on my hands and knees, BEGGING the fandom to stop saying Qui-Gon abandoned Obi-Wan on Melida/Daan.

Look, if you haven't read the book, THIS is how the confrontation actually plays out:

I feel like even without the added context of the entire book, it's pretty clear that Qui-Gon is giving him a CHOICE, one that Obi-Wan seems pretty well-informed about what it means and the consequences for him.

But like, fine. Without context, it might seem that Qui-Gon isn't being fair because all Obi-Wan wants to do is help these people. I have two arguments against though, 1) other options as to how to help these people are brought up during the narrative, ones more in-line with how the Jedi operate, and 2) Obi-Wan's predominant reason for wanting to stay is not because he wants to help.

This is one of the very first options we encounter as to how this issue could be resolved, or at least helped:

This is shortly after they first meet the Young and comes from Cerasi herself, one of the leaders of the group. Asking for more Jedi support or at least broadcasting the situation so that maybe other organizations within the galaxy can help. Which is well-within their means as Jedi to at least try and get more support, and doesn't go against their roles as diplomats and peace keepers. (Obi-Wan, of course, doesn't even bother trying this route, nor does he bring up this possibility with Qui-Gon so we could at least see it being debated and how viable it would be.)

And of course there IS a more hands-on approach that they could take:

Qui-Gon himself tries to come up with a more diplomatic and objective way to broker peace. And the mission was already completed by the way. They were only supposed to rescue Tahl and MAYBE broker peace, but rescuing the other Jedi was the priority. Yoda even tells him before this moment to leave the planet with Obi-Wan as soon as possible because the situation is just too volatile, and he almost lost one Jedi in an effort to help. Qui-Gon is only doing this because he knows how important this has become for Obi-Wan. (And if anyone tries to tell me Qui-Gon doesn't love Obi-Wan, imma start swinging)

It doesn't work, of course. Everyone living on this planet has been steeped in so much anger, hatred, and revenge, that no side, not even the Young are actually willing to talk and really reach for peace. For all that Cerasi and Nield say they want Jedi support, they don't. Not really. Qui-Gon gets stonewalled by them. Both of them mock Obi-Wan whenever he listens to Qui-Gon. What they actually want is for the Jedi to join their army and help them make the Elders listen to them. This is why Yoda wants them to get the hell outta dodge and Qui-Gon feels uneasy and like they can't actually help here. No one actually wants to listen to reason, and the Jedi are not supposed to be soldiers fighting in wars. It gets incredibly obvious in the next book, especially on Nield's end that he wants revenge (a young little warmonger, his parents would be so proud), but honestly? I think we can see it even in this book.

Hey, did you guys know there's a bunch of kids living away from this war. Like, thousands of them, actually. They literally do not have to fight. Nield could take his group of kids (taking the factory working and conscripted kids with him) and fuck off and let the Elders kill each other, and only this generation would be left. They could ask for resources and protection for their new settlement from the Jedi or galaxy instead of manpower to back up their cause and help fight in a war. If Nield ACTUALLY cared about stopping the war and wasn't out for revenge, this would probably be the best choice.

But this possibility never gets brought up, ever, because Nield hates the Elders and wants "justice", Obi-Wan is too inexperienced to realize this is an option, and no one tells Qui-Gon until it's already too late and the Young have declared war on the Elders if they don’t agree to a cease-fire.

All of these options are a more Jedi way of handling the situation in my opinion. Unbiased and working towards actual peace and the end of violence instead of perpetuating it.

And as much as I love Obi-Wan and I know his heart is in the right place, Obi-Wan doesn't care about that, about doing things the Jedi way. Obi-Wan is very clearly taking a specific side in this conflict. I'm not going to put up all the screenshots I took because there are already a lot in this post (and there are. so many more i could put up), but I have quite a few where it's explicit that Obi-Wan is not taking the side of the Young because it's the objectively correct thing to do, but because he likes them. He feels a sense of community with them. He wants to help them, not as a Jedi but as a friend. He is getting involved. Attached.

And, look, I'm not here to argue the morality of that choice. Choosing a different way of life isn't a failure or flaw. Helping your friends in whatever way you can is good. Wanting to stop war and reach for peace is right. There's probably a bunch of people who think Obi-Wan is making the right choice here, and while I might disagree, I can certainly see where they're coming from. I just feel like there's a huge misconception of what actually happened on this planet and what Qui-Gon’s ultimatum is actually about.

Obi-Wan has snuck out time and again to help the Young.

Obi-Wan has used their starfighter, their ONLY transport off the planet, to help the Young on a mission that could very well have shot down the ship. They could have ended up stranded on this planet and might have lead to Tahl's, the rescued Jedi's, death.

Obi-Wan has not been acting like a Jedi. Qui-Gon knows this. Obi-Wan knows this. And in that moment, Qui-Gon is telling him "helping and supporting the Young in such a personal and attached manner is not the way of the Jedi. Do you want to continue on this path?"

And Obi-Wan makes his choice.

(And if anyone tries to argue that Qui-Gon should have brought Obi-Wan with him anyway instead of letting him stay on a war-torn planet, I'm going to start screaming. Yeah, no shit. In the real world, that's probably how he should have reacted.

But this isn't the real world. It's a kid's book. Where kids are the main characters and they go into dangerous situations. So the children reading can see themselves in them and learn how to be brave. How to navigate difficult situations. To learn it's okay to choose a path and maybe realize at some point it isn't what you wanted at all.)

OC Smash Or Pass

Thank you ever so kindly for the Tag, @theprissythumbelina ! I'll be doing this for Major Hilda Goyan, of The Commonwealth Calls and numerous other WIPs!

rules: pretty self explanatory. include physical descriptions or pics, and propaganda. the “other” label can be used for “sexuality misalignment” (ie: oc is femme and you’re gay, vice versa or you aren’t into smashing but have a specific thing you wanna do with them like perhaps hug or study them under a microscope idc)

Don't think there's a face out there I'd associate with her, so leather boots and whiskey will have to suffice.

Physical attributes:

Black hair, brown eyes, coppery / light brown skin, ~180cm, Late-20s, Robust frame, career and experienced Cavalry / 'Armour' officer.

Personality:

Major Hilda Goyan joined the United Commonwealth Army at the tender age of eighteen, almost entirely at the behest of a close uncle determined to ensure that a girl who had wasted her adolescence wouldn't do the same with the rest of her life. Despite this inauspicious entrance to military life, her aggressive drive and sharp mind would serve her well under the Army's guidance, and she would rapidly promote up the ranks. For all her professional success, a subtle yet insidious void rests in Goyan's heart. As her career leaps from strength to strength, it's soon obvious how simply unsustainable Goyan's life has become. Every waking hour devoted to her work, before crashing the moment she clocks out and drowning in drink and cheap love won by her uniform, pay, and the same dashing good looks that carried her through her youth. Goyan's personal relationships outside the service are nearly nonexistent, while those with most of her colleagues are strained at best. Brave, calm under pressure, and a gifted tactician, it seems the only healthy love left in her life is for the troops under her command.

Other / Misc:

Weslich-born ethnic Acueran, Lesbian, Polyglot, future General Officer, and ironically saved from self-destruction by the most violent War in recent history

It feels... odd, Tagging anyone for something like this. So, consider this an Open Tag I suppose!

one of my favorite parts of the owl house is how radical it is, and i mean that in a concrete and political way.

in a lot of the properties we grew up with, it is VERY clear that either 1. the government was bad to start with and clearly everyone knows it (star wars) 2. the system is good to start with and being corrupted by outside influences. it maybe just needs to be a little more welcoming (harry potter).

sure, eda is our point of introduction to the world of the boiling isles, but everyone else is set against her point of view. and eda doesn’t want to topple the government- she just wants to be left alone because she thinks the coven thing is dumb and also doesn’t feel like she’s safe for others to be around. the view of everyone else? this is our world! we love it! that’s the way things are here! our wonderful benevolent emperor gives us coven marks to keep us safe from ourselves!

and if you’re someone who HAS been confronted by propaganda and/or manipulation before, you probably will pick up on this not being great. but it’s so thoroughly ingrained in the world that no one even thinks to question it any more beyond “this is dumb and i’m not participating”. they are in no way aware of their own people’s real history because phillip went on a campaign of destruction and propaganda against their people and eventually got everyone on board with it.

the fact that luz and the detention crew were able to radicalize hexside is mainly due to the fact that bump is a strong personality who cares more about kids than about rules. and i love that for him! but a lot of the educators i worked with would not have been like that at all.

if it didn’t become obvious how insidious everything was and that belos was actively trying to murder everyone, then this sort of wide-scale, quick change would have been nearly impossible. and even still, in this situation where it’s so obvious how harmful belos is and what his intentions are, some people dig right down into their habits and greeds (odalia and kikimora for instance).  

it’s very obvious in this situation that belos is in the wrong and that it needs to be stopped, but the idea of standing up to something that has always seemed so normal... so good and right and Just How Things Were TM is something that i think that kids need to see. it would have been so helpful to me as a kid in a conservative community realizing that i was gay and coming into my politics and my beliefs if it didn’t feel like every outlet in my life was shouting that i was doing a treason.

Finally done with this garbage.

*insert “IT’S DONE” Frodo gif here*

Of course it remains hot garbage all the way to the end. I’ll be honest, I skimmed through the last two episodes posted on YouTube because I just needed it to be over so I could reclaim brain space. So forgive me if I miss anything. 

WARNING, SUPER LONG RANT UNDER CUT.

Of course there’s no satisfactory closure for any of the relationships that were built in the first quarter of the show. Maoze and Danshu never get a final scene together. I didn’t expect there to be one, since her character development had long ossified into Song Dynasty Stepford Wife. Maoze, too, remains completely devoted to the emperor to the end. I’m actually surprised that I wasn't more upset about the lack of resolution for my Straw Hat babies. But then again, I lost interest in what they’d do with drama!Danshu twenty episodes ago. 

He’er seems to have forgiven the emperor for all the suffering he put her and her daughter through. The last thing she says is that she has finally succeeded in accompanying her 6th Prince for an entire long lifetime. Doesn’t matter that she was ready to kill herself to defend Huirou just a couple episodes ago. What is character development?

Huirou’s trauma is so great that she has permanently broken with reality and regressed back into her childhood memories. He’er is relieved of this, because it means Huirou can live in her head in a happier time. 

And before we’re shown all that, we get a scene where shitstain emperor gets to explain once more to Huirou why she’s at fault for everyone’s misery and why the stability of the empire is in danger because of her willfulness. She agrees to part from Huaiji forever, for the greater good. This is filmed and presented to us as a touching father-daughter heart to heart and not as the implicitly threatening psychological abuse that it is. Throughout the conversation, he defends Sima Guang as a true patriot who just cares about the people and their needs, though that asshole has been the megaphone of Neo-Confucian hyperconservatism this whole time, shouting for Huaiji’s head and for Huirou to be punished and thrown back into her torture chamber marriage. Yet another entry in the list of shitty powerful men who are absolved of the pain and suffering they cause without remorse, as long as they’ve got a platform and big mouths to spew enough words out to convince themselves and other powerful men of their moral superiority.

And the last we see of Huaiji, is him making an obeisance to the emperor’s memory. I’d wondered why the show added in the storyline of Huaiji’s brother, when Huaiji barely had any scenes or lines to express the pain of losing his family and future or his feelings about finding his roots again. There was only one scene, as far as I can remember. The purpose of writing Huaiji’s family backstory wasn’t to give more dimension to Huaiji’s character. No, It was actually to make the emperor more sympathetic and so that he could heroically be the instrument for the brothers’ eventual reunion in the end. 

So Zhao Zhen gets to die beloved by all the women he destroyed and lauded by all who once questioned and criticized him. He gets to die in Danshu’s arms as she sobs “take me with you”. The last words on the screen are ones that celebrate his legacy as a benevolent ruler, taken from the Yuan Dynasty-era History of Song.

Let’s be honest, this drama is Chinese history used as political propaganda the entire way through. Because there are splashes of period-accurate detail (like the “three white makeup” and all the Song literati cameos), it gives the entire drama an air of legitimacy and lures you into thinking that they took their research seriously. But really the period detail is just a nice, glossy coat obscuring the insidious bones of this revisionist monstrosity. And the last two episodes really peel away that coat to reveal the machinery underneath. 

If I’m generous, I’ll say that the accuracy of some characterizations in this drama is highly suspect, but I suppose still debatable. Writing an Empress Cao who steadfastly and quietly loved Zhao Zhen despite his historically well-documented, decades-long suspicion of her... like, FINE, even if I think it’s illogical, sexist, bad writing, one can argue it’s fair game for creative license, given the inherently uncertain task of knowing the true feelings and motivations of people living a thousand years ago. 

But then you have something like the fallout of Huirou’s marriage, Zhao Zhen’s role in that sad business, and Li Wei’s later actions, which just completely and merrily skips away from actual historical fact and leaves the most telling details of her tragic end untold. Because to depict the actual events would make Zhao Zhen and Li Wei indefensible. 

Given that China is currently in the midst of an extremely concerning rise in Han nationalism, where Chinese traditional culture (everything from philosophy to art to clothing to music) is being co-opted and reframed to entrench narratives of Han superiority, it’s a problem when this Song Dynasty alternate history is presented as truth. It used to be that anything to do with Chinese traditional culture was suspect and would be in danger of destruction, especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). But now this destruction is a little bit more subtle. Instead of just straight-up smashing Song Dynasty tombs, just dismantle and reconfigurate them piece by piece to create a little shrine for the current ruling party. To tell this story about the struggles of governance from the perspective of the head of the ruling elite during one of the wealthiest times of imperial Chinese history- I just don't believe that was a decision made purely for creative license.  

It’s a perfectly valid stance not to care how history is interpreted as long as it’s good entertainment. I’m certainly not one to let historical inaccuracy keep me from enjoying my period films and TV shows (to a degree, lol). But I also find my experience of historical fiction more illuminating and enjoyable when I try to parse out what’s supported by evidence and what isn’t. So I can try to understand the reasons behind a writer’s decisions for excluding stuff that’s supported and including stuff that isn’t. Because how and what elements of the past are used in popular fiction matter, and they shape our attitudes on so much more than just entertainment.  

So, to end my last long-ass rant about this horrible drama that’s eaten up so much of my time and energy, I’m gonna pour one out for the historical figures who got short shrifted: 

For the historical Empress Cao, who made it through Renzong’s reign without losing her throne, even though Renzong tried and failed several times to depose her. Who promoted highly Zhang Maoze soon after Renzong’s death despite the protests of Sima Guang and didn’t go down without a fight when they wanted her to retire as regent.   

For the historical Consort Miao, who plotted with Consort Yu to try to bring down Li Wei and begged Renzong to execute Li Wei with poisoned wine, all to get her daughter out of the marriage.

For the historical Princess Fukang, who was finally allowed a divorce in early 1062, after attempting suicide multiple times. Who was then forced by Renzong to remarry Li Wei less than a year later. Who died at the age of 33 in a household with people who hated and abused her. The extent of that abuse was discovered by her nephew Emperor Shenzong after she died when he showed up for the funeral. He wept in front of his ministers describing the treatment she had received from Li Wei for the last seven years of her life: she had not been given adequate food, clothing, or medical care. Her body and bedding was infested with lice and she had burn scars on her face from trying to light her own coals. I think it’s important to acknowledge just how much this benevolent father of hers failed her after everything, even after she probably thought she had escaped, even if the show won’t.   

Do you know how to un-like something? I just saw your SNK post and yes I totally agree, but I can't stop reading or watching that thing... Tbh I'd rather not like something this controversial but I can't help and consume it

Oh believe me I was exactly in your shoes. SNK was really important to me back in 2013/2014 because it gave me complex, fleshed out female characters of all shapes and sizes that were never sexualized or sidelined, and until 2016 I guess I still kept up with it and loved the female storylines especially (Historia’s quest for identity really was something I adored).

But the thing is, as you know, media doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I’m not an advocate for Media Purity™ bc I believe every single thing produced out there will be flawed and have problematic aspects, but there’s a difference between, say, the mishandling of a storyline and something that has insidious propaganda that has harmed and will harm real life people for the long run. If you can call out and stop supporting media that has BYG tropes and recognize how it actively harms lgbt people’s lives and twists both their perception of themselves and how non lgbt will perceive them in real life, it is your responsibility to stop supporting literal Nazi propaganda which has a running death toll and is still used today to denigrate, discriminate against and morally and physically harm its victims.

So, to disengage yourself from snk I suggest you ask yourself these questions (bc that’s what I did):

-What do I like about this piece of media? What basically gets me to come back to it? In my case, it was the fleshed out female cast with engaging individual story lines. 

-Is this thing something I will find in snk and only snk? No! I started reading and watching other media and found female characters just as compelling, if not more. The grishaverse and rwby, just to name a few, actually deliver this without it being coated in nazi propaganda. Whatever first drew you to snk (be it the cast, a specific character archetype, the plot twists) I can assure you, you will find in other places, done better and without it being written by someone who actively idolizes literal Nazis.

-So now that I have identified and picked apart the supposed good, how bad is the bad? Go back and spend some time processing everything bad with SNK, and honestly what you’ll find will make you...deeply uncomfortable (at least in my case that’s what happened). SNK’s glorification of the military just deepens and becomes more aggressive as the story unfolds. Everything becomes about how a nation has to arm itself (the way we get destructive weapons’ development in painstaking detail is eyebrow raising on its own) and destroy everyone else’s to survive. The reverse racism backstory of Eren’s father especially is just. All out antisemitic nazi fearmongering dressed in fantasy setting (they literally are made to wear armbands by people who they used to oppress and murder). The cursed bloodline symbolism. It’s just, now that I know what everything means, I just can’t stop seeing just how bad it is. The fact that the main protagonists are German and Japanese coded stops seeming like a fantasy setting quirk and starts reflecting Isayama’s deeply unsettling fascination with the empire of japan and WWII figures that definitely were on the wrong side of history. It’s just so incredibly bad all around, the fucked up kind of bad.

-And final question: is it worth it to still support this horrifying steaming pile of horse dung dressed as an inspirational fantasy story? I’ll leave that for you to answer. But, as I said, you are responsible for what you consume, what you support and what you can end up internalizing because of said consumption.  

Another thing: if you, like I used to be, are a completionist and are driven to read this just to know how the story ends, a piece of advice from Guillermo del Toro: “Do not do homework with your life.” If it stops engaging you (or you know, if it starts revealing itself as a cover up for a Nazi agenda) you are not, in any way, obligated to get to the bottom of any piece of media. It’s not homework, don’t treat it like one. Free yourself. 

If you want recs for things based on the specific aspects of snk that first drew you to it, I’ll be happy to give you some! I hope you get to experience a whole lot of better media this year!     

Why I Hate America........

I am almost 57 years old. I cannot fathom the sadism of the worthless god of puke that created me to have to live in this star spangled land of putrid idiocy..... From birth until now, all I have ever experienced here is poverty, misery, torture and injustice. Every hope dashed, every aspiration betrayed. Life in the USA, has never been anything but an ongoing saga of cruel, mediocre, and obstinate stupidity that never seems to outdo itself in its idiotic meaninglessness. My time in this corporate shithole has forged in me an infinite hatred of everything; and what is left of me is hardly anything that you would call human. I often wonder if I had a newborn son, if I would not choke the life out of him and kill him, not out of hatred of him, but out of love. To spare him the sufferings that I have endured here, and that as a child of a member of the underclass, that he would no doubt suffer as well. People are probably thinking, well you are another left wing radical. No, actually I am not. In order to be a radical, you have to have hope. I do not have hope. I guess what you could call me, is a nihilist. And one of the worst you would ever not care to meet.

I grew up in an affluent, conservative, upper middle class family. All around me was all this bullshit about how great America was, flags, hotdogs, mom, apple pie whatever. I swear to god ever since I popped out a newborn slug out of my mom's cursed joy hole, I have never seen what they were talking about. American society seemed to me to just be a huge plastic put on, with troops fighting in idiotic wars for what? To contain Communism? If Communism was everything that American society wasn't it had to be pretty good, I thought. Now that I am old, I can see that American society is so cruel, hypocritical, and far gone that it has become a monster of ingenious insidiousness; that the Left in its superfluidity could not even comprehend, much less counter. There is no way that you will ever improve or take down this fucker. All hope it subverts before hope can be entertained, all true human values it crushes out and replaces with propaganda and nescient dogma, only possible because the American masses are so stupid by design that the system finds nothing to do any easier than this. And those who see through this diabolical charade are so few and so helpless, that they can only stare dumbfounded at the spectacle of it all. They put their flags out on their porches like a bunch of dumb lemmings; utterly oblivious to the grand stage of absurdity that is burning beneath them. They are cannon fodder for corporate wars of empire, source's of cheap labor for the bossman capitalist, dumbshit glad-handies that do not have the slightest inkling of anything real in their middle class somnolence, comotose mommy machines just popping out more cogs for the gears of universal misery, It is to laugh, or cry......

America is a monument to mediocrity. It is obvious to more all the time, and cruel! America's chief industry is human misery, domestically; but there is always plenty left over for export. Just ask the third world that has been run over by the American War Machine, or the North Koreans that had thousands of tons of bombs dropped on them, and who want to have a nuclear program after this. (The *wonder* of it!) And of course the enlightened American masses have made it all possible.

And this is another thing. Blaming the elites can only go so far. The American masses are almost as bad as they are. Americans are by and large, greedy, selfish, materialistic, stupid, with virtually no interest beyond whatever media dumb-show is going on at the moment. I can tell you with no reservation, that almost every fucking American piece of crap I have ever known in my life, including my own family has been treacherous, selfish, destructively motivated towards me and as worthless as dogshit. Ironically, the best people I have ever met have immigrated from other countries, they were not born here! There is something about native born Americans that makes it seem like they ooze into the domestic shit nest of the homeland like some kind of perfidious hive of maggots, itching to despoil and destroy from the get go. And I am not being unfair.

Well people will say if you hate it here, why don't you leave? Why? I am you. Why would I be so kind as to spare you these diatribes!!I really do not belong anywhere else. My sickness is your sickness. I am you, as much as you may hate that fact. And here is something else. So funny. Toys R Us closed because not enough Americans are having kids to keep the them in business. Why aren't Americans having kids anymore? Maybe it is because America is not the kind of country worth bringing kids into..... Something to consider.

No country can become this bad and hope to survive long term. People can only take so much misery before they break down into piles of quivering jelly. Not that I care. America can go to the devil for all I care, but I never liked America in the first place. I have never had a patriotic sentiment in my whole life, although I have pretended to when manners dictated otherwise. My hope is that every day in every way, people will find every means to set all of the nuclear powers against each other, on the day when America gets what it deserves when it is decimated by nuclear bombs. And when the holocaust is done, cruel, venal, greedy American elites and the masses of America, stupid jellyfish with never an original thought in their heads, can slouch off together into their well deserved oblivion.....

um so most likely countless people more eloquent than I have already said something to this effect, but I’d like to vent about it so whatever. here goes.

A lot of people compare the Confederate statues and monuments found across the Southern U.S. to Nazi statues in Germany (mostly to point out that we have statues of Confederate leaders, while they replaced the statues of Nazi leaders with memorials to their victims), and while it’s not an unfair comparison, it is a little flawed. See, the Nazi statues in Germany were constructed during the Nazi occupation. But the Confederate statues you see today were built decades after the end of the Civil War -- you know, the war that they lost. The Durham statue that was just torn down, for example, was dedicated in 1924. That’s almost 60 years after the end of the war.

Some of you, especially those outside the U.S., are probably wondering why a defeated enemy had monuments built in their honor decades after they were defeated, when the war was just barely within living memory. The cause is one of the largest and, honestly, most successful propaganda campaigns I know of, one which began in 1865 and continues its revisionist quest to this day. Of course, most of its adherents don’t know they’re promoting a lie; I’ve never had a history teacher say, “This is what really happened, but this is what people believe.” Most, if not all, of the history classes I’ve taken that cover the Civil War and Reconstruction actually perpetuate the myths.

The propagandists say this: The war was about states’ rights, not slavery. The Southern states were simply defending their honor, having had their way of life attacked by Northern abolitionists. The common soldiers in the Confederate Army were regular boys, spurred into joining up by a love for their state and a hatred of tyranny, who owned no slaves. Robert E. Lee was a genius, a brilliant tactician, who loved his soldiers but above all loved Virginia. Ulysses S. Grant was a drunkard, a bumbler, who only defeated Lee’s army through the use of brute force.

Like any good lie, it has its truths: If I were given to diagnosing historical figures with mental disorders, I’d say Grant suffered from PTSD, and he used a steady mixture of alcohol and combat to cope. Lee certainly did love Virginia, since he abandoned his nation in favor of his state. Most of the Confederate Army was made up of lower-class men and boys, and the Southern lower-class owned few slaves or none at all -- most of the slave population was located on plantations owned by the wealthiest Southerners. Certainly the concept of “honor” and the defense of it stuck around longer in the South than it did in many other parts of the country, and almost certainly many rebels did believe they were defending their honor. And certainly the war was over states’ rights, if only the states’ right to practice slavery.

The most insidious part of the propaganda, the part that draws people to it, is a careful application of romanticism to the facts. People love to romanticize history, especially the history of their family or area. Adding romance to one of the bleakest periods in American history allows people to feel better about it, and by extension feel better about themselves. Great-great-grandfather was an officer in the Confederate Army? Let’s rebrand that. How about: My great-great-grandfather led his men in the defense against foreign invaders who sought to bring about the destruction of their way of life. That sounds so much better, right? And over time, as people did this, even just in their heads, the Confederacy became synonymous with a struggle against a more powerful foe in order to preserve a way of life.

These bent truths certainly didn’t happen by accident; no, these ideas were planted in the heads of the masses by ex-Confederate officials or Confederate sympathizers after the war. The lax oversight that defined the early part of Reconstruction allowed them to spread their ideas, and then, after the sudden shift toward Radical Reconstruction in 1867, when white Southerners felt like their rights were being imposed upon, then the people really, earnestly, wanted to believe in these ideas, that they were right all along; that if owning slaves was morally wrong, then wasn’t the campaign of total destruction of all things military and civilian that was Sherman’s March to the Sea morally wrong too? Ought people not be angry about the lives lost, the property destroyed, the governments being forcibly removed and replaced with Northern conquerors? To the angry, disgraced people in the South, the “War of Northern Aggression” wasn’t over; they truly believed the South would rise again. And, in a way, it did. After the South was allowed to govern themselves, they immediately starting trying -- and succeeding -- to find ways to disenfranchise blacks.

The statues and monuments are historical artifacts, though not in the way most people might think; they’re not relics of the Civil War period, but rather evidence of a deeper, longer-lasting war against historical fact -- a war which is still being fought. The destruction of these objects is no more the destruction of historical objects than the 1864 sinking of the CSS Alabama by the USS Kearsarge was.

“Fahrenheit 451″ starring Julie Christie - 1966 (Movie Review)

Does the thought of a day without a book in your hands give you the shivers? Does the idea of never being able to step foot in the quiet, blissful corners of a library or bookstore give you the nightmares and cold sweats? How about a possibility of never even seeing a book again...never again in your lifetime? Not only that but your children and their children will not even be able to comprehend the notion of printed words on a page. 

The book and all of the knowledge, delight, enlightenment, and discovery it possesses will be permanently banished from the collective consciousness of humankind and in its place, nothing but what the state wills for you to watch...eyes frozen...mind paralyzed...on an ever-present, obnoxious screen on your wall.

Oh wait, we're halfway there already.

Step into the warped world of Fahrenheit 451 and a man and a woman whose minds are awoken to the truth of their society and their own inner demand for enlightenment.

Throughout history, humanity has often struggled with the dictatorship of the deluded and their attempts to suppress and even eradicate free will. It's come in the form of new forms of tight-fisted government, their intimidated and delusional followers, evil laws that refuse to acknowledge the fact that human beings should not and cannot be mentally controlled. Banning of free speech and freedom of the press has gone hand in hand with these repressive governments' efforts. But in Ray Bradbury's razor-sharp examination of a society where all text is threat, repression takes on an insidious form where faux-contentment is fed to the masses in the form of mind-numbing "entertainment". The book and all its intellectual and emotional challenges is deleted from these citizens' lives and done so cleanly and forcefully that most don't even realize what they've lost and don't understand the first thing about regaining it. There is a minority who resist however. There is ALWAYS the resistance! 

Enter Guy Montag. He's a simple man. A hard-working man. He's also a firefighter but in his society, he does not save people but destroys their legacies.

Guy Montag burns books. And he's very good at it.

In the very first scene, Guy and his fellow firemen are racing off to a drab apartment block in this future, dumbed-down England. Enter another man in a turtleneck happily munching an apple in his drab apartment in said drab block. He receives a phone call on his rotary phone (nobody is allowed to write books, research papers, essays, or ANYTHING anymore, so they'll never reach the digital age!)

"Listen, get out! Hurry!" a female voice on the other end urgently whispers to turtleneck man mid-chew. Puzzled by the fact that his pleasant afternoon has been interrupted, the dude keeps saying "Hello, Hello?" instead of hustling out the door, clutching a paperback for dear life.

Frustrated, the mysterious female bellows, "For God's sake, get OUT of there!"

Finally getting a clue, turtleneck man hears the sirens of the book-hating bastards, hides his contraband and makes a break for it.

I really liked this scene. It introduces the urgency of the situation SO well, with just a few words spoken and the cinematography doing the rest. The steel-gray sky is juxtaposed against the coldness of the industrial looking apartment blocks, with a desperate, nameless fugitive's coat flapping in the wind as he makes his escape from the men who would destroy what’s precious to him...masterful. And truly a sign of the cinematic treasures to come from this film. I've always felt that the mark of a great movie--not just an okay movie or even a "good" one--is the power of the opening scene. If it can grab you and never let you go until those last few minutes, you'll have a masterpiece! Not just a decent way to spend a few hours.

Montag is doing his job SO well that a promotion is dangled in front of him by his captain (played by the phenomenal Cyril Cusack), a quietly fanatical true believer. This "bright" young man is going places! Onwards and upwards as the British like to say, or er...downwards if we're gonna be real about the whole destruction of human knowledge thing.

That is...until a fateful meeting on public transportation with a disarming young schoolteacher who is much more than she seems.

Enter Clarisse, a luminous Julie Christie.

Now, this movie did something I consider pretty original and effective. Christie was cast in two roles both directly linked to the lead character, both influencing his decisions, and both integral to the details of the plot. She is thoroughly convincing as two women with different motivations, purposes, and feelings. She is Clarisse and she is Montag's wife, Linda. Where Clarisse's mind is opening to the world around her and its realities, Linda's is dull, empty and withered.

Clarisse is instantly drawn to Montag. The scene where they first encounter each other is a study in character development. The moment she introduces herself to him on the crowded (upside-down!) train, you realize that there is something significant at play here. She is not a dullard. Her eyes are bright, her questions are incisive. She, in nearly all important ways that his wife and other citizens are not--is ALIVE. Another interesting juxtaposition is inserted here. As Clarisse gazes curiously at Montag, he himself is looking around the train at several passengers who are, as if in a daze, fidgeting with themselves, one woman drawing on the mist of a window like a bored and sleepy child. It's almost as if they are asleep and attempting to pinch themselves awake. 

Clarisse is wide awake.

In the middle of her chat with the awkward-looking Montag, she drops a few interesting lines that looking at it, seem to indicate with brilliant subtlety the emerging truth of who this young woman is and what she's about. 

"Once I get started, nothing can stop me! My uncle says I'm a veritable well of words."

In a society where printed words itself are considered destabilization and a threat to the maintenance of the state's lies, I find it powerful that this is a comment made in the first conversation this clearly intelligent woman has with a destroyer of words.

"You don't frighten me." she cheerfully says to Montag as the upside-down train barrels its way towards their destination.

Montag and Clarisse then disembark and as they head down the path to their homes, their conversation takes an interesting turn, guided by Clarisse as they stroll in the sunshine.

"Tell me, why do you burn books?" she asks and you get the sense that this is not merely a question but a gentle challenge.

At first it seems that he tries to dodge the true meaning of the question by calling it "good work like any other" but then he shrugs off the meaning of literature as "just so much rubbish".

“They disturb them, make them anti-social.”

The question that I asked while viewing the film was whether Montag in that moment, was a believer in his cause or whether he was merely parroting the propaganda fed to him likely throughout his entire life. One of the details I like about Oskar Werner's performance was the casual indifference, the weary demeanor of Montag's whole being. He does not come across as a man particularly set afire by his ideals. He does his job, repeats the party line when need be, and goes home. No more. No less. 

Does Clarisse sense an ambivalence in Montag's spirit that even he did not recognize?

In any case, Montag tries to convince Clarisse and to a certaint extent himself, about the "nobility" of his work and as they part and he walks down the road to his antiseptic little house with his wife waiting before their ever-present television screen, you see him walk into an existence that is so strictly ordered and formulated by the influence of the state that you can't help but notice that basically, most of the VIBRANCE and REASON for life has been stripped away. What’s left? Go to work, go home, eat, make love, gape at a gigantic TV screen filling your head with propaganda entirely designed to keep you from ever fulfilling anything of importance. When people are neither challenged nor seek out answers to any significant life question, what is the result? When something as precious as literature, text in general, is eliminated from a civilization, what really is there to learn, achieve or contribute to humankind anymore? What’s left is a society left to languish, stagnate, and ultimately fade into utter purposelessness.

That is demonstrated with the odd state-run "theater" his drugged-out wife Linda is excited to be a part of, one of the few opportunities she has for stimulation as she lies around their home, popping state-approved pills and draining what's left of her energy and intelligence.

The state theater rambles on and on in a childish and simplistic way, the nonexistent "plot" being which rooms to place houseguests. The whole thing is like a third-grade math question on a school test but this is what passes for "entertainment" in this aggressively anti-intellectual society.

Linda is thrilled later on in bed, that she has given "all the right answers" and she chirps on about her moment of rare excitement to the bored-out-of-his mind Montag as he browses through a wordless comic strip, filled page to page with garish color cartoons.

The emptiness of this couple's life is brought into full focus, and the perfection of Werner and Christie's performances is that it doesn't even take a great deal of dialogue to do it. The body language is expertly detailed--and with Christie, so pronounced that in her double role as Linda and the schoolteacher, Clarisse, you almost feel as if you are watching two different actresses.

Montag's awakening is soon to come into full bloom with the gentle encouragement of schoolteacher Clarisse, who for reasons that are never specifically stated, has become an ex schoolteacher--rejected by her fellow teachers and the administration, and in a surreal scene, treated with contempt as her things are shoved across the floor to her, wrapped in a sack, as Montag looks on.

Now, that's the definition of a brush-off.

The reasons are like I said, never explicitly stated but you definitely gain a general understanding of just why Clarisse is fired, shut out and treated with this kind of contempt. Although she obviously does not officially go against state rules, there is something about her personality, the alertness and the creativity that is a part of her identity not only as a teacher but as a private citizen of this oppressive, draining state (she says early on that "we have fun in my class") that is found threatening. She is not a drone. She has never relinquished a special spark within her, a spark of individuality, that the government ruthlessly wants to snuff out within the hearts and minds of each and every man, woman and child.

Montag comforts her as she sobs into his shoulder on the elevator, and she suddenly looks at him in wonder, wondering how the gentle and compassionate man in front of her could be in what is such a barbaric business.

"Why? How did it come about? What made it begin? What made you want to do...how could someone like you be doing this sort of work? I know everyone says that, but you? You're NOT like them. When I say something to you, you look at me. Why did you choose this job?"

Montag replies,

"Do you remember what you asked me the other day? Whether I ever read the books I burned? Remember? Last night I read one."

With that twist of Montag’s destiny, both their lives will be intertwined.

Montag himself has changed...radically. He does not want to continue a life lived in darkness and ignorance. He's flipped the switch and the light is pouring in. He begins to stash books in every nook and cranny from the raids he goes on and his bewildered wife Linda stumbles upon his furtive reading in the middle of the night. He is desperate to read as many words as he can on the dusty, forgotten pages. He is like a starving man, feasting on an enormous amount of knowledge. He starts to wake up to just exactly what the state has been feeding other intellectually and emotionally starved people, their replacement of the knowledge books can bring, with shallow desires and empty platitudes.

Linda is confused and upset at the change in her husband. 

She has given the entirety of herself to the demands of dictatorship and the presence of the books make her afraid, not just of the consequences of reading, but I always felt that her character was terrified of the discovery. Scared of opening her mind beyond the limited confines of what has been established for her....like a child who has been used to playing in a sandbox her entire life, and never ventures out to explore the world around her.

“I found these things in the house! I don’t want these things, Montag. They frighten me.”

A pivotal scene, one that never fails to send chills down my spine, is a fire that happens at a middle-aged woman's house, which doubles as a secret library (it is a legitimately kick-ass library).

Amidst her pile of books, a veritable treasure trove that she has hoarded, cherished, and protected for years, the woman sets the pile aflame herself....with her in the middle of the blaze. Montag stares in abject horror as he sees this woman kill herself in the most horrible way possible. 

Montag is a man who has followed orders without question, going about his questionable "duties" as if a man who is sleepwalking. Death is actually this one reader’s choice rather than allowing the state to control her and discover a pivotal secret that she holds.

He reaches another level of rebellion and dives into an ocean of words, head-first.

In the process, he turns into a person who not only questions the stupid and corrupt laws, but his married life, the existence he has built up with a woman who is blissfully ignorant.

Linda wants Montag to return to their life of ignorance. She begs, pleads and threatens in a desperate attempt to force him to destroy the books that he is now clinging to...for understanding... of what he has done, why he is been made to do it, and for what yet he needs to do.

And in the middle of all of this upheaval, Clarisse and the uncle that she lives with, has been discovered as "book readers". She has made the escape her uncle has prepared her to make, away from a society that is determined to consider her a “thought-criminal” (Oops. Wrong authoritarian regime dystopia.)

Montag has joined her in the quiet "resistance”, though! He vows to work from the inside, sabotaging the system he has been serving for so long. 

“I must stay in the city, I have a plan. I will hide a book in every fireman’s house until they denounce him. The system will eat itself.”

Meanwhile, she will flee to the country and join a band of underground bibliophiles called "the book people", a bunch of passionate readers who've BECOME books, memorizing the precious pages one by one. 

(What they’re burning ties in to the old woman’s death.)

He doesn't have a chance though to follow through on his plan, because his wife becomes an informant on his midnight reading habit, fleeing from their home in a fit of exasperation. 

The years of the boob tube's endless manipulations had turned Linda into the consummate follower. What was so interesting and realistic about her character was how it presented the end result of effective governmental indoctrination. There were and are so many citizens of certain nations just like Linda, who have swallowed the lie that their natural human freedoms should be taken away in the name of "protection", when what these corrupt governments have really been seeking is the destruction of their will and suppression of their power.

Montag flees in panic after he does something absolutely irreversible--he has become a fugitive! His face is plastered on every TV around him and he flees from a city determined to use him as both an example and a form of entertainment for the millions of dead eyes plastered to their wall screens.

Francois Truffaut's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's book is subtly and powerfully interpreted. The beginning of the movie is all cold edges, uniforms reminiscent of jack-booted Nazis, and boring sameness.

That coldness and an almost desolate feeling of emptiness is carried over into the way people are relating to each other in this society, such as the barren relationship between Montag and his wife, Linda. The truth of it is that Montag and Linda simply don't have an emotional connection anymore. The intrusion of the state, the ever-present wallscreens, the constant consumption of propaganda has destroyed the soul and the integrity of their marriage. Julie Christie's blankness as Linda and brightness as Clarisse are like night and day. Truffaut's decision to cast Christie in both roles is an inspired touch. It brings a striking contrast to Montag's life. Clarisse is definitely her own woman. And I never viewed her presence as simply a device serving to "wake up" Montag. No. Clarisse as a character, as an intellectual woman with agency in a fiercely anti-intellectual state, was a whole lot more than that. But I believe she is also an interesting representation of duality in Guy Montag's life and I feel that Clarisse represents to him the "what-ifs" of Linda. An alternate version of her in a way.

Clarisse also represents the truth of discovery that is forcing its way into Montag's narrow existence. She is a woman who sticks out in a subtle but at the same time, blatant way.  Standing out is dangerous, standing out is looked upon with distrust and is stamped out whenever possible. She loses her job and has her spirit and creativity literally thrown back in her face. But Christie's Clarisse has this indomitable optimism I've always found pretty damn fascinating about her character, an inner source of satisfaction that comes from the fact that unlike so many other zombies of the state, what she has in the end....is HERSELF. One of the most defining details of Francois Truffaut's classic is the serene and unshaking confidence Clarisse has in who she is and what she believes in. She is in my opinion, every bit of the hero as Montag if only because of her total confidence and belief in the normalcy of the pursuit of knowledge despite everything and everyone ordering citizens like her to shut down and go to sleep.

The thing about Linda, Clarisse and Montag, and what's so intruiging about Truffaut's direction, is that all of these characters have multiple layers beneath the surface. The film explores the fascinating concept that when a person is forbidden knowledge for so long, the void can become their familiar and even comfortable world, or they can choose to step out into unknown, scary, but vastly rewarding territory.

It's a unique take on authoritarianism, and quite frankly, one of the most unsettling ones I think has been depicted in film. These characters are well-crafted and wonderfully brought to life, but in the end, they are, in my humble opinion, mere vessels for a larger message.

That message is that theft of the progression we are entitled to as human beings, can just possibly be on the horizon if we aren't constantly vigilant about whom we place our trust and loyalty in. That trust and loyalty can all too quickly be bent into obedience and that obedience switched into mental enslavement. Fahrenheit 451 is a story of human resistance, and I feel one of the most amazing politically charged scifi films ever made. The performances are excellent and I guarantee you, the ending is a work of searing, powerful beauty.

It's a five star flick!

About the Trump survey

I know I’m late to this, but I want to talk for a few minutes about the recently-issued ‘Official Trump Law and Order Survey’ and how it’s a spectacularly shameless propaganda generator. Poor survey design gives you useless data. Intentionally poor survey design gives you propaganda.

There’s a blow-by-blow commentary below the cut. It’s long. I couldn’t help myself. You don’t have to read the whole thing. Maybe read Stanley’s How Propaganda Works instead. 

Still with me? God, I’m so sorry.

The first thing to notice about this survey is that all of the questions are yes/no. If a respondent is somewhere in between complete agreement and complete disagreement, dichotomous questions force them to either (1) misrepresent the strength of their position or (2) leave the survey incomplete. This has a filtering effect. People unwilling to commit to an extreme view are unrepresented. It also results in overestimation of the strength of respondents’ support; people who slightly lean ‘yes’ are given as much weight as those who lean strongly toward ‘yes’ (which is, of course, the goal).

I suspect there’s also a priming effect going on, especially in the first question:

Do you believe that Keeping America Safe should be President Trump’s #1 priority?

The phrase ‘keeping America safe’ is broad enough that it’s hard to disagree with. We’re not told what exactly they mean by the phrase. The respondent is free to interpret it however they want, but their answer will be used to support the administration’s specific interpretation. This question is the easiest to agree with, and that’s why it’s at the beginning. The goal is to get people to agree with increasingly extreme statements. If you start with the most extreme question, you scare people off. If you start with something like the above, people are not only more inclined to continue the survey; they’re inclined to continue agreeing in order to be consistent.  

Do you stand with President Trump’s efforts to restore law and order in our communities?

This is vague. It forces you to agree with ALL of the ‘efforts’ or none of them, without bothering to mention what ‘efforts’ we’re talking about. It’s also a loaded question. In order to even answer the question, you have to take the following as facts: (1) President Trump has made efforts to restore law and order, and (2) ‘law and order’ has been diminished. It’s like asking someone “Do you still take PCP every Saturday night?”

Do you agree that rioters and anarchists should be punished accordingly?

It’s very convenient that the question doesn’t mention what, exactly, an appropriate punishment would be. This is another one where every interpretation that gives a ‘yes’ will be counted as support for an unstated interpretation by the administration. This is also a double-barreled question, in which ‘rioters’ and ‘anarchists’ are lumped in together (not to mention, they’re both pretty loaded terms). ‘Rioter’ refers to an action or set of actions, but ‘anarchist’ is a political position. We’re being led to conflate the two - a very sneaky way to get people to say that there are some political views deserving of ‘punishment’.

Do you agree with President Trump that Democrat leaders who are letting their communities be destroyed need to crack down?

Another loaded question. You are forced to accept as facts that (1) there are communities being ‘destroyed’, (2) destruction is attributable to Democrat leaders, (3) Democrat leaders are not taking action, and (4) ‘cracking down’ is the solution. We aren’t told what it means to ‘crack down’, but we did just read a question about punishing rioters and anarchists. The ordering is intentional.

At this point, I’m going to stop pointing out inflammatory language; it’s in every question. They’re all leading questions, phrased such that disagreement sounds absurd at best.

Do you agree with President Trump deploying the National Guard to communities where Democrat leaders have proven ineffective?

Again, this assumes that (1) there are Democrat leaders who have ‘proven ineffective’, and (2) President Trump has deployed the National Guard to only and all communities where this is the case. It deliberately excludes communities with Republican leaders, whether the Republicans have ‘proven ineffective’ or not, implying that the only ineffective leaders are Democrats. That’s the only reason to include the word ‘Democrat’ at all. If you phrased it as ‘where leaders have proven ineffective’, you’d still be able to claim support for Trump, but you’d lose the condemnation of Democrats specifically.

This is also a great example of why the ordering of the questions is relevant. It doesn’t actually indicate what these leaders have proven ineffective at, although of course we know; we’ve just had questions about preserving law and order, cracking down, and punishing people. It also makes it sound like Democrat leaders are ineffective in general, not just in regards to this one unspecified issue.

It’s worth noting at this point that the word ‘protest’ doesn’t appear once in the survey, nor is it ever stated what exactly people are ‘rioting’ about. (As a side note, I’m not terribly impressed with a lot of Democrats right now, but that’s personal and beside the point.)

Do you support President Trump’s fearless resolve when he walked to St. John’s Church - a historical church that was set on fire the night before by rioters?

WOW leading/loaded question. WOW. I mean, wow. Holy fuck. I’m going to go get the Emergency Gin. I’m not touching this one. Jesus.

Did you know that Joe Biden’s campaign staff is financially supporting rioters?

We’re just calling all protesters ‘rioters’ now. This is an unclear question. If people say ‘yes’, how is that going to play in the “analysis”? “When polled, 99% of people already knew this thing”? Even if we accept the claim, there’s no good reason to measure people’s awareness of the claim. Even if you had a good reason to measure awareness of the claim, this wouldn’t give you anything useful. (Did you know X? Well, I do now). This is going to be used to say “X% of people know that Joe Biden’s campaign is financially supporting rioters.” And X% of people said they know that thing because you just told them the thing. People believing a claim is not adequate evidence that the claim is true; it might just indicate that PROPAGANDA IS HAPPENING. This is a fucking insidious attempt to insert BullshitTM into the body of things that ‘everybody knows’ and convince dissenters that they are a tiny tiny minority and possibly crazy.

Again, there’s no way to disagree with the claim. There’s vagueness around what ‘financial support’ consists of (donations to bail funds? or a countrywide campaign to arm the antifas?) and who ‘campaign staff’ consists of (Joe Biden? his higher-up organizer people in an official capacity? volunteers who do activism work unassociated with the campaign?)

Do you agree that the Fake News is biased against President Trump’s efforts to restore law and order in our communities?

See comments on the first question regarding these unspecified ‘efforts’.

What’s going on with the capitalization here? Is it a heavy-handed attempt to legitimize the phrase ‘fake news’ - make it sound more like a real thing? It’s not just ‘news’ that happens to be ‘fake’; it’s a proper noun indicating that Fake News is...what, an organization? We can say anything we want about the Fake News because ‘the Fake News’, a monolithic entity, isn’t real. It’ll be vacuously true.

Honestly, I don’t know where to end with this one. If the news is fake, it’s biased against Trump. If the news is biased against Trump, it’s fake. There can exist no criticism of Trump that is legitimate; any opposition is the Fake News. This is a propaganda machine.

Do you believe the Fake News should be held accountable for their bias against President Trump?

In the last question, we asked you if the Fake News was biased. In this question, we’re assuming you said ‘yes’. We won’t tell you who exactly the Fake News is. We won’t tell you what their bias looks like. We won’t tell you how we’re proposing to hold them accountable. Dissent is illegitimate and punishable, in the same way that certain political beliefs are worthy of unspecified ‘punishment’.

I suspect that the ‘Fake News’ questions are at the end just in case you need a reminder that President Trump tells the truth and everyone else is a dirty liar. In case this disgustingly biased survey raised any tiny little whispers of alarm in your head. Don’t listen to the alarm. Remember who tells you the truth. Remember how everyone is out to get him because he’s the only one who tells you the truth. You’re not one of those people, are you? Of course not.

It’s so easy to look at this and discount it because it’s so obviously bullshit. That’s why it’s dangerous. We live in a country where this psycho garbage is coming from the establishment in power. Every time something like this goes out into the world, the window of what’s socially acceptable shifts a little closer to fascism. Propaganda isn’t just people saying bad or wrong shit; it’s manipulation that makes it harder and harder to even engage in political discourse. It’s not about what’s true or false; it’s about what serves the President. The goal is to create a climate in which accuracy is irrelevant, critical source evaluation is impossible, and legitimate dissent is discredited. This is how it fucking starts - this “affirm your unquestioning loyalty to our Glorious Leader and punish the opposition as enemies of the State” bullshit.

As a final note, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that the survey does not confirm your email address; it’s not constructed to discourage anyone from submitting duplicate responses. All it asks for is a name, email address, and zip code. So, uh...you know what to do. Especially if you’re one of those kpop weirdos (whom I love very much).

Selective Outrage: What Really Makes You Hate?

What is important to you as an individual?  Each person will have a different answer.  True, many might answer the same but the driving force behind that choice will often be very personal. I live in a very rural setting in the central United States.  My desires and the important things to me are far different from someone in New York City, or London, or Hong Kong.  And yet there are many things on which we can find common ground.

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For instance, two people might respond that illegal immigration is a top priority.  One might have been a legal immigrant who is upset they went through the procedure while others hopped the fence.  The other might have had a loved one killed or injured by an illegal who had been deported multiple times yet was allowed to remain due to sanctuary policies.  We reach similar answers from very different motivations.

We, as a people, regardless of what country we call home, are frequently guided to the “outrage of the day”.  We are also told not only what to be outraged about, we are told why- and most interestingly of all, most people are readily susceptible to this method of control.  Why?

News Flash @VPOTUS as soon as female contraception is free for women and men carry a child, give birth through your #PPhole. Then and only then do men get to decide what woman are allowed to do. Good luck with that #IdiotPence. Perfect example, some men wanting to control women.

— ❄️No tRumpkin Zone❄️ (@M3SMOM) February 28, 2018

The simple answer is ignorance.  Please understand, I’m not saying people are stupid, ignorance is simply the state of being uneducated and uninformed.  In most cases this is intentional.  Not willful ignorance although that is also a factor, but a result of being trained as such.  As education has become more and more centralized, governments have the power of the purse to dictate what is taught.  In an effort to keep the funds coming, schools must comply.  The only way to measure the compliance is through testing so many if not most schools rely on teachers to prepare the kids for the tests and in so doing teach to an end result rather than teaching the kids how to learn.

This method also has teachers teaching to the lowest common denominator so they get the percentage of compliance needed.  This is not to say there are not some excellent teachers out there who are going above and beyond to motivate and teach kids, not what to think, but how to learn.  However our society, in general, has become self-absorbed to care only about what we want or like and if we are challenged in our beliefs rather than defend ourselves with facts and truth, we need a safe place with coloring books and Pay-Doh if our feelings are hurt.  There are many instances of events disrupted or canceled when an invited speaker might challenge some student’s personal beliefs such as happened at Berkeley last fall.

Historically, we once believed it to be a good thing when we were forced to hear things with which we might disagree.  Debate is good and because something is widely held does not make it correct or the proper position.  Nazism was once widely held as the proper belief, yet a few dared to speak out to challenge that status quo.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes to mind with his famous quote about remaining silent in the face of evil.  Another is August Landmesser.  It is likely you have seen the famous photo of a large crowd offering the Nazi salute, while one man stands with his arms folded in defiance.  August was that man.

August joined the Nazi party in 1931 and began to work his way up.  However, he met a young Jewish woman in 1933 and fell in love.  He proposed to her in 1935 but was denied permission to marry her.  They had their first child that fall.  The picture was taken at a rally where Adolf Hitler himself was present making Landmesser’s stand all the more important and dangerous.  In the end, his pregnant wife was taken to a death camp where she gave birth before being murdered.  August himself was impressed into the German Army where he was declared missing in action.

The point here of course is, do you think for yourself?  Do you use facts, logic, and reason to develop your beliefs or do you follow the crowd?  Do you fear to have your beliefs and ideas challenged or are you comfortable in a discussion?  Would you stand as August did for what is right?

The United States is unique in the sense that it’s Constitution is based on self-evident truths: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  This statement from the Declaration of Independence is a cornerstone of the constitution, and it is the supreme law that protects the minority.  Unfortunately, it is our own ignorance, willful or otherwise, that makes us susceptible to those who would oppress us.

The Rule of Law matters, yet we have been conditioned to ignore the law in lieu of feelings.  I recently wrote an article about the origins and uses of propaganda, you can read it here.  Our ignorance makes us a prime candidate for propaganda, but it is no longer governments alone that use this insidious tactic.

When our founders added the Bill of Rights to our Constitution, they were addressing concerns raised by the Anti-Federalists.  They placed five rights in the First Amendment in which they prefaced, “Congress shall make no law…” and then enumerated religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition as being rights which should never be altered.  A free press historically was much like a ravenous wolf seeking out information with which to feed its voracious appetite.  The press was to be a referee of sorts, calling out “fouls” committed by politicians, businesses, and other “bad actors”.  I find it ironic that while many in the media will tout the “Freedom of the Press” mentioned in the First Amendment, they seem incapable of understanding the Second Amendment and the words, “Shall not be infringed”.

We should all care about how social media platforms play a part in our democratic process. Because unless it’s addressed it will happen again. The midterms are in 8 months. We owe it to our democracy to get this right, and fast. https://t.co/aM3pRrZW4J

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 27, 2018

Instead, the press has become more of a cheerleader and instigator.  Investigative reporting is a thing of the past, replaced with a plethora of Parrots or Minah birds repeating what others are saying, nearly verbatim.  If a story is wrong, inaccurate or misleading, it is literally everywhere.  And if called on it a retraction, if any, is as well hidden as the Holy Grail.  The “Guardian of the Republic” is no more.

Unfortunately, we have come to expect this more or less in much of the world.

For example, in the US today whether you watch on TV, online or read the papers you might think this rifle called an AR-15 was the most destructive weapon of war available to man.  They will suggest “If just one life can be saved”, and then ignore all the other ways in which far more people are killed and injured.  What of the deficit spending that is burying our children and grandchildren in debt?  Who sounds the alarm?  What of the politicians who live by a different set of rules from the people, who enrich themselves while holding us accountable?  What of the collusion between businesses and government?  Where are the investigative reporters who leave no stone unturned until the truth is revealed?

Truth has no agenda.  Yet we cannot trust the media to deliver the truth.  We can expect the media to offer selective outrage over the problème du jour.  Dozens of black mothers lose children to violence in Chicago each week, where is the outrage over their loss?  Where is the “Town Hall” assemblage of victims for them?  What of the rapes and murders committed by illegal immigrants or refugees who refuse to assimilate?  Where is the spotlight on the issue?  How about the Trillions in debt being piled on future generations?  Who will be their voice?

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What are we to do?  This is not a problem only in the United States, it is an issue in all the western world where we have a supposedly free press.  Certainly, national propaganda is a given in third world nations and those where the media is tied to the government in some way.  The only antidote for the poison of propaganda and fake news is education and a desire for the truth.  Media outlets have to make money, it is up to us to not subsidize those who propagate lies.

Don’t think we cannot have an impact.  Newspaper circulation has been in a decline since the mid-1990s and ad revenue since the mid-2000s.  Network TV has been in a steady decline for the past 6 years.  In fact media, in general, has sunk to new lows.

Stay engaged, stay informed and stay active in your quest for truth.  Just as we the people are to hold politicians accountable, we must do the same to the media.  To the former, we must send home when they stray, to the latter we must make them pay with reduced revenue.

We have the power if we have the will to use it.

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Expert:    The lone survivor of an all-women anti-aircraft battery near Hanoi. Most were teenagers. (Photo: John Pilger 1975) One of the most hyped “events” of American television, The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam war in an entirely new way”. In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its “exceptionalism”, Burns’ “entirely new” Vietnam war is presented as “epic, historic work”. Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam. Burns says he is grateful to “the entire Bank of America family” which “has long supported our country’s veterans”. Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have taken their own lives. I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings”. The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971. There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans — it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences. In the series’ press release in Britain — the BBC will show it — there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans. “We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy,” Novick is quoted as saying.  How very post-modern. All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the twentieth century: from The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter to Rambo and, in so doing, has legitimised subsequent wars of aggression.  The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy”. Cue Bob Dylan: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?” I thought about the “decency” and “good faith” when recalling my own first experiences as a young reporter in Vietnam: watching hypnotically as the skin fell off Napalmed peasant children like old parchment, and the ladders of bombs that left trees petrified and festooned with human flesh. General William Westmoreland, the American commander, referred to people as “termites”. In the early 1970s, I went to Quang Ngai province, where in the village of My Lai, between 347 and 500 men, women and infants were murdered by American troops (Burns prefers “killings”). At the time, this was presented as an aberration: an “American tragedy” (Newsweek). In this one province, it was estimated that 50,000 people had been slaughtered during the era of American “free fire zones”. Mass homicide. This was not news. To the north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were dropped than in all of Germany during the Second World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly “South Vietnam”, the country America claimed to “save” and, with France, conceived as a singularly imperial ruse. The “meaning” of the Vietnam war is no different from the meaning of the genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, the levelling of every city in North Korea. The aim was described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American. Quoting Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea, Lansdale said, “There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert.” Nothing has changed. When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on 19 September – a body established to spare humanity the “scourge of war” – he declared he was “ready, willing and able” to “totally destroy” North Korea and its 25 million people. His audience gasped, but Trump’s language was not unusual. His rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, had boasted she was prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran, a nation of more than 80 million people. This is the American Way; only the euphemisms are missing now. Returning to the US, I am struck by the silence and the absence of an opposition – on the streets, in journalism and the arts, as if dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground. There is plenty of sound and fury at Trump the odious one, the “fascist”, but almost none at Trump the symptom and caricature of an enduring system of conquest and extremism. Where are the ghosts of the great anti-war demonstrations that took over Washington in the 1970s? Where is the equivalent of the Freeze Movement that filled the streets of Manhattan in the 1980s, demanding that President Reagan withdraw battlefield nuclear weapons from Europe? The sheer energy and moral persistence of these great movements largely succeeded; by 1987 Reagan had negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) that effectively ended the Cold War. Today, according to secret Nato documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as “nuclear targeting planning is increased”. The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against “repeating the worst mistakes of the Cold War … All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this.” But not in America. The thousands who turned out for Senator Bernie Sanders’ “revolution” in last year’s presidential campaign are collectively mute on these dangers. That most of America’s violence across the world has been perpetrated not by Republicans, or mutants like Trump, but by liberal Democrats, remains a taboo. Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record, including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama’s overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia’s western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941. Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011 signalled the transfer of the majority of America’s naval and air forces to Asia and the Pacific for no purpose other than to confront and provoke China. The Nobel Peace Laureate’s worldwide campaign of assassinations is arguably the most extensive campaign of terrorism since 9/11. What is known in the US as “the left” has effectively allied with the darkest recesses of institutional power, notably the Pentagon and the CIA, to see off a peace deal between Trump and Vladimir Putin and to reinstate Russia as an enemy, on the basis of no evidence of its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election. The true scandal is the insidious assumption of power by sinister war-making vested interests for which no American voted.  The rapid ascendancy of the Pentagon and the surveillance agencies under Obama represented a historic shift of power in Washington. Daniel Ellsberg rightly called it a coup. The three generals running Trump are its witness. All of this fails to penetrate those “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics”, as Luciana Bohne noted memorably. Commodified and market-tested, “diversity” is the new liberal brand, not the class people serve regardless of their gender and skin colour: not the responsibility of all to stop a barbaric war to end all wars. “How did it fucking come to this?” says Michael Moore in his Broadway show, Terms of My Surrender, a vaudeville for the disaffected set against a backdrop of Trump as Big Brother. I admired Moore’s film, Roger & Me, about the economic and social devastation of his hometown of Flint, Michigan, and Sicko, his investigation into the corruption of healthcare in America. The night I saw his show, his happy-clappy audience cheered his reassurance that “we are the majority!” and calls to “impeach Trump, a liar and a fascist!” His message seemed to be that had you held your nose and voted for Hillary Clinton, life would be predictable again. He may be right. Instead of merely abusing the world, as Trump does, the Great Obliterator might have attacked Iran and lobbed missiles at Putin, whom she likened to Hitler: a particular profanity given the 27 million Soviet citizens who died in Hitler’s invasion. “Listen up,” said Moore, “putting aside what our governments do, Americans are really loved by the world!” There was a silence. http://clubof.info/