Azula the Scapegoat

I've talked before about how the Fire Nation in the comics were heavily whitewashed. How any and all moral ambiguity and their crimes are swept under the rug as all the characters are presented in the best light possible. The fact that they did any wrong doing in the past is gently brushed aside about how much progress and prosperity they brought to all that they...uh..."touched".

Thing is, you can't exactly have a post-war canon where there's no conflict. And since the Fire Nation were clearly the aggressors in the war, we can't exactly have them be squeaky clean morally either.

...not without a scapegoat.

In order to create conflict yet keep the Fire Nation morally white, Yang designates Azula as the scapegoat. The person that's responsible for all of the Fire Nation's woes as opposed to the natural consequences of a literal century of warfare. She's the old remnant. The enemy. The last vestiges of the old order that needs to be destroyed for the Fire Nation (Zuko, Mai, Ty Lee, Ursa, etc.) to fully redeem themselves.

And to make sure she becomes that much more of a tempting target, her insanity and instability are brought to the forefront as all other characteristics and sources that made Azula her are quietly retconned into oblivion. Can't have squeaky clean heroes if their villain might be sympathetic after all.

Neither is she alone since her entire posse is made up of girls who were broken out of an abusive mental institution:

Let me repeat that.

A group of mentally ill teenage girls who were likely the victims of a system that the narrative keeps trying to push as squeaky clean...are the bad guys.

To give you an idea of how horrendous this is, we see the same story in the real world. Whenever there is some societal ill or upheaval, the mentally ill are almost ALWAYS used as the scapegoat. Even though in reality it's usually the ones on top or the system who are to blame. It's just people who have been historically stigmatized are almost always the first target. Granted this treatment is not exclusive to the mentally handicapped (I mean there's racism, antisemitism, etc.), but I don't think it's a coincidence that Yang tried to play up Azula's insanity in order to make her a scapegoat.

Especially when instead of addressing the actual issues with the Fire Nation (inherent colonialism, rampant militarism, the amount of power the Fire Lord wields), they'd rather blame somebody else instead of helping themselves. That doesn't exactly make the post-war Fire Nation people you want to root for.

you want complex characters? here's Gale.

I am fully convinced that people only hate Gale bc it's Liam Hemsworth and because they think he's annoying - and yeah, it's true, he IS annoying, but to like president snow more than him? (its pretty privilege)

Most people know by now that the love triangle in thg is for metaphorical purposes - the choice between peace and war. And it's not even a choice as a reader - there is quite literally no chemistry between gale and katniss (in my opinion). But that doesn't merit hatred for the character himself.

He grows up in the seam, poor and being the breadwinner for his siblings. (how sad) We're supposed to disagree with his motives by the end of it - he shouldn't want to get revenge because that makes him as bad as the capitol (yada yada yada). And Peeta is in the right because he wants to show mercy. (peace vs war)

But Peeta grows up as the bakers son. Has he ever gone hungry? No. Are we meant to feel bad for him because of his mum? idk. His name was in the bowl far, far less times. Does that make it any better? No, because he's picked (and this is meant to be about how the system is awful... you get it). But Peeta doesn't grow up hating the capitol because they don't hurt him... until the games.

Is this an attack on Peeta? No, of course not, but circumstances are important as the actions taken within them (situation ethics). Peeta goes into the games and you'd think his outlook on life changes, but it doesn't. Some people have stronger cores - a lifetime of security within yourself does that.

Peeta goes into the games again, Gale saves the citizens of 12 in the bombing. Peeta's kidnapped. And Gale says this:

"He might have been tortured. Or persuaded. My guess is he made some kind of deal to protect you. He'd put forth the idea of the cease- fire if Snow let him present you as a confused pregnant girl who had no idea what was going on when she was taken prisoner by the rebels. This way, if the districts lose, there's still a chance of leniency for you. If you play it right." I must still look perplexed because Gale delivers the next line very slowly. "Katniss…he's still trying to keep you alive."

So, he's annoying, but is he a liar? No. He's ever the strategist, thinking of things from the logical point of view. (really grasping for straws but I need a pro and less cons😭)

People really hated Gale for bombs - killing innocent people that just want to help the fallen? (ohno how sad). But are capitol citizens ever really innocent? Bystanders that simply allow children to be murdered year after year? The idea that they simply have no idea of the harm being caused is ludicrous. Do they not have critical thinking skills? No matter what happens in life, you KNOW murder is wrong. No matter what propaganda media shows you.

(also Beetee helped make those bombs too like gale was annoying but stop giving him full credit like if I was beetee I'd be pissed)

So, that comes to the idea that killing people as a whole is unethical, and it doesn't matter that they're awful people. Is that untrue? No. Is it far to those that have been oppressed their entire lives, being told that using force against their oppressors is wrong? Maybe. It's not an easy issue to resolve (kinda explains the metaphor, doesn't it?)

Neoliberalism probably wants you to blame the individuals. Coin, Gale, Snow. Coin and Snow were two sides of the same coin (ooh pun) - politicians, adults, playing for their own power. Is it wrong to enjoy power? No, of course not, just don't abuse it. Gale enjoyed power. But he was fighting for the freedom of the country, not himself. And he's only 19/20. You're a lot angrier when you're younger, as many adults forget.

The system is the real problem, clearly. Why should the capitol have all the power? Why are the districts being used? We don't know. But that's unimportant.

And then there's Katniss. She's the one making the decision - peace or war. On paper, its peace anyday. Katniss has seen both Peeta and Gale's hardships - Gale is a metaphor for who she could have been. Bitter, angry and hateful. It's not unjustified hatred but under Kantian ethics, murder is always wrong. Katniss does not want to retaliate because it's a vicious cycle of violence.

As far as we know, the capitol don't really pay for all they do. I know if I was a district citizen who suffered, I'd want capitol citizens to feel the same way. That is not to say that it is ethical, but it is not unjustified.

It would be more of a fair argument if Peeta and Gale suffered equally, but can you really quantify suffering. Their experiences shape them. Its easier for Peeta to want mercy for the capitol because he wasn't starved his whole life. And Peeta's stance is the right one.

But see, that's why we say complex character and not good person. Because the decisions aren't malicious in intent, just with clashing personal values to the norm. Like, bffr, half the people online hating on this guy would NOT have stood for mercy for the capitol.

(anyway have a nice day this was my ethics essay plan and I'd better get a 9 on it or else <333)

WHY UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS ARE JUST AS UNLIKELY AS EVER, UNFORTUNATELY

I'm a leftist (Libertarian-Socialist), who votes progressive, because I live under an "elected" government, and I had thought I had purged the MSNBC/CNN Nation from my friends list, but apparently not, as my timeline is just chock-full of media-driven hysteria over current events, so here's a primer:

"Liberals" who think their arguments are clever or relevant to the Second Amendment are exhausting.

They are not the left; they are just one half of the good cop/bad cop act of the corporate owned fire-hose of bullshit that is the corporate media, and corporate America's governing criminal cartel/duopoly.

Both cults "I like simple and ineffectual 'solutions', because they make me feel like I'm doing something, and I'm just stinky with fear."

There are over a hundred million legal gun owners, who some want to punish for somebody else's crime.

Well, there are some things to consider.

We've been a heavily armed country since 1621, and yet the epidemic of daily mass-shootings didn't begin until 20 April 1999 (Columbine), at a time when gun ownership was at an all-time low, and five years after Clinton's assault-weapons ban, so maybe guns aren't the variable.

Maybe, just maybe, dead school-children are the price of the neoliberalism practiced under the "Washington Consensus" of BOTH right-wing authoritarian parties since the 1980's? When your country offers you no prospects, and you become terrified of the future, what then? Fear can make unstable people do desperate things. Add to that a culture of celebrity, and what could possibly go wrong?

Another factor that goes completely unexamined, is the way Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill emptied our state hospitals onto our streets, and onto families ill-equipped to deal with the sometimes violent mentally ill.

Thank God, the "solution" is so simple…

Also, 84% of NRA members support universal background checks. The problem is, every time a bill comes up for a vote, Democrats add poison pill amendments guaranteeing defeat in the legislature (and the courts), and then they proceed to tell the TV cameras that "once again the GOP and the gun lobby have voted down background checks and defied the will of the people", or some such nonsense.

If you want to watch Dems sabotage universal background checks (while Republicans roll their eyes and face-palm) in real time, go here:

P.S. You can probably guess which one of these three groups I belong to (Hint: It's the one that's growing and actually decides elections):

LaborPartyNow!!!

P S The line, "You don't need 30 rounds to shoot a deer!" is not clever.

The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting tools, toys for hobbyists (target shooting), or even weapons for self-defense.

It's about ARMS!!!

It's about the individual citizen's right to arms, so they'll be prepared to join a militia, not the other way around. ‘Well regulated’ at that time, simply meant, ‘efficient.’ In other words, in order for a muster to be efficient, civilians needed to be already armed.

So the "collective rights" argument has a couple of problems that make it quite unhinged from history and reality.

1) As I've mentioned above, Americans have always been relatively heavily armed. How did that happen in a collective rights paradigm?

2) Contrary to what you were probably taught in school, by the time of the Confederate artillery barrage on Fort Sumter, the war over slavery had already been going on for over six years, and was fought entirely by independent volunteer militia's. Fort Sumter was just the beginning of official involvement by government troops. How did that happen in a collective rights paradigm?

3) In what universe do government forces need to have their right to arms protected?

4) Since when do National Guard members keep National Guard arms (Hint: they're kept at the armory, and have been since colonial times)?

5) Obviously, "Liberals" are stupid.

Again: #LaborPartyNow!!!

P P S That was ENTIRELY the point of the first fruits of dissent, the 10 Amendments we've come to call the BILL OF RIGHTS (which have become a beacon to aspiring democrats all over the world), to protect INDIVIDUALS from the government they had just created. #TrueStory

I'm feeling that some ppl interpretate the [man hurt → fascist] like we can't hold men and patriarchy accountable for the process. like "oh if you didn't hurt him he wouldn't have descended into fascism in the first place". and i truly need these ppl to give a closer look into the processes and institutions.

bc it's not coincidental that these men go to fascism and conservative spaces and ideologies, it's not something that happens to happen. and i feel like a lot of ppl are blaming marginalized and oppressed groups for feeling enraged and not wanting to be around others that reproduce oppression in the first place, like everything wasn't a consequence of a system that constantly sustains individuality and those behaviors towards them (marginalized groups)

like, it's kinda obvious when you see the bigger picture. but on a smaller level, some responses to, for example, barbie and ken relationship in the recent movie, or snow and lucy gray. yeah it's funny "the boy was heartbroken and became a fascist" at first bc it's so absurd, but then when a bunch of ppl start to take that seriously i get... concerned.

the barbie movie had a clear premise, yes, and the mirroring of the real world to barbieland is there. no, kens shouldn't be invisible and maybe we shouldn't focus on a capitalist and liberal society in the first place, but ken relying on patriarchy isn't supposed to be taken on a simplistic way. if we take the mirroring aspect, the way ken take patriarchy is WAY different than the way women take counterculture movements, especially considering that feminism is about equality and not matriarchy. SO it's not to be taken on a superficial level, there's a reason why men go to patriarchy in the first place bc men does not grow in a women dominant world. the way women use feminism is not the same way ken used patriarchy. feminism should be a movement that also targets capitalism, and so yes (surprise) the approach on the movie was white and neoliberal.

although you can to use your access in information (internet) to go deeper into other ways to approach the topic, the hunger games one makes me much more concerned. because a lot was very clear. other things i think should've been more clear, like the way coriolanus despised lucy and sejanus very much in the book (we know why they didn't make that more obvious tho). but essentially i think there's more discussion to have in more complex ways in this story. bc it shows how one thing is connected to the other, how the stuff do not go alone.

the way he acted towards lucy and his subsequent response to her not complying to what he wanted makes it clear how he didn't descended into conservative ideology from nowhere. since the beginning he felt like the world owned him something, like he deserved more (and I'm not talking ab just his financial situation, although that is linked too). bc his father was a great army man, and they were from a dominant space before the districts dared to rebel, and so he had this thing being reaffirmed all the time - how he didn't had what he was supposed to have, this greatness. and ppl bully him for it, they make fun of him and that makes him feel more wronged. so when lucy gray does not accept what he wanted, when she realizes what their life would be and runs away, he goes to the thing that was there all along. it wasn't a new outside thing, it was present in his life since the beginning, it was there before him, and ppl would say that it's simply human nature so... why wouldn't he go along with it?

i think the barbie movie did a good job when they showed that barbie putting ken aside wasn't right and it came connected with her alienating herself from her existence. but the movie didn't show how everything is connected to the systems and the economic, social and cultural structures, the movie does not try to show how maintaining the system will continue to do harm, or how the hierarchy system it's the problem in itself. it goes so far into saying that "someday maybe the kens will have as much influence as women have in the real world" but does not provide the first step to dismantling the culture that has been fucking everything up since 16th century (at minimum) - again, very white and neoliberal.

but THG saga shows us how everything is linked. and so seeing ppl putting it on a simplistic way makes me very concerned and confused bc... IT'S THERE. and it's not subtext, it's not implied, IT'S THERE. OPEN AND EXPLICT AND WELL EXPLAINED IN 4 BOOKS/MOVIES.

anyway that was a big rant, thanks for coming to my tedtalk

Jade Harley, Calliope, Roxy Lalonde

Meat, page 19

JADE: so you see janes neoliberal austerity measures—

JADE: as i outlined here in graph b-2

JADE: and here in figure a-6

JADE: and here!!! in this very spooky drawing i dictated to callie

JADE: (great drawing by the way!!!)

CALLIOPE: ^u^

JADE: —will no doubt lead to a whole bunch of ugly societal backlashes

JADE: not just in economic terms but on a number of other more serious vertices that weve been lucky enough to avoid on new earth so far

ROXY: u dont say

JADE: i DO say!!!

JADE: the thing is that jane is an establishment leader

JADE: shes looking at doing things the way our old universes did them

JADE: shes pretty convinced that shes going to be able to replicate the capitalist hierarchies that earth had but in a more “responsible” way

JADE: but none of that stuff actually worked!!!!!

ROXY: and u think karkat can do better?

JADE: i think its worth it to give him a chance

JADE: hes a leader of the people AND hes experienced firsthand what happens when establishment goes too far

JADE: which i imagine you can sympathize with!

JADE: and!!

JADE: that’s my pitch!!!!

CALLIOPE: i’m...

CALLIOPE: going to get Us tea and snacks. woUld yoU like some, jade?

JADE: oh

JADE: yeah sure

CALLIOPE: any preferences?

JADE: ummm pumpkin matcha if you have it

CALLIOPE: of coUrse. i’ll be right back.

JADE: soooo..........

JADE: what do you think?

ROXY: hmmmm

ROXY: well i gotta say

ROXY: this has been a hella convincing argument all in all

ROXY: buuuuut idk if i can help u out

JADE: what????

JADE: why not?!

ROXY: i just dont rly

ROXY: care about politics that much i guess

ROXY: also this election is all kinds of personal

ROXY: i mean if i came into ur house and asked u to make some grand political w/e against your bff

ROXY: would you be all

ROXY: oh yea totes sign me tf up

ROXY: im alls ABOUT the sowing of discord among my childhood friends

JADE: siiiigh let me guess

JADE: dirk got to you first

ROXY: not even

ROXY: i got no problem tellin dirk where to stick it lmao

ROXY: but dirks not the one running

JADE: you think hes NOT the one pulling the strings behind the scenes?

ROXY: sure but give janey a lil credit

ROXY: shes got more moxie and ambition in her pinky than the rest of us got all together

ROXY: shes been planning this for years

ROXY: but shes yknow

JADE: ruthless? :B

ROXY: *fragile*

ROXY: shes gotta be miss perfect all the time for the billboards n press meetings

ROXY: always wearin those power suits trying to look like a big bad bitch

JADE: you mean like....... the condesce?

ROXY: wow ouch

JADE: im not just imagining it though, right???

JADE: you see it too

JADE: not to dredge up something horrible from your history

JADE: but her whole image is just kinda...... *woof*

ROXY: is that what you guys think?

ROXY: u and dave and karkat?

JADE: well...

JADE: yeah

ROXY: well janes not perfect

ROXY: and idk if shell be a good president

ROXY: but shes not betty crocker

ROXY: and i luv her and i dont wanna hurt her feelings

ROXY: and thats p much all there is to say on the matter

JADE: fiiiiine

JADE: i understand

JADE: callie what about you?

CALLIOPE: oh, i’d rather stay Uninvolved, thank yoU.

JADE: :(

CALLIOPE: i feel like interfering in both politics and a personal argUment between my friends woUld be impolite as well as kind of... stressfUl, to be honest.

JADE: yeah

JADE: sorry callie i probably shouldnt have put all that on you

CALLIOPE: less apologizing, more snacking!

JADE: wow callie youre such an amazing hostess!

JADE: hehehe roxy youre so lucky to have her

ROXY: psst not “her,” “them”

JADE: oh

JADE: oh!!!!!!

JADE: oh wow!

JADE: im sorry i didnt mean to be uh... culturally insensitive?

JADE: have i just been stupidly calling you a girl for years like a big fat dummy??

JADE: oh nooooo! im such an asshole!!!!!

CALLIOPE: yoU are absolUtely not an asshole!

CALLIOPE: i didn’t mind being called a girl. i still don’t really mind, it’s jUst not exactly... accUrate.

CALLIOPE: bUt i did take comfort in “being a girl” for a very long time. this is something i’ve only recently decided.

ROXY: yea...!

ROXY: m-me too actually

JADE: you??

ROXY: o yeah we are both a “they” household now

ROXY: package deal thing

ROXY: things r nonbinary as fuck around here

JADE: really?

ROXY: yup

ROXY: well

ROXY: i mean thats probably a dumb and bad way to say it dont tell anyone i said it that way rofl

ROXY: but yeah thats about whats goin on

ROXY: wow that felt good to say aloud man

ROXY: ahah hahaha hell of a way to come out

JADE: its ok

JADE: i dont wanna make you uncomfortable

ROXY: i know

JADE: but i am curious!

JADE: if you need to talk about it i mean

ROXY: maybe

ROXY: callie and i have been talkin about it a lot

ROXY: unpackin all kinda baggage w/ their alien stuff and my human stuff

ROXY: and so i got to thinking

ROXY: what even is gender

ROXY: amirite lol?

JADE: oh yeah

JADE: that makes sense i guess........

JADE: so youre uh

JADE: not...... “doing gender” anymore??

ROXY: ya i guess not lmfao

ROXY: i mean that was all stuff from our old universe

ROXY: whyd we even bring it here right?

JADE: right

CALLIOPE: my ideas aboUt gend—

CALLIOPE: —er were entirely inflUenced by my time watching earth.

CALLIOPE: i sUppose i only thoUght of myself as a girl because my, Um...

CALLIOPE: my brother took mascUlinity qUite serioUsly.

CALLIOPE: by which i mean, he became very enthUsiastic aboUt all the things it sUpposedly meant to be a boy.

CALLIOPE: cherUb existence is dichotomoUs, bUt not in the same way hUman biology is.

CALLIOPE: i sUppose oUr view of hUman cUlture indirectly inflUenced alternia’s development, which in tUrn affected yoUrs, which is something i’ve had a lot of time to think aboUt since we came here.

CALLIOPE: it’s all so very circUitoUs and arbitrary.

ROXY: yeah exactly!

ROXY: like when u think about it...

ROXY: so much of what earth c thinks what boys and girls “SHOULD” do comes straight from the imagination of a bunch of dumb teens

ROXY: which is totally FUCKED

JADE: sure

ROXY: i mean what am i gonna do

ROXY: get married and pop out 100 bbs?

JADE: uh... no???

ROXY: exactly

ROXY: i mean once upon a time i guess i thought about that

ROXY: but i dont think its what i really wanted

ROXY: i just liked the idea of me and dirk makin some smart ass awesome kids together

ROXY: cuz i liked the idea of dirk

ROXY: and also literally no one else on the entire planet was alive at the time

ROXY: but we had some babies without even bein consulted about it anyway so w/e

JADE: your kids ARE pretty cool

ROXY: i KNOW right?

JADE: personally im a big fan!

JADE: i...

JADE: i.........

ROXY: jade?

ROXY: o shit

CALLIOPE: is she okay?

ROXY: idk

ROXY: get a cloth from the kitchen! and some water!

CALLIOPE: okay! i’ll be right back!

Now that I’ve had a chance to watch Shaun’s video on Harry Potter (which is excellent, highly recommend), I’ve realized that part of the reason why I love Good Omens so much is that it takes the exact opposite approach that Harry Potter does.

Shaun goes into this better than I can, but the gist of his video is that in Harry Potter, there are no good or bad actions, only good and bad teams. Whether the action in question is owning slaves or being hateful toward fat people or teachers showing blatant favoritism toward a single student, what matters isn’t what happens so much as who’s behind it. The good team always does good and the bad team always does bad even if their actual deeds are identical, and Shaun details how this is one of the failings of a neoliberal worldview.

Good Omens does the opposite. The entire point of the story is that it doesn’t matter which team you’re on. What matters is the choices you make and how you treat others. The angels think they’re so high and mighty because they’re the angels, the “good” team, but they do all the same things the demons do. All that changes is the PR spin they put on it. You could swap out angels with Democrats and demons with Republicans and get a fairly accurate sense of US politics (and probably UK politics too if you swap out angels for Labor and demons for Tories but I’m less versed on that). One side is upfront about being bad while another pretends to be good despite doing much of the same badness, just with a nicer spin on it.

Aziraphale and Crowley are able to be friends despite being on different sides because they both share common values and show kindness toward others. Each one is willing to call out their own side and even leave their side when it’s clear that their values don’t align. In the Good Omens world, your actions are always more important than your labels.

Anyway Good Omens is far more progressive than Harry Potter could ever hope to be so if any former Potterheads are looking for a new fantasy story to read/watch, Good Omens is a great place to start.

I would hardly say Trump’s problems with Obama and Hillary are performative. While it’s certainly true that in terms of policy, they have more in common than not, it must be remembered that Donald Trump is a genuine fascist. As bad as the likes of these right-of-center neoliberal goons are, there is still a wide difference between themselves and Trump. Trump, and most certainly the ranks of his supporters, were and continue to be furious that a black man sat in the Oval Office for eight years, regardless of his expansions of US imperialism. Hillary Clinton, for all her rancid bourgeois machinations, is still an educated, politically motivated woman. She has aspirations that do not exist along the lines or the ideal of the “traditional” woman. Again, as miserable and loathsome as she is, these are qualities that the likes of Donald Trump & Company cannot abide by. The Bushes, The Clintons, Obama, and Biden are despicable. They are faithless, self serving tools of the bourgeoisie, and most of them, frankly, ought to be locked up in The Hague. But they and Trump are not the same. Liberalism, for all its crimes, is not fascism. Though both are evil, there is still an ocean between them, and the rage and hatred fascists bare for their liberal counterparts is genuine.

I have certainly heard arguments that Donald Trump is a grifter, whose simply using an empowered fascist movement to Music Man his way into power. There is certainly an element of this to him, but frankly, the man is far too openly and emotionally invested in his own politics for that to be entirely true. There is plenty to his image that can be called performative. He is a showman by nature, and his refusal to say anything good, publicly at least, about Ron DeSantis proves that the center of his political desires is still always that he must be the leader. He is a narcissist, he will suffer no rivals, and that much will never change. But after everything we’ve seen and been through, the truth should be relatively inescapable. When Donald Trump goes on stage to rave against his enemies, and what he sees going on the country, he genuinely believed everything he’s saying.

I don't disagree with a word you've said, but there appears to be some kind of unspoken agreement between the parties that big names are untouchable. The fascists aren't going after Obama and Hillary or Biden, they're going after regular people without the resources to fight back because they're easy targets and the media wouldn't come to their defense en masse. Hitler and Stalin purged whatever political figures they wanted, Putin and Kim purge whatever political figures they want, Trump could theoretically have purged whatever political figures he wanted but didn't (he had Chelsea Manning thrown back in jail, but she's still alive and she wasn't a big name power player to begin with). He made vague threats to rile up his audience and encouraged stochastic terrorism to maintain plausible deniability, but he's a master at covering his own tracks so nothing ever sticks even if it's traced directly to him. He'd find a scapegoat in his orbit and throw them under the bus; if they stayed quiet he would pardon them and endorse them in whatever they decided to do going forward, but if they said a single word against him he would claim they were always on his Shit List and he never liked them anyway. Trump is a fascist, no question about that, all I meant was that no matter how much he hates his political opponents, he never acted on any of his threats against them, which makes the threats seem like they were half-hearted the whole time because he is not a man known for showing restraint. If he had wanted Obama or Hillary or then VP Biden dead, he could have and would have taken them out, and he would have tried to make it look like an accident, even if the coverup was half-assed and everyone could see through it (like how all of Putin's enemies just so happen to fall out of seventh story windows, or they inexplicably wind up poisoned in a seedy hotel room). He would have denied culpability and he would almost certainly have gotten away with it, so what stopped him besides apathy? I therefore conclude that big names are simply off limits even to someone as vindictive as Donald Trump, so he sics his goons after the tired, the poor, the huddled masses and wretched refuse yearning to breathe free on our teeming shores. He's aiming for the low hanging fruit because he can, and I'm sure that given another term he would start aiming higher, but as it stands his threats against colleagues were, are, and will likely remain empty. Pelosi and Schumer and the January 6 Committee members and the so-called "RINOs" who voted to impeach him are all safe (the latter may lose their primaries, but he won't go after them or their families once the election is over), so American fascists know who's an acceptable target and who's not. If Trump or his supporters killed a big name, the riots and civil unrest that followed would make 2020 look like child's play.

He'll come for me or you, he'll come for our friends and family, but he won't come for anyone we'd vote for.

Why is Pablo Hasel justifying and praising terrosist groups??

I’m not sure if you’re asking why Pablo Hasél is accused of praising terrorist groups or why he said what he said. So I’ll answer both things lol.

He got sentenced to jail because of different verses from his rap songs and some tweets. To be precise, the judges have considered that he published 64 tweets that were either against the Spanish monarchy (yes, “offense against the Crown” is a crime in Spain) or praising the armed organisations GRAPO and ETA. These are the tweets that caused more scandal:

“Los parásitos de los Borbones siguen de trapis con los decapitadores de los homosexuales”: “the Bourbon parasites are still doing business with the ones who decapitate homosexuals”

This is a reference to the fact that the Bourbon family (the dynasty of the Spanish monarchy) are, in fact, doing business and being friends with the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, where human rights are not respected at all.

It is a fact that Saudi Arabia condemns homosexuality as a crime: gay people caught for the first time are flogged or jailed and if the “offense” is repeated they are sentenced to death penalty (source). It’s also a fact that King Juan Carlos I has had a long friendship and business relation with the Al Saud dynasty. In 1979, the Saudi monarchy gave Juan Carlos I a yacht as a gift (which he accepted and used for his holidays for years), when the king Fahd of Saudi Arabia died in 2005 the president of Spain José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (from the PSOE party) declared a national day of mourning for the Saudi king as was suggested to him by the Spanish monarchy, in 2008 king Juan Carlos I received 100 million euros from Saudi Arabia, in 2007 Juan Carlos gave Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (brother of the current king of Saudi Arabia) the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece (the highest chivalry honour that the King of Spain can give), in 2011 Juan Carlos intervened to the king of Saudi Arabia to get the contract of the high velocity train to Mecca (which is valued in 7,000 million dollars) assigned to a Spanish business, in 2019 the Panama papers revealed an offshore foundation that the Saudi monarchy had used to give the Spanish monarchy 100 million euros... Just a few examples that prove this relation. (Source). And now Juan Carlos I is living in the United Arab Emirates, another country with harsh punishments for homosexuality (among other human rights violations).

So Pablo Hasél was just stating the facts in that sentence.

“El mafioso de mierda del Rey dando lecciones desde un palacio”: “the fucking mafioso King giving lessons from a palace”

Given the many cases of corruption that the king has been involved in, as well as his intervention in the economy (such as profiting from big businesses that had profited from Franco’s dictatorship) and pressure in politics, it’s not so crazy to call him (and his family clan) a mafioso. In fact, the French TV news literally called Juan Carlos I a “gangster” once.

As for the “giving lessons from a palace”, that’s what he does in his Christmas speech or any other time he addresses the citizens, as if we all had it so easy as living and owning multiple palaces with hundreds of maids and not having to work while getting all kinds of luxuries payed for with public money. Not just Juan Carlos, Felipe VI is the same (remember when he went to Cuba to give them lessons on democracy, but then pretended everything was perfect in the visit to Saudi Arabia?).

Once again, Pablo Hasél was not being far from the truth.

“Guardia Civil torturando o disparando a emigrantes”: “the Civil Guard [Spanish military police force] torturing or shooting migrants”

The Civil Guard literally shoots rubber bullets at migrants who are trying to get on Spanish soil in Ceuta (source). By shooting them rubber bullets, the migrant people fall back on the water, and many drown. The Civil Guard murders and tortures migrants. And everything that takes place inside CIEs (migrant detention centers) can also be called torture with no doubt.

Again, these are facts.

Those were posts on social media, he has also been sentenced because of the lyrics of his songs. Here are some sentences from his song “Juan Carlos el Bobón” (the title is a pun with the words "Borbón”-Bourbon- and “bobo”-stupid-).

“Me cago en la marca España explotadora y casposa”: “the exploiter and braggart brand Spain can go fuck itself”

That’s self-explanatory. A personal opinion you can agree or disagree with, but given the things we’ve mentioned in this post and so many more, it’s perfectly understandable that he would feel like this. And he should be free to say it.

“Si Froilán se disparó en el pie siendo menor de edad igual ahora que es mayor de edad va a disparar a toda la Familia Real”: “if Froilán shot himself in the foot when he was underage, maybe now that he’s an adult he’ll shoot the whole Royal Family”

For those who don’t know, Froilán is the son of Infanta Elena, and so the nephew of the current king Philip VI. This line is a reference to 2012, when he was shooting in one of his parents’ possessions and he accidentally shot himself in the foot. It was illegal for him to be shooting in the first place, because Spanish law prohibits kids under 14 years of age to hold firearms, but of course nothing happened to his parents for doing illegal things because they’re the royal family.

Unsurprisingly, this line is considered “offense to the Crown”. It’s not a threat from Hasél, it’s just wishful thinking that I’m sure many people share.

And lines from other songs by Pablo Hasél:

“Siempre hay algún indigente despierto con quien comentar que se debe matar a Aznar”: “there’s always some homeless person awake with whom to talk about the need to kill Aznar”

José María Aznar was president of Spain between 1996 and 2004 with the right-wing party Partido Popular (PP). He was a shit president, during his presidency the labour rights decreased and left thousands of workers with way less protection than before, he focused a lot of his work as president on making the economy more neoliberal and left thousands of workers with unfair salaries and harsh working conditions by allowing the owners to fire and decrease pay at will. He also gave support to the USA in the occupation of Iraq, even when the population had been protesting against it (I was only 4 or 5 years old at the time and even I remember one of the general strikes against it).

“¡Merece que explote el coche de Patxi López!”: “Patxi López’s car deserves to explode”

“¡Que alguien clave un piolet en la cabeza a José Bono!”: “Someone stab an axe on José Bono’s head!”

“No me da pena tu tiro en la nuca, 'pepero'. Me da pena el que muere en una patera. No me da pena tu tiro en la nuca, 'socialisto'. Me da pena el que muere en un andamio”: “I’m not feeling sorry for the shot in the back of your neck, pepero [member of the PP party]. I feel sorry for the ones who die in dinghy boats. I don’t feel sorry for the shot in the back of your neck, socialisto [member of the PSOE party]. I feel sorry for the ones who die in a scaffold”.

“Prefiero grapos que guapos”: “I prefer GRAPOs to handsomes” (a pun). GRAPO was a communist and anti-imperialism armed organisation.

“Mi hermano entra en la sede del PP gritando ¡Gora ETA! A mí no me venden el cuento de quiénes son los malos, sólo pienso en matarlos”: “My brother goes in the PP’s headquarters shouting ‘Gora ETA!’. They won’t sell me the tale of who are the bad guys, I’m only thinking of killing them”

“Es un error no escuchar lo que canto, como Terra Lliure dejando vivo a Losantos”: “It’s a mistake to not listen to what I sing, like when Terra Lliure left Losantos alive”. Terra Lliure was a short-lived communist organisation that wanted to fight for the independence of the Catalan Countries through armed struggle. Jiménez Losantos is a fascist radio host who tells all kinds of lies and manipulates information to spread right-wingism, hatred towards national minorities, homophobia, etc.

“Los Grapo eran defensa propia ante el imperialismo y su crimen”: “GRAPO were self-defense against imperialism and its crime”.

“Quienes manejan los hilos merecen mil kilos de amonal”: “those who pull the strings deserve 1000 kg of ammonal”

“Pienso en balas que nucas de jueces nazis alcancen”: “I think of the bullets that would reach the nazi judges’ back of the necks”

None of these sentences are serious threats / plans at the moment. On the contrary, when the politicians he mentions make policies that directly cause deaths (of migrant people at the borders, suicides in migrant detention centers, of workers in their workplace, of people whose heat and gas is cut off or who are evicted, of women murdered by their husbands because they didn’t have anywhere to go for help, etc), now those are real crimes, aren’t they?

Pablo Hasél has been very vocal about being a communist. So I’ll copy-paste Friedrich Engels’ definition of “social murder”. I don’t know what Pablo had in mind when writing those lyrics but I think this fragments helps understand where he’s coming from.

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains. (Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, 1845)

So we can agree or disagree with Pablo Hasél and what he says or his way of saying it, but that doesn’t mean he should be jailed because of it. And it’s incredibly hypocritical to consider saying (not doing, just saying!) that “there’s always some homeless person to talk about the need to kill Aznar with” is violence, but to ignore that Aznar’s involvement in the Iraq helped kill thousands of civilians (for a lie, because Iraq did NOT have weapons of mass destruction!) and caused the misery and indirectly the death of so many workers.

If your question was why did Pablo Hasél say these things, I think two of the sentences we said sum it up:

“I’m not feeling sorry for the shot in the back of your neck, pepero [member of the PP party]. I feel sorry for the ones who die in dinghy boats. I don’t feel sorry for the shot in the back of your neck, socialisto [member of the PSOE party]. I feel sorry for the ones who die in a scaffold” and “GRAPO were self-defense against imperialism and its crime”. Pablo Hasél was highlighting how the current situation we live in is already violence. Violence inflicted by capitalism, imperialism and hatred, so he would consider his words self-defense.

QE, inflation, slave labor and a People's Bailout

The Obama administration inherited a vast economic crisis. They responded with Quantitative Easing, pumping trillions into the finance sector to rescue the banks that had knowingly gambled on bad mortgages, losing so much they were about to go under.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/24/the-fed-launched-qe-nine-years-ago--these-four-charts-show-its-impact.html

At the time, deficit hawks predicted inflation, which is a commonsense prediction: inflation is what happens when the amount of money chasing goods and services goes up faster than the supply of those goods and services, creating bidding wars.

They were right...and wrong. What we got was asset bubbles, especially in housing markets, driving up the price of putting a roof over your head rewarding speculators and landlords, especially Wall Street landlords.

And Obama's handling of the financial crisis put a lot of us under the thumbs of landlords! Obama bailed out the banks, but not the mortgage holders, kicking off waves of foreclosures.

Thanks to lax oversight, banks that had cheated to originate or service mortgages were able to cheat on foreclosures, too - stealing houses from borrowers who were up-to-date on payments or who were entitled to forebearance.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101017014628/http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101014/bs_yblog_upshot/is-david-j-stern-the-poster-boy-for-the-foreclosure-mess

I mean, literally stealing houses by the hundreds or even the thousands. The very same people who created the great financial crisis got bailed out, rather than punished, and used their new lease on life to commit even worse crimes with total impunity.

The houses that were foreclosed (and sometimes stolen) were flipped to Wall Street, who LOVE financial products based on peoples' homes. After all, people will move heaven and earth to keep shelter over their kids' heads.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/blackstone-rental-homes-bundled-derivatives/

Corporate landlords built a sturdy, three-legged stool to guarantee the flow of rents to their investors.

I. Jack up rents to consume the majority of tenants' income:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/09/wall-street-owns-main-street-literally.html

II. Cease maintenance, knowing that your tenants have no recourse if their homes are crumbling and unsafe:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-housing-invitation/

III. Perfect the eviction, heretofore an American rarity:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/wall-street-america-s-new-landlord-kicks-tenants-to-the-curb

America's housing crisis - substandard homes rented at unsustainable costs to people who had their own homes stolen from them by the same investors they're currently paying rent to - is a major legacy of QE, and it's definitely inflationary.

But it's a highly selective form of inflation. Many people won't experience it at all: if you owned your house before the crisis and weathered it, the asset bubble has made your home more valuable, while falling interest rates let you refi at rock-bottom rates. You're great.

You're paying less than ever for a home that's worth more than ever, but that's a spillover effect of the main show, which is the process by which millions of Americans were robbed of their homes and then moved into high-priced slums to the benefit of the 1%.

Both Obama and Trump have boasted of the economy's performance since QE, pointing to soaring share prices - share prices that are totally decoupled from company performance. Companies lose money and still gain value.

Indeed, predatory companies (like Grubhub, Postmates, Door Dash and Uber Eats) that destroy profitable companies (restaurants) while still losing money are booming in value.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/18/code-is-speech/#schadenpizza

Investors understand that consumers have no money, due to rising housing costs plus crashing wages, largely thanks to the "gig economy," a polite term for "worker misclassification."

Companies that get bailouts would be stupid to spend the money on jobs or new productive capacity to make stuff no one can afford to buy. Instead, they buy their own shares and declare dividends, driving up share prices.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#austerity

We have seen an incredible market bull-run since the Great Financial Crisis, a run that has largely continued since the pandemic. It's the other asset bubble: a bubble in investment assets.

Corporate leaders claim responsibility for these rises, but the reality is that it's the predictable result of bailing out banks and companies rather than workers and homeowners.

Société Générale's analysts say that about half of the stock market's gains since 2008 can be attributed to QE.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/without-qe-the-s-p-500-would-be-trading-closer-to-1-800-than-3-300-says-societe-generale-11604688442

Top-down bailouts have multiplier effects. The banks are made whole, then they get to steal our houses, then they get to steal our rents, then they get to goose their share prices.

This is how the super-rich got even richer, before and after the pandemic. It's also why the tiny minority of Americans with adequate retirement savings saw them swell - it's another spillover effect of the great upward transfer of national wealth.

Why does all of this matter now? Well, between my writing my first paragraph and this one, Biden was declared, giving us what the Biden campaign signalled would be "Obama's third term."

Biden's taking office amidst a financial crisis that's far worse than 2008.

Biden has a long track-record of giving legislative gifts to the finance sector at the expense of the American people. They called him "The Senator from MNBA" for a reason.

https://www.gq.com/story/joe-biden-bankruptcy-bill

If he addresses this crisis the same way that he did in 2008 - the way that Congress and the Senate addressed the crisis in 2020 - by bailing out finance, not the public, we're seriously fucked.

Sure, the stock market will continue to rise and rise, as will house prices.

If you are in the 1%, you will get SO MUCH richer. If you're in the 10%, your retirement savings will swell, your mortgage will get cheaper, and your house's value will go up.

For everyone else: evictions, foreclosures, soaring rents, worse wages.

Last week, California voters passed Prop 22, safeguarding the right of gig economy companies to misclassify their workers as contractors and pay them sub-minimum wages, withhold benefits, evade payroll and unemployment taxes, etc.

Uber/Lyft spent $200m to secure that win.

As Prop22's promoters remind us: Gig work is the new unemployment benefit: it's a private-sector jobs guarantee, work you can get at the tap of your screen. It's a perfect labor market - workers effectively bid to offer the best price to perform servant work for others.

The more workers there are, and the more desperate their situation is, the lower the payments go. A lot of those savings are siphoned off by the (money-losing, stock-soaring) gig companies, but some of it is passed onto customers.

This is by design.

Since the Reagan years, neoliberal regulators and lawmakers have hewed to a radical anti-monopoly theory called "consumer harm." Under "consumer harm," monopolies are only a problem if they drive up prices.

Since gig companies lower prices, they are totally kosher - even if they secure monopolies through predatory pricing.

But there's an even more insidious side to "consumer harm" and the gig economy.

Misclassifying workers as independent contractors converts a brutally exploited workforce into a collection of "small businesses." If they get together and demand higher wages, THEY violate the consumer harm standard. They're a group of companies fixing prices!

We're 12 years into the QE experiment and it has demonstrated the relationship between government money-creation and inflation: inflation isn't the result of government spending, it's the result of government spending that leads to bidding wars.

Giving trillion to the rich created inflation in the things that rich people buy: our houses (out from under us) and stocks.

Now, imagine what a People's Bailout could do.

Imagine replacing the gig economy job guarantee (a workfare program with no workplace protections, job security or minimum wage) with an actual Job Guarantee as described by the economist Pavlina Tcherneva:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/05/the-hard-stuff/#jobs-guarantee

Federally funded, locally administered: good jobs at inclusive wages that served community needs proposed by community groups and approved by local governments.

Would that be inflationary? Recall that inflation is what happens when the number of buyers goes up and the supply of things they're buying doesn't keep up. Inflation is the result of bidding wars.

For a jobs guarantee to be inflationary, there would have to be a bidding war for the US workforce. That is the opposite of what we have now.

https://wolfstreet.com/2020/11/06/picture-emerges-of-a-weird-recovery-to-still-historically-awful-levels/

The reason no one wants to buy Americans' labor is that no one has any money to buy the things Americans make with their labor. The only people with money - the wealthy - primarily buy our homes out from under us, and stocks.

QE for the wealthy has made the economy incredibly perverse. Productive companies are being driven to bankruptcy by gig economy companies that lose money. Millions of workers compete to provide services for the lucky few, for dwindling wages.

Workers can't afford to buy stuff so companies have no reason to make stuff and so they become finance grifts, until they collapse, like Hertz did (after it converted itself from a car-rental company to an accountancy trick company):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/literal-gunhumping/#hertz-uranus

The gig economy jobs guarantee can't last. Eventually the number of workers bidding to serve the wealthy will exceed demand by such a wide margin that wages turn negative - the depreciation and payments on your gig economy car will exceed your income.

But a real, public sector, federal Jobs Guarantee? Yes please.

Paying workers good wages to do productive things that their communities need will create demand for the thing companies have decided not to make anymore.

In other words, it will enable companies to make profits again, and it will drive out the companies whose share prices soared on the expectation of losses (accompanied by dividends and buybacks). It will dampen the stock market, but improve the economy.

This will mean the end of those spillover effects - soaring house-valuations and 401ks for the lucky few - but those came at a VERY high price - vast un- and underemployment, the gutting of the productive economy, crushing debt for the majority.

America bought those house price rises and 401k gains at a steep price: it cost the nation its resilience and political stability.

If the goal of QE was to secure middle-class Americans' retirements, it was spectacularly wasteful.

A tiny fraction of QE's trillions went to middle-class retirements, while the vast majority went to making the 1% far, far richer. Most middle class Americans still don't have secure retirements - their dotage will be spent competing for gig economy jobs.

For the price of QE, the US government could simply have guaranteed the necessities of retirees: shelter, food, care. This spending would crowd out jobs, sure - the worst-paid, most precarious jobs, from fast food to gig economy "jobs."

It would make America into a country of secure and prosperous people, instead of food-delivery drivers and dog-walkers.

12 years of finance bailouts and 0 years of People's Bailouts have only exacerbated this, and the pandemic metastasised it.

When it comes to stimulus, America can't afford a third Obama term. We need to demand better of Biden - we need to demand a People's Bailout.

For almost* all our sakes.

*Offer not valid in America's richest ZIP codes.

What My Thoughts On Morrissey Today

In response to my writing idea someone gave me I picked this.

So basically, Morrissey’s nationalism in recent years has gotten in the way of me being able to appreciate much that he comes out with. This is wild because a few short years ago, I stood up for Morrissey and actually still feel very moved by a portion of his music. It got me through some really rough patches in my twenties.

I realize he’s human and has faults and I don’t know him completely but just eh, living in Portland and having seen the stuff going on I’m kind of not in the place in my life right now where I want to even try to dissect him. It’s not just a fact that he’s wrong, but that it seems altogether very much in rejection of the things that made his music so special. It was difficult for me to come to terms with it or fully make sense of why someone who’s unashamed expression of witty despair in the 80’s and 90’s, someone who was outcasted from the overall closed mindedness lower working class post ww2 world of northern England, unafraid to be gay and completely the antithesis of some Tory ideal could be bought by some tired nationalist agenda. It’s even more difficult to realize where his alegianced lie in a world that is starting to reject democracy, embrace anti intellectualism in the guise of some form of selective politically motivated skeptism, and I see the world move farther and farther into fascism.

Margaret Thatcher attacked The Smiths. Morrissey was taken in for questioning more than once out of fear for what he represented. Morrissey and The Smiths has some subversive element that really did threaten the establishment and cultural norms, in a way that I feel was a little more multidimensional than even a lot of bands in the English punk scene. I guess for me, even though I grew up in the Inland northwest of the US, I felt there was a lot of parallels in common. I too detest a culture based around animal consumption, was really not a part of the world I grew up in and didn’t want to work in the factories, I liked art and music and nobody around me was really into that stuff.

I still like the Smiths and most of Morrisseys old music. I read his autobiography. I know he is a dramatic self involved individual but I did feel that up till somewhat recently his heart was in the right place and he just liked to be controversial, which is somewhat true still, but now I think there was more to it, some nationalistic self preservation instinct kicking in. Its actually more prevelant than I even realized and I honestly think it’s getting the best of anyone with money or power, even those who once stood for something counter culture. It’s hard to think of him as racist in the traditional sense with his adoration for Latin America, but he might just be so self involved that his popularity in those regions gave him a bias. He probably separates the racism from the nationalism, blindly not wanting to see how the two concepts are quite inseparable. Falling right into it.

Him saying “everyone prefers their own race”, is kind of wild to me. I genuinely even try to entertain this as a possibility like a philosophical thought experiment or a deep dive of some kind into my own subconscious part of me I am avoiding somehow, and it’s not true for me or a lot of people. Who the fuck is he to say who prefers who, and how backwards and dehumanizing. It’s pretty repulsive, and being he is bisexual and felt the discrimination of homophobia growing up, I’m inclined to think he’s not able to see that he’s become the enemy he once represented the antithesis of.

The guy I’ve kinda been with is Mexican. I totally love him. I look into people’s eyes and I talk to and open up to people and if I connect with them I connect with them. Not like I’m trying to play the I gotta friend who is this or that as some kind of example of much, or that I don’t see color or some faulty implication, but I have been in situations where I’m the only white person at a party and I prefer them because they are my friends and I love them, and the idea of classifying who I prefer is to imply that the white race should be my main concern as they are the same as me and therefore superior and they aren’t. There is nothing inherently special to me or a kinship felt with other white people for either their appearance or cultural background. It’s nice to compare notes of pop culture but a lot of stuff people go through is universal. I don’t take too much issue with multiculturalism. My white skin is meaningless to me. I can’t imagine being so inept as a person that the color of my skin actually defines my identity rather than my autonomy or ideas or relationships and what I stand for and my ability to appreciate and connect with other people.

What gets me is that in his support of the far right is not even in line with his hatred of police, or the hatred he had a few years ago. I mean, he has always gone on and on about police brutality, he’s been harassed by them on multiple occasions. He shows them on giant projectors at his shows. Police are a very important staple for fascism and nationalism, and he is now on their side after all this time? What changed? The lost young man he once was in 1981 feels very very different from who he has become and piecing together that transformation has been something I’ve been trying to do for awhile. I try to embrace both but they seem like similar but different people at odds with one another, like an uncle and nephew.

Here is what I imagine happened, and I could be wrong about that but I was a Morrissey fangirl for quite awhile. I literally had his signed autograph above my bed with dried flowers around it like a shrine for a few years, and got a grasp of Morrisseys personality in some ways.

To start off, Morrissey is a very poetic and sharp guy but he’s very miopic about his interests and has always had the tendency to see the world in a black and white framework. This in and of itself is not necessarily bad, but it’s the core framework of who he is as a person. When he was young it was very much more a reflection of his hatred for authoritarianism and deceitful people and phony artists. It’s not bad and it contributed to his music and lyrics and became the thing he was loved/hated for. The way he goes about it really has always been the double edged sword of his charm and vileness all in one and something people have mocked time and time again. He likes to be the guy in the corner that looks fine and smug and believes he sees the virtues/dispicable attributes of everyone in the room and there have been times in his life where he was, and though he won’t ever attack anyone face to face he’s quick to speak his mind about it.

Morrissey is also a very vain person. It’s subtle but he is very singular on certain aesthetics. At times it made him brilliant and poetic and a visionary. The Smiths album covers are beautiful. His look is both elegant and absurd in its grasp for purity. It also makes him seem like a twat and a pretentious prince. The fact that he seems to be these two things at once is what gave him that kind of controversial star quality at times.

Those are just two natural traits he has always been obvious with. And he struggled with it and focused on his passions and dealt with depression in the 80’s. Then fame happened and the smiths ended. He kept to himself more or less in the 80’s and 90’s aside from his disdain for Margaret Thatcher, but he kinda lost his mind a bit when his drummer took him to court in the nineties. Right or wrong he fought for two years and lost a good chunk of his money from The Smiths and when that happened he kind of was forced to start again. He lost his home. He developed that early personalized sense of self preservation and victimhood. I think he lost faith in many of his more naive ideals when he was younger. When you read his autobiography and know what happened it’s like he had to step out of his old life and into something else.

Then, he’s always been a vegetarian superiority type. I liked that he calls it as he sees it but because of his need to black and white think everything he came off as deluded and smug. I mean, to be fair you can’t seem to win with people who want to eat meat and I agreed with a portion of his message, but he never questioned himself. He’s not good at that, or doesn’t appear to be. My personal interpretation of him was to agree with part of it and give him the cred for being not afraid to be a dick and say it, but to see also that he was so dramatic and self absorbed about it to also laugh at him and the way he said it.

Now to go into fascism and why it grew on Morrissey. I see the world as kind of falling into polarization and flux because of the failures of neoliberalism. It’s a long political explanation, but essentially the systems that are in place do not provide answers to a lot of catestrophic issues. Democracy, though the best thing we have, is flawed. I really like philosophy and have studied this and the various arguments that are made, and I don’t have the answer either but fuck if I will ever side with nazis.

People are seaking solace in new ideas that are actually quite old, namely socialism and fascism that provide answers that democracy fails to. Capitalism eats itself and created monopolies and unfair wealth distribution, technology is making human labor obsolete and therefore not a stable means to base our economic system on, those with wealth are hoarding it and trying to separate themselves from the world they helped ruin. We are destroying the planet, running out of natural resources, many of our leaders in the last three or for decades have been flawed, there isn’t a universal safety net for things like natural disasters and pandemics and there are still places stripped of their natural resources where human slavery is prevalent and children starve to death. Neoliberalism has promised some great answer but has actually been the contributor to this entire mess.

We are seeing the beginning of the end now, and I am sure Morrissey isn’t going to waste that without putting himself in the victim shoes, the white traditional quintessentially Englishman of wit, who sees his beautiful world he grew up in disappearing in multiculturalism and seeing himself and the culture of old England as a dying breed, that needs to be preserved at any cost. He probably was on the fence about it for some time, weighing out his disdain for authoritarianism, having a bougouis experience with the seemingly left leaning media that he never managed to win over and called him out for his every misstep. I bet he had a friend who opened him up to the idea that we don’t know about who changed his mind. I bet cuts in taxes for the rich helped him preserve his wealth that he definitely feels entitled to after losing the first portion of it in the court case. He’s rich, famous and old and often times that leads to being quite out of touch, even to the best intellectuals. He lost his mother who was dear to him and I can imagine, even though it’s not political, it created a deep sense of emptiness and dis ease. Nationalism often times gives people a sense of security and identity and purpose. And the idea of having an unpopular opinion excited him just as it always has, gave him the opportunity to be the smug poet in the corner of the party, and he sold out. Hard. And he’s probably proud of it.

He’s irrelevant now. Honestly his latest album wasn’t good, and I like later Morrissey. He doesn’t have the same energy. I just feel like he’s grasping at something that he never fully ever had. What’s weird to me is that I’m writing about him like this when honestly, I could also easily write about how beautiful and meaningful the Smiths and Morrissey has been to me. I can’t explain how it cut through the extreme isolation I’ve been in, not to mention how the Smiths really changed music for the better. There’s always going to be a part of me that wants to defend him. I’m not saying we cancel him. I kinda think he canceled himself. I’m not going to try to not enjoy the smiths or morrissey when I hear him, and I will still hear it and enjoy it but I’m not ever going to spend my own money on filling his pockets. I still nostalgically enjoy the person he was a very long time ago and what he used to represent. I realize at the end of the day he’s just a flawed person. But also fuck fascism, and fuck Morrissey for caving into it.

I mean, at the end of the day the hardest part is that I made him a part of my identity and I just had to stop doing that in a simplistic way. I tossed out a morrissey shirt I had (it’s was a cheesy shirt anyway), and I found new genres of music and while I still love the smiths it’s not like I can’t do without them every day. I break down and listen to them sometimes. I know the songs so well. I listen to Xiu Xiu which is a modern day similar equivalent in some ways but is absolutely better and the singer Jamie Stewart is fucking gold.

review | shin godzilla

Thankfully, no one is calling this a subversion/deconstruction of the summer blockbuster, just because it has Anno’s name slapped on to it. Which isn’t to say that Shin Godzilla plays out like any old summer blockbuster, including its American counterpart (Legendary’s Godzilla) as well as that movie’s inspiration, Spielberg’s Jaws. The ‘intelligent blockbuster’ the former aspires to be and the latter cosily occupies is characterised mostly by restraint. Enticing people into the theatre by the hordes with the carrot of a giant monster wreaking havoc, with the stick that carrot is attached to being character development and the study of how real people would respond to a shark attack or a giant nuclear lizard creature emerging from the depths. 

Shin Godzilla goes a few layers deeper. It eschews the individual-community-state-military quadrangle that the American ‘intelligent blockbuster’ typically situates itself around to hone in on the question of how the executive as a branch of government, more specifically the executive of a modern day Asian nation-state mired as it is in the geopolitics of a world where American interventionism is a given, would handle a crisis of this nature. 

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t characters or even character arcs. It’s just that those arcs all subsume into the political ambitions and work ethics of the several characters that occupy it, several of whom you will recognise more by face than by name as they flit in and out of screen. They are stratified across age, rank, background and ambition with subtle layers of friction mixed with camaraderie between them. 

To that end, it is an obvious and unabashed parable about how complex bureaucratic structures, even when manned by people who are doing their jobs as best they can, are not best equipped to handle sudden crises. And as ubiquitous as the big guy is, Godzilla is almost a hand-crafted metaphor to represent a crisis Japan could face. He is earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster all rolled into one. 

As such, he (or perhaps it, as Godzilla here seems to transcend terrestrial biology and reproductive patterns, sexual or asexual: the very last shot of the film is bizarrely telling of this) is apparently entirely mo-cap CGI, though designed to look like a puppet, which is a clever way of tricking people who wouldn’t do their research into thinking that it is a phenomenally well made puppet rather than shoddily put-together photo-realistic CGI. It goes through several phases of evolution as the film progresses, shifting from a strange, googly eyed quadrupedal thing that drags itself across coastal suburban Tokyo to an upright behemoth of a dinosaur with veins of magma snaking across its body to eventually a much larger biped with a nuke-lazer in its throat that can sever buildings right in half. 

And while it does toy with the Gareth Edwards narrative (and SFX budget-crunch) strategy of playing hide-the-monster, and doesn’t really show you a whole lot of Godzilla at one stretch, instead of using inane drama about “one soldier’s quest to save his white wife and blonde little children” as buffer, it uses committee meeting after cabinet meeting after group huddle before you get to see another glimpse of it. Which is appropriate because all those meetings end up being about deciding what to do about the walking disaster and usually, by the time a decision has been made after all the vacillation and cross-checking, it is already too late.  

But it is rarely as simple as all that. The political commentary is far more complex than ‘bureaucracy bad because slow’. There is a subtle yet measured analysis of how everyone under it uses the system to try as far as possible to push things on to a fall guy and lay the blame off their own shoulder and that the system can only really move forward if a handful of people at various levels with enough daring to be willing to take the fall take risks and move things forward. Even the trolley problem is slipped in there (it comes with the territory, perhaps). And then the movie gradually shifts gear to consider more interesting questions of US interventionism in ‘natural’ disasters of this kind, whether what the US wants is really what is best for everyone, the very real neoliberal economic noose with which this hegemonic system is upheld and how sometimes, it is important for a country to just do as it pleases. 

This is complicated material to cover, especially with the slow rise of Japanese right-wing nationalism and its cultural tendrils snaking into manga and anime like Attack on Titan. The film has accrued its fair share of academic criticism about a propensity towards fashy patriotism. And there’s no going around it, the film is patriotic about Japan. But it is a patriotism that squares itself not even against the USA but against a certain strain of US policy-making. It is even (perhaps too) optimistic about the prospects of the US and Japan working together towards Japan’s best interests instead of the former. France and some unnamed Nordic country emerge as helpful allies in the struggle. Fo better or for worse, Japan’s Asian neighbours are barely given a mention (with the exception of China but even there, somehow without malice or vitriol). 

It puts forward a relevant political concern: if a disaster like Godzilla takes place and Japan happens to have a means of combatting it without having to resort to America’s decision to drop nukes on it for the ‘good of mankind’, can it manage to do that? In Shin Godzilla, it does, but just by the skin of its teeth. And for all its veneer of optimism towards a brighter future for a more independent Japan (Toho does make a fair bit off money off the very American Legendary Pictures deal, after all), the movie ends technically with the US in the shadows, shaking its cartoon-villain fist. “I’ll get you next time.” 

The movie manages this political-thriller genre so well you forget how difficult this feat is to pull off. A lot of that comes down to a perfect marriage between Higuchi’s creature effects (it is a joy to see Godzilla dump blood-red nuclear waste out of its gills before continuing to crawl along, even in its earliest phase) and Anno’s typical attention to detail when it comes to the cut, shot composition and character development. Though it devolves into trumpet and snare kitsch music towards the end, Shiro Sagisu’s score repurposes motifs from Evangelion to thrilling effect. And the performances are nuance, measured, honed in and tight. 

An authentic Japanese Godzilla movie has to a parable about the dangers of nuclear war. But nuclear war has changed. It is a post Iraq world, a post Arab Spring world, a world entirely entrenched in globalisation, the shock doctrine and a consistently rapacious United States foreign policy. Shin Godzilla asks important and complicated questions. One would question its message by wondering what real life disaster or event would force the US to drop a nuclear bomb on a metropolitan city outside its territory for ‘the good of mankind’. The prospect sounds fantastical. 

But is it?

this is totes random sorry pls feel free to ignore but is there a 'STATE' that's completely independent from like elected government, heads of state, partisan politics etc.. like what's this state that some ppl talk abt that doesn't include the elected president? e.g."korea and france have greater deference to state." is there polisci literature/concept on this? what is this STATE that doesn't include the president or CDC head nominated by said president? im sorry im just so ignorant of polisci

This is not at all an ignorant question! This is a huge issue people argue about--maybe less in poli sci than in other social sciences, because poli sci has gone so completely up its own quantitative ass that it has abandoned what should be its obvious theoretical domain and so other disciplines have kind of taken over this kind of question. There are full professors who cannot answer this question (I know because some of them are on my listservs).

So: what is the state. Seriously, really, there is no one widely accepted answer to this. So I’ll go through a few of them under the cut for you. This ended up being really long because it’s something I’ve been thinking about lately, so the simplest, shortest answer to your question is the first one.

1. Institutions

In this view, “the state” means the institutions and bureaucracy that stay on when political leadership changes. The political leadership is called either “the regime” when we want to imply it’s evil or “the administration” or “the government” when we don’t. (I think this terminology is silly and “the regime” should mean the whole arrangement plus some other things--as in a regime of power--without negative or positive implications, but I don’t make the rules.)

Obviously these two things are not firewalled apart. Elected officials can alter the state through policy and/or direct reforms (creating, merging, or eliminating existing state organizations), and the existing state can constrain what elected officials can do through anything from ethics laws to bureaucratic foot-dragging. (In the US context, when we talk about “political appointees,” we mean high-level officials in “the state” that get appointed by elected leaders, but they take over organizations generally staffed by people who have come up through the bureaucracy and are supposed to be “apolitical,” i.e. just there to do a technical/bureaucratic job. So that’s another way that the two blur.) A great example of this would be what happened with the US’s Syria policy under Trump. Trump (”the administration”) wanted to pull out of Syria. The Pentagon, The State Department, various diplomatic branches, etc. (”the state”) did not. The state succeeded in putting him off executing his desired policy for years, even though as the Commander In Chief Trump in theory had really extensive authority to do whatever he wanted. Eventually he exercised that authority and state officials found themselves scrambling madly to try and salvage something of their preferred policy, which is how the US military ended up with this ridiculous non-presence in NE Syria. Another example would be the attempt to take down the USPS.

That’s why partisan politics and elected leaders are excluded from “the state” in this view; “the state” forms the organizational containers that those movements and individuals fill, and the structures they seek to act on or act from. You can think of it like the ground they stand on. This doesn’t have to mean it is itself “apolitical,” since the terrain has implications for everyone standing on it, but it is the object or delivery channel of politics, not politics itself. (Again I don’t agree with this, but it’s what you’re seeing reflected in the discourse you’re talking about.)

When people go on about “the deep state” they’re espousing a conspiratorial version of this view, where they think the ~real behind-the-scenes power lies in these institutions and the long-term bureaucrats who (sometimes) staff and run them. Definitely some power does lie there, but the conspiracists overweigh this into an Elders of Zion type thing.

2. A sovereign entity.

This is more about distinguishing states from other kinds of political entities, and as a result it’s less concerned with fine distinctions about what is and isn’t “political.” The idea is that there are lots of political structures and systems in the world (anything from tribal law to international associations like NATO) but not all of them are states. States are distinguished from other things by virtue of sovereignty. The classic definition (from Max Weber) of sovereignty is “a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within a clearly bounded territory.” In other words, a state’s police, military, national guard, security forces, etc. have a license to use violence within its borders that no one else has--anyone else engaging in violence is a criminal. It is these groups’ status as “agents of the state” that grants them this license. The bordered, yes/no territorial nature of this status--Turkish security forces have no mandate to act in Greece and vice versa--is also distinctive; fixed, defined, cartographic borders are not necessarily a given. In this view, all power and indeed all law is ultimately founded in violence (enforcement), so what matters is who/what can use force with impunity. (When the state’s monopoly on force is challenged in its territory--e.g., Hizballah making war on Israel without the Lebanese army, the original Zapatistas forming a breakaway region during the Mexican Civil War, or any occupation by a foreign force--then the state’s sovereignty is “weakened” or “under attack,” etc.)

Lots of people have criticized and elaborated on this definition. I don’t want to go on forever about all the critiques that exist, but basically in reality, sovereignty is not a yes/no binary where either you have it completely or you don’t have it at all. Things tend to be more mixed and blurry. It also has more dimensions: two important examples are 1) controlling and disposing of the territory itself (exploiting natural resources, moving people around, etc.), and 2) recognition. In many cases, the difference between a state and a non-state is whether other states recognize it as such, i.e. act like it is one. So for example, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus exercises sovereignty and has a state bureaucracy, elections, etc., but because it is not recognized by ~the international community~ it isn’t “a state.” (This isn’t just semantics; it may seem arbitrary when you just think about what goes on inside the TRNC, but when its citizens try to emigrate, for example, they encounter very specific, concrete problems on this basis--e.g., their passports will not be recognized as valid.)

I find this more useful personally, especially because it doesn’t assume a liberal democratic state--it can apply to a dictatorship or a monarchy or whatever you like. But in practice, i.e. how people use it, I still think this approach is frequently too worried about pinning down differences that aren’t always useful. On the one hand, I wrote my BA thesis about how Hamas and Hizballah aren’t states (it was common for a while to refer to them as “states within states”) while also not just being political parties, terrorist organizations, service providers, or any of the other things they get tagged with, precisely because of the way they relate to the Palestinian and Lebanese states. This is worth understanding because it helps explain their political projects and their successes. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s very helpful to go around arguing that, say, ISIS was a state (or state-like) and the Houthis are not because of some detail of how they think/thought about territory, or courts, or bureaucracy. Like what do you get out of making that distinction. If you want to argue that a tribal council somewhere is “the state” for its context I think that’s fine depending on what you’re trying to get at. It all depends on what kind of question you want to answer, and on what scale.

3. There’s no such thing.

This view recognizes that the state is a salad bowl full of different organizations, individuals, ideologies, etc. that do not actually all work in lockstep together or have the same goals. To talk about “the state” is to reinforce the fallacy of unified power and cooperation. Instead, we should recognize that actors within states have their own agendas, institutional cultures, power struggles, etc., and that whatever the state does is the outcome of 1) these internal dynamics, 2) the ability of different external actors (from citizens to foreign governments) to play on/appeal to/push back against different pieces of the state, and 3) the interactions of 1 and 2.

This to me is common sense. You just have to be careful not to take it too far. We can acknowledge that the state is internally differentiated/not any one single thing without going so far away from what most people understand about their worlds. There’s no point saying “there’s no such thing as a state” when people still have to pay taxes.

4. "The state effect,” or: there both is and is not any such thing

This idea, put forward by Tim Mitchell, is my favorite. It is also the subtlest, and a little tricky to explain, but I think it’s the most useful.

This view steps back and looks at all the endless, elaborate debates about every possible nicety of “stateness” and says: perhaps we are asking the wrong question here. Maybe it doesn’t matter what the state is. Maybe it matters what the state seems to be; how it seems to be that; and what “resources of power” are generated by these impressions.

This is the tricky explanation part, so bear with me for a few paragraphs.

Where exactly do we draw the line between “the state” and “civil society”? Are NGOs and nonprofits part of the state? What if they get government funding? Especially in a neoliberal context, when so much policymaking is done through contractors, consultants, tax breaks, etc., are these kinds of organizations not carrying out the state’s agenda, consciously or otherwise? Okay, that’s tough, let’s try something easier: individual people and families aren’t the state. But if a household depends on an income from state employment, does that not affect their politics and their actions in society? Is a person “part of the state” in one building and not in another? How do we account for the way off-duty cops behave, for example, then? You can do this same exercise for “the economy” or any of the other things that are supposedly separate things/domains that the state manages. How can, e.g., the American economy be separate from the state when the state prints and guarantees the currency, sets interest rates, enforces contracts, and generally sets the terms on which the economy can exist? (Going back to your original question, you could probably also do this same exercise re: political parties, or partisanship.)

The point here is not that absolutely everything is actually the state. The point is also not that there is no state. It’s that there are not firm lines. Amazon may be the state when it builds systems for the Pentagon even though it is also, clearly, a private company and not part of the state’s institutions or subject to the same kinds of political controls that state institutions are. Similarly, the state itself is not one smooth solid object (as in #3). But it seems obvious, common sense, that “the economy” is a thing, just as “public health” is a thing, etc., and both of these things are objects of state management/governance/power.

This makes it easy for political leadership to make claims on the basis of these other things as separate “objects.” I.e., “we need to take drastic action to save the economy.” So the impression of these divisions can be used to justify or legitimate state action. You can see this super clearly in the current coronavirus situation. How many times have we been told the US has to “reopen” for “the economy,” and how many times has it been pointed out that the government could just take its own economic measures to allow people to stay home--because “the economy” is not some separate object that works by itself. (I myself had to explain to a friend that the government couldn���t just switch the economy back on by “reopening.” I think we underestimate how powerful these conceptual divisions really are in people’s understanding of how the world works.)

So, therefore, “the state” is the effect of ideas and practices that make things that political leaders and institutions do seem like they form a freestanding, separate structure, a thing, that we call “the state.” It is the ensemble of all these pieces (as noted in #3), and said pieces often include things that are generally thought of as not the state; these lines between state/nonstate shift all the time. What matters is not where the line is at any given moment but what the particular configuration allows state power (including the consideration of force from #2 and the structural concerns from #1) to do.

The problem I have with this is that it doesn’t really account for state capacity very well, but that’s for another day because I haven’t figured it out via paper-writing yet.

Time, Love, and Memory

The first ever inkling of a life goal began when I was 12 or 13 years old, when I read a biography of Seymour Benzer, called Time, Love and Memory. I had always loved science and natural history as many children do, but somehow it was the notion that something as ephemeral as behavior had something as concrete as a genetic basis that captured my imagination more than anything else. I decided then that I, too, would become a behavioral geneticist, just like Seymour Benzer.

Grafitti - Newtown, CT (2020)

I gave up a lot of things I took up as a kid. 

In chronological order: piano, saxophone, skateboarding, snowboarding, guitar, knitting, sewing, graffiti, printmaking. I couldn’t seem to make anything stick, except the single concrete goal of becoming a behavioral geneticist. 5 years later, I started as a freshman in biology. It wasn’t Caltech, but I was finally in a Drosophila lab.

But reality so rarely lives up to expectation. Looking at the anesthetized flies under a microscope wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Or maybe it was exactly all that it was cracked up to be. As I had cycled through various instruments, I cycled through various lab courses - spending weeks studying the visual systems of locusts, sucking up transparent little worms with pipette tips - until I landed in a fish lab.

For almost 2 years I studied communication behavior of little tropical fish. Popping out the tiny popcorn brains out of anesthetized fish somehow didn’t gross me out as much as the fruit flies did. I even got to be surprisingly adept at freezing and making impossibly thin slices of the brains. Yet, I still found reality lacking. In one particularly depressing incident, the basement flooded over holiday break, wiping out several large tanks of fish. Being the one lucky research assistant who happened to be around the next day, I was tasked with cleaning up the dead fish which had been marinating in the tropical heat overnight. Ankle deep in dead fish soup and cleaning chemicals, I wondered what I was doing this for, and whether I should consider an alternative to being a behavioral geneticist - something that I seriously hadn’t done since starting down this path.

Being a lowly (and worse yet: broke) undergrad research assistant, there were no trips to the jungle to carry me through the daily grind of lab work. Biostatistics didn’t come naturally to me. I was - and still am - an inefficient writer. I would dream of projects far beyond the scope of an undergrad honors thesis, and the smaller projects within my scope didn’t motivate me in the same way. I barely finished my thesis on time. Although I stayed on another several more months to try to expand it into a real publication - because after all, publish or perish - the fish kept perishing at inopportune times. It made me want to perish. The editing process became physically painful. My initial dream of unlocking the biological basis for human behavior had been downgraded to unlocking 1 particular gene’s expression in 1 particular fish, at a particular point in its short life.

It is human nature to apply everything around us to our own lives and particular situations. We see human emotions in non-human animals, even inanimate objects. We apply the language of gravity to human attractions. In contemplating the trajectory of my scientific ambitions, I couldn’t help but think of the biogenetic law, the theory of recapitulation, that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”  An antiquated theory which states that in embryological development, the animal goes through stages that resembles various adult stages of the animal’s evolutionary ancestors. Discredited or not, it rang true with me - it felt like my journey recapitulated the journey of the field as a whole.

Science may have started its journey as a quest to find universal truths about the world in which we live, but through its maturation, development, as well as with changes within the larger societal context in which science happens, it became progressively narrower in scope, at least on the individual scale of pursuit. Aristotle contributed to classical mechanics as much as he did to zoology. Freud dreamt of understanding the entire human subjective experience. Seymour Benzer sought to find the genetic basis for behavior. My professors - as accomplished and as brilliant as they were - had carved out niches which seemed incredibly narrow compared to the historical giants.

Was this an inevitability? That as human knowledge accrues, there is only so much that you can expect to know, and to specialize in? That narrowing the scope of your dreams is just an essential part of growing up? Or was this the product of a larger societal force - the same neoliberal drive towards hyperspecialization, competition, and production pressures plaguing all of society?

I didn’t contemplate this very deeply at the time. If the choice was to publish or perish, I perished. The end.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy - Newtown, CT (2020)

A year later, I was on the interview trail for medical school. Most questions about my research usually ended up becoming pleasant conversations about the interviewer’s fish related hobbies (I had no such hobbies outside of the lab). The one notable exception was an interviewer who asked me in a suspicious tone why I had done that research.

“Because all knowledge is valuable, and I found it interesting?”

She replied disapprovingly, “You will never get a grant this way.”

I was furious in the moment, but she was right. I never did get a grant that way. I did get into a medical school, though, where I found myself still drawn to the mysteries of human behavior, briefly contemplated a PhD in neuroscience, and ended up being a regular ol’ psychiatrist, MD sans PhD.

Regardless of my childhood ideals, science and academia could not be the refuge I sought from neoliberal capitalism. Having a modern scientific career is as much about “strategic action” and elevator pitches and branding as any other career in capitalism. There is little room for imagination and wonder if it doesn’t get you a grant, a publication, or at least an additional line on your CV.  Not that medicine is a refuge from capitalism, but at least I don’t have to publish if I don’t want to.

With all of the extra time indoors (and with encouragement of a few close friends, who are also admirable readers and writers), I have been reading a great deal this year, and sporadically, inefficiently, writing. These have been the few positives during the pandemic.

As I read again, I find myself equally enthralled by the accounts of field work of anthropologists, biologists, geologists, physicists, just as when I was 12. 

I wonder, in a different world, if I, too, could have been a behavioral geneticist.

WHY UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS ARE JUST AS UNLIKELY AS EVER, UNFORTUNATELY

I'm a leftist (Libertarian-Socialist), who votes progressive, because I live under an "elected" government, and I had thought I had purged the MSNBC/CNN Nation from my friends list, but apparently not, as my timeline is just chock-full of media-driven hysteria over current events, so here's a primer:

"Liberals" who think their arguments are clever or relevant to the Second Amendment are exhausting.

They are not the left; they are just one half of the good cop/bad cop act of the corporate owned fire-hose of bullshit that is the corporate media, and corporate America's governing criminal cartel/duopoly.

Both cults "I like simple and ineffectual 'solutions', because they make me feel like I'm doing something, and I'm just stinky with fear."

There are over a hundred million legal gun owners, who some want to punish for somebody else's crime.

Well, there are some things to consider.

We've been a heavily armed country since 1621, and yet the epidemic of daily mass-shootings didn't begin until 20 April 1999 (Columbine), at a time when gun ownership was at an all-time low, and five years after Clinton's assault-weapons ban, so maybe guns aren't the variable.

Maybe, just maybe, dead school-children are the price of the neoliberalism practiced under the "Washington Consensus" of BOTH right-wing authoritarian parties since the 1980's? When your country offers you no prospects, and you become terrified of the future, what then? Fear can make unstable people do desperate things. Add to that a culture of celebrity, and what could possibly go wrong?

Another factor that goes completely unexamined, is the way Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill emptied our state hospitals onto our streets, and onto families ill-equipped to deal with the sometimes violent mentally ill.

Thank God, the "solution" is so simple…

Also, 84% of NRA members support universal background checks. The problem is, every time a bill comes up for a vote, Democrats add poison pill amendments guaranteeing defeat in the legislature (and the courts), and then they proceed to tell the TV cameras that "once again the GOP and the gun lobby have voted down background checks and defied the will of the people", or some such nonsense.

If you want to watch Dems sabotage universal background checks (while Republicans roll their eyes and face-palm) in real time, go here:

P.S. You can probably guess which one of these three groups I belong to (Hint: It's the one that's growing and actually decides elections):

LaborPartyNow!!!

P S The line, "You don't need 30 rounds to shoot a deer!" is not clever.

The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting tools, toys for hobbyists (target shooting), or even weapons for self-defense.

It's about ARMS!!!

It's about the individual citizen's right to arms, so they'll be prepared to join a militia, not the other way around. ‘Well regulated’ at that time, simply meant, ‘efficient.’ In other words, in order for a muster to be efficient, civilians needed to be already armed.

So the "collective rights" argument has a couple of problems that make it quite unhinged from history and reality.

1) As I've mentioned above, Americans have always been relatively heavily armed. How did that happen in a collective rights paradigm?

2) Contrary to what you were probably taught in school, by the time of the Confederate artillery barrage on Fort Sumter, the war over slavery had already been going on for over six years, and was fought entirely by independent volunteer militia's. Fort Sumter was just the beginning of official involvement by government troops. How did that happen in a collective rights paradigm?

3) In what universe do government forces need to have their right to arms protected?

4) Since when do National Guard members keep National Guard arms (Hint: they're kept at the armory, and have been since colonial times)?

5) Obviously, "Liberals" are stupid.

Again: #LaborPartyNow!!!

P P S That was ENTIRELY the point of the first fruits of dissent, the 10 Amendments we've come to call the BILL OF RIGHTS (which have become a beacon to aspiring democrats all over the world), to protect INDIVIDUALS from the government they had just created. #TrueStory

Aw jeez, there’s the second Homestuck 2 update of the month. Now I gotta liveblog it, which is going to take-

Uh, not very much time at all, apparently? It’s only one page, vs the other update’s 25, so either this is a hell of a page or the 2,000 patrons who contributed to have “two updates a month” are gonna be super mad.

Oh it’s a big tall infinite canvas page. Neat! Rose is bored of the last update and is wandering off. Was she not creating a species of her own, then, or is she done with that? 

The dissonant hum of struggling mechanics fills Terezi's ears as she sits, cross-legged, on the floor of the now-ruined engine room. She likes it here. The soft whitenoise ringing of the extensive ventilation network sounds, if she closes her nose just right, like the rustle of wind through the leaves of a treehive universes away.

An entire fucking alien planet to explore and Terezi goes back to the ship she’s been stuck on for three years. Admittedly Deltritus is apparently less interesting than the game worlds, but come on! These kids need to go outside! 

ROSE: And resurrecting my meat puppet would not only be difficult to the point of being worthless, it would also be extremely lame. ROSE: Not that it would be out of character for this story. We live and breathe on the stupefyingly mind-numbing, and the mind-numbingly stupid. ROSE: But then we begin to veer toward dissolution, yet again. TEREZI: 1F WH4T YOU'R3 S4Y1NG 1S TRU3 TEREZI: 1F 4 STORY H4S TO B3 COMP3LL1NG TO B3 C4NON TEREZI: DO YOU R34LLY TH1NK D1RK 1S TH3 TYP3 TO T3LL 4 COMP3LL1NG STORY TEREZI: H1S T4ST3 1N 4N1M3 4LON3 1S CONC3RN1NG

ROSE: It didn't happen because it didn't happen. TEREZI: 1F 1 H4V3 TO H34R ON3 MOR3 T4UTOLOGY FROM 31TH3R OF YOU 1 4M GO1NG TO MOV3 TO TH3 WOODS 4ND PL4GU3 YOUR N3W SOC13TY 4S 4 H3RM1T BOG MONST3R FOR3V3R ROSE: See, that's more the spirit. ROSE: Become as myth, Terezi Pyrope, the troll under the bridge you were always meant to be.

Is this racist, in-universe? 

TEREZI: WH4T'S TH3 PO1NT 1N CONT1NU1NG TH1S STORY 1F TH4T W4S M34N1NGL3SS TEREZI: 1F LORD 3NGL1SH W4S JUST HOLD1NG UP TH3 WORLD TEREZI: 1F 1T T4K3S 4CT1NG L1K3 H1M TO K33P 1T 4L1V3 TEREZI: WOULDN'T 1T B3 B3TT3R TO JUST L3T 1T D13

I’m kind of about this meta horseshit, if we’re being entirely honest, and if someone calls attention to the question of where in the fuck 13-year-old-from-2009 Dave Strider picked up the term “Neoliberal”, I’ll forgive this comic a lot of its flaws.

At the same time, there’s only so long I can read a comic about whether or not I should be reading a comic. 

Rosebot looks over at the plinth where her body sits, kept alive, sure, but atrophied and weak, dependent on this machine to continue projecting consciousness to the abiotic enclosure keeping the realization of the Ultimate Self from tearing her apart.

I suspect that Rose’s comatose body is a metaphor for Homestuck as a whole, here.

Wouldn't it be better to just let it die? Terezi isn't asking new questions. Rose had first threatened suicide when she was eight. (She couldn't bear the thought of attending the funeral her mother was organizing for her beloved cat, Jaspers.) When she was ten, she put on her coat and stood in whipping winter winds on the balcony overlooking a frozen waterfall, imagining the plunge with a blank expression on her face, eyes stinging from the New York cold. (Her mother had drunk herself to sleep with the vacuum on, again, the mechanical wailing inside playing a chord with the gale outside, inescapable.) But her first – and only – real attempt was a success.

Jesus, what a fucking callback.

Also, if you’re not as versed in the DEEPEST LORE as I am, Rose’s successful first attempt to commit suicide is not actually a reference to her being put into a robot body, it’s a reference to the suicide mission from Cascade that created the Green Sun and caused her (and Dave) to ascend to godhood. Suicide in one form or the other tends to follow the Strider-Lalonde family, as Dirk killed himself in Homestuck, and the Candy Dirk killed himself in the epilogues as well. Roxy being the odd man out there. Rose’s first suicide created canon. Her second one could end it. 

That was a step too far. Tensions that once simmered under the surface have found the catalyst for a boil. Terezi and Rosebot's repartee of words is replaced by the dissonant notes of clanging and smashing as they roll around on the floor of the crashed Theseus's central chambers, throwing punches and smashing into control panels in a crescendo of chaos.

I’m having some difficulty accepting that Terezi is able to successfully fight an angry robot. Vriska certainly couldn’t.

Dirk’s irritated reference to the Bechdel Test irritates me, now, given that he’s supposed to be a stand-in from people who thought Homestuck went off the rails in Act 6. It’s kind of an obvious bitter shot at the fanbase. 

Also, and I get that he’s the bad guy and it’s supposed to be hypocritical, but Dirk Strider spent the entirety of Homestuck 1 whining about his feelings and didn’t really contribute to the “plot” in much of a meaningful way.

And...wow, yeah. That’s the whole update. It’s significantly shorter than all of the others, and the last update was also a bit shorter than the previous chapters. This is also the first chapter to directly follow from the previous one, and it sure looks like they did “two updates” this month by chopping off a chunk of a normal update and calling it it’s own thing. But they did have the big tall panel, at least, so that’s something. This is also the first double-update month, let’s be fair, so maybe we can call it a mulligan because they had short notice that they’d need two updates in February.  

[Video] Chile: Protester evades 5 riot police bikers chasing him down (Never give up!) [Video recorded in Temuco, Chile, 7 November 2019] Not Falling for It: How the Uprising in #Chile Has Outlasted State Repression And the Questions for Movements to Come  As of today—Friday, November 8, 2019—the government of Chile has spent three full weeks switching back and forth between strategies of brutality, division, and deceit without yet succeeding in stemming the tide of resistance. The events of these weeks offer a useful primer in strategies of state repression and how to outmaneuver, outsmart, and outlast them. On October 6, the Chilean government headed by rapacious billionaire Sebastián Piñera announced a new austerity package that would further impoverish struggling Chileans. Unfortunately for the authorities, it was an inopportune moment to squeeze an already restless population. The next day, in Ecuador, thousands of indigenous people arrived in the capital city to protest an austerity package, occupying the Parliament building and clashing with police forces. On October 14, the Ecuadorian government backed down, repealing the austerity bill.That same day, students swung into action in Chile, organizing a series of mass fare-dodging protests against the hike in public transit costs. These culminated on October 18 in clashes, vandalism, and arsons that damaged 16 buses and 78 metro stations, as well as various banks and several other major buildings, including the headquarters of the Italian energy company Enel. In retaliation, Piñera announced a state of emergency and curfew, hoping to bludgeon the population back into submission. Conspiracy theories have circulated about the arsons. This always happens when ordinary people manage to get the better of the authorities, shocking those who take it for granted that the state is the only protagonist of history. Conspiracy theories about how the government arranged for the destruction of its own public transit infrastructure are disempowering and irrational; they also obscure what was strategic about the arsons. Whether by smashing the turnstiles or burning entire stations, it was precisely by making business as usual impossible that demonstrators made the desperate circumstances of their daily lives a problem for their rulers. Without the vandalism and looting, the movement would never have become the force that it is. The next day, October 19, Piñera suspended the metro price increase. The speed with which he did this shows that he knew he had pushed people too far. If he could have waited to suspend the fare increase, he might have been able to announce it later, in order to give demonstrators a feeling of accomplishment and get them out of the streets; instead, having already pushed his luck, he had to suspend it immediately in hopes of discharging popular resentment before the crisis deepened. It didn’t work. For a government, the goal of making concessions is only to trick enough people into leaving the streets that it will be possible to isolate and defeat those who remain. On October 20, Piñera expanded the state of emergency to most of the country, announcing from the headquarters of the army that his government was “at war against a powerful and implacable enemy.” This gesture, and above all the place from which he spoke, was a not-so-coded declaration that he intended to return Chile to the murderous state violence of the Pinochet dictatorship. Yet once again, the people in the streets did not back down. They continued to demonstrate, even as the military injured and killed people, and they refused to permit the authorities to sow divisions, sticking together with the same cohesion that has given the movement in Hong Kong its long life. This is why, on October 23, Piñera was forced to announce the suspension of the whole austerity package and the introduction of some minor reforms—what Chileans have been calling “table scraps.” Again, Chileans knew better than to settle for this. That same day, Chile’s trade unions declared a general strike. On October 25, the largest demonstration in Chilean history took place, bringing 1.2 million people into the streets of Santiago to show that they supported this movement that had originated in massive public criminal activity and continued in defiance of the express orders of the government. This was a massive defeat for Piñera—it showed that he could neither resolve the situation by brute force nor by petty bribery. This is why, on October 26, he promised to lift the State of Emergency and to swap out some of the ministers in his government—though not to relinquish power himself. He also changed his rhetoric, congratulating Chileans on a “peaceful” demonstration and suggesting a distinction between law-abiding families and criminal hooligans. Let’s review: when Piñera couldn’t suppress the movement by police violence, he played for time by suspending the fare increase—while declaring martial law and mobilizing the army. When didn’t work, he shifted to a new strategy of divide and conquer, flattering the majority of Chileans by suggesting that their concerns were legitimate while demonizing the brave demonstrators who launched the movement. Now that things seem to have plateaued—not to say calmed down—Piñera is trying, yet again, to return to his original strategy of brute force. On November 7, he introduced an array of bills to increase the penalties for militant protest tactics including self-defense against police and concealing one’s identity against state surveillance. Congratulate the movement on its victories, but crack down on the means by which it won them. Over 7000 people have been arrested and many thousands injured; despite their obvious loyalty to the uniformed mercenaries of the state, prosecutors admit to over 800 allegations of police abuse, torture, rape, and battery. Piñera has expressed his “total support” for the conduct of the police and military throughout this sequence of events, but he is saying that all this brutality is not enough—in addition to arresting, beating, shooting, and killing people, he wants the police and military to be able to imprison additional massive numbers of people for long periods of time. Make no mistake, the movement in Chile would not have gotten off the ground if not for the students organizing mass illegal activity. It would not have spread countrywide if not for the vandalism, arson, and acts of self-defense against police attacks. It would not have created a crisis that demanded a response if not for looting and disruption. To make a distinction between the “law-abiding” participants and the “criminals” in the movement is to say that it would be better if the movement had never taken place—it is an attempt to ensure that no such movement will ever take place again.We have seen this many times before. The movement against police and white supremacy that burst into the public consciousness with the riots in Ferguson only got off the ground because the original participants openly attacked police officers, burned down buildings, and refused to divide into “violent” and “nonviolent” factions. Democracy itself, the system via which Chile, the United States, and so many other nations are governed, began in blazing crime; if not for criminal revolutionaries, we would still be living under the heel of hereditary monarchs. Once again, the movement in Chile faces a crucial juncture. If the majority of the participants accept Piñera’s flattery and congratulate themselves on being “peaceful” and “honest” in contrast to those who are “criminals,” this will enable him to push through draconian measures to ensure that it will never be possible for Chileans to defend themselves against austerity measures again. On the contrary, what is needed is for the tactics of the “criminals” to spread to every honest citizen, to every person who sincerely wants peace. Neither Piñera nor anyone else who aims to rule by force will ever create peace; it can only arise when their totalitarian aspirations are thwarted. To understand what Piñera wants, we need only look at what has happened in Egypt. Since regaining control of the country with the military coup in 2013 and introducing new measures like the ones Piñera is proposing, military strongman al-Sisi has [crushed protests] of all kinds. He now aspires to rule until at least the year 2034. Those who make only half a revolution dig their own graves, as the saying goes. So the stakes are high. Demonstrators in Chile must permanently delegitimize the instruments of state power such as the police, the courts, and the army, making it impossible for them to maintain order by any combination of brutality, concessions, and prosecution. This is the only way out of the nightmare of neoliberal austerity. This is how movements win against oppressive governments: by a winning combination of confrontational direction action, solidarity across different demographics and tactics, persistence, and strategic innovation. The movement in Chile has demonstrated this already. (Text published by CrimethInc) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VRQ2A_vCag