as shyness and an awkward energy, it made sense that the original viewer base was largely women and introverted ‘artsy’ types. As a by-product of that, most of the original people inspired to create ASMR were also women. While men were present since the beginning, the utter lack of masculine energy made YouTube ASMR a bit of a ‘by women, for women’ kind of thing.

When ASMR went viral and blew up, men started watching — mostly drawn in by the feminine energy of the content and the femininity of the creators — but they did not join in. It is not a manly thing to be delicate, or whisper or blow on people, or delight in the supposed minute pleasures of things.

The other group that started watching was, naturally, women. Some jumped into what they thought was a receptive platform for women and were genuinely interested in the quality of sound editing and simulated touch, called tingles, but they were a severe minority. As one might expect, the majority of women watched, but had no interest in creating. And a large number of women saw ASMR as their ticket to a big name.

It was startling how fast a vlogger, or a cosplayer, or any random person could get tens of thousands of subscribers simply because they listed ASMR in their channel name and video titles — even if the videos had nothing to do with ASMR. Google was heavily pushing ASMR as a cash cow, and the meme was taking on a life of its own. But of course, this only applied to women.

ASMR had an inherent sexism baked in, an exact reverse of the gaming cult. It had a male userbase who wanted only to find female vloggers to look at and fawn over; and it had a female userbase who wanted only to find female vloggers to sympathise and engage with on a familiar level. There was no place for men in ASMR.

As an offshoot of the sexism problem, ASMR also started to have a severe racism problem. To become an ‘ASMR-tist,’ there was almost an unspoken rule that one had to be a pale, otherwise attractive, female YouTuber. And so, in search of easy money, thousands of them began to populate the web.

This lack of any content or diversity of choice, along with an easily imitatable premise, large male viewership — and new, broadly unregulated, definition of what ASMR would become — made it extremely popular to the porn industry. The multimillion to multibillion dollar porn industry had been looking for a way to infect its way across the firewall, from its hardcore pornography on porn sites based in California and Florida — which advertisers would, mostly, never use — to the impressionable and relative innocence of YouTube and Instagram.

To stamp the pests out, Facebook bans the use of nudity on Instagram, and Google either age-gates or strikes down suggestive content on YouTube. ASMR was a new grey area, for porn producers to engage with Google on their own territory, armed with a new kind of softcore porn, that proliferated in the wild west of the ASMR boom.

ASMR, again, went from focusing on tingles, vlogs, and mass-consumption content (coining terms like “tingle immunity”), to embracing a salacious tone. Instead of ‘towel rubbing,’ more videos were focused on ‘ear licking,’ where a woman would videotape herself licking a microphone up-close and post it to YouTube, claiming there was no sexual component to the video. Full-blown porn stars and prostitutes started to make the migration over to YouTube, to be a part of the new gold rush; presumably it was much easier to lick a microphone on camera than to have sex on camera. And why not do both?

YouTube proliferating the new kind of ASMR became an opportunity for sex workers, and other utterly vapid creators, to build a quick and lucrative following with no talent and with no effort. The top ASMR videos on YouTube went from, “Let Me Give You Tingles,” to, “Let Me Pretend to Lick You Through the Screen.” This is where Google started to apply its anti-porn hammer to ASMR, very much upsetting the ASMR producers who did not view themselves as sexual and had already set up for themselves a comfortable arrangement.

It is not truly to be said that all ASMR creators lack talent and do not create something of value. Some do put effort and work into their videos. It is to be said however that there is nothing inherently valuable or intriguing about ASMR itself, especially after the name has become so warped from what it at first meant — and continues to gain a wider range of different meanings.

The vast majority of ASMR channels on YouTube do not add anything to the concept of “ASMR,” and certainly do not give much back to their viewer in return for the attention they receive.

It seemed as if — if you were a young, pallid, female, and to at least some degree attractive — you could buy yourself a ring light, a Yeti microphone, and record yourself on your phone, and become a YouTube sensation. Those higher up the ladder may have had greenscreens, or fancy sets set in their apartment, or elaborate dress-up and make-up, but the routine was the same. ASMR had become a racist, sexist, and ageist outlet for pseudo softcore porn.

The backlash against ASMR created a rift in “The ASMR Community” (a loose term for the young women of North America and Europe who makes these videos on YouTube and have a significant following or a Silver / Gold Play Button from Google), between the established channels and this new era of whisper videos. All the wanted attention had become unwanted attention.

The established channels, who had already collaborated with the YouTube outreach arm to an extent, claimed the issue was not the flood of new girls whom they had to compete for views with, as they admitted that the more people making or watching ASMR was all the better for them, as the big channels, but the response that flood of unscrupulous girls creating “ASMR-otica” was prompting from YouTube, and the change those women represented for what it meant to be in ASMR.

Advertisers do not want to put their ads on a shoddy billboard in a rough neighbourhood. That is why, despite the lesser viewing numbers, they advertise on Google or the New York Times, instead of porn sites. Advertisers began to notice that flood of porn into ASMR was not converting ASMR into porn, but exposing that it always was a type of porn to begin with.

In defence of ASMR, or at least in defence of themselves not being compared to prostitutes, many of the young female YouTubers and vloggers posted lengthy videos to their subscribers where they conceded that “ASMR can seem weird,” and “ASMR is certainly intimate,” but drew the line at contrasting intimacy with eroticism.

The failure of their argument distancing ASMR from porn on the basis of intimacy, is that the business model of porn is to sell intimacy. That’s why it was so easy for porn stars to convert into ASMRtists, and start mixing in their erotica and ASMRotica. These young woman also failed to address the fact that they — as teenage, pale, effeminate, and affluent YouTubers — were displacing the “original” ASMR community, of older, more adult women, enthusiasts, and generally more normal people, who held the dirty secret of liking ASMR. It’s a possibility ASMR could have been different to porn, if it had focused on the sounds instead of the visuals, and focused on the so-called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.

After reading some articles on the ‘study’ and suggestions on what such an “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response” is, it seems overwhelmingly convinced that such a thing doesn’t really exist, and has no scientific value whatsoever. At it’s most basic explanation, removing all the sell that the writers put into it, ASMR in these analysis articles is the fact that watching a person touch a camera can trigger a feeling in the viewer of being touched, even if watching from a screen, as if the viewers face were in place instead of the camera. That phenomena is real, and it is much simpler, and better grouped with, other optical illusions than given its own term of “ASMR.”

Women who make ASMR have even appeared on the news to make their argument about how they should be able to keep their money, without falling into the stigma of other — lesser — kinds of sex work.

In the United Kingdom, one woman appeared on morning television where she was challenged by the host who asked her if ASMR was sexual or not, because with the close-up interactions to camera, large and exclusively-female content base, and the employ of things like roleplays, it seemed pretty sexual. Her response could be summed up as, ‘Because I am doing it, and I am not a prostitute, it is not sexual; And people need to leave women alone to do nice and pleasant things.’ The typical responses these women give walk the impossible line on the fence, of trying to one the one hand validate women for going into sex work, while also trying distance themselves from sex work because it would be beneath them.

Interviews were also given in the United States, where the ASMR women were again challenged, or at least questioned, about the sexual component of their content. It should be said that some of these hosts were male, some were female, some were heterosexual, some were homosexual. In some cases, it also came off as it the male hosts had an axe to grind by bringing in a woman younger than themselves to probe her on her sexuality, which made for an inescapably awkward mood in the room. But these women should ask one question: If everyone thinks ASMR looks sexual, and much of ASMR is becoming more and more sexual through the growth of the ASMR porn market, is ASMR sexual?

Should it take an international media campaign to convince people if what’s happening is, in fact, normal? Why are the people mostly defending ASMR only the women who profit from it themselves? Could it be, that ASMR is indeed problematic or sexual, but these ASMR women rationalise what they are doing to themselves, and externalise the problem by calling their critics perverted and misunderstanding their content, instead admitting that by making their videos they are jumping into a perverted space?

To say seeing sex in ASMR is sexist, because it suggests that anything a woman does is inherently sexual, misses the mark in criticisms of ASMR. For starters, normal vloggers do not have their sexuality questioned in the same way ASMR vloggers do, and the majority of vloggers are also women. To suggest that people focus on ASMR — or porn — because it is a way for women to make lots of money both openly admits the sexual component and fails to admit that the women don’t make the majority of that money, the company with a holding interest, like Google in this case, do. And these companies are run by old men, not the young women they plaster to the front pages of their sites.

Watching an ASMR video of a woman rubbing a camera lens, or of a person brushing a microphone, in order to experience a simulated feeling of someone actually touching your face or brushing your ears is a necessarily intimate experience, and overwhelmingly sexual experience, because we only touch each other tenderly and longingly when we are having sex. Maybe it’s a societal thing; Maybe it should change; Maybe it shouldn’t; Nonetheless, it is the truth about how people interact.

For these ASMR women to say they don’t make porn and complain about how Google is oppressing them by demonetising their platform because advertisers don’t like their videos before whispering into a microphone to simulate the act of pillow talk into their audience’s ears, is not so distant from the ASMR-porn market than they may like to believe. The damage to the ASMR world was done, a victim of its own success in many ways, but it did not disappear.

For those who made sexual content on YouTube under titles like, “ASMR Ear Licking,” “ASMR Mouth Sounds,” “ASMR Lens Licking,” “ASMR Intimate Whispers,” “ASMR Massage,” “ASMR Girlfriend Roleplay” — they pivoted their market from the overtly sexual, to the suggestive, focusing more on “ASMR for Sleep” or “ASMR Roleplay” or “ASMR Personal Attention” or “ASMR Clothing Hauls,” which were not only more vague and generic titles, but achieved pretty much the same effect in the end.

By making videos focused more on “sleep” than relaxation — fully aware of the association sleep has, as an activity for after sex — and making videos of girls twirling in skimpy clothing that clearly had a sexual component, but could be said to be ostensibly about the fashion element, ASMR porn on YouTube pivoted into a new realm, a new genre of vlog. It also created a new market: People could develop an addiction to ASMR, where they felt they needed to use the videos to sleep every night, or felt they needed to watch ASMR to pick out their new make-up routine or clothing style. And many of the vlogger ASMR-makers did start to fill that space, because it created an artificial need, and a new kind of demand.

At the same time, removing the words “licking” and “girlfriend” from “mouth sound” and “roleplay” videos, while continuing to put out the same content, was an additional layer of cover. “Sucking on Bananas ASMR” became “Licking Ice Cream ASMR,” to add a layer of deniability for the inevitable content strike.

YouTubers who did not want to be labelled in the same category as the suggestive ASMR channels, and who didn’t want to be demonetised by Google, put an complete nix on those kinds of videos, no longer making the now-taboo mouth sounds, or clothing haul content — or still making it, but in a censored and sterile form.

While there has been such a great controversy over sex and ASMR, Sexual-based content has never done as well as the Vlogging-based ASMR content. Vlog ASMR is even bigger than the original, Sound-based ASMR. And after Sleep ASMR absorbed much of the erotic ASMR field, Vlog and Sleep ASMR became the two largest areas, at least by views.

The reason Vlog ASMR and Sleep ASMR overtook ASMR Porn and Tingles ASMR is because only horny men (and, especially, horny lesbians) watch ASMR porn; No one but the fanatics really watch ‘real’ ASMR. Men, women, and casual viewers from across the Internet watch ‘ASMR Vlogs’ or ‘ASMR for Sleep.’ Of course, the “ASMR” in the title is just tacked on for the sake of branding, yet it defines these new genres of YouTube nonetheless, as a subset of vlogs and long-form content.

Now that ASMR has ‘sold its soul’ to become mainstream, anyone can watch ASMR. Sleep ASMR and Vlog ASMR are also the highest prone to get their viewers hooked, because their viewers feel the need to watch the next “ASMR Makeup Tutorial,” or think that ASMR will soothe their social anxiety or stress disorder, or they might think they need to log-on to YouTube every night in order to go to sleep.

Of course, looking at a computer screen while motionless in your room is one of the single worst things a person could do for their sleep, their social life, or their state of mind. But YouTube is about views, not truth — and certainly not wellbeing.

ASMR erotica was never profitable, not for YouTube or their advertisers, and not for those who brought it to YouTube. Porn is terrible for advertising because hormonal people are not interesting in buying things; They have only one thing on their mind at that particular time.

While erotic ASMR never really worked as an ad-generator, that does not mean it will disappear. YouTube-brand ASMR was a very effective method to produce softcore porn, especially for webcammers. A single woman, typically young, typically pale, running a one-woman production in her spare room while flaunting her attractiveness (wearing fancy makeup and elaborate clothes) to a receptive audience — if it worked for the Vlogger ASMR sphere on YouTube, it will continue to work for the women who webcam for money.

All ASMR is based on, as the ASMR bigshots say themselves, intimacy. All sexual gratification is also based in intimacy. To put it another way: All sex is intimacy, but not all intimacy is sex; All ASMR is intimacy, but not all intimacy is ASMR. (All ducks are birds, but not all birds are ducks.) While intimacy is not the same as either sex or ASMR, being a bigger concept on the whole than either, ASMR and porn are forever going to be in the same tent.

YouTube ASMR will always be a place for low-budget female exposure, even if the form it takes continually evolves over time. Since the exodus of advertisers, ASMR content creators have turned to new avenues to continue their revenue streams. Some have migrated to Twitch, and simply stream “ASMR” content to their fans in return for donations (and that sounds a lot like webcamming. . .).

Others have turned to the site Patreon, the infamous haven for anyone who is saying something too disagreeable for YouTube to monetise, but not so disagreeable that they could be taken down in a place of free, acceptable speech.

Hand-in-hand with Patreon, the more risqué part of YouTube (and Instagram) have turned to a site called OnlyFans, a scourge which deserves unique and individual attention, but was the internet’s answer to combining the porn subscription model of a model’s porn site with the air of exclusivity and fear-of-missing-out people experience from sites like Instagram and Snapchat. People buy OnlyFans because its the place your friend’s mom might be doing porn, because she’d fancy herself too ‘classy’ for another site, while somehow deluding herself that OnlyFans is closer to Instagram than just another the full-fledged porn site (and it is just another webcam / porn site).

YouTube and Instagram are forever engaged in the battle, and balancing act, of swatting down porn while at the same time promoting suggestive content which advertisers don’t really consider porn, because it drives traffic to their sites. While YouTube may consider ASMR suggestive, it keeps ASMR on its site because millions of people watch it every single day.

Google manages to keep ASMR traffic running through its site while keeping advertisers satisfied in the knowledge that their ads will never appear on such smut by leaving the videos up and demonetising them.

Google thinks the videos are popular and harmless enough to leave up and benefit their platform, and Google still boosts ASMR videos by pushing them into people’s suggestions. It’s really the worst of both worlds, because Google recognises there is a fundamental problem with that type of content, hence demonetising it, yet they are still fully willing to exploit it, while not paying the content makers. Even if Google hates porn (which they — all five of their employees — probably don’t), they should at least ban it entirely, or pay the women making it. The middle-of-the-row attitude of condemning it while continuing to profit from it, albeit a bit more indirectly nowadays, is objectionable and dishonest behaviour all around.

The women who never viewed themselves as purveying in sexual content have pivoted by finding their own advertisers, through video sponsorships, a common tactic on YouTube’s insecure and turbulent management landscape.

ASMR may have reached the point where it is widespread, but it is not mainstream. It can never be mainstream, not without a serious change in the world’s entire culture about what is appropriate conduct. There is a perception that ASMR is still just for perverts and weirdos.

In the current times, stroking people through a screen and whispering into a mic for a living, because “I saw other women doing it online and thought it was strange but something I could do, and give my personal spin on” — as one ASMR producer with several hundred thousand followers has said — will always be one of the lowest forms of content available.

The women who profit from ASMR make their complaints about the reality of what they are doing, but unconvincingly so. The world has already caught on. ASMR is regularly demonetised on Google, banned outright in China, and listed as a porn category on dozens if not hundreds of shady websites.

What ASMR really is these days is a fad, but not so much a gateway drug to porn as an easy side deal for the aspiring ‘porn artist.’ Still, that coincidence cannot be denied; The porn industry is justly interested in the ASMR market, because it draws from the same source. ASMR is not useful for people, but that point is true for the vast majority on online content feigning under the guise of the “entertainment” or “editorial” headers.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who “watches” ASMR videos. Maybe they’ve seen one, probably by accident, and they certainly don’t talk about it. Yet ASMR is huge on YouTube, underground sites on the Web, and even Twitter. It looks like it has penetrated the internet culture, from the point of view of someone locked in the tunnel vision of social-media-suggested content, but it has not penetrated the popular culture — even if Cardi B also has made an ASMR video.

Cardi B is a good example of the grey line between ASMR and porn, as Cardi B, along with many other women who are popular and make ASMR, has worked as an escort or a stripper in the past. More conservative celebrities have not jumped in the ASMR pool just yet.

There is nothing wrong with porn, but ASMR needs to be honest about it, and admit that it is not so innocent, or inclusive, or indeed healthy. For instance, in the small number of years ASMR has been a public thing, a number of women who made it have gone into hiding or have died — two traits unfortunately not uncommon with prostitutes.

Sometimes women who fashion themselves more-so as using ASMR as a gateway to becoming successful sex workers catch the tailwinds of the YouTube ASMR craze and use that momentum to bypass Google’s system altogether:

There have also been a more than a few women who made sexual ASMR videos, got blown up over a matter of days by Google listing their out-of-nowhere video on the YouTube frontpage, the one video went viral, and rather than use those millions of views to build a long-lasting YouTube career (isn’t that supposed to be the dream?) they immediately set all their YouTube videos to private, age-restricted, or unlisted — directing their new subscribers to a now-exclusive Patreon account and started making porn outright.

Just like the allure for an “Instagram Influencer” with a dimming spotlight to make the jump to OnlyFans, these girls are swept away by the potential all that attention could have for them. For women who are just as dirty as their viewers, that might work out, but that isn’t always the case.

This is just another example of how YouTube, Google, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, OnlyFans — THEY are the true influencers, and the sultry women who drive a large portion of their sites are a commodity to them. The tech companies very consciously choose who wins or fails, and these companies are not the friend of these women, or really of anyone.

* * * This article was written in May 2021, before the porn-ban on OnlyFans.com in the summer of 2021, which made national headlines in the U.S., and subsequently this article was written before the OnlyFans reinstatement of pornographic content. It is no surprise that OnlyFans and Instagram and Google exploit pornographic content, then threaten to sell porn out to the big banks, before someone calling their bluff. OnlyFans, before courting Instagrammer teens as a form of alternative income, was started as an adult site by a porn company, and Facebook along with competitors like SnapChat would die off quickly were it not for the promise of seeing current classmates’ or old flames’ 24-hour nudes, or bum pics at the beach. * * *

It is eternally surprising how much money can be made off an isolated and ailing populace — even if it will lead to some collapse far down the road. That goes for health, medical, grocery. . . and tech, even ASMR — the monetising of intimacy — is no better. Think about what kind of person would watch ASMR if they really had everything going well in their life? Would they watch “girlfriend roleplays” if they had a girlfriend? Would they watch “clothing hauls” if they could afford a shopping spree? Would they watch “makeup tutorials” if they felt beautiful? Would they watch “personal attention” videos if they had a friend? Would they watch “flight attendant, or teacher, or secretary, or nurse roleplays” if they had a career of their own? (Again, very similar to the porn industry given the types of professions listed.)

Under several ASMR videos there is usually a tip or a hotline to a women’s health, anxiety, counselling, or suicide hotline. That means the video creator, more than likely a young woman, recognises that something had to go horribly wrong for her viewer to click on her video. Yet she doesn’t judge, she gives the info in the description, gives the viewer content they might like, and collects her cheque. But these women are not so much helping their audiences as mining them for views, and keeping them in a loop or feeling bad, watching YouTube, and feeling bad again.

These women may profit from sorrow, but they probably don’t enjoy that concept. And after all, firefighters profit from fires, even if it is their sole mission in life to never have another fire happen. And what’s the harm of a video, anyway?

Even if the creators create because they view it as harmless, it cannot be denied why certain ASMR creators become famous and others don’t. And the trend for ASMR creators is just getting narrower, younger, and more racist as the genre becomes more pigeonholed by existing prejudice.

There are men who make ASMR, but they are represented in one-in-ten, one-in-one-hundred, kind of numbers. Never to this day has it even been heard of that an elderly man, of any nationality, made a whisper video. And even if one did, they probably wouldn’t last long or go very far. (But you never know. . .)

For their part in this, Google is to blame. Google pushes those videos, and Google is notoriously troublesome in deciding what videos to promote. Google’s trained response is that it gives viewers what they want, and racism is so entrenched in internet culture and real life culture alike, that it will always make its way into Google results. Not only is that a bad response because it is a dodge, not an answer, it is made worse because it is not true.

Anyone who has sat down and seriously analysed what Google does or doesn’t promote can see a clear and purposeful — if blunt — racism on the part of Google the company, Google employees, and Google’s biggest users who generate the majority results Google pulls from. As just one, one, minor, very minor, experiment, go to a Google outlet that cannot be automated, so there is no deniability from Google. Like, say, YouTube’s Twitter handle.

Look through all the posts and start taking note of what the images are, what the implicit message Google is sending is, and what the explicit written text above those images is saying. Next, Google the words “ASMR producer” or “ASMR maker,” and look at the top 10 results — then scroll to the very bottom of the page, click Show More Results, and continue to scroll to the bottom 10 results. Compare the two, and see if you notice or learn something about what Google wants, or doesn’t want, you to see, see first, or see at all. Try this on any Google product that curates media or expresses a company opinion.

Another problem that is prolific in American media, and pretty much all of modern media, is exploitation of adolescents. ASMR is no different, with ASMR creators running massive YouTube channels from the ages of 8, 12, and 13. After researching the average age of the faces behind the biggest ASMR channels on YouTube, that average age is 21 years old, and always going down.

These girls (and their parents who operate their channels since they are technically too young to even be on YouTube at all) know there is a sexual component to what they do, and what draws attention. There is one prominent ASMR channel featuring a 13-year-old who’s mother has been in a fight with YouTube over removal of “suggestive content,” which the mother has objected to by claiming that anything done by someone under the age of 18 cannot be suggestive (a flimsy claim also employed by many TikTok users, and their parents). Of course, that is a lie.

Dressing up a 13-year-old in a bikini and having her “eat sticky honeycombs” on camera may not sound sexual, but, omitting the age of the child in question for a moment, such an act performed by anyone certainly errs on the side of the suggestive, which only makes it more objectionable that it is a child taking part, not less so. And then there is the consideration that these videos are being sold to YouTube viewers for the explicit purpose of profit. Parents profiting off their tween kids on YouTube has to start tripping some kind of alarm somewhere.

As for the 13-year-old herself, in one of her videos — a “flight attendant roleplay” — she utters the statement: “We don’t allow alcohol on the flight because all the boys would try to get with me,” or thereabouts. In another of her videos, she is seen in a skin-tight, leather biker suit exposing her midriff, yet covering the top and bottom.

Her videos have become, like much of ASMR, a meme onto themselves, with people playing GIFs, animated clips, of her content on Twitter and forums such as Reddit. Neither of those scummy sites are places you’d want to see people discussing your thirteen-year-old daughter.

Some of these forums, and even in the comments sections in YouTube, have “countdowns” until the day these child stars become “legal,” upon which day it will become possible for their underground followers to begin posting not only suggestive, but overtly sexual content about them, including making photoshopped nudes and deepfake videos — something that is already a common feature of child TV celebrities and kids of TikTok fame.

Platforms that generate such content should not be left off the hook either; Companies that churn out child stars like Disney and TeenNick have long histories of child exploitation problems, and even some abuse incidents. It is no coincidence that dozens of the “Disney princesses” that grow up in the spotlight have led crash-and-burn lives, and many of the stars from Disney and Nickelodeon have spoken out about what a bad experience they have had. At least two former Disney actresses have openly entered the porn industry in the past decade, perpetuated by sites like OnlyFans, and many more former Nickelodeon / Disney-affiliates (like Josh Peck, Miley Cyrus, and Logan Paul) just flirt around the edge of it.

TikTok is a disgusting site built on melting children’s brains, and is filled with exploitative videos of teens trying to get famous fast — after logging in to TikTok for the first time to check its potential as a media platform, two of the first videos “suggested” through the random stream of videos TikTok content is distributed through were a large, fat woman squeezing her large butt into leggings, and a racist video of four men fighting over one masked woman who was covered head-to-toe in more skin-tight, revealing leggings. Since this was a completely new account on a company phone, and therefore there was no personal data for the app to mine from, that means this is the kind of content the general user is consuming on a regular basis, and TikTok thinks is normal to send to people.

In such a perveance of sexual and suggestive content geared directly towards children, and making use of fame-hungry children themselves, from television, to social media and YouTube, ASMR is not alone, but it is certainly not exempt, since anything even remotely associated with the cheap and suggestive, like ASMR, will attract that crowd.

The elements of sexism and racism in such a narrow and limited space as the, quote, “ASMR Community,” is also immediately apparent. And that is to say nothing of the numerous racist things that often come out of those women’s mouths, or the racist assumptions they make of their target viewer.

Millions of people watching teens webcam from their bedrooms and off their couches while YouTube gives it it’s blessing by boosting the videos while Google cuts the monetisation unless the video makers find a sponsor or open a Patreon, OnlyFans, or Donate button is egregious. It also trains those women, and the audience, to beg for validation on the production side and to pay for affection and gratification on the consumption side.

No one should have to pay for attention, which is why the escort and prostitution markets are so looked down upon, even the phone-sex market (where no one even physically interacts), while at the same time the online dating market is so popular, when in reality there is very little difference between them. For most people, crossing the line of paying for a basic human right and normal human need — close relationships with other people — is a bridge too far. The same applies to making people watch ads or scale paywalls for ASMR content that has the same purpose: Billing people for simulated human contact, and picking the pockets of people who lack real-world human connexions.

It is probably best to be as kind as possible in any assessment of ASMR, since it is a fringe product with a vulnerable community, but the ASMR effect is a detriment to the internet, just as pornography and YouTube itself is. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for it, but it also makes one think fondly about a world where China can just ban it.

Maybe coming down on ASMR, like Google and China have, is just being too harsh on ASMR. Gamers are a sexist community, appealing exclusively to men, and only allowing men to hold authoritative voices in the cult of gaming — just like ASMR — and has an unhealthy trend of encouraging its users to stay indoors and get addicted to its content — just like ASMR. Gamers also have an obsessive and inexplicable infusion of racism into their main content — just like ASMR. Yet gaming is not banned.

And twerking, which is a “simulated sex act” of bouncing a buttocks up and down as quickly as possible, is much more suggestive than the majority of ASMR, yet twerking is everywhere, and has been completely accepted as mainstream. There are even child twerking contests on American television, and many male celebrities have joked about giving it a try (the joke being that no one wants to see it, but only by an attractive woman with a large butt). There is also explicit racist tones about the origin and acceptability myth of twerking in American popular culture. There is a real case to be made that twerking is a worse thing than ASMR, but as part of being in the music business, it is ubiquitous and everywhere.

There may be things similar to ASMR in the problems presented, like gaming, and things probably worse, like the pop music business, but that doesn’t change what ASMR is. There can be three problems at once: Gaming Culture, Perverts in Corporate Music, and the ASMR Community. The existence of one does not negate either of the others. And there is some restriction of gaming and music industries, even if only marginally. ASMR, which is almost a combination of gaming and music do to its streaming format of long-form audio content, would be expected to draw in many of the same problems those platforms have, since it draws its base of revenue and competition for the same audience from them: ASMR is also targeted toward children and teenagers, young outcasts on the internet.

The internet, social media, and cell phones are corrupting the minds of all who use them, and they are increasingly being marketed towards children while conversely beginning to become more brazen in their exploitation of children. The most famous person on the internet, with tens of millions of followers on Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok, was a 14-year-old girl. She was not a genius, she was not a singer or actor (as many exploited teens in the corporate field are), she was a dancer. She was not even a good dancer; let’s just say there was no chance of her being drafted to the top ballet academie. She was just a 14-year-old that shook her bikini-clad body in a way that was imitable by other 14-year-olds, and caught the attention of those older than 14-years-old.

Some might say that’s perfectly normal and natural and fine, but what is not normal and natural and fine is that she has 50 million plus followers on the internet for doing such a “normal” and “natural” thing. And there is not a chance in the world there is no component of child exploitation, sexism, and racism consistent with her rise in popularity. Consider the fact that teens on TikTok have more clout than teens who go to the Olympics, and you start to realise there is an imbalance, and a problem.

While the women (and, perhaps, girls) who make ASMR might have a love in their hearts they want to express to the world — in return for money — it is impossible to go easy on what they are doing because it isn’t harmless, it isn’t helpful, and it isn’t inconsequential. So long as ASMR is getting millions of daily hits online and is inextricably linked with the topics or sex exploitation, racism, and suicide, it must be constantly considered for reform, censorship, and removal.

Maybe if ASMR goes back to what it originally was, or was never picked up by the general public in the first place, it would be in better tidings.

And if the stray twenty one year old loses her million-dollar platform in the process of cleaning up the web, so be it. The world needs less millionaires — and less webcammers.

. . .

The Question: What is ASMR?

The Answer: A problem.

Jason McCleary is a contributor to Rum & Times. His father, Jacob McCleary, is a marketing consultant, and his mother, Tatiana “Tate” Bradshaw, is the daughter of a farmer and housing broker, and worked as an assistant for an agricultural corporate office in Brisbane.

#YouTube #Sex Work #Onlyfans #Women In Tech #ASMR

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rumandtimes · 3 years

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Does Cultural Appropriation Apply to Natalie Portman?

Sean Ezersky

Assoc. Fantasy Contributor

Does appropriation apply to the worst parts of European cultures?

Today, I want to discuss cultural appropriation. Yes, the issue of the times. But what exactly is cultural appropriation? Well, nobody knows. Starting at the first word, it claims to be some kind of appropriation. And it has something to do with culture.

Firstly, it should be said that this article has nothing to actually do with cultural appropriation. That is because cultural appropriation is essentially defined by racism. The term first appears, so it goes, as a description of how racist citizens of England marginalised and exploited the peoples of the Caribbean, and attacked sections of the working class schtick, for fun. Sounds evil enough.

The term cultural appropriation cannot be used as a mild term or played around with much, because it is by definition a form of misconduct. The term cultural appropriation is defined by the words “inappropriate,” “racist,” and “commercialist.” There is no redeeming quality to cultural appropriation because cultural appropriation is used to describe exclusively irredeemable activity, markedly opposite to cultural exchange or respect.

Consider the worst perpetrator in the United Kingdom and the United States: hip-hop / rap music, curly hair, or a summer tan. Racists always attack these music genres and human characteristics un-European, placing them into the same box on the fringes of their minds, but at the same time view themselves as ‘cultured’ for dipping into the same music, view themselves as ‘interesting’ for factory curling their hair, or view themselves as ‘unique’ for getting a spray-on tan. There is a murderous and delirious sense of bad irony, that racists altogether marginalise, demonise, and lust after perfectly normal traits and human practices, which the racist calls exotic, for fear of being labelled as freaks themselves. That is cultural appropriation.

Another bad actor is the billion-dollar yoga industry in Western nations as well, which attempts at every corner to steal Indian culture then mutilate the original concept, taking the yoga gurus off the cover and planting in some body-bleaching whores, or some wavy Italian guy, to appeal to the racist American, à la youth female target audience. All the while, Hinduism, inextricable from yoga’s origins while not necessarily the same as yoga in any way, is viewed as a false and inexpiable religion by most people in the West. Yoga was not learned from the Hindu, it was looted, and replaced with a shallow, cruel, commercial, and disgraceful attempt to Europeanise and trivialise the hobby while selling it the crude sex markets. That is a form of cultural genocide and religion-sacking. That is cultural appropriation.

But this article is not about cultural appropriation, in a way. The distinction was only added to please those offended by the comparison. This article is about movies, as part of a series of Star Wars critiques, and it’s about Natalie Portman.

Long have I harboured a question about Natalie Portman’s career, as it is so vapid yet so prolific, so vain yet so ubiquitous. This is just the opportunity. Natalie Portman got her start in acting as a 16-year-old leading actress on Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. She returned three years later as a 19-year-old lead on Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, where her character dies. After moving on from the Star Wars prequels, she used that resume to enrol at Harvard University to study psychology.

She has actually commented on this, as all Harvard associates eventually do, saying she and her peers felt she was only enrolled because she was in Star Wars, and this insecurity led her to push harder than her friends in her classes and challenge herself by picking ‘harder-than-necessary’ classes. Still, psychology is the most common undergraduate degree major among women, so hardly original. Whether or not Natalie invites the assessment or feels it is correct, this is undoubtedly true; She, as most people, never would have been looked at by Harvard if she did not have some kind of bank of riches or wealth of limelight that could be mined by the admissions board. Natalie might want to be viewed as a genius of “Hebrew literature” who stood out among the crowd, but that is just impossible parlour speak. Not that she deserves to go to Harvard any less than anyone else, no one deserves to go to Harvard, as Harvard in the 20th Century existed for the sole purpose of excluding people who were not rich, famous, or connected: not academics, so Natalie’s lie to herself merely parrots Harvard’s lie to the world.

But I want to go back just a second. Yes, Natalie Portman said she studied Hebrew at Harvard, even if not intensely enough to double-major in it. That is because her name is not actually Natalie Portman. Her name is Neta-Li Herschlag, and she is Jewish. So, studying Hebrew isn’t impressive knowing she speaks fluent Hebrew at home. That is not to undermine literature, as English-speakers still study English literature, but it’s hardly extraordinary. Hershlag, as I will now be exclusively referring to her, is using her association to Harvard, Judaism, and other, lesser, things to seem smart, yet all of those were gifted to her by either birth or Star Wars.

Now comes the question of cultural appropriation. Neta-Li started her acting footprint as an understudy for the part of Elle Woods in Broadway plays. Yes, that Elle Woods, aside Britney Spears no less. It hardly seems like the right role for a good Jewish girl. But lo, there are some who might point out that Hershlag is an Ashkenazi, and therefore not actually Jewish, that is, not a Semitic person. This is a touchy subject for the Jewish community, particularly since the establishment of Israel: Who actually is Jewish, by means of ethnicity or heritage, and not just language and religion? Is there a meaningful distinction between the Semitic Jewish culture that remained in the Levant, the Sephardic Jewish culture that emigrated to Africa and Iberia, the Mizrahi Jewish culture in Iran and Arabia, the Yiddish Jewish culture that stuck around in Germany, and the Ashkenazi Jewish culture that settled Eastern Europe? Really, who knows, and that is a deeper question; a question, perhaps, for a student of Hebrew literature, wherever we should find one.

Nonetheless, Hershlag is most certainly not British. That Israeli-American nuance is fine for the world of “Naboo” in Star Wars, which ideally would defy every concept of the term “ethnicity,” but works less congruously for Elle Woods. In Star Wars, Hershlag was a doppelganger of Keira Knightly, a dyad which has persisted the entirety of Netali’s 30-year-long career. Here too, we find questions.

Netali gave an interview, which I discuss almost on a daily basis among my social circle, where she firmly wanted to establish herself as a kind of British legacy. She said, of herself, “I iron out my Jew curls” and bleaches/dyes her hair, for no particular reason other than she wants to, and thinks it will make her fit in. Netali also went on to say that no one has naturally yellow hair — which is true, they don’t — implying that a non-Jewish, European actress would not face the same questions about her hair she did. Because the concept of hair straightening and hair bleaching are Nazi holdovers in British and American culture, and as someone who personally hates Nazis, this endlessly infuriates me. All the more so because Hershlag identifies as Jewish!

If Hershlag thinks modifying her hair to make it look ‘more European,’ or, more correctly (since almost all young Europeans have brown hair), to make it look more Hitlerite, more ‘Arianised,’ is acceptable, then she must either view herself as European first and Jewish second, or just care very little about the legacy of antisemitic racism. Why else would a person who calls herself Jewish want to alter her appearance so drastically, in order to look like a posterchild for one of the Hitler Youth?

Many Jewish-Americans feel pressures of Nazi antisemitism and colonial racism in the United States, and many Ashkenazim respond to that by changing their names, Nazifying their looks, and abandoning the Jewish religion. Netali retains a veneer of her Jewishness on the inside, within her own self-perception, while turning into the Arianised version of the Elle Woods archetype on the outside, for the world to see. Is she just playing a part? Is there a real difference in the personality and values of Netali Hershlag vs. Natalie Portman?

People don’t treat her as such. Keira Knightly, for instance, is an Englishwoman. Knightly claims she is ‘British,’ not English, but she is definitely English. Intriguingly, Knightly never went to school, reportedly a dyslexic, while Hershlag, in the Jewish stereotype, went straight to Harvard College. I wouldn’t say Hershlag seems like a nice person, she seems like an ordinary person. Remember that she is part of the Star Wars pantheon of small-time actors who were lifted by George Lucas to notoriety, like Mark Hamill (despite him being my favourite Star Wars actor, I can never remember his name), Harrison Ford, and of course, Sir Alec Guinness CBE.

Jokes aside, with all the classically-trained, upper-class, heavy-hitters from Britain — Peter Cushing OBE, Sir Christopher Lee CBE, and Sir Alec — not to mention the affable nobodies from Hamill to Ford, most Star Wars people are considered likable, especially by fans of nerdom.

That is not to say anyone was struggling, as every lead character in Star Wars was already documented as rich and famous by the time they were cast, but they were “nobodies” in the sense they were not household names until after the film became one of the first Hollywood summer “blockbusters” in history.

Most of all, it is undeniable that, other than Lucas, no one defined the Star Wars films as much as Carrie Fisher, if not for a want of contrast. Fisher was the only female character in all three of the movies, and both the predecessor and counterpart to Hershlag’s character in the Star Wars prequels. Does Hershlag meet the comparison?

The two are very different, both personally and on-screen. Fisher at the age of 19 had sex with numerous middle-aged members of the cast, often the only female and only teenager in a room of dozens of men, forbidden to wear a bra or choose her own hairstyle but allowed to partake in the rumoured plethora of drugs on the set. Hershlag, part of Star Wars from 16 to 19, was entirely unremarkable, both in life and profession, not a very impressive actor or much of a hoot. Again, the good Jewish girl. Some blame Netali’s poorly role on the weakness of the prequels compared to the originals, just as some blame Carrie’s bipolar diagnosis for her eccentricity. Both of these are half-truths, as personality and talent can never be substituted for anything other than what they are. Nonetheless, Fisher and Hershlag were both made rich and famous. While Hershlag is the lesser in terms of her performance, she probably got in the end a much better long-term deal.

A boring role meant Netali would not be immediately typecast, though she went on to play exclusively the girl-next-door leading female interest for a male protagonist, much the same as in Star Wars: Episode II. Coming into acting younger meant she could largely leave acting after childhood, then return to it later as an adult experience. Moreover, we never got to see teenage Netali chained to a bed in a gold bikini.

Our good, Jewish girl.

So, if Hershlag is playing roles given mostly to British, or Hitlerite, actresses, is she not taking away from the British actor? There are too many actors in the world. They are overexposed and over paid, seen too much and given too much, as they are in the same camp as clowns, entertainers, and comedians. But, people like to be entertained, and in the world of capitalism where only money is worship in lapse of dignity, anything people like sells, and anything that sells can make people rich, and riches are a substitute for class, if only a thin one. Just as the weak-minded can be fooled by the Force, so are they easily bought and sold. The British or American actor suffers for nothing, and there are too many of them as it is.

But, does Hershlag have a place in displacing them, or moulding in to become one of them? And would it be cultural appropriation? Undeniably, Netali is conforming to something objectionable when she plays simple roles as sex objects and Hitlerite women, embracing if not embodying the racism and problematic nature of Hollywood casting. But then again, it is with her very body that she represents this trend. One could defend Hershlag, saying she is made to do these things, that she is not so much appropriating Western culture for her ends, but more so that Western culture is stifling her true self, at least if she wants to continue to have a role in acting.

An interesting counter-point, but undermined by Hershlag’s particular brand of coy self-promotion, and eagerness in taking on such roles. And are the Jewish people entirely exploited by Hollywood? In many respects, so-called Europeans are exploited by powerful Jewish moguls in media more often than the other way around, even if they are Jewish Europeans themselves. Harvey Weinstein, a Jewish millionaire who sexually assaulted non-Jewish Western women in order to get them roles, his Jewishness hardly made a ripple.

The biggest names in Hollywood: Steven Spielberg, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Rudd, Marta Kauffman, J.J. Abrams, Scarlett Johansson, Harrison Ford, John Stewart, Louis Szekely, Mila Kunis, Daniel Radcliffe, Rachel Weisz, Gal Gadot, Roseanne Barr, Judd Apatow, Marcus Loew, Lauren Bacall, Adam Sandler, Amy Schumer, Larry David, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cassidy Freeman, Stanley Kubrick, Jennifer Connelly, Richard Dreyfuss, Samuel Goldwyn, Julia Garner, Elijah Allan-Blitz, Kirk Douglas, Ellen Barkin, Ingrid Pitt, Darren Aronofsky, Eva Green, David Geffen, Lesley Ann Warren, Paul Newman, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ben Stiller, Louis B. Mayer, Alison Brie, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Chuck Lorre.

As Conan O’Brien jokingly stated: “The Cash-ews run Hollywood.” Almost every major production in Hollywood has a massive Jewish section of development. The United States, for whatever reason, is a majority “Christian-identifying” country, but Judaism plays a much more massive role in the culture than Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism combined. Even most of the agnosticism in ‘progressive’ Hollywood values comes largely from material secularism, or Jewish incredulity of Christianity, not an ideological pull towards atheism. Is this cultural reproachment why Jewish people are pulled towards media and entertainment, theatre being a known haven for outcasts and oddballs? The Judeo-Protestant alliance of the Hollywood ilk would seem to disqualify the established Jewish community — rich, interconnected, secular Jewish communities of New York, Los Angeles, and DC — from being an oppressed mass.

An important editor’s note is that the actors listed are: Jewish people who adopt non-Jewish appearances or non-Jewish values to a borderline-racist degree (i.e. Eva Green: Jewish actress who plays roles bookmarked for non-Jewish Europeans), thoroughly Jewish people who refuse to identify as Jewish (i.e. Julia Louis-Dreyfus: Jewish billionaire heiress who plays Jewish characters on TV), or regular observers of Judaism who are really, really famous (i.e. J.J. Abrams: co-director of the controversial Star Wars reboot).

More often behind the scenes than on-screen, but usually leading the show when taking a starring role, the Jewish imprint is inseparable from American movies, media production, television, the comedy scene, finance, and screenwriting. Is Jewish not the ruling order of Hollywood? And then would Europeans be the group on the margins? But why, if Jewish people write, pay for, and put on the shows, are there so few Jewish actors, and of those who are, why do they not look Jewish, or a better question would be, why do they try to avoid looking Jewish, and actively attempt to look Western European? That gives the impression that Jewish people are still marginalised in media, even if they are overrepresented in media, and generally more affluent, interconnected, and educated than those non-Jewish counterparts. Why do Jewish people go out of their way to appeal to racist audiences, and in the process erase their own Jewishness.

Maybe it is because the Hollywood Jewry isn’t actually Jewish. Nothing about their jobs or their behaviours embodies the Jewish religion. Most people in Hollywood in general consider themselves as nonreligious, yet that too, might be an influence of a markedly Jewish trait. Non-Christians in the United States are much more likely to turn to atheism and agnosticism on the one hand or fanatical extremism, likely due to being outcast by the mainstream Protestant dialogue, with liberal Jewish people often going agnostic and conservative Catholics often going supercharged while Muslims live on somewhere off in the shadows of public perception.

Yet nonreligious Jewish people still identify as Jewish, separating the religion of Judaism from the ethnic mark. Faith has nothing to do with appearance, and appearance is the base of antisemitism. Enter non-Jewish-looking Jewish people, usually women with heat-flattened hair, like Netali Hershlag and Gal Greenstein Godot. That is not to say they don’t look Jewish, as in an equal measure they all do and at the same time no one does, since what a Jewish person “looks like” is a narrow heuristic based on problematic cultural expectation. That is not to say they are or aren’t Jewish. But are Jewish people like Natalie Portman being forced to conform to racist society, or are they jumping on the bandwagon of racist society and using it to their advantage? Is there actually a difference between the two?

There is a deeper question lying beneath the surface here: The questions of “Jewish complicity in racism?,” “Jewish participation in neo-Nazism?,” and “If ‘Jew’ is a ‘race’ and ‘White’ is a ‘race’ then why are there ‘White’ and ‘non-White’ Jews?,” which other people have asked before. This article is not to address those questions, but they are acknowledged.

Certainly, there are some Jewish people who attach themselves to racist tendencies and Hitlerite habits out of personal advantage in the racist countries in which they might live. In this narrative, the notional collaborator Jewish community would blame the Europeans for racism and cast themselves as convenient survivors. That is not a uniquely Jewish trait, it is a flawed human trait, bystanderism, which defies religious teachings. Why there is such a prevalence among rich, secular Jewish people, of racism mixed with liberalism, is a concern. It could be as simple that, at a certain point, the trait “rich” might start to cancel out the trait “religious.” Old guard antisemites would be unforgiving regarding hatred towards ‘ethnic Judaism,’ and contemporary racist sentiments would reject Jewish people from the points of heritage and beliefs, but it is not immediately clear if Western neo-Nazis would target non-religious Jewish people who, quote, “pass” as Euro-Christians.

If Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrahim join Western cultures, ideals, and appearances while abandoning the Jewish religion, are they functionally Jewish at all? In the absence of different brands of generational antisemitism, what is holding back an atheist Ashkenazi from becoming a Nazi themself? The Jewish community and Israel critics have been ablaze with debate about the Eurocentric, Ashkenazim-focused account of Judaism in the West, drawing attention to the issue of inter-Jewish racism and inequality among the diaspora of the Jewish faithful. This question is debated separately for Jewish communities because unity is their faith. Followers of Christianity have always cut one another down over heresies and infidelities, but discourse and diversity have defined the post-Rabbinic tradition. The notion of one Jewish diaspora being more powerful than another, based not even on secularism such as in Christianity, but based solely on racism and adjacency to Christian empires, causes non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities to question that proximity in values and appearance Western Ashkenazi populations have with the goyish counterparts. Even the terms Ashkenazi and Mizrahi have taken fundamentally racist connotations, particularly in the advent of Zionism, to separate the ‘European Jewish’ from the ‘Arabian Jewish,’ in a kind of wartime apartheid of academia; a conflict emblematic of larger paradoxes in modern Israel.

This is not the focus of this article. Obviously, Jewish people living in Western Europe and urban America are more “Western” than people who live somewhere else. And obviously, Western nations have a serious and prolonged issue with racism. However, welding those two facts together, then conflating them with Judaism in some sense, would be a mistake.

There are some racist people in Hollywood who identify as, or are identified as, Jewish. That is not the question. The question is: How does the concept of cultural appropriation contribute to that complex dynamic, of conformity and exploitation in Hollywood, even amongst the big names?

This all comes back to the perceptual balance of power. Just as the term cultural appropriation is defined as a group being in a oppressive position and exploiting something that that group itself has made derogatory.

Is Netali Hershlag appropriating Western culture? In a way, yes. As a rich, powerful Jewish actress, she could hardly be said to be put at a disadvantage to Keira Knightly (Harvard versus dropout, remember), or the millions of aspiring brown-haired actresses who are shunned from Hollywood castings. And yet, she decides to look more like them. Obviously, as an ordinary woman herself, she has been victim to the usual sexism and obsessive demands of producers and directors concerning appearances, but that is hardly so say she is a victim. At any moment, she could deign to take a different part or produce her own movies (I would balk to call them films), rather than be typecast as the sexy and innocent girl-next-door. She lives the life of the good Jewish, girl, but never takes on those types of roles, opting instead for Princess Amidala, ballerina Nina Sayers, valley girl Elle Woods, comic book Jane Foster, or Englishwoman Anne Boleyn. Hershlag could at any moment leave acting to climb the ladder a Harvard A.B. clears the way for. How could Harvard Law School, or subsequently the California Democratic caucus, say no? Who wouldn’t pay for a doctor’s visit with the woman from V For Vendetta?

This is not to say that Jewish people are appropriating or imposing themselves upon Westerners, but it is to say that there is a distinct group of Jewish people who draw from Western or Hitlerite practices while entirely avoiding ‘Juden-haus’ or ‘Euro-trash’ rhetoric that hampers people on both sides of the racist conflict. Portman is Netali’s grandmother’s name, so she does have some kind of loose claim to it, if her cousins are still go by that name and she is close with them, while Natalie is a form of the name Neta-Li, and plenty if not most actors use stage names. Many people do racist or questionable things because they are in fashion. But altogether, one must ask the question why the self ascribed curly-haired Netali Hershlag is appearing is French wig and makeup commercials. Is it raw, unidealistic money? Is it Maybelline? Or it is fake hair, fake lashes, and a fake identity?

Natalie Portman is hardly an inspiring figure for women, playing roles subservient to men, often murdered by her lovers or terribly afflicted herself. This is true in Star Wars, Black Swan, Thor, V For Vendetta, and when she played the wife of wife-killer Henry VIII. Where is the liberty in being bedded by an uxoricidal maniac, be it a tired British period piece, or the obsessive Anakin Skywalker? Body modification of any type is not the product or respect or exchange, and can only be looked down upon as unnecessary and insecure. Acting is lying, but that does not mean the actress must change their looks or change their self to read some lines to a camera.

#Natalie Portman #Hollywood #Judaism #Cultural Appropriation #Star Wars

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rumandtimes · 3 years

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I Don’t Trust Atheists on TV

__________________________________________________

Winfred Thoroughfare

Assoc. Reasonable Man Contributor

There’s something unsavoury about television personalities in general, but especially those that address the topic of religion. As a reasonable man, I don’t trust religious personalities on television at all, but I couldn’t say that I distrust overt atheists any less or believe in them any more than the commercial evangelists.

The Call To Atheism

For an out-and-out atheist to take to the stage and the limelight, they must have some sort of mission. Namely, to sell their book, but on the back of that goal they have a supplementary objective: the destruction of religion. TV atheists usually don’t espouse the benefits of one religion over another and typically hate them all. Their goal is to destroy world religion. But as most of them in the English-speaking circuit come from the United States or England, they usually set their targets for Christianity, making little distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism, but viewing Protestantism as slightly more evolved because it can in certain cases be more secular, and usually making no distinction between Orthodoxy and liberalism, since such a divide is unimportant to the U.S. / U.K. audience.

While they are no worse than idiots spreading religious lies and falsehoods to a closed loop of believers on TV, televisions atheists are often consumed by their particular egos and in propagating the achievement of their respective book. Even atheists who feign humility will go on and on about how humble they are, and take the stage to speak of how they do not care for recognition. The companionship of atheism and egoism is likely, probably because the atheist feels as if there is a thousand-year-old tradition spanning human existence up into the majority of the present population, yet they alone in their limited group of intellectuals have solved the ultimate problem: that the big, existential lie of monotheism does not exist.

Everyone knows it’s not so simple. It is an easy matter to prove that any religious text is demonstrably false, and every religious tradition is inconsistent and inane more often than not. But that does not negate the purpose religious has in society, which is not a historical or scientific one, but a bluntly cultural function that often guides socioeconomic behaviours.

Christianity in the United States, for instance, is a markedly isolationist, greedy, and self-indulgent religion; it exists to justify the biases of the congregant, not to challenge a sense of conformity or growth. While American Christians might take umbrage with that observation, pointing to charitable works by their millions of churches and blanket ideals of amicability, religion in America is more often an economic identity or a regional heritage than a calling to a universal standard, and the threat of hell to the nonbeliever out-levers the embrace of opposing factions to a ubiquitous degree.

The Mormons, who may call themselves the most American sect of Christianity (as they claim Jesus was an American) prioritise charity, discipline, and humility for the congregant — all which could be viewed as selfless virtues. But, of course, the Mormons are also extremely strict about social habits such as embracing all forms of abstinence, and their charity comes as a cloak over the dagger of proselytisation and attempts at conversion. Humility on the individual level may be cooperative, but at the institutional level it plays a part in enforcing conformity and obedience from the top down. Charity comes with expectation, discipline comes with sacrifice, and humility comes with ceding control. While it may be hard for a believer of such transactional and oppressive religion to hear, there are forms of Christianity that ask the believer to give up nothing, and instead revel in what there is to gain in following ‘the one true way.’

While religions are often polluted and poisoned by administrative strangling of the freedoms of their lower communities, all religions at their centre have a commentary about the nature and purpose of life, a narrative on the conquest of death, and a guide to live a happier and better existence. Most people are not blind to the corruption of the global clergy, but are happy to ignore and accept the nonsense in return for the community and spiritual gains, or at the very least, the illusion of these comforts. The evangelist atheists underestimate this along with the capacity of their audience whom they ostensibly hope to convert, and underestimate the mortal terror most people have of death and living a useless life.

To broach this fact, many TV atheists speak to the fact that they don’t care what a person believes or how they find comfort, so long as it falls within the cliche utilitarian principle that it does not harm another person. For these atheists however, that is a hard definition to make, because they are very much building a public profile and a career on exterminating religion because they view religion as necessarily irrational and damaging.

Take the prominent TV atheists, while all of them are somewhat fading as of late: Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Stephen Fry, Daniel Dennett, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Nye — it is difficult to trust any of them on the topic of religion. Not because they can easily and conveniently poke holes in religious structures, as we all can, a child can grasp the paradoxes and mistruths of a religious story or text, but because they do not offer an alternative set of mind.

Becrying a problem and then failing to point to a solution helps no one. How will religion die? Where is the answer to that question? They avoid this question. Yet, to the TV atheist, questions of god are easy: Is God all-good? Of course not, because the world is a place that is not all-good. Is God anthropomorphic? Of course not, expecting the creator of the universe to resemble humankind is a clear limit of human hubris and egocentrism. Is God real? Of course not, there is no evidence that a god exists, and all religious accounts we have are clearly incorrect, so there is more reason not to believe and remain atheist or at the very least agnostic than there is reason to believe, therefore any god does not exist. Everyone but the deepest and most repressed religious fanatic has asked themself these questions and come to these rather obvious conclusions, and they didn’t need to map it out in a lengthy book to do so. Yet, still, to the vast majority of people it simply does not matter.

If you meet a Christian on the street and become upset that this man could believe in such a stupid, corrupt, and repressive religion as the Christian church, what will you do? Tell him that the church is corrupt? He will respond that the message of Christianity is dependent on Jesus, who is perfect, not the church, which may well be corrupt.

What if you tell him that Jesus did not exist? Or that Jesus was just a man, and not a deity or demigod as the Christians claim? He will respond that it is irrelevant, because the Bible is a narrative handed down through the generations and not a book of current events, and he values the heritage of traditions set forth in the Christian faith, regardless of the perception nonbelievers have of the Bible, and regardless of whether the account of Jesus exactly correct or not the message of Jesus is real, and that is all that matters.

What if you tell him the message of Jesus and the Bible is inconsistent and self-contradictory? He will respond that it is the duty of a good Christian to see the true, all-good message of the Bible by picking out the good parts as scripture, and ignoring the bad parts as a list of examples of traps of sin not to fall for.

Any argument you throw at this man about the history, epistemology, or philosophy of the Christian faith are irrelevant, because all he cares about is the end result: a belief that Christian teachings will guide a good life, and holding an absolution from the fear of death. Atheists can spout off their nonsense as much as they want, but unless they have a good alternative on how to live a meaningful life and how to not fear death, nothing they say actually focuses on the points at hand. And it is these two questions atheists routinely fail to address.

The TV atheist would tell you to live a life that feels good and helps others, and to accept the inevitability and futility of death. Not only are such statements callous and almost entirely incompatible with human psychology, they are easily criticised through quite valid complaints against hedonism and fatalism. Just as easily as religion in practice falls prey to the atheist attack, atheists’ advice in practice also can quickly fall flat. If religion is a lie, it is a lie that helps the individual live their life.

Atheists are brought back to their initial debate: If god (a higher, infinite purpose) doesn’t exist and if believing something doesn’t hurt anyone else, there is no use in changing the world as it is. But religion is an exception, because while it may help the individual, it hurts society, therefore there must always be a separation between church and state. Yet atheists are forced to reconsider the fact that religion is actually bad for society, and if it indeed isn’t at least worse than the alternative, then to consider the problem that promoting atheism actually trips the lines of not hurting others.

If atheists are spreading anti-religious rhetoric because they know religion to be false and consider it useless or redundant, but in so doing break the spirits of religious people, they are causing harm to others with out of a personal grudge or for the purpose of a vanity project. And if it turns out that human beings start to feel hollow and morbid in the broad absence of religion, or a replacement of religion, and the atheists are not able to provide that replacement, then they will have dismantled a potentially essential part of society, not only in transgression of their values of utilitarian freedom of ignorance and freedom of belief, but also to the detriment of many disillusioned peoples’ lives.

TV atheists would tell you that religion actually does not offer people anything, and everyone would be better off without believing in myths and lies, but people believe in existential lies all the time. The whole of human existence is based upon illusion, not least of which the illusions of the senses and the illusions of consciousness. Religion may be false, religion may be stupid, but by the very rules atheists set for themselves about what is acceptable for other people to believe, religion does not cause enough harm to justify an atheist making a highly public profile and international campaign in favour of destroying religion.

Atheism is not the same as education, as, again, many religious people are fully aware of the gaps in their religion already, but they choose to ignore them. That is an informed decision to remain ignorant of a problem, which is very different to being ignorant of that problem in the first place. Atheists setting out to teach Christians the truth about Christianity because they want to look so informed has a reverse effect of making the atheist look foolish and narrow-minded. Once atheists are making arguments about the weakness of religious thought, it is no longer an educational session but is just that, an argument, and if TV atheists are utilitarian as they claim then they should recognise there is no utility in arguing a moot point. Even is a religious person lapses from a religion based on being persuaded by arguments, they might change their nominal identity and retract support for a religious movement, but are their core values and daily routines really all that likely to change. They are the same person, but they just no longer check the “Catholic” box on registration forms, and now they will attend annual atheist book signings instead of attending weekly mass (which one could argue is a downgrade in practical social terms).

Many of the complaints atheists have are also complaints religious people have: Corruption in churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues; Vapidity of religion in politics; Deviation of contemporary religious teachings from the revelation of ancient religious texts; The failure to modernise the message of some religious doctrines on a regular basis. These are not religious failures, but social failures, and as the religious person would be quick to point out, religion is the solution to social ills, not the cause.

An atheist arguing with a believer about society, where religion is the solution to one person and religion is the problem to the other person, won’t get anywhere. It would be much more useful to actually argue solutions. Bill Nye arguing religion in the objective that undermining Christianity would somehow bolster Darwinism was misplaced; he should have stuck to solely explaining evolution rather than argue with someone who refused to listen to what he was saying based on irrelevant defiance of facts. That is not a religious problem — as many, if not most, Christians embrace evolution (not to mention, many nonbelievers refute evolution on baseless grounds) — it is a problem of dealing with an idiot. Tracing the gospel of Jesus will never advance that conversation, because that was not the question at issue, and Nye should have seen through and restrained himself from the red herring. Just because an idiot wants to invoke a “religious exception” to facts does not mean it is worthwhile to focus on the appeal to religion, as the tantrum against facts is the real point of contention.

TV atheists going off about religion in public sounds more like TV religionists than not. They both have a message to sell for their own sake, usually a financial or even spiteful incentive to push those ideas, and are driven above all by an egoism of hearing themselves speak a correction to the flawed masses while reaffirming just how right they are and how their own rules do not apply to themselves. In short, they want attention.

An instance I completely lost all possibility of respect for Richard Dawkins is when he gave a televised speech and took questions from an audience. All the audience were likeminded to him, as you might imagine the kind of draw to a commercial book promotion for a text Dawkins had authored and was willing to sell and sign for a price. There was no ‘reaching the masses,’ only an atheist author playing an atheist crowd, or — as they say — preaching to the choir. One spectator asked Dawkins a moral question, a chance for Dawkins to build a moral philosophy to replace the absence of modern religious guides to life, and that question was, shockingly, if gay incest was morally acceptable and even healthy. Disturbingly, Dawkins agreed with his pervert fan and said that it was okay, specifically for a lesbian mother to have sex with a lesbian daughter, or for lesbian sisters to have a long-term or exclusive sexual relationship.

A perfect example of how TV atheists will say anything to sound contrarian and build up a stir while playing their fanbase, and of how completely devoid of the human condition their thinking is. Having sex with a family member, or against an imbalance of power, is not solely wrong because it could lead to genetic diseases or questions of parenthood as Dawkins assumed. Those are costs to be reckoned after the fact. But it is wrong in the conception of the act because it violates the family structure and destroys the development of a normal and healthy life if a parent views their own child as a sex toy to be groomed into adulthood, and it violates the requirements of happiness and satisfaction in consent if there is a power imbalance in a purposefully mutual relationship.

While the loser in Dawkins’s audience obviously didn’t realise it, there is a need in human relationships to have a bond on a personal level, to have an unconditional bond on a parental level, and to have a familial bond on the sibling level (including cousins). People’s relationships are not just sexual.

Promoting incest in the presence of contraception or homosexuality as Dawkins did in an offhanded comment is disgusting and disturbed, because such a broken system would be harmful to the people involved on a social, biological, and individual level, depriving them of the value of having a family. Viewing each person as a sexual object, and each household as a harem in the process of self-breeding where people have no worth outside of being violated by their close kin, not only undermines the first and most major drive that people have in forming new relationships despite the risk with new people but it also corrodes the safety and security of life at home. There is a reason that most people don’t have an urge to have sex with their family members, and where it does happen occasionally it has never in the history of any human society on Earth been viewed as most normal and best long-term option.

Just because people consent to something does not mean it is good for them, and two lesbian siblings having sex with each other could only lead to disaster (or is likely the product of some previous disaster), no matter whether Dawkins and his acolyte have given them the go-ahead. As pornographic as it might feel to have sex with a sibling to the Dawkins-brand of utilitarian, such a perversion of biology could never compare to the fulfilment of going out into the world and meeting someone who cares for you on a purely sexual level without destroying the deeper relationship you have with a sibling for the rest of your life after the hormones wear off.

Most people know that hooking up with an ex or a co-worker is a bad idea, yet Dawkins is telling people to go for their mom if she’s into it and they bring a condom. And as a biologist, hiding behind the title of biology to push evolution as a trojan horse for atheism, Dawkins should — should — have immediately noted that such a stance is evolutionarily unsustainable if adopted to any real degree, and that it comes off as somewhat homophobic and ill-informed to acquaint doing gay stuff with doing incest and then say it’s cool only because “they can never have children.” Gay people are not black holes of morality, nor are they dead ends of evolution, which Dawkins neither said nor implied, yet that was implied by what he said.

Perhaps tellingly, Dawkins and fan completely failed to understand the fact that sex is a behavioural more than a procreative act — another misconception about human nature Dawkins ironically shares with the church. As a general rule, as well as an absolute rule, say no to incest.

While that’s Dawkins, and maybe people never respected him anyway, the other TV atheists have a repetitive air to their talks of wasting their time (Bill Nye), pushing an ulterior agenda (Sam Harris), going on a pointless rant (Stephen Fry), flattering their own ego (Richard Dawkins), suffocating people with the obvious (Daniel Dennett), being generally unsufferable if not all of the above (Christopher Hitchens), failing to properly contextualise the issue (Neil deGrasse Tyson), or acting out as a contrarian (Bill Maher). If being reasonable is the only goal of the TV atheist, they ought to reason out the fact that religion does play a role in people’s lives, and solving the issues of child rape or poor education or genocidal conflicts are not as simple as saying, “abolish the church,” because the church is a manifest if flawed representation of religion, and religion itself is not responsible for those atrocities.

If anything, religion is a meaningless term — especially in hyper secular and materialist societies like the United States, Britain, European Union, China, and Russia — and especially in hyper dogmatic societies such as Pakistan, Iran, Tanzania, Israel, and Argentina. Religion means whatever the religious person wants it to, and that is not due to ignorance as the TV atheists believe, but is actually by design.

People convert religions, lapse, mutate, and protest their teachings in accordance with their own beliefs. Just because this happens behind the scenes and in silence for most people does not mean the internal doubts and realignments do not take place. And at the end of the day, religion is still there, because people need a sense of purpose and a reason to live their lives, and because most people (unlike the impenetrable exterior of the common TV atheist) don’t want to die — and the concept of death includes aging, being outperformed by rivals, feeling useless, losing a sense of purpose or time, feeling regret over memories, and facing the unknown in both the present and the future.

Religion helps people by telling them lies. Such as in America, American-Christianity telling people everything happens for a reason, telling people that god has an individual purpose for them, telling people that money does not corrupt but instead empowers, telling people that they are guaranteed to live forever in a perfect existence after the first inevitable death which they already know is coming, telling people that they can never be alone because god is always with them, telling people if they do the right thing the right thing will happen for everyone in the end. No one in their right mind could live in a world where they did not believe each of these things were true, regardless if religion is what gets it to them.

Having a handful of rich, famous, and disillusioned men complain about the idiot commoner rejects reality, or complain that the idiot commoner is being scammed by the insidious clergyman, because they just won’t accept that their lives are meaningless, and that there is no plan, and that there is no afterlife, is — frankly — mean-spirited, impractical, dishonest, harsh, and somewhat insane. Atheists may have qualms with the rabbinic tradition, but what is the harm whatsoever in a Jewish person believing that they have a calling in life and suspending disbelief is something challenges that identity? That does not mean that religion cannot or should not be reformed constantly, but the TV atheists need to start asking what is their calling, and what truly does it mean to be religious.

#Atheism #Bill Nye #Neil deGrasse Tyson #Richard Dawkins #Religion

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rumandtimes · 3 years

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The Right to Remain Uninhabited

Luke McLean

An Open Letter to Stop Space Exploration

The exploration of space receives more attention that almost any other science fiction topic. Whenever the news cycle wants to find something ‘sciency’ they turn to NASA, or one of its government contractors such as SpaceX. Questions about possibility or cost float through the collective conversation about space. One question not asked is whether space projects should be allowed to go forward, irrespective of cost.

Ask any commentator on space and they will advocate travelling interplanetary space to extend the human capacity in the universe. Some even point out that humanity will be linked to the mortality of the Earth, or the Sun itself, if people can never leave the planet.

For the sake of knowledge and exploration, and the indefinite preservation of the species, space advocates push people towards leaving the atmosphere and into the stars. They never stop to ask if humanity should go to these places, not just if they can.

Assuming interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic space travel were quick, safe, and free, what would be the obligation of humans to go to these places? Or to stay away?

Some enthusiasts submit that life itself is important and if humans can spread any form of life anywhere, then that is a gain for the entirety of the universe, beyond just the human interest. The “astro-ecologist” approach falls into a pit of bias, and forgets a truth of the world around us.

Distributing life is a human interest, because humans are dependent upon other life forms. Seeding ‘barren’ locations with life as a first step to developing an Earth-like ecosystem far from Earth is not a neutral or objective practice — any less neutral than a fungus cultivating lichens (not fungus) in an inhospitable environment to prepare for the direct spreading of its spores.

Shooting bacteria into the orbit of a foreign moon in planning of the eventual human conquest of that rock on the backs of those bacteria one day isn’t beneficial to the moon or the microbes participating in that man-made experiment.

The failure to understand nature in ecological outlooks leans on the fallacy that life is more important than existence. Life is not in balance. Life is not in peace. Life is dynamic, and self-interested, and relentless. Yet life wanes in comparison to the power and majesty of the inanimate and inorganic world. The stars, the mountains, the wind, the heavens, the earth. None can be called “alive,” but that does not mean they are not important or deserve a place in the world.

By artificially placing the interests of the living organisms over top of non-living world, and therefore biasing the interests of organisms such as humans over ecosystems in space, advocates for exploration and colonisation beyond the Earth make an argument about the priorities of all of existence.

The hubris to suggest that planets such as Mars, moons such as Luna, and stars such as Sol are at a detriment because they are devoid of life betrays the destructive and consumptive habits lifeforms can bring to any environment. To accept the truth of existence is to accept that most of the world is not alive, and not attempt to impose a value on that.

Space analysts pass around a regularly used thought experiment, a paradox about the lack of life in the galaxy. If human life is at all representative of common life forms, and if the galaxy is billions of years old, then the galaxy should be teeming with life — the story goes — but it isn’t. This isn’t a limit of observation, because the very need to look closely proves that life is not easy to find.

Is there a flaw in the scientific models of the cosmos? Or did all these lifeforms die off? What does that bear in mind for humanity?

This paradox bases an assumption on a “progressive” model of biology — that lifeforms will become increasingly specialised and complex, and eventually develop technologies which become more and more sophisticated and wide-ranging. The second assumption is that the so-called “advanced” life either has a drive to explore the galaxy, or takes no interest in their surroundings.

Neither of these assumptions should be granted to the famous story. Such assumptions impose a recent and idiosyncratic outlook of certain human societies as a universal, not only onto mankind throughout all of time, but onto the vastness of the universe itself. More importantly than exposing a problematic bias, the assumptions take no account of the non-living world.

If life-centric scientists believe so much in the power of life, they have to consider the origin of life. All living beings originated from non-living beings, no matter how much scientists try to create an artificial starting point by searching for the “origin of life” or “the first replicating cell.” The inorganic bourns the organic, so to any degree the living have rights then so do the non-living.

Plants and ecosystems that do not have life, or that maintain only microbial life, have a right to remain in their equilibrium without a human presence. Humans have a desire to replicate themselves and consume their environment, which led to the consumption of every continent on the Earth.

Conservationists have already made the criticism that humans should not have the right to pollute other planets merely as an escape from having recklessly polluted the Earth. The rights of other planets go deeper; It may be that they should not have humans on them at all, even in the unlikely utopia of a sustainable and well-behaved state.

From a planetary perspective, Earth created life on Earth, so should any Earth-being be open to find a place on Mars, or Jupiter? Should a Solar being be open to inhabit another star system? Not as a point of nationalism, but as a point of balance and of right, what place does an Earthling have on another planet?

On Earth, any person has the right to live in any nation on Earth because all humans have equal right and inheritance of the Earth, on an individual level. Because no human presence is natural or in balance with the surrounding environment, all human colonies are equally as natural as each other, creating a more unified experience.

Imagine, however, if there were a place of natural humans, adjacent the human colonies that now span the globe. The species inhabitants of those colonies would naturally view the human invaders as a pest, an infection, that came to inflict harm and consume the resources of the planet. Just as a human population feels unease with the introduction of a new predator or parasite, the rest of nature may have something to lose if humans commit to take resources while failing to replenish them.

As a species, humans must rely upon predation for energy and upon parasitism for habitancy — that is to say, people cannot make their own food or find a place to live without killing or displacing something else in order to eat or relocate it — so the capacity to replenish is necessarily small, and permanently limited; Any species which could produce its own food or live in harmony with nature could no longer be called a human, as humans are defined by their predatory and animated characteristics.

The human bias to consume in the face of mortality is not an excuse to violate the right to be uninhabited, which has been deprived of much of the Earth, and which remains in most of the universe. Everything in existence has a right to exist, and the ecosystems around the universe exist beyond a definition of life. Humans have no place to divide the world between living (us) and non-living (them), nor do they have a place to make a determination that lifeforms have more rights and powers than everything else. The “non-living” world has much greater majesty, beauty, and power than the “living” world could ever imagine.

As scientists can not even agree on what a definition for “alive” versus “not alive” is, it ought to be considered that there is no real difference, as the organic and inorganic live as one in the world, and each have a right to their continued existence but for the violation of each other. The doesn’t mean tsunamis have a right to obliterate human cities, nor does it mean that humans can imagine they have inherent dominion over the universe. The paradox of life in the galaxy is not the perceived absence of alien warships, but the paradox that if everything has an absolute right to exist, then in essence nothing does.

The point is, that no one has an absolute right to determine the fate of another planet, and humanity certainly does not have an absolute destiny to colonise the stars. If it could be said that any human being has an absolute destiny, that would be: to find a group of friends, have children, and then die. This is the fate of all healthy human lives, not more and not less — a social life, a new generation, and an inevitable fate. Space is not a convenient escape from reality, as much as furious fiction authors and the few immature billionaires (usually borne from tech rather than energy, retail, or finance) make it out to be.

There may be some voices tempted to say the world is a free-for-all. That any advantage one can get over the other, or on the surrounding world, is a victory, as in the end all life will come to an end eventually. Those tempted to say that give into the same human bias, looking out into the great, unfathomable world and regressing back to the basic penchant for consumption and self-proliferation; they fall back into fatalism and surrender to vices. There is a difference in accepting the lack of a right to life and losing respect for all life as it is. Human life has value, but not an absolute value. The entirety of the universe cannot be expected to share the anthropomorphic focus on self-preservation and perpetual growth.

There is no meaningful difference between the words “consumption and proliferation” versus the words “parasitism and infestation.” People usually use the word “infestation” to refer to non-human animals or microbes, but those animals probably wouldn’t commit to such a human-centric bias. To them, a human body is nothing more than a host, not a prize nor a victim. There is no moral component for the infesters. They view the human body as an open landscape of energy, space, and nutrients; they have no capacity to even understand that the human as a whole is somewhat united and self-aware.

Humanity resents being infected with bacteria or invading animals because they represent a loss of control and present a likelihood of death. But to the infecting faction, what is death? A once fertile, inanimate field of resources become [ inviable / unviable ] after being consumed. At their scale, there may be no difference, while at the human scale people know that is not the case.

People, including space advocates and scientists, have no right that they can understand nature at the planetary scale — just as the bacterial or insect parasite has no right capacity to understand humanity at the human scale. To understand the rights of existence at the human scale, one must be human, or looking down on humans. To understand the rights of existence at the planetary scale, one must be on the planetary scale, or the galactic scale, or encompassing the universal. That is impossible, as humans have no more chance to embody a planet they inhabit as a roach or a mosquito has to embody a human it consumes.

As we cannot begin to fathom the world around us, we should not be so eager to consume it all in the fears of our own mortality. Existence has a right to exist, distinct from the terms of human consideration. What is the end goal of space exploration? To discover the origin of life? The meaning of life? To one day leave the Earth and spread Earth-based life to other planets? While unlikely to happen in the least anyways, it should be questioned immediately whether these objectives are actually benign, or have anything to offer those other planets.

The secrets of human purpose likely do not exist on Mars, or the Moon, or even in the deepest core of the Sun. Even if they did, what exactly would we learn that we could apply? At what cost comes the destruction of those worlds?

Some call Singapore a marvel of human achievement, a world onto its own, but there was a world before the skyscrapers, and a world remains buried under the concrete, swirling aside the boiling oceans on the coast. Will Mars be the next “achievement?” Sprawling farms and condominiums upon what is currently a peaceful and balanced landscape? Not everything can be expressed in human terms. Failing to understand that reinforces that humanity has no place infecting the world with its presence, as humans seek to exploit those worlds for their own sake.

The world has the right to remain. Existence has the right to exist. In terms of people eying the cosmos, space has The Right to Remain Uninhabited.

#Space Exploration #Conservation #NASA #SpaceX #Environmentalism

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rumandtimes · 3 years

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College Must Be Abolished

Peter Marrows

Senior Academic Contributor

In the United States, colleges are not so much educational centres as they are economic epicentres for local communities. Ask any small town mayor of a so-called “college town” what the municipal budget will look like or prioritise, and he will not tout his citizens, but will probably refer to the local college as an “economic engine” that needs to be expanded or preserved.

In America, the sector of tertiary education is one of the largest employers on the continent. A college of even just 1,000 students hires dozens of menial staff, hundreds of faculty, and as of late hold onto even more administrators and administrative assistants than faculty. Those thousand college students attending a middle-of-nowhere, no-name college are eager to burn their parents’ money rather than continue the pretence of mediocre education, which leads merchants to set up around the campus borders and tailor to those wasteful impulses.

As such, a college in the United States is not a place of learning but a hub of services. Millions of dollars in inflated tuition, unnecessary salaries, and questionable impulses pass through the halls every year, not to mention propping up the technology and real estate sectors in seasonal laptop and apartment sales, both of which start to become overpriced much like everything else purchased by and marketed towards students.

But there may be no need for college at all.

The open sewer of fraud and bad faith loans that college recruiters depend upon to scam American high schoolers into supplementing their own government paycheques and educational subsidies is both a lifeline and a goldmine: for small towns that dragnet underachieving students with promises of the mythical university degree, despite their bad grades and lazy demeanour that would pre-empt them from a scholarship or acceptance to a better place of learning; and for shady universities who tell high schoolers that their campus will give them some kind of non-existent prestige or exclusivity, because they prey on students with 3.5–4.0 GPAs yet still offer an education that is left wanting versus a Udemy or Khan Academy course.

As students are lied to about what the nature of colleges are, they can often miss the signs that a college is not useful to them at all. Colleges are not meant to educate students above all else, but meant to exploit students for financial gain.

In North America, tales are told to high schoolers that anyone who wants to live a normal life needs to go to college, to get a respectable salary requires college, and that only the rich or high-achieving will ever go off to a college campus and escape the relative trappings of home. If this is not the mythology of a scam, akin to a snake oil salesman or the common fearmonger, then what is?

The government does not protect students from these lies, but shovels them into such a predatory system by subsidising colleges with loans and loosely defined accreditations. This is why American children are signing away their souls, coming away $250,000 USD in debt at the age of 23 for a “piece of paper.” Some might call $250,000 a small pittance for a high quality education in good skills and a guaranteed lifetime of a high-paid and rewarding career, but, as referenced before, the quality of the American college education is extremely low and often does not confer any kinds of skills of really information at all on many students, and there is no significant increase in prospects for employment or a job when it is all over.

Of the students who do find a pipeline to a job after graduation, it usually has absolutely nothing to do with the colleges, but instead internship programmes which companies run that discriminatively seek out young people and upperclassmen as students. The students who actually learn something during their time in college are routinely those students who go “above and beyond” the college curriculum, and education themselves on their own time, merely under the guidance of a professorship. They are learning, but not being taught, it just so happens that they are at a college while teaching themselves.

The question should be asked, what if these job training and internship drives were open to the general public and not purposefully made exclusive to juniors and seniors in colleges? And what if people were allowed to educate themselves and apply for an accreditation like a degree, similar to how home-schooling works in the United States, instead of getting tied into the college system?

Colleges like to admit the most accomplished students for two reasons: those students give the illusion that the college teaches their students, and those students do not need to be taught. Culling the applicants for the 4.0–5.0 GPA applicants means that colleges want people who already have an education, not as a baseline for improving that education, but as an easy grab for a student they can simply coast to a degree on the back of their secondary school education. If colleges were interested in educating and improving people’s lives, they would be marketed as a remedial and second chance option for straight-C students, the students who actually still have something to learn. Straight-A students are pretty much a finished set as soon as you get them, and often don’t need any additional help.

Colleges like to sign job agreements with companies, ostensibly so that qualified students can find a job and so that companies can find qualified applicants, but in reality it only makes it more difficult for normal people, the 75% of American children who do not go to college, to find a job. Colleges are therefore not building, but destroying the job market, by positioning themselves as a harmful man-in-the-middle (MITM) to progress in life. There is also the concern of just how “qualified” the most qualified college graduate is, as new hires are still put on a several-years-long job training suspension after being hired anyways.

College is above all dangerous for the average American student. The ubiquity of bullying, drug culture, hazing culture, abuse in sororities and fraternities, alcoholism culture, rape culture, defiance of due process, and financial exploitation makes college on of the riskiest times for American adults, and leaves countless millions of the 17–25 year olds beaten, changed, and alone during their time away from their parents and hometown friends.

What if there were no more colleges? The lacklustre American education programme could certainly be accelerated to accommodate college curriculum into high schools; most high schools in America have a program that teaches high school students up to the sophomore level in college already. Elementary education could mandatorily begin in preschool. Primary or middle school education could begin in elementary school. Secondary or high school education could begin in primary school. And college education could begin in secondary school. This is often already the case for so-called “advanced” students, but these opportunities could be made uniform, and undercut the cartel of colleges since elementary, primary, and secondary education are free.

What this would look like in the mathematics would be: Counting in preschool; Times tables in early elementary; Prealgebra in late elementary. Algebra in early primary; Precalculus in late primary; Calculus I, II, and III in secondary; Mathematical theory the year of graduation. Currently, many American students are still in precalculus at the college level, which is not only a disgrace in itself that needs to change, but both inflates the necessity and diminishes the use of American colleges. Undergraduate or community college can then become the equivalent of what graduate school is now. Any student that falls behind should be left behind; if a student fails the eighth grade, let them stay in the 8th grade until they pass. There should not be a stigma or a minimum age requirement on graduation from school. A school was never meant to be the pure and complete centre of a person’s social, familial, developmental, and professional life, much like it currently is in the United States.

As for hiring, if companies were prevented from discriminating in their internships and job training programmes and had to hire from the general populace, and were required to provide job training to all hires rather than outsourcing that requirement to colleges, employment and employability in the United States would increase in an equitable manner, and those employees would be better at their jobs because they would jumping right into the real-world scenario, not going over abstract theory of what it might be like to one day have a job in a detached college classroom. That would be no small task, as that theory would still need to be taught, but tailored to the individual company. No matter how difficult a transition, it would surely have to be more efficient to train on the job than to nationally spend billions of dollars on colleges that leave hundreds of thousands of graduates unemployed, and unemployable, with no option of a reset button for the rest of their life.

The most costly aspect of colleges and their patented system of delayed education and gatekeeping to the job market is Time. The age of a graduate is 22 to 27 years old. The minimum age to become president of the United States is 35, a job that was meant to only accept people who are old, and at a median or end point of their career. The mid-twenties is a long time to wait to start a life, especially when the rest of that life is not guaranteed to you, and the conventional retirement age is around 60. With the current system of education and employment, you get around three decades to live your life, following three decades of being treated like a child in the education and new hire system, and proceeding just one or two decades of retirement before you die and your being is permanently erased from the Earth itself.

Students should be able to have lives while they go to school, and that schooling should end around the age 19, and around the mid-to-late-twenties for post-graduate professionals like medical researchers. It’s difficult to fathom where the current assumption in the educational system for the United States came from, that people have unlimited time and money to burn.

Abolishing College has the benefits of giving a longer, more fulfilling, more educated, and freer and equitable life. The only detractors of such a cause might be the drug addicts and serial rapists who prey on college students; or the multi-billion dollar, government-subsidised education market, that small town mayors have come to be enamoured with. The college cartel has no place in the economic sector or in the social sector of people’s lives, and their polluting and corrupting interests represent a battle the American people must have to improve their country.

Just as the pharmaceutical and insurance cartels lavished for generations in the lies that they were the good guys while letting their clients die on the operating floor, people must wise up to the harmful and counterproductive place colleges and universities have in American life. The battle to topple those massive corporations as a historically bad track record in the modern United States, yet is another battle Americans must have for the improvement of the lives, education, and health of themselves and their children.

Americans colleges are unnecessary, overvalued, and place a significant strain on the economy. It is long time for education to strengthen itself, and do away with the parasites of four-year, degree-offering universities and colleges.

#College #Employment #Finance #Abolish College #Free College #University #Sanders #Cruz #Warren

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rumandtimes · 3 years

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“Bossypants” by Tina Fey: A pre-view

Luigina Cecchina-Tarquina

Assoc. Lifestyle Contributor

When I picked up Tina Fey’s book, I knew little more of her reputation than as a female comedian. I expected a chuckle and some depiction of a woman’s take on the world of hollywood success — I would not have expected to come across a racist book that struggles to relay a single joke while recounting the life of a southern woman’s bygone teenage years, but then, what would one expect from a cast member of “saturday night live”.

For those who are even aware of Saturday Night: Live (SNL), it is common knowledge that Tina Fey, and saturday night live for that matter, are controversial figures in american media. It seems to be a split right down american society: people who find Tina Fey “L-O-L” funny, and people who find her humour unsufferable; people who tolerate the blatant racism of snl and 30rock as “satire,” and those who have had enough of the denigration, minstrels, slurs, and tropes for cheap comedic effect.

I know Tina Fey is a comedian — a clown — and sets out to prick peoples ears and widen people’s eyes. To quote another comedy critic, I do not seek to come off as someone wilfully misunderstanding humour and repeatedly not getting the joke.

Yet the illusion of that decision is for those who do not remember that Bill Murray had a sketch on snl, where he dreamed about “turning from ‘brown’ to ‘white’”, and the more recent habit of snl writers hiring minorities as comedians to attack themselves on the show with slurs, because it would look less objectionable than if the writers denigrated those actors or people themselves. In Tina Fey’s book, she states that “As a Greek,” she would “only date a ‘white’ man, such as a redneck” inexplicably fond of camouflage.

But to quote that same critic again, humour has a goal; It has an audience. When engineered to subvert expectations and play to the common denominator, jokes have a base which they are founded upon. If that baseline for the comedian or writer, like Fey, is a bedrock of deep-seated racism, which the comedian exploits rather than lampoons, it is no longer a humorous observation, but a cheap, racist ploy servicing an already receptive racist base.

Tina Fey saying she would only date in a certain imaginarily-defined group is racist. Full stop.

Fey going on to say she would date even the lowest, “redneck,” in that category, before anyone else in the world is not less racist — as Fey probably expected her statement to be received (by deprecating people of European-descent with ethnic slurs like “redneck” or “hillbilly” or “honche”, rather than solely praising their racist memes) — but it is more racist, as Fey is simultaneously using racism to make fun of her suitors, and again using racism to elevate even them above anyone and everyone else.

Not to “belabour the point,” as Fey would appreciate, or focus on one bad joke: but Fey’s joke is playing to long-festered notions of racism, colonialism, and rogue supremacism, which Fey buys into rather than challenges, where Fey herself puts (1) any “Aryans” above (2) rich Europeans, (3) Greeks above poor Europeans, and (4) poor Europeans above (5) the rest of the living world. It is inane — and stupid — but a strongly held delusion among groups (1) through (5), and probably strongest among groups (2) to (4).

Fey happily plays with this unholy flame of racism, undergirded by genocide in her native South, fuelled by the segregation in Fey’s own high school, and leaving embers of anti-marriage laws across the American East.

That is not to say racism, colonialism, genocide, holocaust, mob rule, political repression, et alia, are not to be joked about — they are the most popular comedic material in the United States (even if only in the United States). But these topics are deadly serious, and not as distant and abstract as we would like them to be.

There is a real possibility, given their frequency and recency, that anyone who read the first edition of Fey’s book, or attended same secondary school, committed a hate crime, using the exact same rhetoric Fey employs as a “joke.” Not only that, Fey never says it is a joke — there is no punchline.

The only reason I give Tina Fey the benefit-of-the-doubt and assume she was not serious about what she said is because the statements where so outrageous and absurd that someone would have to be insane to print them in sincerity, and equally as ungracious to print them even in jest.

Nonetheless, it was never expected to have to wrestle with these issues, which Fey has ill-managed, in a comedy memoir. Maybe if it had to do with Fey’s experiences or personal identity (as “German–Greek”?) it would have a more natural place. That is, if Fey had been the victim of racism, and condemned it, even through humour, that would be expected, cool, and fine. Fey calls herself “Greek,” but only tongue-in-cheek, and it’s apparent she doesn’t speak Greek. Fey calls herself “German,” but only in relation to being American, and it’s apparent she doesn’t speak German.

What we learn is not how Tina Fey suffered racism, but her experience in adopting racism itself. It offends the senses, and anchors the book.

While hardly intended to win over the intellectual crowd, some of Fey’s items over the years cannot be ignored. Conventional culture, and Fey herself, would seem to agree, after the firing of certain snl comedians and the pulling of certain 30rock episodes, that just went too damn far.

This puts Fey in the precarious position of defending her legacy of racist and baiting comedy, and that of her colleagues, as now she has been outed as admitting herself that she has crossed the line on several, several occasions. But does that mean that Fey is accommodated now that she has made a partial apology? Or is that the mere beginning of scrutiny now that critics have gotten their first concrete admission of her failure?

Fey, and many of her cultivation, say such racist things in order to just have meaningless fun, or in order to make fun of the racist. While Fey and the others may consider this to be in good fun, and an inclusive way to overcome racism, at the end of the day you have subtly racist comedians repeating the words of violently racist hate-mongers for the entertainment of an audience often apathetic to the realities of racism. That is to say, with such willingness to commonly, repeatedly, and recklessly embrace such a serious topic, they can miss the mark.

The impulse may be that racism is so at the heart of American culture and popular life that it is expected that a pop culture figure embrace it (similar to why comedians talk so much of ornery subjects such as politics), and that they should not be taken seriously as comedic plays on the feelings of the populace.

However, comedy is nothing if it does not play to the sentiments of the crowd, and the cover of the clown mask is a poor excuse for crude thinking. In Fey’s apology for racist comedy sketches on her show 30rock, she echoed a previous comedians apology, David Letterman, when she said that intent is less important than perception when that perception causes innocent people pain. In Letterman’s statement (on a different subject), Letterman also says it is not about intent but perception that forced his apology and goes so far to say that if you must explain a joke, it wasn’t that funny anyway, so there is no sense in defending it.

Elizabeth Xenakes Fey, or Tina, has been a supporter of progressive movements in the country, but it should not be overstated to what extent, nor should the virtue of this support be overstated. Fey’s famous endorsements of Barack Obama versus John McCain, and of Hilary Clinton versus Donald Trump, and moreover her critical statements of Sarah Palin’s alliance to both McCain and Trump, have been definitive to her identity as a good liberal and progressive person who supports women’s advancements.

Yet, so too did the majority or Americans. It is not a controversial stance to support the candidate that won the popular vote of a national election — and, sadly, many racist people, both aware and unwitting, also vote for so-called “progressive” candidates for different reasons, despite their problematic stances. That is to say, being a Democrat is not exculpatory of anything. It should also be noted that Fey endorsed Clinton over Obama in the primary, and refused to endorse Bernie Sanders (or Clinton) in the next primary, and Fey describes herself and her works as “neutral,” rather than progressive.

Fey’s most famous work in comedy, the impersonation of Sarah Palin wasn’t as scathing as one might expect of a true critic, but was in many cases humanising, and even flattering. Fey was not kind in undermining the Tea Party spokesperson, but Palin was made out to be an odd yet loveable figure, rather than a contemptible one: she was written off. As Fey’s alter ego said herself, ‘it would be egotistical for saturday night live (or anyone else) to believe that a couple of jokes swung the 2008 election.’

Tina Fey has many hard questions to answer for racist depictions in her sketches, television series, and book — and it is not so easy a dodge to say that she once ‘made fun of Sarah Palin.’ Another reviewer stated, “I don’t think Fey comes off as a bad person, I just don’t think she’s funny.” Tina Fey doesn’t come off as a good person, or a bad person, but just presents as an ordinary person, and whether you find Tina Fey (or mor importantly, any of her jokes) funny is a personal and indeterminable matter.

I watched a few of Fey’s “world-famous” skits for this review, and I admit I did mistake Sarah Palin for Fey in their cross-over cameo skit; And the moment I laughed the hardest (in fact the only moment I laughed through the skits) was during the VP Debate Sketch with her fellow southerner, Jason Sudeikis, where “Biden” repeatedly attacked Scranton, Pennsylvania as “the worst place on Earth” — so again, people react to comedy in an unpredictable way, as a basis of personal experience. I don’t think all of Fey’s jokes make it, yet no one can singularly define anything as “funny,” or not, but I do see her as a professional on screen. I don’t give a pass however on bad interest jokes, especially on the mere basis of not liking Donald Trump (who, remember, is also a television celebrity who has worked in comedy, and made jokes that were blatantly racist — and sexist).

Entering Fey’s book, “Bossypants”, with this pre-review (re-preview?) in mind, it introduces to me that this memoir may turn to places unexpected, and that just because it is a celebrity-text does not mean it will be a simple, casual, or homey, ride.

#Book Review #Bossypants #Greek Culture #Sarah Palin #Tina Fey

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