Alex Has Opinions 7/1/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/1/21

Yes, You Are Afraid of Queer People

Tearing apart the myth that you can’t be queerphobic because you “are not afraid”

There is a common refrain heard by bigots whenever the word transphobia or homophobia is brought up. I can’t possibly be that, they argue, because I am not afraid of them; I just disapprove of their lifestyle. These men, and a few women, but mostly men, will spend hours trying to logic their way out of this position, writing articles and op-eds devoted to the Sisyphean task of trying to convince everyone the opposite of what we all know to be true — that they are afraid.

They wouldn’t be spending years of their lives tying themselves into logical knots about the etymological root of a word if queer people did not absolutely terrify them. A person’s alleged distaste of queer people can indeed be centered around fear, and the fact that a queerphobic person does not understand this fact makes them very dangerous to all the queer people around them.

Those ignorant of their fear are the most dangerous of all.

The crux of the “I can’t be afraid” argument relies on a juvenile understanding of how fear works. These people are basically operating under the delusion that fear is all about shivering in a corner as though you’ve just seen a horror movie monster, but people have all different reactions to a perceived threat: some people freeze; others do indeed flee; a sizeable portion, though, they fight. They redirect all their rage and anger onto the source of their discomfort, which in the case of queerphobic people, can lead to very horrible outcomes for their targets.

Many members of the LGBTQIA+ community have experienced a lot of discrimination over the course of their lives. A 2020 Survey by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that LGBT people are almost four times more likely than non-LGBT people to be victims of violent crime. Anti-LGBT attacks have been increasing at alarming levels both in the US and abroad.

It would be impossible to know all the reasons for these attacks, but in my initial research, the theme of fear did come up a lot. It might seem strange to suggest that queer people — a group that is historically less financially secure and powerful than the general population — somehow make others afraid, but this fear is far more symbolic than it’s tangible. Bigots are not rationally afraid of queer people (because there is no reason to be), but they do have many irrational ones.

A trend that I have observed is that queer people often bring a perceived threat to a bigoted individual's masculinity. Gay men and women are the frequent targets of attacks by people who love them because the knowledge of that relationship is threatened to be exposed. In one example, a man in Brockton, Massachusetts, was believed to be involved in the shooting of someone he slept with because he was afraid that the victim would reveal his sexuality to both his family and his employer. The man in question was not public about his identity, and the relationship in question went against the rules of his work. He is believed to have tricked his lover and friend into meeting at a certain location in the dead of night so that they could have him killed.

Likewise, transgender people are often falsely accused of “trapping” straight men into relationships by concealing their transness. These accusations can get quite violent, with many men killing trans people for this alleged “deception.” Many of these encounters do not come from one-night stands but longstanding relationships. For example, the first person charged with a federal hate crime against a transgender person killed his former girlfriend after a friend discovered that she was transgender. The perpetrator was a member of a criminal gang and feared reprisals, so he lured his former girlfriend into a car under false pretenses and stabbed her, ending her life with the swing of a hammer.

It should be emphasized that these encounters are numerous. Every year comes with it multiple headlines of someone killing a person they love or loved because of the fear that others will learn the truth of their queer identity. These relationships were not an issue when they were secret. These men knew their partner's gender and sexual orientations. The person was afraid of the judgment of others, and they resorted to violent means to preserve their fragile masculinity.

This fear exists even when the relationship is nonexistent. In 2016, one man described punching a trans woman to death after she flirted with him as a way for him to preserve his sense of pride. He told police: “I don’t go around gay-bashing people. I don’t care about what they do, I just don’t wanna be fooled. My pride is at stake.” He initially pleaded not guilty, relying on a sort of “trans panic” defense or the idea that the woman’s advances were enough to justify his violent response.

It might seem strange to some that the sight of a queer person would spark this response, but such reactions have historically been quite common. Our recent past is filled with fragile men and women attacking queer individuals for much less. We saw this especially when queer people made sexual or romantic overtures to individuals, often referred to in the press as “indecent advances,” which were then seen as justification enough for the recipient to respond violently. Many people died (and continue to die) because the law would often not take these assaults as seriously as they would of ones committed against heterosexual individuals. As Caleb Crain wrote in The New Yorker:

“Even when an intimate attack ended in death, the law was sometimes lenient with a gay man’s killer. A judge might spare a victim’s family the “embarrassment” of a full-dress trial, for example. And, time and again, killers won lighter sentences by claiming to have been surprised by what newspapers euphemistically described as “indecent advances” or “improper proposals” from the deceased.”

Another way I see fear factoring into violence against queer people is when the person has imagined queerness to be a larger-than-life threat that must be dealt with immediately. For example, two Floridians attacked a gay couple visiting Wisteria Island back in 2018. The sight of the couple being unapologetically queer in speedos was enough to send these Floridians into a homicidal rage. “Hey, Mr. Speedo f@ggot, get the f@ck off our island,” one of the Floridians shouted. “You have five seconds to get off, or I will kill you.” The couple had to fend off knife stabs with an inflatable dingy, paddling to safety until the coast guard eventually rescued them.

This is also a type of gay panic, but rather than being “offended” by a romantic or sexual overture, it is the mere presence of overt queerness that has prompted such a response. They are reacting to the perceived threat of difference and trying to purge their space of it. This type of panic is constant. Many bigots are actively consumed by the “impending threat” of what they perceive to be a battle with a clear-cut enemy.

We see this fear in the very creation of our laws. When conservatives pass bigoted legislation, one type of justification commonly used is to protect society, particularly children, from the looming threat of queerness. Conservative lawmakers, for example, have framed recent anti-trans legislation (e.g.. laws that ban the use of gender-confirming healthcare like puberty blockers, ban trans people from participating in their preferred sports team, etc.) as protecting children, even if it is to protect those children from their own identities. “…every child deserves a natural childhood,” Montana Rep. John Fuller told the Montana Free Press in January of 2021 on why he supported such bigoted legislation. “…one that allows them to experience puberty and other normal changes that shape who they will become.”

More comprehensive analyses than this one have been made that debunk why this pearl-clutching over trans health care is wrong. Puberty blockers are not particularly harmful, and most of their symptoms are reversible, but the science is not really the point. It’s a justification to mask their fear of change. “the pushback,” Fuller said earlier that month, “…will come from people who have an agenda…and a vested interest to put forward the destruction of what I would call, traditional and classical and moral treatment of young people.” It’s about the fear of changing institutions men like Fuller care about that actually drives all of this legal bigotry. Things are changing, and they don’t like it.

We saw similar sentiments with the battle over same-sex marriage. People would talk about needing to preserve the “institution of marriage” when really many of them seemed to be projecting their own fear of change onto strangers. In fact, an interesting study came out nearly half a decade ago now in 2016 that proposed that fear of sexual promiscuity, which many people believed gay men and women to be at the time, correlated with opposition to same-sex marriage. The lead author of the study says: “Many people who oppose same-sex marriage are uncomfortable with casual sex and feel threatened by sexual promiscuity…Sexual promiscuity may be threatening to these people because it provides more temptations for spouses to cheat on one another.”

Those who push for regressive policy or actions against queer people may shroud their intentions in many different things — protecting children, preserving the natural order, temporary bouts of insanity — but at the end of the day, they are very obviously afraid.

People continue to have a deep misunderstanding of fear, and that includes even other queer people. This problem is highlighted in a small scene in the web series The Outs where one of the characters is opining on the meaning of the word homophobia. “You know what, homophobia gets a bad rap,” they say dramatically, “but what it means is people being afraid of homos. And I know I’d feel a lot safer walking home alone at night in Charlotte, North Carolina, if more people were afraid of me.”

As we have just covered, though, this understanding of fear is rudimentary at best. While we will never know all the reasons that push people to commit violence towards queer people, it would be foolish to dismiss fear entirely. Fear is a powerful motivator that pushes people to do horrible things. The fear of judgment can cause insecure people to hurt and kill those they love, and the fear of change can cause people to distort the laws of society to exclude the most vulnerable.

To those insisting they are not homophobic, transphobic, or queerphobic because they are not afraid: yes, you are, and your fear is deadly.

Alex Has Opinions 6/27/21 Alex Has Opinions 6/27/21

Pop Culture Seems To Think Polyamory Is Just About Sex

The Politician, Schitt’s Creek, House of Cards, & other poly couples in our media.

If I were to guess what polyamory was, based on pop culture, it would be the image of lean, attractive people having non-stop orgies. I see examples of this trope in works like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, where Scott’s roommate Wallis Wells (Kieran Culkin) is in a loosely defined relationship with two other men, or Sense8, where the act of connection is often depicted as big joyous screw-fests.

Many cultural works hit on this note of polyamory being linked almost exclusively with sexuality. While there is nothing wrong with this in-of-itself, as a trend, it speaks to the exoticism that goes on when describing polyamory in pop culture. For far too many people, polyamory is a kooky type of relationship. As a result, most polyamory in media is not only otherized, but is portrayed in a way that goes against how these relationships actually work in the real world.

There is more to polyamory than just sex — a lot more, in fact — and honing in on those distinctions could better serve all people in relationships, not just polyamorous ones.

Polyamory, for those unaware, is the practice of someone engaging in multiple consensual, romantic relationships at the same time. These relationships do not have to be sexual (in fact, many of them are not), but you wouldn't know that from how polyamory is portrayed in media.

Polyamory is overwhelmingly brought up in a sexual context in pop culture. I briefly gave the example of Scott Pilgrim vs.The World, where roommate Wallace Wells has two partners, who we mostly see in a comically oversized bed the main protagonist also sleeps in. We could also talk about the minor character Jake (Steve Lund) in Schitt’s Creek (2015–2020), a very sex-positive person with whom characters David (Dan Levy) and Stevie (Emily Hampshire) both date separately before dropping him because they don’t want to be in a threeway relationship. Jake empathetically realizes that he has made a mistake and decides to take a step back from the two of them — the episode’s shenanigans over.

Many modern-day representations of polyamorous people in media fall within the “ethical slut” trope or a person who is moral or benevolent regarding matters of romance and sexuality. These are people who are typically guided by the concept of effective consent in their escapades and usually have a strong sense of empathy (see Blanche in The Golden Girls (1985–1992), Jack Harkness in Doctor Who (1963–present), Rizzo in Grease (1978), Jake from Schitt’s Creek, etc.). There is nothing wrong with portraying sexually empowered people this way (I personally like Jake as a character), but because polyamory is often framed as exciting and strange, these portrayals can sometimes come from a place of exoticism. As a result, polyamorous characters make their way into many scripts for wacky hijinks or, for the chance for the viewer to gawk at something bizarre first, and to be well-developed characters second.

As an example, take the Netflix show The Politician (2019–present). A main subplot in the second season is that antagonist Dede Standish (Judith Light) is in a polyamorous relationship with her husband, Marcus Standish (Joe Morton), and their partner William Ward (Teddy Sears). There are many confessions of love between these three characters, but we don’t see much work on their actual relationship. We instead watch it implode over and over again, as characters who have allegedly had a stable relationship for years come apart at the seams. “I thought I was happy,” says partner William Ward as he finds himself cheating on the couple with Dede’s Campaign Manager Hadassah Gold (Bette Midler). “I’m so special to both of them, but I didn’t realize until I was out of there and with someone without dual loyalty, someone who gave all the attention to me, just how lonely I was.”

This framing of loyalty — the idea that one person can give you all of their attention — is not only unrealistic, but it’s also not how polyamorous people typically view time and attention. No one can reasonably give you all of their time. Your time is naturally split between your coworkers, friends, family members, and so much more.

Ward being oblivious of this fact doesn't make this portrayal malicious, but he is clearly being written for a monogamist audience, consequently making the entire relationship quite voyeuristic. It’s all about gawking at the drama of the polyamorous relationship, particularly the sexual nature of it, and then writing a rather stereotypical love triangle that you would see in a storyline with a monogamous relationship. “They always say that’s the problem with a threesome. Someone always ends up in tears,” the main character Payton Hobart (Ben Platt) says of threesomes after a single bad experience — a statement that says more about the people who wrote it than anything meaningful about threesomes or polyamory.

Source: Literally the current Netflix thumbnail as of writing this article.

Exoticism and polyamory come hand-in-hand with many portrayals. The HBO show Big Love (2006–2011) was all about the viewer being led into the secret and scandalous world of Morman “polygamy” (i.e., the act of marrying more than one person) through the lens of the suburban Henrickson family (see also Sister Wives, Escaping Polygamy, My Five Wives, etc.). The fun was learning about how this strange world operated between the cracks of mainstream society, a setup that would have seemed even stranger in 2006 when sexual norms were far more conservative than today. “Before the show made its premiere,” begins Mary Carole McCauley in the Baltimore Sun, “it was tempting to think: Throw ’em all in jail, even the kids. But then we saw the first episode. And the second. And the third. Despite our most cherished notions of what constitutes a family, we found ourselves rooting for the Henricksons to remain intact.”

We see a similar amount of exoticism in science fiction, where polyamory, especially its more sexual components, are shown as the defining traits of an alien species. For example, the franchise Star Trek has half a dozen species where polygamy is practiced. As revealed in Enterprise (2001–2005), a typical male Denobulan has three wives, who each have three husbands. This created a situation with very large families. It is implied that the entire Denobulan species is one big marriage (see also the Bolians, the Rakhari, the Skrreea, Taresians, and the Ligonians). Polyamory, although practiced by some humans on the show, is mainly seen as a niche activity largely reserved for strange aliens.

As we can observe, polyamory has frequently been used as a shorthand for otherness, and over the years, not all of these portrayals have been particularly kind. Since polyamory is a non-normative type of relationship, it has historically been demonized in media. For years the go-to image people had of polyamory was fringe groups like the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) in places like Arizona, Utah, and Canada — groups long associated with child brides and statutory rape. The public knew about these people through raids, like the one that famously backfired in Short Creek, Arizona in 1953, and later, a more successful one in Schleicher County, Texas, in 2008. This association is the reason why HBO created a polygamous show based on FLDS renegades and not say queer Chicaogans writing comic books. For years, the American publics' primary association when it comes to polygamy, and by extension polyamory, has been weird sex cults.

Additionally, many polyamorous people are queer in pop culture and fall within the “depraved bisexual” trope. These are people whose bisexuality, and by extension, their polyamory, is a facet of their general apathy and moral degeneracy. The quintessential example is Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn — two characters who are canonically both bisexual and polyamorous. These DC comic villains are well-loved in the comic book community, but they are also kind of awful. Poison Ivy, for example, whose power allows her to charm others, has perpetuated numerous sexual assaults against characters ranging from Superman to minor side characters like unnamed police officers.

It’s not that there can never be bisexual villains (see Villanelle in Killing Eve as a great example of this done right) or even bisexual polyamorous villains (see Clarice Willow in Caprica), but when you make that polyamory a component of their villainousness, then you are leaning on moral sensationalism that is inherently problematic. The same goes for polyamorous characters who are dramatic or have their relationships fall apart. We should reflect on these relationship dynamics in media, but that work involves telling stories focused on real characters, not exaggerated stereotypes clearly coming from a monogamist lens.

Polyamory is already a poorly understood identity, and many shows seem more interested in shocking viewers with exaggerated exploits than telling an honest conception of what polyamory even is — which, to clarify, isn’t about constant sex.

No, polyamory is mainly talking.

Something obvious I want to stress about polyamory is that it involves more than two people, and these relationships have many of the same ups and downs of any monogamous relationship. Relationships are hard. Monogamous couples spend a lot of time on communication. Therapy, which includes couples counseling as a large portion of it, would not be a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States if relationships did not take work.

Polyamory takes that dynamic — one that monogamous people admit is difficult — and adds at least one other person. And so you take that hectic dynamic and multiple it by at least two: two times as many conversations, two times as many disagreements, two times as many arguments. There is a joke in polyamorous circles that it’s for people with a talking fetish because you spend so much of your time on communication.

Occasionally a piece of media will hit this point just right. The Netflix show House of Cards (2013–2018), for example, had a lot of problematic elements to it, but something I was generally impressed by was how they treated the polyamorous nature of the characters' Frank (Kevin Spacey) and Claire (Robin Wright) Underwood’s relationship. The two of them shared sexual partners and occasionally had separate romantic ones. There was even a moment in season four where Frank encouraged Claire to see another partner, saying:

“He should stay on, because he can give you things that I can’t. Look, Claire, we’ve been a great team. But one person — one person cannot give everything to another person. I can’t travel with you. I don’t keep you warm at night. I don’t see you the way he sees you. It’s not my permission to give, but you’ll do what’s right for you. But I want you to know, if you wanted, I know you’ll be careful. And I’ll be fine. I mean, if we’re gonna go beyond marriage, let’s go beyond it.”

Again, Frank is abusive in many areas of his life, but not here.

We could also look to the show BoJack Horseman (2014–2020) for an example of positive polyamorous communication. BoJack’s sister, Hollyhock (Aparna Nancherla), was raised by eight gay dads. This premise may have initially been set up as a joke, but it’s clear from the get-go that she was raised in a loving environment. The one conversation we see of all these parents comes in season four, which isn’t centered on sex and sexuality but on communication. Their characterizations may be heightened for comedic effect, yet we clearly see an eight-way couple working towards consensus.

However, this type of communication is rare to see in media, and that’s because most writers are monogamists and most monogamous relationships do not as frequently have these types of conversations about boundaries. In many, though not all, monogamous relationships, a lot of boundaries are assumed. Characters in media (and people in real life) often assume that their partner will be there for them romantically, financially, emotionally, and sexually. As character Noah Calhoun says in The Notebook (2004), a movie often joked about as the most romantic movie ever made: “We’re gonna have to work at this every day, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, you and me, every day.”

The problem is that forever is a lot. Problems naturally arise when unstated expectations turn out not to be true. Not every wife wants to be someone’s therapist. Not every husband wants to co-raise kids with the person that they love. When these problems do arise, they are existential crises in monogamous relationships because that person has to be your everything. For example, a common trope in cinema is that of a former couple having separated, usually, before the movie or show starts, because one of them wanted kids and the other didn’t (see Alex and Maggie in Supergirl, Jan Levinson in The Office, Monica and Richard in Friends, etc.). These couples have to separate because, under the logic of The Notebook-style monogamy, one person has to be your everything.

In healthy polyamory, however, these do not have to be crises at all. In fact, those expectations often need to be hammered out well in advance (and constantly reaffirmed) because you do not have the time or the bandwidth for miscommunication You are juggling two or more relationships, after all. This means that there are various types of relationships in polyamory: some partners will be sexual; others will only be romantic; sometimes people with be both sexual and romantic; occasionally, you will only form emotional or financial relationships with no sex or romance whatsoever.

The combinations are varied, and they are shocking to many monogamous people because they are so used to everything being bundled together as a packaged deal. If you are with someone romantically, doesn’t it have to be sexually as well? Won’t you get jealous about your partner being f@cked by someone else?

I remember a friend, let’s call him Sam, telling me a story about a date he had with another guy called Jacob. Sam is in a polyamorous relationship with a man named Timothy, and Jacob, his date for the evening, couldn’t comprehend the concept of polyamory. “Isn’t your partner going to be jealous?” Jacob asked over and over again. So finally, Sam had to explain to Jacob that not only was his partner Timothy “okay with it,” but he knew about the date, and the two of them would probably gossip about this conversation later.

However, Jacob could not get over this arrangement. “If you were mine,” he said jealously, “I do not think I would let you go.”

There is a possessiveness in how many monogamous relationships are framed that remains largely unexamined. This idea that you “belong to someone” is deeply unhealthy and one that a lot of self-identified polyamorous couples actively reject. Again, you don’t belong to anyone, and many problems arise when this perspective is not examined.

Yet this concept seeps through media that allegedly seeks to represent polyamorous people, which is why you get shows like The Politician, where a polyamorous person frames his relationship through ideas of loyalty and exclusion. It is media that tackles polyamory through the lens of possession — a hallmark of many monogamist relationships.

There is so much more to polyamory than just sex. There are the conversations well into the early morning, parties with only people you have slept with, late nights cuddle fests, trips surrounded by people you know so very well, meticulously detailed parenting sessions, the occasional three-way, and of course, some polyamorous people don’t have sex at all (shout out to my aces!) Relationship dynamics are varied, and that’s part of what makes life beautiful.

We need more representation that not only focuses on communication and boundaries in our media, but a diversity of relationship structures. I want stories about three dads raising a child; an amicably married couple running a family’s finances together but seeking romance and sex elsewhere; a polycule building a compound in the middle of the woods. The sky is the limit with the stories left to tell!

Let’s stop objectifying polyamory in our stories and start portraying it as just another type of relationship. I think that many monogamous couples would benefit from the communication and boundary techniques that polyamorous couples have to employ as a standard act of survival.

Because healthy communication transcends labels.

Alex Has Opinions 6/24/21 Alex Has Opinions 6/24/21

Heterosexuality Isn’t Natural

Looking at the “queerness isn’t natural” debate with new eyes

It’s something said over and over again by conservative pundits. “Why Homosexuality is Abnormal?” goes the title of Michael Levin’s infamous article, which was published in 1984 inside the well-known philosophy Journal The Monist. “This paper defends the view that homosexuality is abnormal and hence undesirable — not because it is immoral or sinful, or because it weakens society or hampers evolutionary development, but for a purely mechanical reason.” He then goes on to talk about how the penis just fits into the vagina. “They are just made for each other,” he writes, purely academically, of course.

For centuries, whether using science or religion, people have used the philosophy of the time to justify their disgust of queerness. This conservative meme, however, is not rooted in biology. We have no evidence indicating that homosexuality is abnormal, and more than that, we have no evidence to indicate that heterosexuality as an identity is natural either.

One of the common arguments LGBTQIA2+ people will use to counteract the claim that queerness is unnatural is to bring up the diversity of sex and gender within the animal kingdom. From mating to parenting, there are documented instances of same-sex behavior in nearly 1,000 species, and many where sex doesn’t happen at all. Animals don’t have sexual orientation in the same way humans do, but claiming that same-sex activity is unnatural is patently false.

Male giraffes, for example, engage in an overwhelming amount of same-sex activity. Herds are mostly segregated by sex, and while in male herds (and sometimes even not within them), male giraffes will often engage in a ritual where they curl their necks around each other and rut — a process called “necking.” As Adam Rutherford writes in Humanimal: How Homo Sapiens Became Nature’s Most Paradoxical Creature — A New Evolutionary History, “… robust conclusions are elusive. But it does appear that the majority of sexual encounters in giraffes involve two males necking, followed by anal sex. Not all necking encounters result in attempted or successful mounting, but in many cases, the necking males spar with erect unsheathed penises.”

That sounds pretty queer to me.

Gender is also very fluid in the Animal Kingdom. Animals like the Banana Slug are entirely hermaphroditic (i.e., they have working gametes associated with both males and females). Many animal species have a minority of individuals in their populations that share a combination of these two organs, though they are not always functional. This gap is partly why the term hermaphrodite is offensive to humans, and the label intersex is used instead. There has never been a documented case of a true human Hermaphrodite (i.e., where they have both working ovaries and gonads). To claim otherwise ties into a painful history beyond the scope of this article.

Additionally, some species experience a process known as sequential hermaphroditism, meaning that they start as one sex and transition to another. Clownfish, for example, live in sea anemones with a group of small males and two mature fish of both sexes. If the female dies or is otherwise removed, the mature male clownfish will shift into her new role as the adult female. The second-largest male will then rapidly grow into his new role as the sexually mature male.

There are also animals such as the Spotted Hyena, whose sexual anatomy goes against what we humans typically perceive as male and female. The Spotted Hyena has a penile clitoris, which is the name of a hypertrophied clitoris in the shape of a phallus. They also have fused-together labia that resemble a ballsack. Female Spotted Hyenas pee and give birth through this penile clitoris, making it difficult to tell males and females apart from genitalia alone. As zoologist Kay E. Holekamp writes in 2011 for The New York Times: “every once in a while, a hyena fools us, and an individual believed to be a male for two or three years one day shows up nursing cubs at the den!”

Usually, this is where the conversation ends. Queer people will claim that the idea of “queerness being unnatural” is false, and we will go about our respected days, obliviously to the fact we can go further in the debate. Straight people are so sure that their lifestyles are correct that we never place them on the defensive. We do not ask if “straightness,” or the idea that our species is naturally inclined to confining itself exclusively to opposite-sex pairings, is the natural way to go?

And I am sorry, the evidence does not support that position.

Let’s return to the animal kingdom again. One of our closest living relatives is the Bonobo. We share 98% of our DNA with them. They are great apes located in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their existence seems to contradict the classic Darwinian meme that nature is a competition or a “survival of the fittest.” Bonobos are a matriarchal society that centers on communication in a lot of what they do. This doesn’t make them free from aggression (especially in captivity where food dynamics are different), but they are less violent than their chimpanzee cousins. As Melissa Hogenboom writes in BBC:

“While chimpanzees tend to be more aggressive and manipulative, bonobos are much more gentle. In fact they are so gentle they often express their affections towards many members of the group with sex, the so-called bonobo handshake.”

Sex is a core facet of how their society operates. It is used to defuse tensions during high-stress events like pre-feeding. Bonobo sex can get quite animated, and like with humans, it often involves same-sex pairings. In the words of Jack Hitt in Lapham’s Quarterly: “All bonobos frequently have homosexual sex — the males being quite fond of hanging upside down, face to face, from a tree and engaging in what the gay community calls frottage (some primatologists call it “penis fencing”; to most teenagers, it’s better known as dry humping.).”

Our other living ancestor is the Chimpanzee, with whom we also share roughly 98% of our DNA. They are admittedly more patriarchal than the Bonobo. Chimpanzees are territorial and violent. As the lead author of a study published in Nature in 2014 wrote: “We found that chimpanzees sometimes kill other chimpanzees, regardless of whether human impacts are high or low, whereas bonobos were not observed to kill, whatever the level of human impacts.” Chimps have been known to guard resources and do not have sex for pleasure as Bonobos do. In fact, outside of the narrow period that female Chimps can conceive, male Chimpanzees do not seem much interested in sex at all.

Even here, however, this Spartan image of Chimpanzee heterosexuality is not as clear-cut. Chimps have been known to engage in same-sex activity. As authors, Brookera, Webb, and Claya write in their paper Fellatio among male sanctuary-living chimpanzees during a period of social tension: “…chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are also known to engage in same-sex sexual behaviour across multiple contexts (Savage-Rumbaugh & Wilkerson, 1978). Pan same-sex sexual behaviours include mounting, genital touching, and rump-rump touching (de Waal, 1988; Goodall, 1989).”

Again, that sounds pretty queer to me. Evolutionary biology is not on the side of heterosexuals. We have two options among our closest living relatives — a queer as f@ck matriarchy and bicurious bros, and neither one of them is particularly straight.

And of course, our understanding of evolutionary biology is only coming into focus now because our society’s own homophobia has severely limited our study of animal sexuality. Not too long ago, people would literally censor their findings of same-sex activity in the Animal Kingdom because it was seen as improper. When, for example, zoologist George Murray Levick researched the world’s largest Adelie penguin colony in Antarctica from 1911 to 1912, he omitted his findings of the penguins “astonishingly” depraved sexual activity. These included having sex with dead females, young penguins, and apparently, equally shocking, other living males. It would take 50 years before this knowledge was rediscovered.

Sometimes this bias does not just lead to direct censorship but structures how we perceive the knowledge we do observe. The scientific community did not embrace findings of the Bonobo for over two decades because it contradicted widespread assumptions about evolutionary biology and human nature — i.e., that we are “killer apes” in the mold of the Chimpanzee. As primatologist Frans de Waal told Jack Hitt: “It was totally ignored. When something doesn’t fit your thinking, the best way to deal with it is to shove it out the window and ignore it, and that’s what the scientific community did for about twenty years.”

It also bears mentioning that humanity is itself very queer. I will not go into too much detail in this article, but historically, you can develop countless examples of people violating the “straight” ideal of sexuality and gender. There have been queer people recorded in every major empire that has a historical record to observe. Queer kings have led nations. Queer writers have written poems and novels that inspire people for generations. Queer icons have been Gods and other vital aspects of mythology. There are so many counterexamples that it's almost like queerness is natural or something.

Polling data also shows us that the overall percentage of the population that identifies as LGBT is growing in many countries. A recent Gallop poll had the number of self-identified LGBT Americans jumped to 5.6% of the overall population and nearly 15.9% for Generation Z (1997–2002). We see a similar generational shift in France, Germany, and many others. This generational gap indicates that social factors may be driving this shift.

As stigmatization of queerness lessens, more of the population is simply doing what feels right, and that should tell you something about humanity in general — heterosexuality is not our natural state.

While heterosexual sex will probably continue indefinitely, heterosexuality as an identity is a social construction that has nothing to do with biology. There is nothing to indicate that our species gravitates to heterosexual sex exclusively as a matter of survival.

The Animal Kingdom is a crazy hodgepodge of various survival mechanisms. Contrary to conservative opinion, you do not need to have heterosexual sex exclusively for an animal species to propagate its line. Giraffe males have way more homosexual sex than they do heterosexual sex, and yet their species has survived for millions of years.

In fact, when we look at our closest living ancestors, the less grounded in “nature,” this conservative argument appears. The Bonobo engages in many different types of sexual activity, and to a much, much, much lesser extent, so does the Chimpanzee. Many animals are like this, including humans.

Heterosexuality as we know it is a social construction that has formed outside the realm of biology. It is a product of society, and like all things in society, it can change.

Alex Has Opinions 6/19/21 Alex Has Opinions 6/19/21

Debating the Morality of Heterosexuality

We need to question heterosexuality as an identity

Photo by Wedding Photography on Unsplash

It’s time someone finally spoke up against the institution of heterosexuality. For far too long, “straight” people have insisted that their lifestyle is “natural” and “right.” They have devoted hundreds of books, shows, speeches, and far too much of our time to the idea that their way is the only way to go, and it's infuriating.

I want to emphasize there is nothing wrong with either hetero or homosexual activity. You, as an individual, should engage in any consensual activity you want to. However, I do want to challenge the belief that heterosexuality as an identity, or the idea that our species is naturally inclined to confine itself exclusively to opposite-sex pairings, is an ingrained aspect of human nature.

As we shall soon see, the opposite is the case. Heterosexuality is a recent invention that goes against how our species organizes itself. There is nothing natural about the heterosexual way of life, and while it’s all well in good if that’s something you “choose to do,” it’s not an ideal we should claim is innate to the human condition.

A frustrating element of the “straightness is natural” discourse is that it’s hard to take seriously if you have an even passing understanding of history. Bigoted men and women will spend hours talking about how opposite-sex attractions are the only ones that matter, but, of course, our recent past is filled with examples of non-straight sexual behavior and gender expression being perceived as normal or accepted.

It’s hard to know where to even begin here with counterexamples because there are so many throughout history. People will often bring up ancient Greece, particularly Athens, to emphasize the oldness of queerness. The Athenian gymnasium was where a lot of the recorded same-sex attraction between aristocratic men went down. Far different than the gymnasium of today, it had its own rituals and rules. Courtship typically happened between older men and “boys” (a term that could vary greatly between those below the age of 18 to those slightly above it, the latter referred to as Striplings or Cadets). The younger boys (i.e., below 18) were more closely guarded, usually by slaves. Most sexual activities came in the way of standing frottage, termed diamerion (meaning “between the thighs”), and typically occurred between older men and striplings or cadets — although sex with younger boys did happen. The power dynamic here should not be romanticized.

Acceptance of same-sex attraction in ancient Greece and even in ancient Athens varied across time and place. Athens would become decidedly less tolerant of the practice in the 4th Century as a more robust slave market challenged the “dignified” culture of the gymnasium. This would not be the end of same-sex courting in Athens, and we would see similar courtship centuries later, in places like the Roman Empire, where Emperors such as Nero took on male lovers. Fun fact, Nero is rumored to have enjoyed being penetrated by his well-endowed husband.

Halfway across the world in Han China (202 BCE — 220 CE), bisexuality was the norm for much of the nobility. According to folklore, Emperor Ai (27-2 BCE) famously found himself waking up from an afternoon nap to see his lover Dong Xian sleeping on his robe. Deeply in love, Ai refused to disturb him. He instead opted to cut the sleeve off his own robe. The tale quickly spread to Ai's court, and to this day, “the passion of the cut sleeve” is a Chinese euphemism for “intimacy” between two men. The majority of Western Han emperors had both male and female companions. According to anthropologist Vincent E. Gil, “[China had] a long history of dynastic homosexuality…with courtly love among rulers and subjects of the same sex being elevated to noble virtues.”

Historical records show us that LGBTQIA2+ people have existed all across Asia. It would not be until Ghengis, or Chinggis Khan (1158-1227 CE) declared sodomy an offense punishable by death in his public code of laws known as the Yasa (probably introduced in 1206 CE, well after the Han dynasty) that the tide started to change. The Yasa is one of the earliest documented instances of a sodomy law (i.e., a law outlawing certain nonprocreative sexual acts). A sad ordeal, to be sure, but it indicates how this was not a common practice for most of human history. It should also be noted that death, particularly through decapitation, was a common punishment for most offenses in the Yasa and should not be seen as an inditement of sodomy in particular. You could receive a similar fate for stealing someone's cattle or hunting certain game from March to October.

As with sexuality, genders outside the male-female binary have also emerged throughout history. We know, for example, that there were more than 150 different pre-colonial Native American tribes that acknowledged third genders within their communities. As Duane Brayboy writes in Indian Country Today: “At the point of contact, all Native American societies acknowledged three to five gender roles: Female, male, Two Spirit female, Two Spirit male and transgendered.”

They go on to write that the term Two-Spirit was adopted from the Ojibwe language during a conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1990. This was done to communicate with the general population, as well as to distinguish from other more harmful terminology. Two-Spirit, therefore, doesn’t necessarily have a direct translation in every tribal language, with each tribe having its own wording. The Navajo have the Nadleehi, meaning “the transformed,” who have both masculine and feminine energy. The Lakota have the Winkté, roughly translating to a man who desires to behave as a woman.

Not all these tribes celebrated these various identities. From the accounts of European colonizers, which should be taken with the heaviest grains of salt you can muster, some may have been conquered warriors forced to wear feminine clothing as a form of humiliation. Yet, gender expression was still much more fluid than in puritanical European society, whose missionaries were horrified by the varied gender expression they saw in the “New World” and considered it a sign of the inhabitant’s “uncivilized nature.”

Obviously, there are so many examples I am leaving out. This topic of “alternative” genders and sexualities is a subject that could not be contained in a single book series, let alone one article. We could talk about Bushman artwork depicting same-sex acts or the queer Kings and Queens of Europe. We could spend ages examining the Bakla in the pre-colonial Philippines and Hijra in South Asia.

There are also all the stories we can never know about because they were not recorded. The history I cited here has been overwhelmingly about male nobility. We cannot know of the passionate trysts between poor queer people during most of history, especially poor queer women, because they didn’t have the ability to preserve their own stories until very recently. It’s highly likely they happened, though, because the rich are not unique in their desire to express themselves.

We can say without a shadow of a doubt that queerness can be found throughout time and place. It's not only natural, but it emerges in even the most repressive and dire of circumstances. The reason people are ignorant of this information now is that we are exiting a political regime that not only criminalized queer behavior — and hence our recording and preservation of queer history — but fabricated the queer-straight divide we currently live under.

For while I can find hundreds of years of queer history, the same cannot be said for straight people: who, as far as I can tell, do not really exist.

This position may confuse you because clearly “straight” people must have existed throughout history. People have had opposite-sex intimate activity before — it’s probably the reason why you are here.

However, for most of human civilization, heterosexuality and homosexuality were not identities. Sexuality was something that you did — not something that you were. When we look at the criminalization of same-sex activity throughout history, which, again, has not been dominant until after the rise of Christianity (let’s put a pin in that for now), it was the act of sodomy that was mostly banned. Genghis Khan was not trying to stop sodomy for moral reasons. He seems to have been concerned about increasing his military forces to combat the far more populous Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE).

Similarly, sodomy or “buggery” laws in Europe and the Americas were initially geared towards stopping non-procreative sex with both humans and animals — not against homosexuals specifically as an identity. This framing was heavily religious in nature. The word buggery is believed to derive from the Bogomil heresy — a religious group during the early tenth century that rejected the Church’s power in exchange for a form of worship that was far more decentralized. This movement was, unsurprisingly, violently suppressed and was purposefully associated with sodomy by Christian leadership. Buggery laws were designed to “protect” society from “moral degeneracy.” “Straights” were punished for these nonprocreative acts alongside queer people, though sodomy laws were sparingly enforced throughout the early colonial period.

It was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that we really started to see these laws geared towards demonizing “queer people” specifically, and that’s more or less when heterosexuality was invented. The terms heterosexuality and homosexuality were not coined until the late 1860s, initially by Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny and later adopted by psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. This lack of terminology did not make Europe a queer utopia before the invention of these terms. Acts of queer sex remained heavily taboo, but it did take a while for the current framing of heterosexuality to become mainstream. As recently as 1923, Merriam Webster’s dictionary defined heterosexuality as “morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex.”

As European influence spread during the age of colonialism (i.e., 1415 CE to the 1950s and um, now?), this emerging definition of “straightness,” alongside a general demonization of same-sex attraction and non-normative gender expression, was imposed onto the world. The superior military capabilities of European powers meant that they had the ability to force their will onto many different polities, allowing them to rewrite norms that had existed for hundreds of years within one or two generations.

India, for example, is the birthplace of the Kama Sutra, which is an ancient Sanskrit text written allegedly by sage Vatsyayana, devoted to, among many other things, sexuality and eroticism. There is an entire section within this text devoted to homosexual sex, Vatsyayana writing: “it is to be engaged in and enjoyed for its own sake as one of the arts.” Hindu epics are dotted with examples of Gods engaging in same-sex activity (see Agni) and varied gender expressions (see Ardhanarishvara).

Within a generation of British occupation, many polities in India went from being relatively progressive on these issues to downright conservative. Victorian British administrators, horrified by India's more flexible views of sexuality and gender roles, criminalized such activity in 1860 under section 377 of the Penal code. The legacy of which lasted nearly 160 years. It was not repealed until the country's Supreme Court struck it down in 2018.

Conservative leaders across the country opposed this decision. “You can’t change the mindset of the society by using the hammer of law. This is against the … religious values of this country,” remarked the chief of the xenophobic Hum Hindu group, Mr. Ajay Gautam. Men like Gautam claim to fight for traditional and conservative values, but most ironically, these are very clearly British ones — as we have already covered: aspects of Indian society were far more permissive of homosexual activity before the British occupation.

This irony is seen the world over as conservative movements complain that the LGBTQIA2+ community is a western import or invention. In Uganda, as another example, homosexual acts were made punishable in 2014 by life in prison. The International community reacted negatively to this decision. The then-United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, called it a violation of “fundamental human rights.” Uganda President Yoweri Museveni reacted to this criticism by telling the International community to “Respect African societies and their values,” claiming that Westerners brought homosexuality to his country.

However, this distaste for same-sex activity and non-normative gender expression, as well as the framing of heterosexuality itself, is a Western import. Uganda’s history of sexuality and gender is far more fluid than men like Museveni claim. In the Kingdom of Buganda, which is inside modern-day Uganda, a king there, Mwanga II, was reportedly an open bisexual. He had relatively positive relations with his people, and it was not until Christian missionaries started converting people to Christianity that widespread calls for his removal were made. Mwanga II’s refusal to bow to British rule led to him being deposed from the throne and provides a visceral example of how western imperialism has imposed heterosexuality onto the world.

We likewise saw a similar experience in how Westerners “civilized” the Indian tribes of the Americas. When Western colonizers came to the Americas, they were horrified by the sexual and gender fluidity of many tribal cultures. This led the US government, my government, to “correct” this with assimilationist policies — the most notable policy being the Civilization Fund Act of 1819. The fund paid missionaries and church leaders to work with the federal government to establish boarding schools in Indian territories that replaced tribal practices with Christian ones. As Mary Annette Pember writes in The Atlantic:

“This is what achieving civilization looked like in practice: Students were stripped of all things associated with Native life. Their long hair, a source of pride for many Native peoples, was cut short, usually into identical bowl haircuts. They exchanged traditional clothing for uniforms, and embarked on a life influenced by strict military-style regimentation. Students were physically punished for speaking their Native languages. Contact with family and community members was discouraged or forbidden altogether. Survivors have described a culture of pervasive physical and sexual abuse at the schools. Food and medical attention were often scarce; many students died. Their parents sometimes learned of their death only after they had been buried in school cemeteries, some of which were unmarked.”

The ones who survived returned with new “Christian” values. Soon tribal leaders started to forbid Two-Spirit marriages and other acts of queer self-expression. As we have seen elsewhere in the world, this created a lasting legacy. Activist Christine Diindiisi McCleave describes how her grandfather disowned her gay uncle because of the values he learned at one Catholic boarding school, writing: “This was the direct result of what my grandfather learned at boarding school — the rhetoric that homosexuality is a sin.”

When people claim that heterosexual norms and the gender binary are worldwide, they forget that they were spread there by some of the most aggressive empires in modern history. The concept of straightness that we have is a fabrication backed by force. These entrenched norms have not only caused people to be ignorant of reality, but they shaped how we perceived the recorded history we do have. People are claiming that heterosexuality is an institution going back forever, when in reality, it’s a concept that has barely lasted one hundred years.

If you pause to actually consider everything above, you may hopefully realize that if humanity’s default status were truly straight, there would be no need for these oppressive laws and institutions. Equilibrium would sort itself out. We would see queer people be a relatively obscure, somewhat stable number in the population rather than an ever visible and growing part of society.

There was a controversy a little while back on Twitter when commentator Glenn Greenwald retweeted a Gallup poll, which he then used to insinuate that gays and lesbians were disappearing and being replaced by trans and nonbinary people. The data doesn’t support this conclusion — gays and lesbians did increase in number as well. It’s just that there are more self-reported transgender people now among Gen Zers than there are lesbians. There are also a lot more bisexuals!

However, there was actually something more interesting in that poll than this controversy, and it's that the total number of queer people is increasing. It jumped to 5.6% overall and now sits at nearly 15.9% for Generation Zers. I think if we are honest with ourselves, this is a more accurate reflection of humanity. It’s not that the kids these days got a whole lot queerer, but that stigmatization that has been present in society for hundreds of years is being successfully (and hopefully permanently) chipped away. People feel more comfortable just doing what feels right. As acceptance of queerness in society continues to increase, it’s most likely going to implode our concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality in general.

There is nothing wrong with identifying as gay, straight, bi, or pan on an individual level. You don’t have to have sex at all as far as I am concerned (shoutout to my aces). These are the labels we have, and for the time being, I intend to use them because I exist in a society that does. The label of heterosexuality, however, is based on an imperialist dichotomy. The people who defend it have, for far too long, pretended to base their arguments on human nature when, in actuality, their rigid enforcement is entirely unnatural.

As we come to terms with queerness, straightness will eventually lose its meaning and become something less static. Have sex, kiss, cuddle, love, platonically hold hands, or spurn advances with whoever you want to, but we should philosophically question the need to create an identity around straightness. We should question why we demand rigidity in our society when it comes to the expression of sex and gender when historically, these things have been very fluid activities.

Again, I want to stress that I politically see the usefulness of labels for the sake of organizing. However, our species does not default to heterosexuality or, for that matter, homosexuality, as a point of nature. These are social constructions used to describe acts that are present in large swathes of the population. Humans have a propensity for both hetero and homosexual activity as well as a multitude of gender expressions. Hopefully, we can one day be mature about that as a species.

In other words, humanity is queer as f@ck, and the “straights” better get used to it.

Alex Has Opinions 6/13/21 Alex Has Opinions 6/13/21

The Confederacy Is Alive & Well on Facebook

While the Confederacy may have surrendered over 150 years ago, for these Facebook groups, its spirit is still around and waiting to rise again.

“Happy John Wilkes Booth Day,” one commenter writes, commemorating the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. “Our Avenger,” reads a response directly below it. “Landed gentry was a vital part of our Southern heritage, and it is in dire need of being reinstated,” reads a different post a short scroll down.

You might think that these quotes come from alternative social media sites such as Telegram, Parlor, or Gab, but they are from Facebook — a company that has policies discouraging these types of behavior. These, in particular, come from the group Secessionist Party (CSA). All over this platform, people are advocating for the resurrection of an empire built upon the enslavement of human beings.

The existence of these groups represents a dicey ideological question for the social network. We should want to preserve records of even the darkest moments in our history, but what happens when that aim is used as a pretext to share and recruit others into a hateful ideology? Where should the line be drawn between discussion and hate speech?

While the Confederacy may have surrendered over 150 years ago, for these Facebook groups, its spirit is still around and waiting to rise again.

The first thing you have to keep in mind is that this is not one or two groups. I cataloged over 20 active groups and pages in my research and over a hundred inactive ones, and my list is by no means exhaustive. These groups ranged from those with only a couple hundred members or likes to ones in the hundreds of thousands. Some of them are open to the public, but the vast majority are private, especially since Facebook has more aggressively regulated them in recent years. They hence require moderator approval to join.

Most of these groups advertise themselves as dedicated to the appreciation of Southern heritage or history. Many posts are simply uploads of old pictures and memorials. You will see a painting of Confederate soldiers on horseback or black and white photos of children waving the Confederate flag.

As the About section for the group, Dixie Cotton Confederates describes: “This is a Confederate history site. We love our heritage. This group is neither radically nor politically motivated…” Yet this pretext melts away immediately in the next line, with that alleged neutrality not even staying within the group description. “…however,” the author continues, “we do hold concervative [sic] values.”

These groups overwhelmingly have a right-leaning bent, with many of them replicating more traditional conservative rhetoric. It’s common to see posts lambasting socialism, disparaging Democrats, and of course, praising former 45th President Donald Trump. “I Miss Donald Trump,” states one user on Dixie Cotton Confederates. “UR STILL MY PRESIDENT,” reads another. Discriminatory posts are frequent among these users, with commenters clinging onto social battles that feel decades or centuries old. “I posit,” shares one commenter in Secessionist Party (CSA), “that there is an ocean of anecdotal evidence suggesting the development of same-sex attraction is a direct result of child abuse.” He then links to his blog that covers the same topic in greater detail — none of the information particularly accurate.

Racial issues are not much better, with even “tame” posts quickly escalating into pretty hurtful directions. One comment in the group Confederate Supporters posted a meme about not being offended by the confederate flag but instead being incensed by saggy jeans, clothing with a long history of being associated with Black people. A commenter below it immediately picked up on this subtext, writing: “N@ggas to [sic] lazy to pull pants up, lazy stupid bastards.” Clearly, a hateful comment, yet the moderators have yet to intervene, and no one has self-reported it.

Additionally, there is the prevalence of conspiracy theories that have overtaken the Republican Party in recent years. Anti-vaccine and anti-masking sentiments are still quite common, with posters sharing memes and videos of intense skepticism over these two medical practices. The same goes for the belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. “The worst attack on American soil happened in the Ballot boxes on November 3rd, 2020,” one user reposted on Dixie Cotton Confederates in late May of 2021. This is a comment that slipped past Facebook’s aggressive flagging system with voter fraud.

Since many of these comments technically go against Facebook’s terms of service, moderators are in a constant battle to curb the more heinous offenses. “Bullying of any kind isn’t allowed, and degrading comments about things like race, religion, culture, sexual orientation, gender, or identity will not be tolerated,” reads one of the rules for the group Confederate live’s matter trump 2024. These rules are common on Confederate pages and groups, indicating the prevalence of that type of content on their sites.

Yet, the culture of bigotry and hatred is there. I have found an abundance of hate speech in many of these groups (see above comment on baggy pants). Even when commenters are not dropping the N-word, the subtext is still there. The biggest element that ties these groups together is a softness for the Confederacy — again, an organization built on slavery — which means that an insidious racial dynamic exists in the entire feed ecosystem.

The page Southern Historical Society, for example, primarily posts old photos and paintings. It bills itself as devoted to “Southern history from the Mid 1800's,” but several times a day, you will see content that sympathetically paints the old Confederacy in a more positive light. “No People, in the history of the world, have ever been so misunderstood, so misjudged, and so cruelly maligned,” the page posted of Southerners. This quote comes from a former Confederate general named John B. Gordon, who, at the time, was lamenting the alleged horrors of Reconstruction. “It’s not just about history,” goes another meme, “The South was right.”

Source: Confederate live’s matter trump 2024

But right how?

The only way that you can hold this position is if you completely divorce the Confederacy from the institution of slavery, which of course, is what a lot of pro-Confederates end up doing. This stance ties into the myth of the “Lost Cause,” or the idea that the Confederacy was a heroic institution not centered on the principle of slavery but rather unfairly attacked by Northern aggressors. This false narrative allowed Southerners to immediately resist the new political order built after the Civil War (see Reconstruction) and continues to be employed to this day. Many posts will still use the terminology of “Rebels” or “Rebellion” to describe confederates — something tying directly into this legacy.

Occasionally that belief that the Confederacy (often conflated with the South itself) did nothing wrong is far more direct than a sassy meme. There exists on the platform not only advertising for pro-Confederate organizations such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, but groups promoting a new secession from the Union. The group Secessionist Party (CSA), for example, advocates for an “immediate secession from the United States” with a desire to build an ethno-nationist state for the Confederate people. This desire to resurrect the Confederacy is a common rhetorical point in this space. “The South Will Rise Again,” reads one comment ominously in the group Confederate Supporters.

These groups clearly are doing more than a mere recording and appreciation of history. Contrary to their claims of neutrality, they use the pretext of history to promote a specific ideology. They are not passive figures in history. They are instead constructing a version of the past to build towards a more hateful future.

The issue of Confederate groups on Facebook has been consistently reported on for over half a decade. Vice ran a piece back in 2015 about a reporter infiltrating a group called confederate pride, heritage not hate. Slate published a piece last year about the prevalence of the groups on the platform, writing: “Facebook can be dangerous not just for its content, but for its lack of public data; for how its (private) algorithms work; for the ways it amplifies certain voices and can lead to deeper polarization and, in some cases, radicalization.”

Recently Facebook has removed hundreds of groups directly associated with hate movements, including ones connected to the Proud Boys, American Guard, and the “boogaloo” movement. The company now has clear-cut rules on hate speech, defining it as: “violent or dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, statements of inferiority, expressions of contempt, disgust or dismissal, cursing and calls for exclusion or segregation.” It's not apparent, however, that the core problem has been addressed because, again, the bigotry is still there. This crackdown has merely pushed many Confederate groups to switch from public group settings to private ones.

There continue to be gaps in moderation. Some of these groups consistently violate Community Standards in self-evident ways. It’s hard to see how the Secessionist Party (CSA) — a group literally calling for segregation in the way of an ethnostate — does not constitute “calls for exclusion or segregation.”

I was also able to find slurs and calls for an uprising or civil war on many of these groups — though my study of the previous reporting leads me to believe that this has gone down in the last year. Dixie Cotton Confederates, for example, used to have over 100,000 members, and now that number sits at 19,000. Despite this drop, however, the group still shares memes calling for a return to the Confederacy.

Part of this continued gap in moderation has to do with how the company regulates content. Facebook relies on a combination of AI and self-reporting to make sure that people are adhering to Community Standards. Now that many of these groups have switched from public to private settings, AI is largely how hate speech must be regulated. This is because there are fewer outsiders to take these groups to task. To avoid the algorithm, moderators are interested in making sure things don’t get “too political.” However, they are still there to promote a White Supremacist worldview, which means that hate speech that is subtextual, indirect, or just stated in a nonvulgar way will often not get taken down.

Many pro-Confederate groups will often have rules that prohibit degrading comments and bullying of someone’s identity, but they then actively support an ideology centered on the subjugation of other people's identities. These groups use Facebook’s legalese to avoid criticism, dancing around the issue until they can be more direct again. They may claim to be against hate speech (and some may truly believe that), but after spending some time sifting through these feeds, it's apparent that the hate speech is there.

Confederate or Southern pride groups also serve as jumping-off points for other, less-regulated spaces. Spend enough time on these groups, and you will easily be directed to more “vocal” content both on the platform and outside of it. For example, on Dixie Cotton Confederates, I saw several reposts for non-Confederate Facebook groups such as Man Cave, which is far more derogatory in how it depicts marginalized communities such as queer people. “This is what a dying society looks like,” one post fearmongers, insinuating that a child seeing kinksters at a Pride event somehow indicates the end of our society.

Additionally, I saw many redirects to websites such as Rumble, which has been described as “the worst possible things about YouTube amplified.” Members of the alt-right like Donald Trump Jr., Patriot Streetfighter, and Mark Levin constantly use that platform to push far-right content. “Get ready for war,” one video thumbnail reads, describing protests in the wake of U.S. Marshals killing Winston Boogie Smith Jr. in Minneapolis. Rumble can take you down a rabbit hole of reactionary content with just a few clicks — a statement that applies to many of these original Facebook feeds as well.

Confederate Facebook groups can be breeding grounds for White Supremacist thought. They are insidious in how they package their worldviews. To reach a fair amount of people (and to stay online at all), they are willing to couch what they say in the language of history and inclusivity, and yet calling for the return of a slave-holding empire sure doesn't feel inclusive. Even if propaganda like the Lost Cause doesn’t make people consciously realize how damaging their rhetoric is, it doesn’t change the fact that it is hurtful. If a person or entity calls for an awful thing nicely, that doesn’t make it good.

This opens up a fundamental question about content moderation. This issue is not just about Facebook regulating its Community Guidelines more stringently but making a political decision on how it will treat the depiction of the Confederacy on its platform. This problem is not about the presentation of history but about what kinds of political behavior Facebook considers acceptable.

Pro-Confederate spaces on Facebook have gone through a lot of shifts in recent years. These groups used to be far more vocal than they are currently and had a far more pervasive reach. In combination with the public’s increasingly negative reaction following Charlottesville and the January 6th Insurrection, recent reforms have dampened their influence on the platform.

However, the bigotry is still there, and some of these groups are putting forth very alarming rhetoric. It should concern us that a group can actively call for secession under the banner of one of the most hateful countries in modern history. It’s all well and good to chronicle dark periods of history (I spend a lot of time doing that on this blog), but there is a difference between trying to understand that darkness and whitewashing it so you can repeat the mistakes of the past.

At a certain point, a political decision needs to be made by Facebook (or far more likely, our government) of whether it will accept the promotion of the Confederacy’s iconography or not. Do we treat the symbols of the Confederacy — not just the rhetoric behind it — as hate speech? And if so, what does that actually look like?

I have no easy answers. We exist at an awkward crossroad right now, where, as long as pro-Confederates talk nicely about the issue of resurrecting a slave empire, it's not viewed as a problem. However, the confederacy as an ideal should be perceived as a problem because, again, it is an institution founded on the principle of enslaving other human beings. There is no way to make that concept inoffensive.

I currently live in the South — a short drive away from the former Confederate capital— and I do not believe that these symbols or ideals should represent my community. Heritage is more than the bones of hateful men long since buried. It’s a chance to realize that they were wrong and the promise to commit to something better.

Alex Has Opinions 6/8/21 Alex Has Opinions 6/8/21

Americans Are Very Weird & Immature About Sex

My fellow Americans, we are so weird about sex that we would rather people be abused and neglected than our own psyches made uncomfortable.

I say this as an American who grew up and had their sexual awakening in America: we are a very strange country when it comes to sex. We fetishize it in nearly everything we do. I see it in our media where women and men are dressed in ways that accentuate their bodies. I can find it in our many songs about love and sex. I see it in our humor where many jokes are “dick this” and “I f@cked that.” I see it in our bachelor and bachelorette parties, where penis merchandise is plastered over everything, and infidelity is teased in the way of strippers.

At the same time, however, we shame nearly everyone for wanting it. Conservatives preach the values of abstinence-only education in schools and chastise anyone who dares to have sex before marriage. It’s our duty to have sex, but only if it's not for pleasure or enjoyment. Sex is something that we are told that we must have, and yet we must also hate ourselves for wanting it. “Don’t be a prude,” the advice goes, “but also don’t be a slut.”

This dichotomy underlays everything we do, and it's not just conservatives who are susceptible to it. This awkwardness around sex infects even the most leftist among us, and we need to take stock of how weird this fixation with sex is in America.

There are some obvious ways that we are strange about sex, and then there are the not-so-obvious ones. The obvious ones are the shaming campaigns put forth by conservative actors and movements. There are a lot of people who actively lobby to prevent people, particularly teenagers, from having sex at all unless it's done “the right way.”

The most infamous example of this is abstinence-only education campaigns promoted by conservatives in the 80s and up to this day. These programs claimed to be the most effective way to prevent teenage pregnancy, but really they were simply about preventing sex until marriage. All the research we have indicates that they were not very effective with curbing sexual impulses and came with them some pretty intense stigmatization. “While abstinence is theoretically effective, in actual practice, intentions to abstain from sexual activity often fail,” says John Santelli, professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School.

The legacy of these programs means that there are 11 states in the Union that require abstinence-only education to be mentioned in schools and 28 states that require it to be stressed. The ridiculousness of these programs is made fun of the world over. You can watch it be scrutinized in comedies such as Glee (see episode Showmance), where the character Quinn Fabray (Dianna Agron) is president of the celibacy club — only to realize that she is a sexual being throughout the series. You can see it ridiculed in the Garfunkel and Oates song “F@ck me in the ass ’cause I love Jesus,” which is all about making fun of how some Christians infamously have anal sex to “save” themselves for marriage.

It’s easy to scoff at this mentality, but there are other ways that we are weird about sex that don’t fall along clear political lines. An obvious example is how we view nudity, linking it to sexual activity regardless of the context. It’s illegal in most parts of the country to be nude in public places, and even in the privacy of your own home if a member of the public can see your naked ass through an open window or in your own yard. These instances can be labeled indecent behavior. Even in the liberal state of California, nudity is a felony if you expose yourself in any public place or in any private place where there are people who could be offended or annoyed. It’s a system of laws that coddle the comfort of the most triggered. As a culture, we basically prescribe to the idea that nudity is inherently sexual, and if you inconvenience other people’s comfort with it, you are the one at fault.

Nudity, though, is not inherently sexual. Plenty of people get naked because they enjoy the experience and are not trying to achieve an orgasm. All over the world, you can participate in naked marathons, naked bicycle races, naked yoga sessions, and more that have nothing to do with sex. These body parts are being sexualized by the onlooker, not necessarily by the nudist, and that’s just creepy. If you claim that nudity is sexual at all moments, then you are the one doing that sexualization, not the object of your fixation.

And, of course, we are weird about nudity in very sexist ways. Men can generally show less skin than women. No one bats an eye at a topless male runner, but we give women and female-presenting nonbinary people a tough time about revealing their breasts. Although it is changing for the better, several states treat male and female toplessness differently. Indiana, for example, explicitly forbids the showing of the “female" nipple, and there is still reported harassment in states where it’s 100% legal. After a court ruling made female toplessness legal in six states, including Utah, a judge there refused to dismiss charges of lewdness in a case where a woman was topless in front of her step-children. Note the father, who was also topless at the time, has not been charged.

This distinction even applies to when people are breastfeeding their children. While you may technically have the legal right to breastfeed in all 50 states, not all of these polities necessarily exempt you from public indecency laws. This oversight means breastfeeders have been threatened repeatedly by the police over the years for being “indecent,” including a high-profile incident in 2016 by a Georgian police officer against a woman named Savvy Shukla inside a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. According to Savvy Shukla’s own account on Facebook, the police officer claimed to be harassing her because what she was doing was “offensive.”

The main excuse given by weird Americans for policing others' bodies is that they protect the greater public, particularly children, from indecency. However, there does not appear to be a whole lot of compelling evidence that nudity by itself traumatizes children. While coerced nudity (i.e., forcing another individual to get naked) is certainly abusive, the act of witnessing another person’s nakedness does not seem to correlate with harm from any study I have read. By all means, please send me a meta-study if you disagree.

Yet despite the obvious lack of evidence, this “save the children” argument is used everywhere in our society. Since sex itself is considered shameful, its mere suggestion is used to discourage support in activities that have nothing to do with sex. People have used the specter of sexual deviancy to discourage interest in a whole host of activities and people.

As an example, “Kink” (i.e., consensual, non-traditional sexual, sensual, or intimate behaviors) is often claimed to be inherently sexual, and therefore shameful enough to be kept out of family-friendly places (i.e., most places). Recently, there was a leftist streamer who riled up a controversy by insisting that Kink should not be at main Pride events, tweeting: “Kink at Pride makes people uncomfortable and makes the event less accessible when accessibility should be a priority. Keep less family-friendly stuff to the many, many afterparties and adjacent, private venues every Pride has.”

Undoubtedly, many people are uncomfortable with Kink, but discomfort is not the same thing as harm. As with nudity, Kink is not always sexual (notice the words sensual and intimate in the definition I used). Many Kinky clubs and events explicitly ban sex acts there. So again, we have people sexualizing other adults for wearing things like dog masks or leather harnesses during Pride parades when that’s not happening at all in this particular situation. They are doing this, they claim, to appease an imaginary child traumatized by the sight of objects they barely comprehend, but in actuality, it seems to be rationalizing their own distaste in Kink.

Now, there might be some line we want to draw here about not having sex in public to avoid “consent violations” (i.e., when someone violates someone else's physical or emotional boundaries), but that has nothing to do with Kink. It also has less to do with “protecting children” and more about protecting the rights of the people around you. We should care about adults when their consent is violated too. However, it is not a consent violation to wear a harness, yip in public, or dorn a mask. In the context of Pride parades, no one is yanking on someone’s dick, pleasuring themselves in public, or demanding that you perform an activity with them, which would be a violation, even if it wasn’t sexual.

Just because you are uncomfortable with something doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done in public. We don’t ban fireworks because they can trigger someone’s PTSD. We don’t ban the distribution of condoms in public places, including pride parades, just because they might be used in sex acts at another point in time. We don’t ban public displays of intimacy because they can maybe inconvenience asexual people or conservatives. We shouldn’t tell someone they can’t dress in fetish gear or run topless because maybe you can imagine a scenario where it can be sexual.

This fixation of using sex as a cudgel to ban practices we don’t like is weird. It’s using our shame with sex to limit human expression, and that’s very telling for how we as a society perceive sex in general. This shame has nothing to do with protecting children, and in fact, harms many more than it “protects.”

The worst part about pearl-clutching over sex in America is that all of this weirdness has some pretty messed-up consequences. We talk about protecting others when we use the sexualization of a person or object to pass more oppressive laws, but rarely do we think about what that practically means. When you push for banning human expression that you find uncomfortable, even if it's not harmful, the way our society is structured inevitably means that you have to use the force of the law to fine, arrest, or jail perceived offenders.

It was not too long ago that the same arguments used by people condemning nudity, breastfeeding, or Kink were used to jail queer people for engaging in consensual sex and other acts of intimacy. There used to be sodomy laws (a Biblical reference to the destruction of the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah) all over the United States that initially banned non-procreative sex in general and slowly became about banning queer sex specifically. These laws were not only used to arrest queer people in sting operations, but also as a pretext to deny members of the LBTQIA+ community employment protections, adoption rights, and other equal protections under the law.

A chief pretext for this discrimination was to protect the public’s sense of decency, which is why many of these laws are popularly referred to as “crime against nature” laws. Yet they didn’t just “protect” young people from the danger of “homosexuals,” but jailed them too. In one example, an 18-year-old named Randall Menges was arrested under Idaho’s “crimes against nature” law in 1993 for having consensual sex with two 16-year-olds, which in the state of Idaho would be legal for a straight person. He ended up serving a seven-year prison sentence.

Even after sodomy laws were technically overturned in the 2003 Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, “crime against nature” laws still remain on the books in nine states. Police have used these laws to harass queer people as recently as 2015, and while the laws may be outdated, their legacy continues to impact people to this day. In some states, people convicted of sodomy laws before the Lawrence ruling still have to register as sex offenders. Randall Menges, for example, had his status as a sex offender expunged this year. This feat happened only after moving to another state that allowed it, and the state’s Attorney General still plans to fight it. A reminder that he was 18-years-old at the time of his arrest — convicted by a law often justified as existing to “protect children.”

Today, we see similar sentiments with how many trans people are arrested and harassed by police officers due to being associated with sex work. Since our society has a negative view of that activity, this association often detrimentally impacts the trans community. For example, until recently, New Yorkers were prosecuted by section 240.37 of the penal code, an anti-loitering statute that officers used to target perceived sex workers. Infamously called the “walking while trans” law, it affected trans people, most notably trans people of color, for no other reason than officers assuming that they were sex workers. As activist Bianey García remarked of her own run-in with a police officer:

“I tried to explain to them that I wasn’t doing sex work, that the person walking next to me was my boyfriend. He also tried to explain that we are partners, and the officer told my boyfriend, ‘You have to go or you’re going to be arrested.’”

Bianey García ended up pleading guilty because she was an undocumented immigrant at the time who did not know her rights. As of February 2021, this law was repealed in New York, but similar ones are still on the books in other states such as California. Some of the victims of these laws are not too old either. Bianey García was only 18 when her reported incident happened. We are so paternalistically wrapped up in “protecting children” that we sometimes forget that children are also human beings engaged in acts of intimacy and sensuality. When we criminalize sexuality — whether it be actual sexuality or just the perceived sexuality of someone’s gender identity — we don’t just end up hurting adults. Young people will inevitability fall into the crossfire.

Even when this repression does not lead to direct violence with the state, it can create a lot of stigmatization that harms children all the same. We see in many polls that children are not getting the sex advice they need from their parents, and a significant amount of them are not being asked about sex by their doctors at all. This knowledge gap might partly correlate with this country’s abysmal sexual education. Only 18 states require that sex education be medically accurate, and that can have a knock-on effect as both children and adults struggle to obtain the right information.

Yet this lack of communication does not result in less sex. This stigmatization and uncertainty merely lead to more unsafe sex. According to the CDC in a study published in 2019, condom usage among sexually active high schoolers has dropped to 54%, bringing with it an increase in Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs). For example, a 2018 CDC estimate placed 21% of all new HIV infections among youths between the ages 13 to 24 — a number that has been steadily dropping but is still high. An active minority of teens seem to be engaged in increasingly riskier behavior, which does not always result in more STIs. Sometimes a lack of a supportive environment has teens engaging in riskier settings to obtain the sex they are denied.

Take the example of Kink again. Some sexual tweens and teenagers engage with Kinks. I have found many anecdotes of teenagers engaged in choking during sex (not all of it consensual). I also came across a large swath of testimonials of teens expressing an interest in BDSM. As one user writes in an online forum, I will not be linking to: “I’m a 14 year old girl, and I haven’t been influenced by any sexual content during my life. But, I remember that since I was 10, I was intrigued by the idea of BDSM. I’ve had the kink since I was 8! Is it bad to be interested in this at my age?” This comment not only hits home the idea that people can be curious about Kink starting at a very early age, but that those desires are not necessarily sexual.

I realize that this is an uncomfortable subject to talk about. I have been cringing at myself for the last hour writing this entire section, but it leads to problems when we don’t talk about this reality. Since Kink revolves around power exchange of some sort, this makes the principles of trust and consent paramount in these relationships. However, Kink is largely an underground scene. Although it seems to be less rapey than the larger population, there are definitely “dominants” or “doms” (i.e., people who strive for control in sexual or intimate situations) who take advantage of these power exchanges to justify their abusive behavior.

Teenagers are not always removed from that equation. In one anecdote, a 17-year-old tried to move halfway across the country from New York to Lawton, Oklahoma, to be a live-in submissive for a 59-year-old dominant and his 26-year-old girlfriend. The young girl in question made this change because the dominant was a prominent BDSM author, and she was curious about the BDSM lifestyle. The power dynamics in age and status alone make this relationship questionable. If Kink were more widely taught and explored among teens, it's doubtful she would have felt the need to move halfway across the country to learn more about BDSM.

We have such a protectionist outlook when it comes to young people and sex. However, teens and tweens can also have desires, and they frankly deserve to have an environment where they can learn about sex, sensuality, and intimacy safely. I would rather a child learn about the dynamics of Kink and safe sex at a Pride event than the more seedy avenues that are out there. Repression doesn’t stop sexually active tweens and teenagers from learning and performing sex. It simply ensures that the information they learn is not always credible and that their partners are not always kind.

My fellow Americans, we are so weird about sex that we would rather people be abused and neglected than our own psyches made uncomfortable. We need to ask ourselves what’s more important: a child possibly being uncomfortable by the sight of something that in another context can be sexual, or actual children being endangered because they cannot have sex safely; a stranger made uncomfortable by the sight of nudity or a person being able to express themselves free from harassment; the sight of sex workers not being visible to the general public or a trans person being able to walk safely down the street.

If you take away one thing from this article, let it be this: comfort and safety are not the same things. We should not be in the business of making everyone comfortable at all times because such a thing is impossible. People have contradictory definitions of what comfort is, and as we can see, this standard of valuing comfort in general usually has us defaulting to the more mainstream position. While this rhetoric sounds inclusive, it weaponizes our shame of sex to push for regressive laws that ultimately harm countless people, including children.

Think of the children, America. If you want them to be truly safe, then you will prioritize their education. You will seek to ensure that they not only learn the most medically accurate information possible but that they have the tools and resources to learn about their desires safely.

Stop being weird, America, and end this policing of sexuality. The children will thank you.

Alex Has Opinions 5/26/21 Alex Has Opinions 5/26/21

The Anger of Realizing America Isn’t Free

We are told that we are free by nearly everyone, yet that is not what many of us experience in our day-to-day lives. We are constrained by our laws, norms, jobs, and so many other factors that it can be dizzying to contemplate.

Over and over again, the one “truth” told to me as a child was that America was free. It would be something spoken during official commencements by school administrators and local politicians. Candidates for office would begin their debates by extolling how American freedom allowed them to be where they are today. Teachers would take time during lessons to discuss the uniqueness of the American experiment, highlighting all the rights and opportunities given to all of its citizens.

America is fixated on the idea of freedom. Liberty is asserted as a right in the Declaration of Independence and as a founding aim within the US Constitution. “The policy of American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits,” writes Thomas Jefferson in 1787. “Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured [in the US] than in any other place on earth,” Ronald Reagan said in a speech in 1981. This certainty of American freedom is seen as a universal constant. We have so many politicians regaling Americans about how free we are that rarely do we stop to question if this is true.

While America has worked towards many admirable goals, it has not achieved the level of freedom that it thinks it has. This certainty is an illusion. America does not let its citizens be free in any classical sense of the word. We are told that we are free by nearly everyone, yet that is not what many of us experience in our day-to-day lives. We are constrained by our laws, norms, jobs, and so many other factors that it can be dizzying to contemplate.

For some, this awakening can lead to exhaustion and depression — neither of which are mutually exclusive — but for many others, it swells into anger. The gaslighting of freedom has many Americans furious over something they thought was their birthright but always somehow remains just out of reach.

As a child, I remember not wanting to say the pledge of allegiance. I had become disillusioned with America (see my previous article here). I asked to be able to opt-out of the salute to the flag during homeroom. My teacher acquiesced after getting a signed note from my parents but still insisted that I face the flag every morning, saying that I was free to stand there and say nothing.

However, I sure didn’t feel free. If you were a philosopher, you could say that my teacher was interfering with my “negative freedom” or the right to do something absent from coercion or restraint. The teacher was an authority figure preventing me from doing what I wanted, which was to not participate in the pledge of allegiance. This example is small and arguably inconsequential, but it filled me with so much rage. I would glare at my homeroom teacher — my lips unmoved.

There are so many times in America where I have felt this way. I was legally only able to marry my partner six years ago (see Obergefell v. Hodges), and I could not change the gender marker on my state ID to the right one until three years ago. I felt grateful when these changes finally happened, but legal recognition also brought with it so much anger at the lost time others had stolen. I wanted to throttle all those responsible by the neck, and I don’t think that resentment will ever go away completely.

Flash forward years later from that classroom where I refused to say the pledge of allegiance: I had started to develop gender dysphoria. I was unaware of my dysphoria, and I did not have the resources — neither in terms of money nor social support — to transition even if I had been aware. This gap severely impacted my well-being and prevented me from participating in “normal” society. It took a long time to come to terms with my transness and begin to live comfortably.

Here, you could say that my “positive freedom” was denied, or the ability to do or enjoy certain things I want free from externalities such as social stigma and money. The thing I wanted as a child was the ability to know myself. I needed to have the education to learn that I was trans and then be given the resources to transition. The society I existed in, however, did not materially make allowances for that to happen. And so, from this perspective, I was less free, even though no one was telling me directly that I couldn’t be trans (at least not initially).

The anger over this reality was not immediate. It took a while for this injustice to seep into my person — for me to truly internalize that others thought I was a lesser being not deserving of recognition. I don’t think people who have acceptance — an admittedly small and increasingly out of touch minority — can understand that feeling: how could they? They have never had their humanity debated and scrutinized. It makes me so angry that some people get to drift through life unexamined, while I have to endure debates on my very existence.

When I look at my America, I see so many individuals who have had their time taken from them by others. If and when they manage to claw those moments back from their oppressors, relief does not always follow. When former police officer Derek Chauvin was finally convicted for the murder of George Floyd, many commentators did not feel happy about the conviction. I instead saw a lot of justified anger: anger that it took so long; anger that similar injustices are still happening; anger that justice could happen if people truly cared to enact it. “It’s not justice because justice is George Floyd going home tonight to be with his family,” politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said of the verdict.

We have a society that takes people from us, and it’s not always just at the end of a gun. Positive and negative freedoms are usually not distinct spheres, and it’s truthfully a fantasy that you can separate them at all. Oppressed people will almost always experience both problems at once. The transgender community, for example, is not only at the forefront of battles for negative freedoms (e.g., the right to change their government documents, the right to use any bathroom free from discrimination, etc.), but positive freedoms such as fighting for better healthcare so that medically transitioning is possible for more people. If you are dealing with coercion at the hands of a state or business, you are most likely facing systemic barriers to employment, housing, or health care.

There are many nuances to this framework (e.g., Hobbesian, Lockean, natural liberty, civil liberty, etc.). If you would like to learn more, there are great resources out there to break this stuff down further (see Plato Stanford, Tanner R. Layton’s essay A Theory of Freedom, and Isaiah Berlin’s essay Two Concepts of Liberty). Generally speaking, conservatives claim to fight for greater negative freedom (e.g., “get big government out of my life”), and liberals claim to fight for greater positive freedom (e.g., “let’s give people greater opportunities so that they can participate in America”), but reality often fails to live up to either expectation.

When it comes to all aspects of freedom (e.g., positive, negative, etc.), our country does very badly in both respects, and having to pretend otherwise is infuriating.

Conservatives like to pretend we are the freest country in the world. The mythical concept of negative freedom advocated for by conservatives is that “all we need to do is stay out of people’s way.” To reiterate Thomas Jefferson: “The policy of American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits.”

This position, however, is naive. America never stayed out of everyone’s way. Jefferson enslaved over 600 people throughout the course of his life. Coercion existed from the start of this country — in fact, our country was built by it. There has never been equal enforcement of negative rights for all people. This country has enslaved, jailed, and beaten people for no other reason than for them living their lives.

While many laws have improved over time for some, the circumstances of countless people have only done so marginally or not at all. We live in an America where people can “theoretically” do many things on paper but can’t do much in practice unless they are obscenely wealthy or privileged. Any adult American outside of prison can vote (a big caveat), but millions of Americans are prevented from voting due to regressive voter suppression laws. Anyone has the right to a public education, but the quality of those schools varies greatly depending on where you live. Elon Musk may be able to launch a car into space, but wealth inequality and white supremacy ensure that many people are one bad bill away from homelessness.

It turns out, that when you don’t give people the resources to have a good life, and you don’t rein in individuals from being able to do whatever awful thing that they want, it creates a society that is pretty fucking awful. While billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos fight over dead rocks like the Moon, tens of millions of Americans are starving. Musk has launched over 1,000 satellites into orbit with plans to launch many more, and I cannot help but think of all the homes those resources could have built instead. Many people will die from those increased emissions because one rich man wants to build a paradise 206.19 million miles away, and it makes me furious.

Where is the freedom here? How does this massive injustice ensure that our lives are materially better?

This inequity makes a lot of otherwise nonviolent people like myself very, very angry. A recent wave of “eat the rich” memes has emerged because our society gives a few people everything and everyone else too little. The hatred of the rich is everywhere. Watch as a majority of Americans get behind the idea of a wealth tax. Buy an “Eat The Rich” shirt on Etsy. Read a breakdown about how the rich are hoarding all of our wealth. Skim through a diatribe of an American ranting about the rich on Reddit. “I get tired of working my ass off to get a degree and hold a job,” begins the post, “while some assholes get to live the lives that 90% of people will never see.” Another one goes: “The rich want to be assholes and hoard their money, fuck 'em, and I hope they all burn in hell.”

The rich are beyond hated at this point. I don’t think privileged people truly understand the rage that comes from being denied your humanity. When a Wendy’s is burned to the ground, a window is smashed, or a trash can is lit on fire, it does not come out of nowhere.

It’s because we condemn countless Americans to live in poverty with no chance of upward mobility. It’s because cops keep shooting people of color. It’s because we keep incarcerating Black Americans at higher rates. It’s a status quo that’s infuriating. That anger will not go away because the injustices never go away. The rage simmers at the back of your mind, waiting for the chance to spread to the surface and burn everything down.

Staying out of someone’s way is a nice thought, but when you don’t focus on an equal playing field, those rights end up being all but meaningless to those who need them the most.

This realization naturally brings us to positive freedom, which theoretically accounts for these differences because it’s all about reducing the divide between what people want to do, and what limits them. As Isaiah Berlin wrote in their essay Two Concepts of Liberty: “The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind.” It’s all about reducing externalities so we can act.

The issue here is one of implementation. America not only lacks the positive rights of many other developed countries (e.g., paid maternity and paternity leave, greater unemployment benefits, universal healthcare, etc.), but the way we try to achieve those gains is predominantly through inefficient market forces. Social Security is all about providing benefits to people in retirement, as long as you or a partner pay into it as a worker for at least 10 years. The Affordable Care Act sought to expand healthcare coverage to millions of Americans by making private insurers more competitive and cheaper. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is devoted to more stringently regulating financial entities like banks and lenders so that they can treat the US consumer more fairly. These classic policy achievements focus on ensuring that we have as much autonomy in that marketplace as workers and consumers as possible.

However, is that real freedom? I spend some 40 hours a week on my job, and it’s not something I would choose to do if I had more resources. My work commitments are on the low end of the spectrum too. The majority of full-time workers spend an average of 7 hours more per week, and some professions take get much longer. Amazon warehouse workers can pull 10 or even 12-hour days, 5 or 6 days a week.

Americans also take fewer breaks. One 2019 study found that 51% of Americans had not taken a vacation in a year. When people do take time off, they report feeling guilty for not being at work. “There’s always a part of me that has a bit of a toe in the water on work, even when I’m vacationing, just making sure nothing urgent is going on that I need to be responding to,” told one Silicon Valley worker to Marketplace. I am literally writing this article while on vacation.

If you have to spend a large number of your waking hours — an estimated 30% or more of your conscious life — at a job to subsist, how can that be real freedom in a positive sense? You are literally being constrained by your work, and although that improves with a better welfare state, it doesn’t go away. Even countries with more robust safety nets still have workers spending a sizeable chunk of their lives working for others.

We have to question why this is necessary. If technology can provide for most of our basic needs (e.g., healthcare, food, housing, etc.) more quickly and efficiently than ever before, why does it not feel that way? We have become more productive over time, but the larger population has not felt those gains. Instead, they have been concentrated in the hands of a hundred or so people who have more wealth than what can be reasonably spent in hundreds of lifetimes. Technology is supposed to free us from the drudgery of life, but at this point, I’d rather give up my iPhone forever if it meant I didn’t have to work all the time just to eat.

Not only do most of us not choose the amount of time we spend working, but most of us also do not choose what work we do. A solid majority of workers do not feel good about their jobs (a finding felt globally, not just inside the United States). When this finding is probed more seriously, as anthropologist David Graeber did for their book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, many people admit that their jobs provide no worthwhile utility either. “A lot of bullshit jobs,” Graeber told Vox, “are just manufactured middle-management positions with no real utility in the world, but they exist anyway in order to justify the careers of the people performing them. But if they went away tomorrow, it would make no difference at all.” This last point has been proved viscerally by the pandemic as many of us realized rather quickly that most of our jobs have not been necessary to keep society moving.

Contrary to the popular meme, most of us are working to survive, not to find profound meaning. We are there to eat, which means there is an obvious power imbalance between our bosses and us. Since we are all forced to work for the sake of subsistence, those who control our labor can dictate a lot of what we do. As long as a work-related case can be made for it, we can be directed to change our hair, clothing, weight, and so much more — on top of, of course, how long our hours are, and if we will be able to eat that week. We may be “free” to try our luck elsewhere, but the same dynamic can be found in bad workplaces across America.

I have had my fair share of these experiences. I remember one boss calling me often in the middle of the night demanding that I look over old work or even just reassure them emotionally about their divorce. I would try to politely establish boundaries; however, they still called many nights, asking me to work later and later and to console them more and more. This bled into holidays where I was “highly encouraged” to spend one New Years' Eve poring over invoices. I was young and depressed and didn’t have many options career-wise, so I stayed for months longer at that job than I wanted to. And I was privileged enough to have a partner who supported my transition to a new career. Many are not so lucky.

None of this feels like freedom to me.

We do not have the luxury of freedom with work — either in a negative or a positive sense — and the few slivers of autonomy workers do manage to obtain reveal the rage simmering underneath. Once stimulus money started coming in, many workers flat out refused to work during the pandemic because the health risks were not worth the low pay and hectic hours. “We all quit!!,” reads one viral sign posted inside a Wendy’s. “If you don’t pay people enough to live their lives, why should they slave away for you?” reads another set of signs outside a Dollar General, notifying customers that the store had “closed indefinitely.”

Those in power are so accustomed to assuming the world should be this way that they don’t realize many of us are here by force, not by choice, and their ignorance of this status quo is maddening.

I have been angry for a long time. As I learned that I was trans, my rage only grew. I kept flashing back to all the time I lost in this “free” society. Whenever I saw a politician arguing against helping trans kids in schools, it was they who I blamed for all those stolen moments. They were the ones making it materially difficult for trans people to have a good life, and although they were not always the same people who made my life difficult, I grew to hate them all the same. This problem was not just happening to me, but to millions of trans people around the globe, and billions more were ignoring it.

In an interview, the writer James Baldwin famously said that to be Black in America was: “to be in a state of rage…almost all of the time — and in one’s work. And part of the rage is this: It isn’t only what is happening to you. But it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference….”

This quote hits me every time I hear it because its words are so true that they hurt. The injustices of America have always been more than what they do to one person. The weight of them is felt individually and collectively all at once.

I am an angry person because life has taught me to be angry. I started as a disobedient tween refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. Since then, this rage has continuously been validated by a society that uses its monopoly on violence to punish people for merely existing. This punishment sometimes comes in the form of the wrong end of a gun, but more likely than not, a lack of freedom is far more nuanced than direct coercion. It is experienced as a lack of opportunity, the hoarding of wealth, and often both.

America loves to think it's the freest country in the world, but nothing this dysfunctional can ever be considered free. We should be angry about the lie of American freedom and pissed off enough to want to change it.

Alex Has Opinions 5/18/21 Alex Has Opinions 5/18/21

‘Falcon & The Winter Soldier’ & The Myth of Nonviolence

The hit MCU show gets social justice all wrong.

The MCU show Falcon and The Winter Soldier (2021) tries to cover a lot of ground in its mere six-episode runtime. Among many other things, the series is a reflection on what it would mean for a Black man to serve as an American superhero and icon, the white entitlement that inevitably follows in the wake of that change, as well as a not entirely fleshed out conversation about nationalism and anarchy. It covers all these themes and more while connecting to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe and delivering plenty of action.

The way the series ties these themes together is through a philosophical debate on violence and activism. At the core of this show, there is the central question of how to stop an injustice. When an entity is going to do something unspeakable, as the central governing body is poised to do in the show, how far should you go to stop them? Is it okay to use violence, even if civilians end up in the crosshairs? Should you resort to extreme methods to prevent tens of thousands of people from being killed and millions displaced?

This conversation is an interesting one for a mainstream franchise to have, but unfortunately, the show largely sidesteps it, so the viewer doesn’t have to think too deeply about these questions. We walk away paternalistically thinking that the series’ more radical actors, while motivated by the right reasons, are ultimately misguided. They went too far with their violent ways and should have fought for social change “the right way.”

That narrative is awfully convenient for a multi-billion dollar company such as Disney to make. We need to question if maybe there is a reason the “bad guys” are the ones who want to disrupt the social order, and the “good guys” are the ones who ultimately maintain it.

It’s tough to talk about the MCU because every triumph and mistake follows it — that’s the whole point of an extended universe. One frustrating creative decision that has been with us since Phase II is an active attempt to distance all criticism from real-world American institutions. While there is an Earth and a United States government in this fictional universe, it’s not our world. It’s close. It has most of the same culture, music, racism, and inequality, but much of the mistakes perpetrated by the US government in our timeline were not actually caused by it in this one. As we learn in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), these were caused in the MCU by secret HYDRA agents working within the US government, “secretly feeding crisis, reaping war” so that humanity would “sacrifice its freedom to gain its security.”

We see a similar situation play out in Falcon and The Winter Soldier. While the U.S.’s racism is called out in this series — an issue difficult to ignore following the George Floyd uprising — the actual US government and the military are mostly not criticized here. A fictional inter-governmental body known as The Global Repatriation Council calls the shots in this series. The GRC is the one responsible for the current “bad” plaguing the world. “You Americans have become brutes,” says one anarchist sympathizer to an American operative, insinuating that it’s the GRC that has really changed things. This deflection is why many critics often label MCU films and shows a type of propaganda. This level of distance safely allows the viewer to absorb the message of these films without feeling defensive over genuine criticism.

The Falcon and The Winter Soldier likewise commits a similar sidestep with its villain. While there are many antagonists on this show — the mischievous Baron Zemo (Daniel Brühl), the new Captain America John Walker (Wyatt Russell), the elusive Power Broker of Madripoor, a mysterious lobbyist called Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) — the central “bad guy” is an idealistic revolutionary named Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman). Karli is a young ideologue and super-soldier who wants to uproot the status quo. She leads a grassroots movement of ordinary citizens who are tired of how the world's governments manage the planet, and are not afraid to resort to violence to get what they want.

Right off the bat, this characterization rings some alarm bells. Our recent history has been one of young activists such as Greta Thunberg fighting for social justice. Intentionally or not, when you make your revolutionary, grassroots movement led by a charismatic young woman, it’s going to create a comparison with these real-world movements. The implicit framing we receive (i.e., the message this story is trying to impart to the viewer) is that the movements of our world have the potential to be this “radical” as well.

However, Karli isn’t battling to stop climate change or other more tangible, polarizing issues, but instead belongs to a group called the Flag Smashers, who want to live in a world without borders. The central conceit is that during “the Snap” (i.e., when an intergalactic space tyrant removed half of all sentient life from the galaxy), there were more resources to go around, which meant old paradigms were no longer enforced. Migrants that were once prevented from entering parts of the world due to xenophobia were now actively welcomed to “developed” countries with open arms.

After everyone who left came back, referred to in the show as “the Blip,” it created a strain on resources. There were suddenly billions of more people again, after five years of society readjusting to them being gone. We see a great reflection of this shift when superhero Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) tries to get a loan from a bank. He used to have government contracts, and under the rules before the Blip, he should qualify for a Small Business Administration (SBA) loan, but as the banker says: “…what, with everyone just showing up, well things tightened up.”

Karli is fighting on behalf of all the people who experienced greater equity during the Snap and are now being pushed out of their newfound homes by increasingly uncaring governments. From an ideological standpoint, it’s hard to argue against her perspective. We don’t see too much of the abuses the GRC has caused, but the one refugee camp we do visit is chronically underserved. One character mentions not getting supplies from the GRC for over six months. Much of Karli’s work in the show involves securing supplies for these refugees or “internationally-displaced persons.”

It would have been nice to see a show centered on a character like Karli, who is fighting against an arguably oppressive government. We instead get one centered on Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), aka Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Although these two characters work on the fringes of the law, they are still very much agents of state violence. They have contacts within the US government (see Joaquin Torres) and receive logistical support from them as well. They may be unhappy with the current world order, but they are still fighting against Karli on behalf of entities like the US government at the end of the day.

And so, how the show manages to accomplish the catwalk of giving Sam and Bucky the moral high ground is to portray Karli and, on the flip side, the New Captain America, aka John Walker, as too extreme sides of the same coin. Karli, who advocates for actions such as blowing up supply depots with guards inside them, represents activist radicalism. The new Captain America, who smashes a Flag Smasher agent with a shield in front of national television, represents American jingoism. Yet as the old Captain America Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson narratively prove, neither side is considered correct. It’s not the mantle of Captain America — an entity that is simultaneously a symbol for both America and vigilante justice — that is portrayed as wrong, but that some people go too far in how they try to obtain justice. As Sam lectures Karli halfway through this season: “…it’s not a better place if you’re killin’ people.”

As we shall soon cover, this stance is not only naive, but something Sam does not really believe in. He kills people all the time.

The thing about this argument Sam is making (i.e., violence vs. nonviolence) is that it’s a false dichotomy. Not only is the current political order quite violent — the whole reason America has a police force and a military is to enact both defensive and punitive violence — but as a member of that military, albeit as a private contractor, Sam is quite violent himself. The first episode has Sam taking down several terrorists near the border of Tunisia, literally blasting flying helicopters out of the sky and pushing someone out of a moving plane. In fact, according to some counts, he killed more people within this initial scene than Karli did the entire season. It’s funny Sam preaching against violence when he very clearly is a tool of state violence.

Another place this pops up is when former S.H.E.I.L.D. agent Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp) takes out bounty hunters in Madripoor. She stylishly eliminates three of them in a wonderfully choreographed fight scene. These deaths are framed as cool and inconsequential. Action music plays in the background while Sharon kills them. Somehow the value of these men does not seem to matter a whole lot. Compare this scene to the murders Karli and John Walker commit, which are very clearly framed in a negative light. Remorseful music plays in the background, as characters “who are not supposed to die” are killed off.

We can see from these examples that the show never truthfully pushes for a world without violence. How could it? That would make for a dull action series.

In reality, our current system requires a lot of violence to operate. When someone breaks the law or, as what happens too frequently, inconveniences someone in power, violence is used to penalize, jail, and kill perceived offenders. When men like Sam preach nonviolence, this is a misnomer at best and misdirection at worse. What they really are advocating for is that only one side (the one Sam happens to support) be the one allowed to use violence and for everyone else to endure it.

We see this point exemplified in the climax. The GRC is on the verge of passing a law that will forcibly relocate millions of people. Given that most forced relocations have caused the death of countless people (see the Trail of Tears, the Partition of India, or the hundreds of other forced migrations throughout history), this would have amounted to a war crime — something Sam mentions in a touching speech at the end of the series (more on this later).

In the face of tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths, Karli attacked the GRCs headquarters. She performed a desperate action to capture GRC delegates to use them as bargaining chips to stop this violent law. We can argue that she was a bit too zealous in her implementation of that plan, but her logic was sound. If Karli did not intervene, that law would have passed. Before Karli’s “terrorist attack,” the text clarifies that this vote will go a certain way. “Do we really need to bother with a vote?” remarks one GRC representative, “There are troops in place. I can make a call and have the refugees move now.” We see this after the attack has been foiled, too, with one politician assuring Sam that the attack only delayed the relocation momentarily.

Yet, the show is also clear that Karli’s method is wrong. The alleged “good guys” would not have stopped her otherwise. The “right method,” the show suggests, is speaking truth to power in a nonviolent way — something we have already established doesn’t exist. Sam ends up giving a passionate monologue to leaders of the GRC that just so happens to be recorded on national television. This is the tactic that the show wants us to employ because it's the one that works within the narrative. The GRC changes its mind after the speech, and they decide to withdraw the deal.

I could write an entire article on why this is naive on multiple fronts. The idea that you can reason your enemies out of their hateful positions is a nice fantasy, but we have plenty of historical evidence proving this generally doesn’t happen without major political and sometimes violent pressure. The well-documented abuses Trump committed (some arguably treasonous) did not shame Republicans into impeaching him. The Supreme Court opinion Worcester v. Georgia, which ruled that Indian territories are completely separate from States, did not reason President Andrew Jackson out of committing to the Trail of Tears. The leaks committed by people such as Edward Snowden, which revealed a massive, unwarranted surveillance system of US citizens, did not push the US government to dismantle these programs. It is naive to assume that you can get abusive leaders to reform themselves.

Not only would Sam’s monologue not have had its intended effect, but even within the logic of the show, the only reason the world was watching his speech was because of Karli’s “terrorist attack.” Her violence was literally necessary to create that positive change — a fact that seems to go right over everyone’s heads. While Sam is ultimately sympathetic to Karli’s movement, urging GRC representatives not to label the Flag Smashers as “terrorists” and “thugs,” he is very paternalistic of her actions. He calls Karli a “misguided teenager,” never seriously considering for a moment that maybe he’s on the wrong side.

The speech Sam gives is worth watching in its entirety mainly because it's quite revealing to how those in power think. Sam says many good things in there about the weight of being Black in America and not otherizing other people, but he never validates the core philosophical tenets of what the Flag Smashers wanted, which was a world without borders. The closest he comes to this is asking the GRC to consider other voices when making their decisions, saying, “who’s in the room when you are making those decisions? Is it the people you’re gonna impact? Or is it just more people like you?” However, the Flag Smashers were never fighting for more inclusion amongst the GRC board. They were fighting for a world where the GRC no longer exists.

Sam ultimately pushes for a solution no one asked for — one that keeps the current power structure in place and does not challenge the GRC’s, and by extension, his right to use violence. Sam, a begrudging member of the status quo after the events of Captain America: Civil War (2016), is not interested in true reform. He warns the members of the GRC and the world that is watching, that “You’ve gotta step up. Because if you don’t, the next Karli will. And you don’t wanna see 2.0.” A very telling line that reveals more about the anxieties of the people who wrote and made this show than anything meaningful about political change.

Give in to this small concession, Sam cautions to those in power, or the next Karli will take everything from you.

There is a scene near the climax of this series where Karli is talking with the recently revealed Power Broker of Madripoor, who, before this moment, we were led to believe was a friend of Sams. A shootout follows where the Power Broker is pinned to the ground, and Karli points a gun at her. Sam, who had missed the reveal, rushes into the fray, not understanding the context, and immediately accuses Karli of perpetrating violence for violence's sake: “So, what’s next, huh?” he lectures. “You kill ten this time, then, what, a hundred?”

Disregarding the fact that Sam has already killed over ten people in this show, this moment perfectly encapsulates the naivety of the ideology he embodies. You have a man who does not understand the context of the situation, lecturing a person, who at this moment could arguably be perceived as defending herself, to “save” someone who is actively dangerous. He then distracts Karli so much that the Power Broker ends up killing her. He does more than annoy Karli with his words. His distraction contributes to her death.

Despite assertions to the contrary, Sam does not seem to understand how the world he is in works, and I think that describes a lot of people who espouse his position. It’s not that they actively try to spread propaganda that stops reform (though a minority of them might be). It’s just that they have an ideology that prevents them from understanding the harm they are preserving.

Yet, whether someone is naive or malicious, we have to treat these actors seriously, or we not only fall into the same paternalism Sam had for Karli, but can potentially get ourselves killed by it. Most people on the Left do not have the luxury to get distracted by a philosophical conundrum on whether or not violence is okay. They are actively experiencing violence themselves, and need people to defend against it or stop that violence from happening in the first place.

We need to understand where people like Sam are coming from to disarm them, which is why consuming content like Falcon and the Winter Soldier can be so edifying. It is essentially an open roadmap to all the anxieties of the modern liberal: people who want to change things without changing anything at all. These are people who ultimately desire to be on the side of the radical. Sam agrees with nearly everything Karli is saying. He disagrees with her methods because he has not stopped to seriously understand his own.

It would be so easy to scoff at this show and end with a snappy line about how “monologues don’t stop war crimes,” but we need more than detached judgment. We need to get the Sams of the world out of our way, so they stop getting us killed. He’s an easy convert. He’s practically begging to find a way out of his current predicament, and yet we have a lack of media right now showing us how to begin that process successfully.

Now more than ever, we need this content, or the Karli’s of the world will keep dying, and everything will remain the same.

Alex Has Opinions 5/13/21 Alex Has Opinions 5/13/21

The Trope of the ‘Good’ Abusive Mentor

We might want to retire this character for good

The disgruntled wizard with a dark secret. The Kung Fu master with a quick jab. The doctor with a stinging barb. All over media, you find them hurling clever insults and berating the main character in front of the entire class. They operate under the assumption that strict discipline is what’s needed to teach their students. This professor’s words cut to keep the main character in line.

We are at first expected to dislike this teacher, loathe them even. They are the object of the main character’s hatred, and we are there with them hating every minute of this teacher’s “education.” Somewhere in the book or show, however, a turn happens. We learn that this educator was good all along, and the abuse, although not always absolved, is recontextualized in a way that makes us empathize with them more.

This trope of the “good” abusive teacher has been around media for a long time, and it has some pretty unsettling historical roots. As society becomes more tolerant and our understanding of education evolves, we might want to question the application of this trope in media more thoroughly.

The most quintessential example of this trope is of course professor Severus Snape from the Harry Potter series. Severus is a contemptuous man who spends the majority of seven books making the protagonist’s life hell. He gloats over the possibility of Harry Potter being expelled in the second book and assumes Harry is lying about not putting his name in the Goblet of Fire for the attention. There are many more examples of this behavior in the series, and they paint a clear picture of a bitter man willing to abuse his students to satisfy a personal vendetta.

This impression is completely turned on its head in the final book when our protagonist learns that he had been a triple agent for the mentor character Albus Dumbledore the entire time. Harry’s opinion of Snape is changed so dramatically by this information that we learn in the epilogue that he names one of his kids after him (specifically Albus Severus). We walk away feeling better about the character, especially in the movie franchise where Alan Rickman's Severus Snape is portrayed as far less cruel than in the books.

Harry Potter was massively influential. Although this trope existed well before J.K. Rowling (see Miss Hardbroom in The Worst Witch), her work definitely helped inspire characters in the Severus Snape mold. The TV show Shadow and Bone (2021 — present), based on the Grisha novel trilogy, has a character named Baghra (Zoë Wanamaker) who teaches the protagonist magic in a stern and abusive way. She hits her with her cane and berates her abilities. The character Tissaia de Vries in The Witcher TV series (2019 — present) has an undeniably abusive teaching style. She lets her student’s hands become disfigured and for lightning to strike their bodies. Tissaia is so sadistic that she turns her rejects into eels. “Sometimes the best a flower can do for us is die,” Tissaia says of the transmogrified students.

Another great example is the Guardians of The Galaxy (2014) film. The father figure to protagonist Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker), is an alien ravager who raised Quill in a physically demanding environment. “When I picked you up on Terra,” Yondu lectures Quill, “these boys of mine wanted to eat you. They never tasted any Terran before. I stopped them. You’re alive because of me.”

Father of the year, right there.

In the first film, he never shows much kindness towards his adopted son — instead opting to throw a barb or joke his way, which is an upbringing that most likely explains Quill’s own detached outlook.

We see this trope outside of science fiction and fantasy as well, especially in medical and legal procedurals. Professor Loftus (Ernest Clark) in the comedy Doctor in the House (1969–1991) is so intense that he paralyzes a student with fear just so that he will become doctor-worthy. Doctor Cox (John C. McGinley) in the ABC series Scrubs (2001–2010) demeans and berates all of his medical interns to have them be their best. Professor Annalise Keating (Viola Davis), in the law show How To Get Away With Murder (2014–2020), pushes her favorite students into the legal deep-end, having them solve cases as first-year law students. These cases are grueling both because they compromise the students’ ethics and because Annalise is quite demanding.

And of course, there is Dr. Gregory House — the titular character in the FOX show House M.D. (2004–2012). The show is about a genius doctor who is bitter and cruel to all those around him. House is the Head of the Department of Diagnostic Medicine at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Although he is not technically a teacher for most of the series, he serves in a mentor role to the other team members. He is undeniably mean to them and his patients, hurling unkind insults to nearly everybody. “How much do you get for a massage now, without the happy ending?,” he asks a colleague in orthopedics. Yet he is kept on as a staff member, despite these abuses, because of his results. When grilled by a board member (Chi McBride) on why they should keep him, Dean of Medicine Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) reluctantly informs them that he solves the cases no one else can (see season 1 Episodes 14 & 15).

A component of this trope is often that the teacher’s educational style is proven correct by the narrative. The “tough love” they provide many times helps the protagonist master a vital skill set to overcome a trial or the Big Bad. Baghra in Shadow and Bone is mean to her students, but we have every indication that she gets results. “One time, Baghra released a hive of bees on me,” a character named Marie (Jasmine Blackborow) tells the protagonist. “The worst part is, it worked,” says another named Nadia (Gabrielle Brooks). “It really did,” continues Marie, “I could summon at will after that.”

In another example, Quill in the Guardians of the Galaxy does appear to have learned immensely from his adopted father figure Yondu. He comes into the first movie knowing how to fight and pilot spaceships — skills he undoubtedly learned from Yondu while growing up among his ravagers. “I had a pretty cool dad. What I am trying to say is sometimes that thing you’re searching for your whole life. It’s right there by your side all along. You don’t even know it.” This comment is said during a massive funeral for Yondu, where scores and scores of ravagers launch fireworks to honor his life. We are clearly meant to see him as a hero in this scene and not as an abusive maniac who kept his “son” in a terrible environment rather than placing him somewhere without a galaxy’s worth of trauma.

Even when the abuse of mentors itself does not lead to better outcomes, it’s often hand waved away as justified within the context of the story. Snape’s animosity towards Harry Potter hurts the protagonist academically. In fact, Harry appears to have performed better in his O.W.L.S (a magical standardized test) without Snape there. Yet, the narrative's decision to glorify this vindictive potion master in the epilogue undercuts this point. While Snape was a detriment to Harry Potter’s mental health, we clearly are supposed to set those feelings aside when the book comes to a close.

There is a concept in media analysis called “framing,” which focuses on how elements in the story encourage certain interpretations. The text (shorthand for all works, not just books) may not directly say something, but how characters or objects are positioned in the narrative or scene reinforces various ideas and themes. When a character says, or doesn’t say something, it can be just as important as telling the reader a position directly.

When we look at how these stern and sadistic teachers are framed — often proven “right” or “good” by the narrative — that tells us something about what these authors think about teaching in general. They provide direct examples about how the “tough love” approach is a valid educational style, and that is controversial, to say the least. While an author can merely “decide” that an educational approach works through the act of writing a few words, real life is far more complicated.

The thing about universal education (i.e., the idea that every person in a society should be educated as a matter of right) is that it’s a relatively new experiment. For much of human history, education was an asset in the hands of a select few (e.g., the rich, the religious classes, or, on a limited basis, those pursuing a trade).

Universal education only began in the US in the 19th century (see Horace Mann), and the initial product looked very different from today. Public classrooms could be sparsely furnished with supplies, and teachers did not always have much more education than the students themselves. Public education has evolved over the last two centuries to be more expansive, not just in the US but also in countries worldwide. Yet, historically speaking, we have not been managing this massive system of public education very long, which means that a lot of practices we employ in schools will not survive the test of time, as our understanding of education changes.

Until very recently, the idea that children needed a tough hand to learn was the dominant educational narrative, and it’s one that by no means has been supplanted in its entirety. Corporal punishment, or the idea that guardians, including teachers, can inflict physical pain as a form of discipline, remains quite popular in the United States for minors. There are 19 states where corporal punishment is permitted in both public and private schools, and parents are given a great deal of legal leeway in this matter as well.

The problem is that this “laying down the law” approach seems to go against our evolving understanding of childhood development. Ample evidence indicates that hitting children can lead to many problems ranging from increased aggression to antisocial behavior. It doesn’t appear to be very effective either. As Elizabeth Gershoff and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor write in a meta-study about the effects of spanking specifically: “Studies continue to find that spanking predicts negative behavior changes — there are no studies showing that kids improve.”

There’s also the grim reality that the use of corporal punishment falls along pre-existing lines of inequity. For example, Black students are singled out for such discipline at higher rates than their white counterparts. A 2016 peer-reviewed paper on corporal punishment in schools by scholars Elizabeth T. Gershoff and Sarah A. Font found this disparity in their findings, most prominently in several states across the South. The paper remarks on the following: “Black children in Alabama and Mississippi are at least 51% more likely to be corporally punished than White children in over half of school districts, while in one-fifth of both states’ districts, Black children are over 5 times (500%) more likely to be corporally punished.”

Despite this new information, some still employ the “tough love” approach and are annoyed by our society's justified skepticism over it. There are hundreds of quora posts, mommy blogs, celebrities, and politicians devoted to a pro-corporal punishment stance. One example is this chilling quora post where an abuse victim seems to be rationalizing their abuse, writing:

“…I would like to say that I have never been beaten and my parents are pretty great, but they did hit me when I was a kid. The kind of hitting where the parent knots their fingers in your hair and yanks you over sideways (and then your swollen scalp hurts like hell) in order to get you to obey, and then they smack your face numb and your face and mouth get all puffy and red. I’d like to make it clear that you can still be a good person and hit your kid — one example being my dad…”

This is the context in which most people still perceive education. Many of our favorite authors grew up during a time where teachers could abuse their power far more directly than today. JK Rowling, for example, modeled Snape after a real teacher, saying in an interview that he was “loosely based on a teacher [she herself] had.” Rowling would have gone to school in the 70s and 80s, and Shadow and Bone author Leigh Bardugo would have done so in the 80s and 90s. These authors are not directly advocating for more lenient corporal punishment policies, but it’s clear that the “trial by fire” stance to education has seeped into their work, even if subconsciously. Whether recreating the trauma they endured as children or just a personally held belief, these writers present a style of education that forces the protagonist to either brave the fire or get burned.

Going back to the example of Harry Potter, consider how the environment was framed: many people longed to go to Hogwarts as children, so much so that “I lost my Hogwarts invitation in the mail” became a meme. Hogwarts, though, would be a terrible place to go to school. Even ignoring Severus Snape for a moment, it was an environment ripe with abuse at every turn: the children served detention in a forest with murderous spiders; took a standardized test so stressful it caused regular breakdowns; dodged harmful poltergeists in the halls; braved creatures and enchantments that caused serious bodily harm. This was all part of the school’s standard curriculum — well before including Dark Lords and escaped trolls that make their way into the school for plot reasons.

Now, Rowling was not telling us directly in the text that this abuse was acceptable. She was bullied as a child. In many ways, she created a franchise about a child persevering against abusive teachers and guardians. She has gone on record saying that no one should date Snape and that he was not a good guy. She still managed to create a story, however, where not only does an abuser end up being lauded as a hero, but where an abusive environment is depicted as enchanting to visit. Headmaster Dumbledore was a terrible administrator, but he sure wasn’t framed that way. There were plenty of characters who sacrificed themselves during the Second Wizarding War that Harry could have named his child after — Cedric Diggory, Tonks, Fred, Dolby — but it was Severus Snape and Albus Dumbledore who ended up being given that particular honor.

Many of these teachers have these warm and fuzzy moments in the narrative where suddenly, all the cruelty they inflicted onto the protagonist and the world is softened by their heroic actions. In another example, not only is the teaching style of Baghra in Shadow & Bones effective, but she ends up being morally aligned against the series’ Big Bad. When we learn that the shadow summoner General Kirigan (Ben Barnes) has really been evil all along (you are shocked, I’m sure), Baghra tries to stop him from getting power at any cost. We, as the viewer, no longer see her as that jerk abusing teens so that they will learn magic, but as a hero, fighting to stop someone who is “really evil.”

When an abusive teacher is framed to be “good” in the narrative, we need to consider what message is being imparted to the viewer, and if we agree with the moral, it's preaching.

You might disagree with my interpretation of several of these texts. The nature of media analysis is that you try to make your information as well-supported as possible, but that there are other valid interpretations out there. I tried including many different texts to show that this is not a problem of one or two works but a trend in media overall. We have too many abusive teachers and mentors in media whose educational styles are proven “right” by the narrative.

We need to question this pervasive narrative that abuse is okay if it gets results. Snape may have secretly devoted the latter half of his life to a good cause, but he was an abusive teacher who emotionally and physically traumatized countless students, and we maybe shouldn’t look at him as a hero. Baghra’s teaching style may have been effective, but it came at the cost of her abusing the students in her charge. Dr. House may have correctly identified countless illnesses and injuries, but he was verbally abusive to coworkers and patients alike.

Abuse is not okay, even if it gets results, and it bears emphasizing that the results they achieve in these narratives are a fabrication of the author's imagination. In reality, the “tough love” approach may work for a minority of students, but statistically, it's a failure in real life. This educational style is not that effective, and it tends to generate a host of separate problems on its own.

It’s not that abuse shouldn’t be shown in media — in fact, it must be shown. Abuse is regrettably a core facet of our society, and we need art that reflects that reality. However, how those stories frame their characters deserves scrutiny. We need to question who a story decides should be the hero and what earns them that moniker.

Otherwise, we will end up allowing the vilest people into our hearts, and there is nothing magical about that.

Alex Has Opinions 5/7/21 Alex Has Opinions 5/7/21

The Most Exhausting Part About America Is The Pretending

Refuting “American Exceptionalism” so that we can build a better tomorrow!

Growing up as a white, middle-class person in the United States, I was taught many false things about my home country. The narrative told to me repeatedly was that America was the greatest country in the world, sometimes referred to as “American Exceptionalism.” Every politician praised us for being the best place on the planet, serving as a beacon of hope and democracy for everyone else.

President Reagan referred to America as a “shining city on a hill” — a statement he paraphrased from Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop, spoken nearly 360 years earlier. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called our system “the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced.” Many of our greatest political figures have presented a fawning image of American greatness.

This narrative is a false one. While America has many admirable ideals on paper, it’s not “great” for most of its inhabitants or to other members of the international community. It’s an active symbol of terror and oppression for many places around the world. We have started and orchestrated dozens of wars and have actively neglected large swaths of our own population. The ideals these men speak of were regrettably built on the blood and bones of the people they discarded.

This country hurts many people, yet we have to pretend that this reality isn’t true, lest we be labeled irrational extremists. A small, unending hurt caused by being awake in the United States is knowing how bad this country is and being forced to lie to almost everyone but yourself.

I cannot recall exactly when the myth of American Exceptionalism shattered for me. I don’t think there was a single ah-ha moment, but more like a slow, creeping realization. I grew up as a closeted trans kid (though initially, I thought I was just odd) with severe depression and anxiety. I had enough privilege not to get buried, but not enough to excel.

I spent my early years at a Catholic school, and the first major injustice in my life revolved around the priest there sexually molesting several of the students. It was a scandal, but a quiet one spoken about at a whisper. The girl who was rumored to be one of the victims ended up transferring to another school. The priest who committed the abuses was not removed from the church but instead transferred to a non-school district, where he remained until retirement decades later. His “indiscretion” was not revealed to the public-at-large until well after his death.

This event initially led to rage. An injustice had been committed, and we were supposed to pretend as if nothing had happened. I was so angry at the world, though I didn’t understand all the reasons why. I lashed out at the systems of power around me because I had enough privilege not to comply. Years later, in a hastily made decision, I ran in my middle school election under the platform of abolishing all detentions. The administration unsurprisingly squashed this effort. I was promptly removed from the ballot, and the person who promised an ice cream machine won instead (we never ended up getting it, Josh).

As a child, I naively thought that my experiences were unique. I believed that the world was supposed to be a just place but that I was somehow undeserving of that justice. I had seen so many stories of people triumphing over the bad of the world, and it was only when I grew into adulthood that I truly comprehended how banal these inequities were to American history. America was not a shining city on a hill — it was a walled palace sending volleys in every direction.

I learned about how this country was founded on the twin evils of genocide and slavery. I learned about all the wars and military interventions we started — hundreds in all — with over 80 covert interventions orchestrated in just about as many countries. I learned about the over 200,000 Filipino civilians killed during the Philippine-American War, the 2 million civilians killed during the Vietnam war, and the over 32,000 Afghanis we killed during the latest round of imperial expansion. Each time I thought I had reached the floor for my America, only to be shocked by a new low committed by our nation’s alleged heroes.

It was a privilege to learn about these things from afar. I surrounded myself in a shroud of masculine whiteness because I was terrified to be openly trans. I kept thinking if I would have made it over the line as a child if I had, or if I would have ended up like that girl transferred to another school district — buried and unbelieved. “Better to bury myself,” I thought. At least then I would have a choice.

I have seen so many people swallowed whole by our country and even more wither away from neglect. It’s one thing to bring up statistics about how so many Americans are starving and homeless, how hundreds of thousands cannot access proper medical care and clean water in some cases. It’s another to see it.

I have been to communities in America where people are starving on the street. A mother in a wheelchair asks me to buy diapers for her baby. She doesn’t care if I give her money. She wants the diapers for her child because it has not been changed in over a week.

I have been to communities in America where households do not have working sewage, let alone clean water. The smell is the first thing you notice before you even make it to the door of the house. It lingers in your car and on your clothes, and it takes days to scrub off.

I have been to communities in America where children have witnessed people being gunned down in the street. They do not speak about it with horror, but humor — the instance so ingrained in their lives that there is nothing left to do but laugh. The people in these communities certainly have greatness about them, but it is in spite of a country that has abandoned them.

This has never been a good country, let alone a great one, and yet we have to pretend like it is. We have to constantly listen to men like Joe Biden call this “the greatest, powerful, decent nation in the world.” We have to hear former President Obama wax poetically about how “if you had to choose any time in the course of human history to be alive, you’d choose this one. Right here in America, right now.”

Outside, shouting into the void that is the Internet, we are expected to listen to all of these platitudes, nod, and smile. It’s seen as common sense that this is a great country. When people lamented Donald Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again, it seems many were not objecting to the delusional grandeur of that statement, but to the idea that America’s greatness was already behind it. They took no issue with the myth of exceptionalism that has rotted away at this country. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great,” Michelle Obama remarked in 2016, “That somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on Earth.”

When I hear speeches or headlines like this one (and there are many), I find myself transporting back to that younger me who wants to scream. What country has Michelle Obama been living in these past few years? Because it's not my America. In my America, which is to say reality, most Americans have little chance of upwards mobility. My America is a place of vast wealth inequality, racism, and institutionalized violence. I want to talk about those problems without having to comfort the collective delusions of petulant, rich men and women.

It's a tiring dance, and I know I am not alone here in this exhaustion. Most Americans are exhausted. The reasons they give for this exhaustion are varied — the pandemic, the news, increasing political polarization — but I believe it cuts far deeper than anyone one of these things. It has to do with how we organize ourselves as a people. Everything in this country is so dysfunctional, and yet we have to keep trekking along: paying our bills, going to work (if we are lucky enough to have it), and pushing ourselves and our kids through every day. Exceptionalism requires not only that you exaggerate your strengths but that you ignore your weaknesses — that we as a people ignore our problems.

Like myself, some people have had it with this way of thinking. There has been a string of content over the past few years questioning American Exceptionalism. The TV Show The Newsroom (2012–2014) infamously started its pilot with its main character Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), telling a room full of people that America wasn’t the greatest country in the world, and then listing how far behind it was by every conceivable metric. It was a shocking moment at the time, and since then, movies, articles, and books have sprung forward, expounding upon this point. There are now people such as Umair Haque who have made their careers producing content that heavily critiques the United States.

These critics, however, are not the majority opinion. Joe Biden would not have secured the presidency with a bid to return to normalcy if distrust in American Exceptionalism were the norm. When we look at polling data, a sizeable portion of the population believes in America's greatness. For example, in a USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll taken in 2020, 60% stated that America was the greatest or one of the greatest countries in the world.

This perception means that outside the most radical of circles, it's uncouth to criticize America. Most of the time, I suppress my opinions of this country because the people in my life live in the delusion of American Exceptionalism. They do not find it acceptable to call out the brokenness of America unless I caveat it as a limited problem, not a facet of America itself. Strangers on the Internet may read a curated version of that anger in a ten-minute article, but my justified rage is largely seen as counterproductive, irrational, and extreme to everyone outside a narrow few.

Day in and day out, everyone who sees America for the lie that it is has to largely swallow that anger — to pretend like everything is fine — and it’s exhausting. We hold our tongues at work and around our family members. We repeat to our acquaintances the talking points they feel comfortable hearing. We curate our online personas so as not to offend anyone within our chosen professions. Until all that is left is huddled conversations with close friends and screaming on the Internet.

It’s what I have done. Over and over again, I articulate my problems with this country because this is the only place I have to be discontented. I am so tired of having to pretend that this country is somehow better than it is. I write articles on the Internet when in actuality, all I want to do is cathartically scream at this insanity until my lungs give out.

I imagine this article may have ruffled one or two feathers. It was designed to do just that. There is so much hand-holding when it comes to American Exceptionalism, and it has done little good.

Yes, some things have improved over the years, but those gains have not been enjoyed universally, and they don’t excuse the preservation of this awful status quo. It is possible for some things to improve while other aspects of our society remain bad or even deteriorate. The moral arc of the universe does not require that things point in one direction for all things and with all people.

We have such a naive conception of progress. When leaders such as President Barack Obama tell young people that they will be “the ones who will decide whether or not America becomes the country that fully lives up to its creed,” I don’t think most listeners, including the speaker, truly comprehend what that work would entail. I think what people actually hear is that “things used to be bad, but they can and are getting better.” Rather than the truth, which is that things are bad for most people. They are getting worse, and to actually improve things, we will need to fundamentally change so much of America that it will be unrecognizable to us today, assuming it continues to exist at all.

That’s a lot to take in. I’ll wager that there will be one or two people raging against this article in the comments, informing me that everything I have stated is wrong. However, if that were true, you would not be here ranting to a powerless stranger on the Internet. Life would prove your point for you. Greatness does not have to lecture people on how great it is. You are here because the illusion of American progress has been briefly punctured, and you are screaming at the crack in the illusion rather than the illusion itself. You want to go back to thinking everything is fine when it is not.

To everyone else, I know this article was not the most optimistic one I have written. Statements of hope and progress are not inherently bad. We do need to find a future worth fighting for. It’s part of the reason I have a publication called After the Storm, devoted to telling stories about that very topic. Yet, right now, our current image of America is being used as a shield to block us from making that better tomorrow possible.

To truly build it, we need to be honest about both this country’s past and present so that we here and now (not just our children) can diagnose America’s problems accurately. We must be able to say that things are not fine and that they have never been fine. Until we take this step, we are just pretending that everything is okay for the sake of others’ comfort, and it’s exhausting.

Alex Has Opinions 4/30/21 Alex Has Opinions 4/30/21

YouTube’s Copyright System Was Designed to Be Broken

In the summer of 2019, YouTuber Koolers Mobile uploaded a video about a threatening email they had received. It was from the company AppLike, which wanted the creator to take several videos down.

“We reserve the right to take legal action if the named videos remain online…We expect the answer to the request within the next four weeks… Otherwise, we will take necessary steps to enforce our claim.”

The videos in question were reviews of their app — a fairly standard practice on the Internet. AppLike, though, threatened to submit a copyright strike if their demands were not met, claiming that the reviews were a violation of their IP.

Koolers Mobile is not alone in this problem. A quick search online reveals thousands of similar videos from small and large creators alike, claiming that third parties are trying to take advantage of them. This issue is a common one for content creators to deal with, where negligent and sometimes even malicious and opportunistic actors will use the massiveness of YouTube’s platform to squeeze out concessions and income from creators.

When you have a platform managed by AI that no one really understands, those who learn how to exploit it can easily target creators for both revenge and profit.

YouTube Policy

To get a good sense of all this stuff, we first need to talk about policy — I know, I know, not the most fun stuff, but bear with me for a couple of paragraphs, and then we can get to the scandalous bits.

When we talk about copyright strikes, it’s important to note that we are dealing with a complicated intersection between U.S. law and YouTube’s internal policies. Alphabet — formerly Google — which owns YouTube, is beholden to something known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We could devote an entire book to the intricacies of this law — check out a cool breakdown here. In essence, it's a 1998 law that dictates the requirements that must be followed so that copyright holders can have infringing content on the Internet removed without litigation. To not get sued, referred to as a safe harbor provision, platforms have to provide a way for people to eliminate content that violates copyrights —in this case, a DMCA takedown request — and ensure that specific information is included within those claims.

The way that YouTube has interpreted these requirements is one of two ways, a manual form for submitting DMCA takedown requests and a Content ID Match system, the latter of which we will dive into later. The manual form only really requires that the claimant — who in this instance is the person submitting the DMCA Takedown request believing that their content has been violated — supplies their email, their relationship to the copyrighted material, and their name, which can also be a business. The relationship to the material does not have to be very detailed, and in some cases, I have seen examples of ones that are a single sentence long.

In the meantime, the claimant can request the video be taken down, increase the ads on the video, or take some or all of the revenue from the video. If the claimant wants the piece of content taken down, YouTube will often comply as a first resort because the legal responsibility lies with the claimant, who technically perjures themselves for a false claim. It's no skin off YouTube’s back if the matter takes a while to resolve. The creator is the one bearing the financial cost of the video being taken down, and the claimant is the one who will face legal costs if it ends up in court.

The content creator — the target of the claim — gets one strike for an unresolved claim, and after three strikes, their channel can be permanently removed. The content creator can appeal this request with a DMCA counter-notice, but assuming that YouTube doesn’t intervene, they have to appeal directly to the very person trying to take down their video — the claimant. Since claims can take weeks to resolve, you can perhaps see how this system places creators at a disadvantage. After two strikes, creators' accounts are no longer in good standing — essentially putting them out of work for that amount of time. More unscrupulously, claimants have used this power imbalance to punish creators they have perceived as wronging them.

For example, YouTuber Lindsay Ellis created a two-part series about how erotica writer Addison Cain used DMCA takedown requests to punish potential rivals and critics of her work. The YouTuber remarked:

“…it is extremely ironic that we have a fanfiction author who published her erotic fiction, which was just batman fanfic with the serial numbers filed off, filing DMCA claims against an author who appears to be using [her genre’s] tropes…”

For these comments, Ellis quickly became embroiled in the scandal herself after the first part of this series was targeted by Addison Cain with a DMCA takedown request. Ellis had to hire legal representation, and while the matter was ultimately resolved, it came after a month of a tedious back and forth with the writer's lawyers.

In another example, creator James Stephanie Sterling was in a similar situation after reviewing a series of video games by a developer who goes by the moniker Gilson B. Pontes. The claimant strategically spanned their DMCA takedown requests over the course of three separate days so each one of them could be counted as a separate copyright strike. The last one was released on Friday, before the weekend, to make the matter as difficult to resolve logistically as possible. It was only after Sterling threatened to go to court, notifying both YouTube and Gilson B. Pontes of their decision, that the videos were reinstated.

It cannot be overstated how many times DMCA takedown requests are used punitively against creators. There have been well-documented cases of scammers using the ambiguity of this system to ransom smaller creators. The Verge reported on a case of a ransomer threatening to ding a midtier creator with a third copyright strike — in essence deleting their channel — if they did not send them money to a bitcoin wallet or Paypal account. The blackmailer wrote to the YouTuber in a Telegram account and stated that both strikes on the channel would be canceled once the payment was received.

Takedown requests are supposed to take good-faith critique into account — see fair use — but malicious actors are very clearly manipulating this system so they can punish people they disagree with or extract money from vulnerable creators. Most creators don’t even appeal copyright strikes because they find the process too laborious. As professional audio engineer Glenn Fricker told The Verge:

“There’s no third-party arbitration system there. They make the claim and you could deny it, but what’s the point?”

This hesitancy is sadly very understandable. I just spent four minutes explaining how DMCA takedown requests work before even beginning to tackle how their current implementation on the platform is problematic. Most people don’t have the time it takes to grasp the intricacies of these policies, and they certainly don’t have the resources Ellis and Sterling do to pressure platforms such as YouTube to comply. As James Stephanie Sterling remarked in a video:

“And that’s how you beat an unfair, biased, deliberately disadvantageous system. All you need is the privilege to buy and lawyer your way out of it.”

And the situation is getting worse. With the recent solutions YouTube has implemented to solve DMCA takedown requests, manipulations have only exacerbated this problem for smaller creators.

Content ID System

The second way YouTube handles copyright issues is the Content ID System — an approach first rolled out in 2007 and has been steadily increasing in scope every year. The way it works is that certain creators can upload their work to this system — the form of which can be found here — which then creates a sort of digital fingerprint used to cross-reference with YouTube’s library. If a match comes back, a Content ID claim is auto-generated. The content holder can then decide what to do with the video in question — i.e., take it down, run ads, or collect the revenue.

This approach theoretically takes the malicious intent out of the process. No one is targeting anyone in this system because everything is happening automatically. The content creator does not receive a copyright strike on their record and has the same ability to generate a DMCA counter-notice, just like with the manual form. A problem, however, is that the system prioritizes uploaders into the Content ID System, particularly big companies such as Universal, Warner, and Sony, which can place smaller creators at a disadvantage.

In one example, user Paul Davids received a notice of copyright infringement for a backtrack that they made and recorded themselves. Another singer had ripped their backtrack, added vocals and guitar, and uploaded it into YouTube’s Content ID System. Since Paul Davids had not done the same, it meant that they, the original creator, were the person who received a content flag. The situation was resolved, but it highlights how the Content ID System is far from perfect. Again, most users do not bother to file a DMCA counter-notice, which means if you are an unscrupulous or indifferent actor, you can make quite a bit of money extracting ad revenue for content you do not own.

In another example, user EckhartsLadder had their intro song flagged by the company INgrooves — a subdivision of Universal Music Group. This situation meant that they were receiving copyright flags for hundreds of videos, and INgrooves was placing additional ads on their videos and contesting the revenue. EckhartsLadder had to submit a DMCA counter-notice for each claim, and until the situation was resolved, the money from those videos was placed in a holding account. It allegedly affected their income. EckhartsLadder lamented to their viewers in a video:

“They target the most recent videos (i.e., the ones that are still earning a lot of money)…my income has dropped by probably two-fifths since they’ve started this claiming process.”

Yet, the song in their intro, Resonance by the artist Home, was one that user EckhartsLadder had explicitly received permission from the original owner to use. In a Tweet on April 3rd from the musician Home, we can see that they are also confused by the ID claims and have pledged to resolve the situation. The disputed song listed by INgrooves on the hundreds of ID claims was not even the song Resonance, but Absurd by Daniele Matracia, who allegedly was also in the dark about the situation. And so, we have the revenue for a song being contested by a company that doesn’t even own it on behalf of a musician who is not asking for this to happen.

Eventually, the situation would be resolved because EckhartsLadder has a big platform and pressured YouTube to review the situation manually. Most creators are not so lucky. The situation with INgrooves is an ongoing problem dating back almost a decade, and other companies such as Warner Music Group are also aggressively taking advantage of the Content ID system.

While the creators who make a video on their situation mostly have enough resources and willpower to file a DMCA counter-notice — something that does not always guarantee a victory — countless others simply take the loss and move on, especially since they don’t receive a copyright strike for a content ID claim. As one user lamented on the online forum MPGH:

“There is no solution other than going to court. If I click appeal they will put a copyright strike on my account. I don’t know what to do other than just removing the song or deleting the video.”

Unless the claim comes in for a substantial number of their videos, content creators are essentially incentivized to take the loss and move on.

This system was designed to benefit larger content holders, not individual creators. YouTube relies on major music conglomerates for its service YouTube Music, which it bundles together with YouTube Premium — basically an ads-free version of YouTube — for $11.99 a month. Companies such as Universal Music Group and Sony have individual deals with YouTube to make that happen. The Content ID system keeps them happy, so these conglomerates get the revenue they think they deserve without resorting to the courts. According to Universal CEO Lucian Grainge, growing compensation from YouTube’s ad-supported and paid-subscription tiers was a major component to re-up their deal in 2017. The same goes for media companies like Warner Bros. Pictures and Paramount that leave infringed content up to continue extracting ad revenue.

The Content ID system has been implemented to better these relationships. It doesn’t resolve the core problem of Manual DMCA takedown requests and has instead created an even larger problem with automated ones. According to YouTube, most copyright claims are coming through the Content ID System by a ratio of 50 to 1. The revenge stories from the likes of Ellis and Sterling may grab headlines, but what we are experiencing with the Content ID System is a systemic problem, one going on for over a decade, that ultimately makes it harder and harder for individual creators to extract a profit.

YouTube does not appear to have any intention of resolving this situation. When responding to user dissatisfaction with the Content ID system in 2019 — problems that have not gone away — CEO Susan Wojcicki, wrote that she was aware of creators' frustrations with the system and that they were:

“exploring improvements in striking the right balance between copyright owners and creators.”

This legalese may sound nice in a statement, but it's ultimately a nonanswer that fails to identify the problem — copyright owners hold too much power in this dynamic. They have leveraged their position so much that they are now claiming the monetary value of content that they do not own, and for this arrangement to be more equitable, they will have to lose a bit of that unearned wealth.

Final Thoughts

This system is broken on multiple fronts. The original DMCA law provides legal requirements that ultimately reduce litigation costs for companies, not content creators. Platforms have no incentive to ensure if a DMCA Takedown request is happening in good faith. They mitigate their risk by taking the video down right away and then leave the legal responsibility left to the claimant, who technically perjures themselves if they lie about a DMCA Takedown.

Unfortunately, the high cost of litigation means that very few creators, even successful ones, have the time and resources to go to court. Most claimants know this reality, which means that, like with the cases of Sterling and Ellis, claimants can falsely assert that good-faith critiques and reviews are a violation of their copyright. The best-case situation is that the creator has enough clout to publically pressure YouTube to manually review the case and release the videos and income — a policy that places creators at a decided disadvantage.

On top of this problem, YouTube’s automated copyright system, the Content ID System, has created even more problems. It has not solved bad faith manual claims and has instead created an even further problem of creators being swamped by erroneous, automated ones. The Content ID System has merely increased claims, rather than ensuring if the ones being made are happening correctly and in good faith.

For this problem to be solved, YouTube will have to place in some mechanism to ensure that the initial claim does not place creators at such a thorough disadvantage. An obvious step forward would be for the company not to take down videos, extract income, or give out copyright right strikes until after a counterclaim has been rejected or a grace period has lapsed. The law does not require them to take videos down immediately. They are merely doing so to reduce their legal risk to zero. This change would mean creators do not suffer as many consequences upfront. However, if their counterclaim is eventually rejected, it still gives these companies the money they are legally entitled to.

And that's just one possible idea. Many concepts could be implemented, ranging from hiring more human monitors to revamping the three-strikes policy to be less strict. While not solving everything, these solutions would help remove some of the penalties creators who are wrongly targeted by a claim face. This inequity in YouTube’s copyright system does not have to exist. We can see how changes could be made to ensure more equity in the creator-advertiser relationship.

Until the platform is willing to value the people producing work for it — or far more likely, the law is changed to make them — then the money content creators make will get less and less, one strike at a time.

Alex Has Opinions 4/27/21 Alex Has Opinions 4/27/21

Understanding Our Queer Obsession with Childish Things

A breakdown of the LGBTQIA’s community love of young, adult media

Years ago, I was in a gay bar for a screening of Steven Universe: The Movie (2019). It was being emceed by a local drag queen (shoutout to Vagenesis) who would pause the film so that local performers could lipsync their favorite Steven Universe characters. I loved every moment of it: the costumes, the singing, the emotionally intelligent cartoon show about intergalactic space rocks.

I remember looking around the room and seeing smiling, queer faces all around me. There were a lot of LGBTQIA+ adults who loved this show, and not just Steven Universe. I saw people with Adventure Time stickers and gushing about SheRa. There are active queer fandoms for all these shows and more. It’s not just TV either, but board games, stuffed animals, fan fiction, and video games. Several decades earlier, these impulses would have been perceived as childish and embarrassing, but now queer people talk about their young adult hobbies with pride.

This shift represents both a broader trend in our culture as well as elements specific to the queer community. Many people use media to cope with trauma — a refuge for a world that has rejected them as they rebuild their self-esteem — and queer people fall into this category a lot.

There has been a general shift in our society towards being comfortable with liking more “childish” things, and it has progressed very quickly. A little over five years ago, people were openly mocking Bronies (i.e., adult fans of the cartoon show My Little Pony) for liking a kid's show. As user AntagonistDC mocks in their video, My thoughts on BRONIES!!! “They’re all just a bunch of boys, you know, worshipping these ponies, you know, having some kind of autism over them…what’s going on in this generation?”

Nowadays, however, that type of reaction is largely perceived as mean. People may object to certain fringe elements of the community (e.g., bronies who create hyper-violent or over-sexualized fanart). Still, outside of radical conservative circles, it’s not seen as strange for a man to like “girly” things. “…the problem with bronies has nothing to do with grown men liking a children’s cartoon,” argues Gianna Decarlo in the Baltimore Sun in an article that is ultimately critical of the community.

In general, we do not shame people as much for liking “kid stuff.” When that mentality does resurface, it’s usually a minority opinion. When talk show host Bill Mahr lamented about how people who like comic books and superhero movies are childish, writers from Neil Gaiman to Fiona Staples were quick to decry this opinion as out of touch. As Tom Chang countered in Bleeding Cool:

“Maher’s naive message against adult comic fans diminishes the value of generations of visionaries that paved the way for the future. Comic books are beyond just superheroes, encompassing fantasy, science fiction, romance, westerns, historical-based stories: all serving as loose societal templates of what could be.”

Anyone who has followed pop culture for the last ten years knows that nostalgia for old childhood IP is the norm with movies and TV shows. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) first launched with Iron Man in 2008 and is still going strong 13 years later. It’s hard to turn on the channel without coming across the latest superhero franchise or reboot. LGBTQIA+ consumers are very much involved with this trend. There exists not only rampant speculation from outlets of when we will get queer representation in the MCU (probably The Eternals) but also indie creators who are trying to expand that representation themselves (see The Pride, The Young Protectors, etc.).

As another example, we are living through a renaissance for tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Partly, thanks to the podcast Critical Roll more people play this game (and other tabletops) than ever before. Queer people are among this trend, with podcasts like Join The Party, Queens of Adventure, and Godsfall reclaiming this space for the community. In the words of Linda H. Codega in Tor: “The power of queer people to interact with a game that does not question their existence, but molds itself to support it, is a hugely emancipating and rewarding experience.” These products are enjoyed because they give queer people the space to process their identities, and it's not a niche experience.

Overall, there has also been an increasing dominance in media when it comes to nostalgia and childlike wonder. When we look at a lot of the most popular shows in our culture — assuming they're not remakes of childhood movies, TV shows, comic books, or videogames — they usually have one or two characters brimming with kawaii goodness (see Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Shrek, etc.). Even the gritty world of The Mandalorian (2019 — present) has Baby Yoda to counterbalance that show’s edgy aesthetic. Cuteness has become so ingrained in our culture that there is an emerging field of Cute Studies.

A love for childhood nostalgia is everywhere. And so, it's not surprising that queer people, like the rest of society, would be interested in the cute things from our childhood. It is more socially acceptable to do so now than it has ever been before. We are not only permitted to engage with more childhood properties but encouraged to form identities around them.

However, I think there is another element that, while intersecting with this general trend, overlaps with queerness specifically. The greater queer community has had to grabble with a lot of trauma, and the products we consume are sometimes used to process that trauma.

Many queer people did not have the best childhoods. This fact is thankfully changing for some, but, for a long time, queer childhoods were filled with rejection, shame, and a disproportionate amount of abuse. A study by the LGBTQIA+ rights organization Stonewall, for example, found that families are a major source of abuse for lesbians, bisexual women, and transgender people, which partly explains why homelessness among LGBTQIA+ youth remains so disproportionately high.

Something I have come to terms with about trauma by learning about the topic extensively in books, papers, and in therapy is that people will often try to recreate its conditions. We do not fully understand why this happens (it’s doubtful there is a singular reason). The literature varies from the Freudian idea of gaining mastery over it to an aspect of dissociation (see Dr. Sandra Bloom).

This phenomenon is sometimes given the label “repetition compulsion,” though I have also seen the term reenactment. A classic example of this compulsion is someone who has faced abuse as a child, becoming a more sexually provocative adult who places themselves into situations where a similar abuse can happen. People are not always consciously aware of this pattern. Since the nature of this compulsion places the person in similar situations, the trauma can be cumulative, as old experiences bleed into new ones.

A less harmful iteration of the same impulse is when a therapist recreates this behavior in a safer, more controlled environment via exposure therapy. This type of therapy can be used to treat a variety of problems, ranging from PTSD to Phobias to Generalized Anxiety Disorder. The types of treatments are likewise varied. A therapist may ask a patient to recall a feared object or situation to reduce overall feelings of dread and anxiety (see Imaginal Exposure), or maybe they will combine exposure with relaxation exercises to make the situation feel more manageable (see systematic desensitization)

More controversially, I have seen reference to “trauma play” (not to be confused with play therapy), where people engage with their trauma safely. An obvious example is BDSM (short for bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadomasochism), where two or more individuals will engage in various forms of consensual power exchanges. I want to stress that BDSM is not something I have ever seen prescribed by a therapist directly; however, there are many kink-positive therapists that will work with patients to help them understand their various kinks in a non-judgemental way. People involved with the BDSM scene, or just kink in general, may be inflicting a form of harm onto themselves or others, but they are doing so with established boundaries and rules.

These types of behaviors are a useful lens for examining the queer obsession with childhood media. While it may be a bit much to label the vicarious consumption of queer, young adult media as exposure therapy, it does seem to come from a similar angle. Many queer people had terrible childhoods, where they could not do quintessential “childhood things.” We didn’t have first kisses or dates in primary school. We could not identify as queer into well into adulthood, if at all, and that oppression can be quite traumatic.

Queer media lets us revisit those terrible moments safely and with a better outcome. I see many LGBTQIA+ people watching queer shows so they can reimagine a safer, more inclusive childhood, not just for future generations, but for that kid-version of themselves inside their head.

For example, there is an entire genre of media devoted to the queer prom. First visible in the Indie movie G.B.F. over 8 years ago, the subgenre has ballooned in recent years. Buzzfeed launched its own Queer Prom in 2018 for all those high schoolers and college students able to make the trip to Manhattan. Ryan Murphy created an entire movie, with a star-studded cast, with a plot about how an Indiana girl who was denied her prom gets a queer one of her own. The movie received mixed reviews, but it quickly earned high marks from many LGTBQIA+ viewers. “This year I just need a film that would make me feel good about myself as a bisexual man…” writes a reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes. “As a lesbian, I loved it,” goes another.

The LGBTQIA+ community’s obsession with queer, young adult media is quite evident in the various products we support, and I think some of it comes back to this desire for safety. Many of us want to see queer young children who experience acceptance rather than rejection because it allows us to rewire those traumatic moments in our heads. We gush over Adora and Catra sharing their first kiss, Kora and Asami holding hands, or Ruby and Saphire getting married because that’s the past we wanted, not simply the future. It’s a salve to make us feel safe.

When people dismiss these activities as childish or unhealthy, I think they miss a vital element of the picture. This practice is about establishing a sense of control after a lifetime of trauma. When you think about all the unhealthy ways people process their baggage, escapist fantasies that create positive representations for queer people are probably one of the better coping mechanisms to exist.

When I was backed up against the wall of that crowded bar watching Steven Universe: The Movie, Vagenesis said, “look at all of us, having the queer sleepover we never had as kids.” It’s a comment that has stuck with me because it's true. Many of us wanted an accepting childhood, and we didn’t get it. We instead got ostracization, humiliation, and in some cases, physical abuse.

My queer childhood was a lonely one. I was sad, dysphoric, and depressed, and things didn’t get better until my late 20s. I had a lot of work to do, and yet that pain aside, I was a lucky one. I eventually found some semblance of stability, but the pain still lingers. I think about missed connections and disappointments often. I see so many other queer people likewise looking back at their childhoods with regret and longing, instinctually trying to rewrite that pain.

We can’t have those times back, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. We impossibly try to remake those moments over and over again, and in the process, we hopefully work towards making a better today and tomorrow for everybody else.

Alex Has Opinions 4/20/21 Alex Has Opinions 4/20/21

The Victim Complex at the Heart of Conservative Cancel Culture

We need to talk about how conservatives love to be persecuted

The debate over “Cancel Culture” has been a big discussion in recent years. At a glance, canceling is the practice of using public shame to diminish the social or material capital of someone who says or does something problematic. A classic example of this is film producer Harvey Weinstein. He is now serving prison time after many women came forward about the sexual harassment and assaults he committed against them.

There is no unified consensus on the efficacy of Cancel Culture. Some people think it’s a morally correct form of justice in the face of a system that refuses to punish its worst offenders. Others (mainly conservatives) believe that it has gone too far and is now ruining the moral fabric of society. There are more still between these two points, arguing that Cancel Culture exists but is not as effective or as pervasive as these two parties claim.

We will sidestep the conversation of whether Cancel Culture is right or wrong and instead discuss its narrative purpose in the larger discourse. Regardless of whether Cancel Culture can be problematic, it serves as a way for conservatives to continue a narrative of persecution that allows them to justify bigotry and intolerance — a trend that has been going on for hundreds of years.

The contemporary usage of the phrase “canceling” seems to have its origins in a misogynistic joke in the 1991 film New Jack City. The character Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes) breaks up with his girlfriend, who is in tears about all the destruction he has caused in the film, by saying, “Cancel that bitch. I’ll buy another one.” Rapper Lil Wayne would later reference this scene in his 2010 song I’m Single, singing: “Yeah, I’m single. N***a had to cancel that bitch like Nino.”

Canceling rocketed in popularity several years later due to the reality show Love & Hip Hop: New York. Character Cisco ended an argument with love interest Diamond by telling her that she was canceled. Cisco would later say that New Jack City served as inspiration for the one-liner. You’re canceled immediately blew up online on sites such as Twitter, where people joked that certain brands and people were canceled. Some of these statements were more serious (i.e., requests to unfollow them if they liked person x or thing y), but most of them were simply jokes.

Allegedly, this has turned into a new movement of needlessly dragging people, both online and offline, for the most trivial offenses. As conservative commentator Harry Hurley writes hyperbolically for WPG Talk Radio: “Their concept of “Cancel Culture” is that if they don’t agree with you … they will take away your social media platform … your record of accomplishment, fame, business, reputation, or, any combination of the above … because they have decided that you’ve done something unforgivable…”

Yet, it’s difficult to trace the alleged shift from cracking jokes about canceling brands on Twitter to the mobs' Harry Hurley is talking about here, mainly because mobs have always been with us. Mobs were with us during the Salem Witch trials helping to burn women alive. They were there during the Red Summer of 1919, stringing up people of color. Mobs were also there during the Scarlet Scare terminating LGBTQIA+ people from their jobs. A lot of what we consider to be Cancel Culture is taking our society’s collective weaponization of “shame” (i.e., casting ourselves in a negative light for transgressing a norm) and “guilt” (i.e., casting our actions in a negative light for transgressing a norm)— something that has existed in society for thousands of years — and retrospectively rebranding it as this new force.

For example, men such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby were allegedly “canceled” because they sexually harassed and assaulted women. However, they broke the law. They were made liable by the government for those actions and were then scrutinized by the public for them. The only significant shift here was not the punishment itself (people are punished and judged for sexual harassment and assault all the time) but the targets. Rich men are not normally held accountable in our society for these kinds of behaviors. We do, however, routinely scrutinize and shame poor and brown individuals for breaking these norms.

The same goes for canceled celebrity Louis C.K. who faced intense public scrutiny (though no legal consequences) for sexual misconduct. Many have been keen to paint this as part of the new Cancel Culture, but this was by no means the first time the public turned on a celebrity for expressing an opinion the mainstream public disapproved of. Over 17 years ago, the country band The Dixie Chicks faced an intense backlash for criticizing President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, and unlike Louis C. K., their reputation was dinged for years. Fans boycotted their albums, and they were blacklisted from the airwaves by many members of the industry.

Clearly, harassment and abuse from “mobs” existed back then, and they continue to exist now. Millions of people face unfair harassment every year, especially on social media platforms where such behavior is rampant. This is a problem. It’s just not a new problem. Neither is it one exclusively limited to the left.

The idea of publicly shaming and sometimes harassing and abusing people for violating perceived norms has been going on for a long time (again, see the Salem Witch Trials). There is even ample evidence that ganging up on someone for violating social norms isn’t a uniquely human experience. Bullying-like behavior has been found in other animals such as Chimpanzees. As Hogan Sherrow wrote in the Scientific American about why three Chimpanzees were bullied to death:

“In all three instances the males that were killed appeared to have broken social rules or norms, and bullying-like behaviors that erupted into violence were used to attempt to get them to conform. Among chimpanzee, and many other primate societies, proper socialization and conformity are critical for maintaining social order and consistency, just as they are in humans. Individuals whose behavior challenges, disrupts or are considered unusual are often the targets of aggression, and that aggression continues until those individuals change their behavior.”

This narrative of collectivized harassment being a new phenomenon is nonsense. The thing anti-cancel culture people are “suddenly” reacting to is not the tactic of shame and harassment itself — that’s been with humanity for a while. Conservatives continue to weaponize shame quite readily for topics such as preserving “traditional” norms and family structures. We have seen conservatives support the burning of John Lennon records and destroying Keurig coffee makers. We have also witnessed conservatives advocate for doxxing and harassment campaigns against members of the left.

The issue here is more about what cancel culture rhetorically lets these men (and a few women) accomplish — i.e., it lets them pretend that they are persecuted. Cancel culture paints their movement as one under attack, and when someone is attacking you (as conservatives claim that leftists are doing to them), that gives you social permission to strike back.

Conservatives believe that they are victims, or, at least, they spend a lot of time broadcasting this belief everywhere in the media. There are articles lamenting how conservative students cannot express themselves in universities, how conservative teachers are ignored, and how conservative workers live in fear. A Hill-HarrisX survey in 2019 found that 78% of GOP respondents believed conservatives suffered discrimination (and that figure has not gone down).

Conservatives as a group, though, are not a persecuted minority within the United States. Some individual conservatives may be having a hard time, but as a group, they are overrepresented in political institutions such as the Senate, the House of Representatives, state legislatures, and the courts. They have a disproportionate amount of power over the political discourse, which does not appear to be going away anytime soon.

It’s true that many conservative Americans may claim to feel oppressed, but feeling persecuted is not the same thing as being persecuted. It’s common for people who are called out for harming others to conflate that feeling of shame with being hurt themselves. As author Nora Samaran writes of white defensiveness when examining racism in her essay Own, Apologize, Repair: Coming Back to Integrity:

“If we cannot feel ‘comfortable’ while grappling with the reality of colonization, or if we cannot have our bubble of ego preserved and coddled while we learn the hard facts about racism, we expect that it is somehow normal that we can go on the attack, and expect the people experiencing harm to coddle and apologize to us, rather than being responsible for our own feelings…”

We see this turnaround constantly from people of privilege when they are criticized. They will call people who criticize their racism as reverse racists. They will decry trans people asking them to respect their identities as the true bigots. This trend of recasting oppressed people as aggressors has been a tactic of oppressors for centuries, and it doesn’t start and end with defensiveness. It ultimately can be used to preserve and reinforce power structures.

For example, during the 19th and 20th centuries, it was common to see white people lynch Black men for allegedly having sex with white women. It often didn’t matter if the relationship was consensual or real. Many times the accusations were false. It was merely propaganda white people used to justify their place in the hierarchy, and they readily employed it whenever that position was threatened.

Activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett recalls in one example of going to verify an extra-judicial killing of a black man (described by authorities as a “brute”). He was accused of raping a local Sheriff’s 7-year old daughter. When she got there, she learned that the Sheriff’s daughter was actually in her late teens and that the lynched man was a farmhand well-known by the family. The Sheriff used the myth of the black predator to save his daughter’s reputation — a myth that would pop up time and time again to justify white violence (see the Tulsa Race Massacre and the Rosewood Massacre).

We see the same power dynamic again in how LGBTQIA+ people were treated for most of our history. Authority figures would treat queer Americans as active threats to be reviled and feared. An infamous 1961 PSA created with the help of the Inglewood Police Department, and School District depicts “homosexuals” as active threats that prey upon children. As the narrator hyperbolically claims in the video, “What Jimmy didn’t know was that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious. A sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual.”

It should go without saying (though sadly doesn’t for many) that these ideas were false. There has been no evidence proving that LGBTQIA+ people are any more predatory than heterosexual ones. This narrative was not an objective fact but a salve that allowed mainstream society to actively discriminate against this community without feeling bad for doing so. After all, it’s far easier to criminalize people when you don’t see them as human beings, but rather as monsters looking to take away everything you hold dear.

Conservatives are employing this tactic again with the Cancel Culture debate. They are using the image of false victimhood to ignore responsibility and perpetuate harm. They are insinuating that trans people are predators and that elections won because of high voter turnout from Black and brown people are invalid. Conservatives are portraying marginalized people as aggressors, using this rhetoric as a pretext to advance discriminatory policy.

As of writing this, many conservative polities within the United States are using the specter of Cancel Culture to attempt to pass bills that deny trans youth access to medical care and advance laws that make it harder for individuals to vote. This legislation will do untold harm to the people living within those communities, and it would not have been possible without the enemy of “Cancel Culture.”

America was a country founded on injustice. We genocided many of this continent’s first inhabitants and pushed the remainder into reservations. We built up our economy using enslaved people and never compensated the descendants of that travesty with the money they deserve. We also continue to let millions languish in poverty to maintain unjust hierarchies.

Those truths are hard to swallow for those in power, and, from the beginning, they generated the same projection we experience today with the Cancel Culture debate. We have seen how victimization has been used as a cudgel for oppressors to ignore accountability. It has allowed the majority to paint the people they are oppressing as the true monsters, so they can pass laws against them and still believe themselves to be in the right.

This does not mean that mob mentality is a topic unworthy of discussion. Mobs (i.e., collective harassment) exist, and we should be figuring out social tools that allow us to mitigate that abuse. Now more than ever, we need to have more productive conversations. We need to improve as a society so that all of us can communicate more effectively and clearly. It’s apparent that platforms such as Twitter do not achieve that end. If anything, they seem to worsen outcomes.

Conservatives bemoaning cancel culture, however, are not looking to have that conversation in good faith. They are trying to build a narrative that paints them as victims so they can continue being the oppressor. It has nothing to do with accountability and everything to do with overstating harm to perpetuate violence onto others.

If anything needs to be canceled, it’s that.

Alex Has Opinions 4/16/21 Alex Has Opinions 4/16/21

The Flawed Logic Behind Getting Your News From “Both Sides”

The “both sides” rhetoric can be used as a tool of oppression.

If you have followed the political discourse for the last couple of decades, you’ll have noticed an unending conversation around how you need to get your news from both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum. “Democrats must get out of their bubble,” writes Arlie Hochschild in the Berkeley Blog. “To Beat Trump, Democrats May Need to Break Out of the ‘Whole Foods’ Bubble,” David Wasserman laments in The New York Times. “Democrats And Republicans Should Argue More — Not Less,” suggests Daniel Cox in FiveThirtyEight.

This maxim has led to the creation of digital platforms such as OneSub and Nuzzera. These sites aim to burst your bubble so that you can get information from the other side. “Unbiased news does not exist; we provide balanced news and civil discourse,” declares AllSides, a news site that breaks its content into five categories — the far right, the right, the center, the left, and the far left.

For a variety of reasons, this advice couldn’t be farther from the truth. It not only reduces the many complexities within these two political coalitions into an unhelpful binary, but it also perpetuates misinformation in the process. Some information is incorrect, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s true to satisfy some imagined doctrine of fairness. We need to build a world where people seek new information to expose themselves to different perspectives, not to assuage the hurt feelings of people who are misinformed or wrong.

The advice that you should get news from both the Left and the Right rhetorically seems sensible. We should be examining our biases constantly to see if they are accurate. We all have blind spots, and I encourage people to read all kinds of information from many different sources to verify if what they believe is true. However, part of that work means acknowledging both the reality of how politics works and how we process information as human beings.

Firstly, the idea that most users exist in echo chambers due to lack of exposure to other sources online is debatable. Many consumers use social media as their launch point for information, which exposes them to diverse perspectives. They aren’t always the most accurate voices (a whole other problem), but they are varied. A 2016 paper (using 2012 data from over 50,000 users in the US) found that many participants did visit sites with opposing viewpoints — with only 8% having low media diversity. A 2016 Pew Research report likewise found that the majority of people’s social media feeds are filled with an array of perspectives.

Yet even if media bubbles were caused by a lack of exposure, which doesn’t seem to be the case, this perspective would come with some issues. One of the main problems with getting a “balanced perspective” is that it flattens everything into a Left or Right when really we are talking about complex coalitions united temporarily to achieve policy objectives. The Right is composed of groups ranging from Christian fundamentalists to libertarians to white ethno-nationalists. The Left is likewise made up of everything from business-friendly moderates to progressives to communists. There may be arguably some similar psychological elements that unify these two camps, but really the only thing they can agree on is that the other side is mostly worse.

When we examine the Left more deeply, we see a lot of contradictions, which will inevitably lead to fracture once the coalition’s short-term goals have been met (i.e., the few things everyone can agree on). This is not me being pessimistic but merely acknowledging the reality of all these disparate worldviews. Economic liberals generally want to work within the confines of the markets to create reform. Progressives and social democrats want to use government tools to more strictly regulate that marketplace, tax the wealthy, and expand the social safety net. Communists and anarchists want to dismantle that marketplace entirely and place private property into collective hands. These ideologies cannot possibly lead to the same place.

The same logic applies to coalitions on the right too. The world that libertarians and religious fundamentalists want is not the same. One wants a world dictated by their interpretation of a religious text, and the other wants society to be governed completely by market forces. There is natural tension there, so the moment their short-term goals are met, assuming they are ever met at all, they will join groups that better advance their interests.

When people exclaim that we need news from both the Left and Right, the natural question becomes, where on the Left and the Right are you referring to? Do you want people to read The White Supremacy Times? Are you directing them to zines from anarchist collectives? Are you giving them the latest copy of the Communist Quarterly? Do you tell everyone to read the Pope’s sermons? When examining this suggestion literally, we begin to understand how absurd of a perspective it is. We cannot possibly devote our time to understanding all the Left and the Right's nuances. There is no uniformity among these two arbitrary sides in the political spectrum. It’s merely a useful shorthand meant to describe coalitions tied together by circumstance.

Not only is the suggestion of consuming news from “both sides” impractical and reductive, but it goes against how human beings process information. We are emotional beings driven by biases and blind spots that prevent us from weighing information objectively (see cognitive biases). In fact, some evidence suggests that exposure to the “other side” can worsen polarization because it causes people to double down on their stated positions. A paper published in 2018 asked participants to follow a bot that retweeted opinions on the opposite side of the political spectrum from themselves, and it had surprising results. Users reported being more confident in their initial viewpoints once the experiment concluded.

There is a high probability that you would have an opinion about being told to read The White Supremacy Times or the Communist Quarterly. That’s a reality we have to acknowledge when telling humans to consume information. We have frameworks we use to sort data. Our biases have us naturally discard certain information while spotlighting others. For example, a cognitive bias commonly referred to as “motivated reasoning” can be used to describe why some of us are so willing to dismiss information that conflicts with our worldviews. As explained in the BBC by David Robson: “Countless studies have shown that we are so attached to our political identities that we will devote extra cognitive resources to dismissing any evidence that disagrees with our initial point of view, so that we end up even more sure of our convictions.”

If I am somewhere on the Left, then chances are my tribe and I have categorically rejected the Right’s various ideologies. The Right coalition is advocating for policy objectives (e.g., things such as banning abortions, rolling back labor laws, repealing LGBTQIA+ protections, etc.) that are completely inimical to what I believe and know to be true. I am probably not going to objectively weigh the merits of the other side, even if I pretend to, because nobody’s brain works that way. It’s emotionally invested in a certain outcome, and it is going to filter out the stuff I disagree with and highlight the information that strengthens my preferred positions.

This filtering happens, and we need to build information systems rooted in real human psychology, not an imagined concept of objectivity. We do a lot of harm when we pretend otherwise. When we emphasize the merits of “both sides” (which, again, is reductive and limiting to our political discourse), this rhetoric hampers our ability to call out dangerous or problematic positions.

Because when “both sides” are considered valuable, how can one of them be wrong?

Let’s talk about climate change. It’s common knowledge that climate change is real, but infamously, one of the biggest debates waged over the past few decades in the political sphere has been over its existence and causes.

During the early 2000s and up to the 2010s (and now), we saw climate skeptics debate or downplay the “merits” of climate change. Think tanks like the Heritage Foundation released regular reports stressing that new information about climate change was “really nothing revelatory.” In another example, skeptic Bjorn Lomborg had a 2005 TED Talk (not a TEDX Talk, but a TED Talk) about how there were so many better problems to address other than climate change. And, of course, a member of Congress infamously brought a snowball into the House chamber to talk about how climate change wasn’t real.

Again, I want to stress that climate change is being worsened by human activity, and if unchecked, it will have catastrophic effects on societies across the globe. The majority of the academic consensus supports this position. We can see articles, videos, speeches, and reports during this period stressing how the warming of the planet is caused by human activity. Yet we spent the better half of four decades we can’t get back, arguing over the validity of this well-established fact. Skeptics were brought onto shows and into the halls of power to advocate for a position that was — not a difference of opinion, not a new perspective — but simply wrong.

This “bothsidesism” was not only reductive, but it was ultimately harmful because it framed an issue as having two sides when the science on the matter was settled. It made people not versed in the topic think that the issue was up for debate. When polled by Gallup in 2009, 41% of Americans claimed that concern with Global Warming was exaggerated, and you couldn’t really blame them because their leaders weren’t taking the issue seriously either. A major effort to introduce Cap & Trade legislation (i.e., regulating carbon emission through a market system) was killed off in 2010. We have not seen an earnest attempt to regulate carbon since. A recent study by Rachel Wetts concluded that the “both sides” narrative in the media was a major contributing factor to this atmosphere of skepticism and indifference. The Grist recapped some of her findings as follows:

“…one reason for the imbalance might be tied to journalistic norms of objectivity, which reporters and editors often interpret as a need to give at least two sides to every story, no matter the science. She called this “false balance,” because it can put unsubstantiated opinions on the same footing as well-established facts. In the case of climate change, she said that the practice has lent legitimacy to those who deny climate change, leading readers to believe that denial is “more than a fringe stance.”

So much of our time would have been saved if these positions were framed as false from the beginning or never given air time at all. We don’t need to validate the information of a group of people who are wrong by all conceivable metrics. It may be useful to read climate change arguments to know how to counter them rhetorically, but they are not valid sources of information. Many positions on the Right are not any more factually useful for getting your information than learning geometry from flat-earthers or biology from anti-vaxxers.

In fact, when we look at the people who insist on flattening perspectives to two sides, many of them have a material reason for doing so. We now know that a lot of climate change skepticism was funded by conservative actors such as David and Charles Koch, petroleum billionaires who had a financial interest in stopping our society’s switch from fossil fuels. The Koch brothers have given hundreds of millions of dollars in seeding think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. ExxonMobil not only has also given a hefty sum of money to similar think tanks and climate change-denying politicians, but purposefully buried the reality of climate change for over 40 years.

These actors were aware that climate change would be bad, and they used the “both sides” rhetoric to sow doubt and confusion among the public. A leaked presentation in a 1989 ExxonMobile report to the company’s board shows a possible beginning to this approach. The report argues for the company to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions regarding the potential enhanced greenhouse effect” and to “urge a balanced scientific approach.”

In truth, people who demand that we understand both sides of a polarizing issue sometimes have a vested interest in doing so, even if it’s merely a psychological one. Several of the pundits we mentioned at the beginning of this article, who urged Democrats to go outside their bubble, are either self-identified moderates or conservatives. Daniel Cox is a fellow for the Koch Brothers-funded American Enterprise Institute. David Wasserman works for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. They may pride themselves on being Moderate Democrats or Lincoln Republicans, but they generally support a liberal, economic worldview when you comb through their policies.

When they argue for a fair and balanced approach from sources “on the left and right,” what they really seem to be asking for is for people to affirm their worldview in “the center.” They are not telling people to consume the philosophies of anarchists, communists, or libertarians because these are philosophies that people “in the middle” — people who flatten all politics into Left and Right — have rejected. It’s always the Left that must understand their perspective, but the same luxury is never returned in practice.

Looping back to to the example of Allsides (the website that promises to “provide balanced news and civil discourse”), the fact that the site frames all news as either center, left, or right is a moral choice. This site is literally centering the center, and as a consequence, much gets left out. They are implicitly labeling all other points outside their preferred position as an Other — an item left or right of the idealized center.

As we can see, not only is this framing reductive and contrary to political reality, but, at its worst, it can be used as a tool to preserve unjust systems of oppression. The “both sides” rhetoric was employed by fossil fuel companies to prevent genuine reform from taking place. It allows people to believe that they are doing a civic good when they might actually be absorbing a downright toxic narrative.

As mentioned earlier, most people already get their news from various sources, and only a tiny portion of Americans have low media diversity overall. The problem of the media bubble appears to be one of hyper-engaged, very online users, which, if I had to guess, not only describes the people these writers are complaining about, but the writers themselves.

There are issues with digital spaces: misinformation spreads more quickly than accurate information; collective and individual harassment is rampant; polarization does not seem to be going away. We need to develop better ways to mitigate these problems; however, many are happening at a systems level. We get our information from deeply flawed social media platforms that need to be overhauled or set aside completely. There is not much to be done about that apart from divesting ourselves from them overall and lobbying for reform.

All this being said, seeking out new information is still a good thing. We should be challenging ourselves to acquire new knowledge and perspectives. There are enormous psychological and physiological benefits to doing so. We shouldn’t uphold erroneous and false information as part of that process. We need to be focused on the truth rather than hurt, conservative feelings.

Alex Has Opinions 4/14/21 Alex Has Opinions 4/14/21

The Perfect Video Games for Your Next Virtual Vacation

A guide to some of the best video games escapes this side of the multiverse.

Video games allow us to escape to fantastical new worlds. We are permitted to play with people and do things that would not normally be accessible to us. This fact makes them a perfect vehicle for travel. You are not just going to far-off countries, but realms that defy everything but the human imagination.

And like any vacation, you need a guide. We are going to rate these games based on how great of a vacation spot they are. This list is a continuation of an earlier guide, the first part of which you can access it here.

Join us as we judge these multiverses on their locals, vistas, and food to provide you the ultimate list for your next virtual vacation.

Final Fantasy VII Remake — Best City Crawl

Final Fantasy VII Remake has the best of both worlds, from fantasy and science fiction. You play as a sword-wielding hero named Cloud Strife in the super-advanced city of Midgar, fighting against the evil Shinra Electric Power Company, whose actions threaten the very existence of the planet. This game lets you cast magic and use hi-tech simultaneously, which is a truly wonderful experience.

The most thrilling (and shocking) part of this game is the environment. Midgar is a heavily stratified city where the upper class lives on plates lifted above the ground, while those impoverished live below them in sunless slums. Let yourself wander through the streets, experiencing both the good and the bad.

The Locals: Mixed. Like any corporatocracy, there is a fair amount of cognitive dissonance happening in the city of Midgar. People living in the upper levels are fairly ignorant of all the problems being caused by Shinra and would much prefer entertainment. Everyone else is either beaten down or down for a fight.
Where To Sleep: If you want a wild, eccentric venue where you can dance your heart away, and also experience great accommodations, go to the Honey Bee Inn. This large venue has a huge dance floor and private rooms if you need to take a break from all the action.
Best Venue: It may not be in the best part of town, but Seventh Heaven is the perfect dive bar. There is a friendly bartender who will listen to all your troubles. Use the jukebox or dartboard if you need to get out some pent-up frustration.
Most Stunning Vista: Aerith’s Garden is an oasis inside the slums of Midgar. This adorable house sits beside a waterful, surrounded by a lush garden. Steampunk valves protrude from the sides of the rocky barrier that separates the house from the slums. Overhead you can see a gap between two Midgar plates, integrating these two dissonant spaces aesthetically.
Best Grub: The Wall Market in Sector 6 is an infamous shopping and entertainment district. There is a restaurant there where you can chow down on some delicious food. Try the special!
Honorable Mention: There are so many good games that feature a city. Don’t like Final Fantasy? Check out Bioshock, Dishonored, Mirror’s Edge, or LA Noire.

Minecraft — Best Procedurally-Generated Expedition

It’s hard to beat a classic. If you want some aimless fun — where literally the sky is the limit — then you want the sandbox game Minecraft. Some people spend their time trying to survive the world’s eldritch horrors. Others will build obscenely intricate creations that rival real-world buildings or the complexity of computers. There is also the option to set the game on peaceful and pick a direction and go.

No matter what your playstyle is, Minecraft allows you to explore a world that is both real and fantastical: traverse through forests and underwater depths, hop over giant mushrooms, craft magical items, slay dragons, and punch lots and lots of trees. This procedurally-generated world is your pixelated oyster.

The Locals: Mostly hostile. It’s fine to walk about during the day (above ground), but you better get inside at night. There are a few scattered villages throughout this world; however, most of the villagers there will not give you the time of day unless you are willing to toss a few emeralds their way.
Where To Sleep: We recommend anywhere with four walls, a roof, and a torch. Villager houses make an especially great space in the early-game.
Best Venue: Seed -573947210 is a charming little island out in the middle of the pixelated sea. There is a village there with a long walkway and cute little houses. Go diving off the shore to uncover shipwrecks. There might even be buried treasure on the island!
Most Stunning Vista: Head over to seed 46663436141796529 to find a mountain that defies explanation. Blocks hover impossibly in the sky. There are large falls showering the surface below with water and lava. And if you need a quick breather, spend a night in one of this locale’s several mountainside villager houses.
Best Grub: Unfortunately, Minecraft is mainly a DIY establishment. You are just going to have to break out that oven and cook some food yourself. Personally, I recommend the cooked salmon. It may not provide the best buffs, but it is delicious.
Honorable Mention: Another world you might want to explore is Star Citizen. Fly your spaceship around a galaxy as large as your imagination.

Subnautica — Best Maritime Outing

There is something primordial about the water. The ability to submerge yourself in a world that is entirely familiar and alien at the same time. Subnautica is all about exploring that intersection. You are the sole survivor of a spaceship that has crashlanded on a watery world, secretly on a mission to unearth a groundbreaking secret.

Much like Minecraft, you have the ability to mine and craft various things in the game, but the main joy comes from exploring the depths. This open-ended map allows you to navigate many different environments, ranging from kelp forests to underwater islands.

The Locals: Rarely talkative. Occasionally deadly. Most of the time, you are by yourself, in the water. Watch out for dangerous creatures such as leviathans.
Where To Sleep: The planet tragically does not come with the most human-friendly accommodations, but you can make bases that are quite complex.
Best Venue: In Sabanautica, with no other civilization insight, this question really comes down to where you should set up your base. I recommend doing so near the mushroom forest or the cove tree. Not only are these locations practical, but they are gorgeous too.
Most Stunning Vista: There are many fantastical places to observe on your journey, however, one of my favorites is the floating island. The topside is a striking tropical landscape, but it's the island's underbelly that you need to really observe. Gigantic creatures called floaters have attached themselves to the bottom, keeping the island in place above the water (note this area is also a short dive away from the Grand Reef).
Best Grub: Another DIY cooking game, we recommend chowing down on the decadent Cooked Reginald. Enjoy the smokey flavors of the fish. It’s highly filling and will keep you going for a while.
Honorable Mention: Looking for more of a ship focus in your water adventure? Try Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.

Uncharted Series — Best Indiana Jones-style Romp

The Uncharted series was made for the player to voyeuristically travel from one amazing locale to the next. You (mostly) play as adventurer Nathan “Nate” Drake as he and his friends unearth mythical cities all over the world. The game is a 3D platformer/shooter on a railroad, so you spend a lot of time hopping between various set pieces.

Occasionally, pause and take advantage of all the ancient architecture and stunning surroundings. This game series may be heart-pumping at many moments, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stop to enjoy the artwork.

The Locals: Mostly absent. A few locals will occasionally pop up in the story, but they are predominantly in the background helping Expats. The Uncharted series takes a colonizer’s view of travel. Both the story’s heroes and villains are westerners fighting over the artifacts of cultures they do not belong to. 🤷
Where To Sleep: You spend a lot of time in this series traveling in Humvees and on planes. There is not a lot of rest in this game, but I would love to crash in the secret London underground lair found in the third game. This hideout for the nefarious Order is hundreds of years old, surrounded by marvelous ancient relics, as well as elegant furniture. Who wouldn’t want to take a quick catnap on a reupholstered, 200-year-old feinting sofa?
Best Venue: Near the middle of the second game, you find yourself in a delightful Tibetan village in the Himalayas. Spend time kicking soccer balls with the local children. Take in the beauty of the surrounding landscape as you enjoy the view of the mountains.
Most Stunning Vista: Every game has a moment where you enter the lost city for the first time, and you are treated to a panoramic view of the ruined cityscape, still mostly preserved. A personal favorite is the mythical city of Shambhala, but that’s mainly because I am a sucker for any city with the secret of immortality buried beneath its depths.
Best Grub: Unfortunately, not a lot of eating goes down in this series. I am going to go with the piece of corn Nate has in a flashback in Uncharted 3.
Honorable Mention: If you want a game with a little less toxic masculinity, try the latest Tomb Raider reboot.

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch — Best Fantasy World Journey

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is a game that manages to synthesize a lot of favorable elements. A project between Studio Ghibli and Level-5, it has the best worlds of both video games and anime. You play the character Oliver as they go back and forth between the “real world” and a fantastical “other country” — a place of magic, pirates, and fairies.

There is a plot, but with no set time to complete it, you have the option to explore a truly staggering open world. You can cross deserts, climb mountains, voyage across the sea, and fly in the sky on top of a purple dragon.

The Locals: Adorable. Who wouldn’t want to communicate with talking animals? There are intelligent magical creatures everywhere in this world, and most of them are darn right charming. My personal favorite is Queen Lowlah — a cow who loves to eat. Chat them up and get lost in this world’s vast lore.
Where To Sleep: The fabulous Cat’s Cradle Inn is located in the downtown of Ding Dong Dell city. Enjoy the premium accommodations at a discount. The customer is always apurreciated there!
Best Venue: For some fun, go to the fairy island of Teeheeni. There you will come across the Fairygrounds — a playful community where fairies laugh, play, and perform terrible standup.
Most Stunning Vista: It’s not every day you get to ride a dragon. After you befriend the pirate king, you get access to the wyvern Tengri, who becomes your mount. Pass over the Golden Grove to get a birdseye view of a landscape in perpetual autumn.
Best Grub: There are a lot of yummy snacks you can feed both yourself and your familiars. Go to the city of Al Mamoon to come across a curry vendor with some delicious bowls of Tikka Mahala.
Honorable Mention: There is an abundance of fantasy games right now that allow you to travel stunning new worlds. Check out The Witcher 3, Skyrim, or Breath of the Wilds, to name a few.

Alex Has Opinions 4/9/21 Alex Has Opinions 4/9/21

Inside the Hateful World of White Supremacist Fashion

A deep look at Walknvt, Thor Steinar, Midgard, & other hateful brands.

I had been monitoring white supremacist groups for a while when a message came in from one of the Telegram groups I follow. “Support only white-owned markets,” it read, providing a list of Telegram handles of white-only businesses for its viewers to patronize. The message was shared around a few times, and within a matter of hours, it had been seen by tens of thousands of people.

These groups are so secretive about their identities, yet here was a list of them — almost thirty storefronts sorted by country and Telegram handles. Several of the storefronts even reshared it, and soon commenters were looking for merch. “Where are the German shops?” inquired one user below the post.

The world of white supremacist storefronts has to paradoxically operate both secretly and quasi-openly. As businesses, they need to reach as wide a consumer base as possible, without being shut down by the sites and platforms that house them. This tension has created an underground network of online shops promoting their white supremacist merch while also demanding loyalty and secrecy from those who follow them.

White Supremacist storefronts often do not describe themselves directly as white supremacist brands. They have to rely on innuendo and symbolism to signal to potential consumers that they “get it.” A common tactic is to rely on the language of nationalism or “history” — something that they can pretend has nothing to do with white supremacy but certainly alludes to it.

The American clothing brand Will2Rise, for example, describes itself as being founded by “front-line nationalists,” telling viewers on its About page that they specialize in “top quality nationalist apparel.” The White Rhino Athletic Club claims to “foster a high energy, youth-focused cultural alternative that gives a nod to our ancestral past.” I found this nationalistic language used on over a dozen sites, and this is by no means an official accounting of all the sites with this kind of rhetoric out there.

This tactic of using the language of nationalism to couch white supremacist rhetoric translates to these storefronts’ products too. The brand Homeland and Family advertises several shirts with the slogan “Europe is Ours.” Another brand has a shirt with the phrase “Defend Your Tradition.” The people who wear and sell these shirts may undoubtedly have white supremacist intentions, but they can pretend to ignorantly just be interested in their “heritage” like “any other ethnicity or race.” However, the subtext chillingly reminds anyone “in the know” that they are referring to a white Europe and white traditions.

In this same vein, these brands will use obscure phrases that dog-whistle to their supporters while keeping everyone else oblivious. For example, the Italian expression Me Ne Frego (‘I don’t care’) pops up everywhere on these sites, and that’s because of its association with Italian fascism. It was first sung by special forces known as the Arditi during WWI to signify that they didn’t care if they lived or died. The blackshirts of Benito Mussolini’s regime later adopted this phrase, signifying how members would devalue their own lives to better help the project of fascism. When modern fascists use it, they are referring directly to this history.

Another common item we see on these storefronts is the symbolism and mythology of European Cultures associated indirectly with white supremacy. German and Italian imagery is quite rampant due to connations with Nazi Germany and Mussolini irrespectively. Symbols like the Iron Cross (a military decoration used during the Third Reich) remain a particular favorite in these circles. These storefronts rely on the history of these fascist regimes for cred while avoiding more well-known symbols like the swastika, which would garner more intense suspicion.

There is likewise a lot of emphasis on the imagined grandeur of past civilizations such as Sparta or Rome. Designs will often show masculine Mediterranean men crowned with olive branches and surrounded with phrases such as “Old ideas, New style” and “Imperium Aeternum.” It’s an appeal to legitimacy based on the perceived ancientness of these beliefs. They are using these fictitious men's strength to talk about how great things were back then and how great things could be again. If you dig a little deeper, it's clear how they want to achieve that greatness. “Rise above democracy,” instructs one product with obvious Nazi imagery.

Fascism often dovetails into the worst strains of hypermasculinity, with fascists going to great lengths to prove their physical superiority, both individually and “as a race.” “Lift Big. Eat Big. Get Big,” states one piece of merchandise. Norse symbolism is pretty widespread in the scene for this exact reason. Several popular brands are not only named after famous places in Norse mythology such as Asgard and Midgard, but often draw upon the imagery of godlike figures such as Thor. These brands want to sell the idea that their beliefs are strong and unshakeable, like the ancient Gods of yore.

One reference to Norse mythology repeatedly mentioned on these storefronts is the mythological apocalypse Ragnarök — an end time when the Gods fight to the death, and the world is reborn anew. “When the horn blows, Ragnarök comes true,” reads one shirt from the white supremacist brand Svastone. This upheaval ties in directly to the white supremacist belief that an impending race war is coming. Whether it's packaged as a boogaloo or simply an end, the idea of an impending apocalypse is a prevalent meme sold on these platforms. They either want one to occur to “prove” their race's superiority or believe that one is inevitable.

This belief in cataclysm means that the humor in this scene can get nihilistic very quickly. “La Misanthrope” describes a shirt on the storefront Walknvt. The woman wearing it in the promo picture smirks as she holds up two large machine guns. “No lives matter. You’re all c**ts. F**k you,” reads another sardonic shirt, parodying the black lives matter movement for social justice. A disturbing one shows a white Pacman ghost threatening to burn several black ghosts alive. These “jokes” indicate a user base violently angry with a society that has moved in a direction they disapprove of.

Of course, not all of these sites work simply in allusion, codewords, and edgy humor. If you know where to look, brands can sell you some of the most heinous imagery on the web.

Mainstream social media platforms have cracked down on many of these storefronts. You will not be able to find Third Reich merchandise by scrolling through your Instagram stories or Twitter feed. Instead, the white supremacist brands that remain on the major platforms rely on the coding and innuendo we mentioned earlier.

Designers such as Savstone or Thor Steinar may have a small presence on these sites, but they do it by posting seemingly inoffensive candids of men in hoodies and tees. They signal to white supremacist and fascist users by posting indirect symbols such as runic imagery, references to mythological events such as Ragnarök, or ironic tees telling users that “it’s okay to be white.” Their catalogs are mostly like this as well. They are lifestyle brands with a white supremacist subtext. They may be indirectly advocating for white supremacy, but you cannot get banned from the Internet for an implication.

Now several small sites are actively selling more hateful content. Walknvt and Midgard openly promote everything from the confederate flag to products celebrating hunting down nonwhite people. These sites, however, do not have a presence on the major social media platforms for this exact same reason. They occupy small niches where users have to find them through either word-of-mouth or on the few corners of the Internet that still allow their existence.

They are understandably disliked by the vast majority of the online public, and as a result, the more vocal storefronts have to be very careful with their security. When we look at whose hosting them, many of these sites rely on firms like Cloudflare, Inc. that specialize in security (though Walknvt is hosted by the rather basic Go Daddy Netherlands B.V). It’s apparent from their guardedness that several of them have been the targets of cybersecurity attacks and doxing campaigns. Anti-fascist groups have been very good at organizing online to expose the activities of fascists (see Unicorn Riot and AntiFash Gordon).

Fascist vendors also report being the targets of in-person harassment from anti-fascist groups. For example, the white supremacist and fascist website Midgard notes defensively that “our shop was smashed a few nights after we opened. Not a single person was arrested or even investigated for doing it…The nightly attacks against us — both from so-called patriots and reds — [were] numerous, the demonstrations as well.” It’s important to note that fascists often self-victimize to gain sympathy from moderates and people on the right. I could not verify this particular story, but similar instances of Anti-fascist activists infiltrating and harassing fascist actors are well documented.

I am not bringing up this history to decry the actions of any Antifa group engaged in that type of organizing (that discussion is beyond the scope of this article), but rather mentioning it as an active cost fascist and white supremacist groups have to consider. They are not like any other business. White supremacist storefronts have to constantly worry about not only retaining customers and bringing in new ones, but gaining the attention of the people who hate them (i.e., most people). The wrong type of growth can very quickly spiral into articles in the press and demonstrations.

This constrains a lot of organizing and promotion to sites such as Telegram, where white supremacist brands have set up informal storefronts. Many of the groups I found there don’t even have a corresponding website. They advertise their merchandise on their Telegram group, selling everything from swastika mugs to busts of Adolf Hitler. These brands list their email (usually a Gmail or proton mail) to take orders. Paypal seems to be the preferred payment method, but that was just my experience.

I contacted four brands this way (Radical Sh8p, No Compromise Clothing, Last Round Records, and Pur Sang Clothing), and all responded to me in less than an hour. Last Round Records gave me their entire music catalog, which sold albums from bands such as the neo-nazi group Bound for Glory. One brand called the Serbon Shop organized directly from the app, using the chat feature as an informal customer service hotline. The contact person there, who went by the name Serbon Srbija, was willing to sell me an anti-Antifa shirt (by far their tamest merchandise) for $20 plus shipping via Paypal.

Clearly, de-platforming has not stopped this market from existing. It has simply pushed it to the electronic margins of the web.

This quasi-Blackmarket of hateable merch is probably here to stay. Many of these sites are working within the confines of the law, and the ones who are not have retreated to online platforms with little oversight. As long as you can pay for the cost of shipping, it’s not hard to get some hateful content sent to you.

When we talk about de-platforming, it's important to recognize that markets like this will probably still exist in the shadows, even with our best efforts. People are pretty resourceful, including bigots who want to find hateful merchandise they can wear and jam to. We would have to systemically change the way the web operates to stop this kind of behavior, and that would bring with it a host of other ethical questions.

This doesn’t make de-platforming efforts valueless — far from it. It’s good that neo-nazis and fascists have to work so hard to keep their storefronts afloat. We just need to realize that this is an ongoing struggle. White supremacist and fascist ideology will not die overnight, assuming it ever dies at all.

The mitigation of that harm will require ongoing monitoring to ensure that these men (and a few women) stay inside the electronic cages we have built for them.

Alex Has Opinions 4/2/21 Alex Has Opinions 4/2/21

A Travel Guide to the Best Video Game Escapes

Some of the best virtual vacations on this side of the galaxy.

Sometimes we need an escape — a place to retreat to when the insanities of life become a bit too much — , and for me, that refuge is video games. I have spent hours crawling through various dungeons, planets, and cities, trying to get lost in a world for an hour (or six).

However, many of my favorite escapist fantasies are not places I would necessarily want to visit. They are fun journeys, to be sure, often filled with peril and heart-thumping moments, but definitely not ones I want to meander aimlessly in. Now more than ever, I want games that capture that spirit of travel — ones with fun conversations, random encounters, and beautiful locations.

Rather than judge games on graphics or mechanics, we will rate them based on how great a vacation spot they are. We will judge their locals, vistas, and food and serve you up the ultimate list for your next virtual vacation.

Horizon Zero Dawn — Best Post-Apocalyptic, Backtripping Adventure

Horizon Zero Dawn has a lot going for it: superb graphics, stellar storytelling, and giant robot dinosaurs (you literally have the ability to take down robot dinosaurs with a futuristic bow and arrows). You play the character Aloy (Ashly Burch) on her fantastical journey to uncover why the robots of this land are going haywire and attacking people.

This game has a massive, open-ended world that you can easily get lost in. Stroll aimlessly through the snowy mountaintops of the Frozen Wilds or the buzzing hub that is Brightmarket. Tilt your camera up at the sprawling night sky or the misty mountains. Let yourself take a breath and relax.

The Locals: Nice, though sometimes deadly. There are a lot of different people in this world. The Nora are lovely but very xenophobic. Many Carja are strong but arrogant. The Shadow Carja…well, avoid the Shadow Carja. And past all these generalizations are well-rounded people that crack jokes, cry, and deliver poignant observations about life.
Where To Sleep: With a landscape this stunning, I highly recommend camping at least once underneath the starry night. The Sacred Lands provide many vantage points for a good view. Find a spot and tilt your camera into the night. Alternatively, if the great outdoors isn’t your thing, the town of Lone Light has a charming little tavern (after you deal with its deadly Glinthawk problem, that is).
Best Venue: Hunter’s Lodge is damn near enchanting. This members-only bar is located in the Carja capital of Meridian. When you walk in, the first thing you will notice is a dead, metal dinosaur splayed out on its back. The tavern has everything you need for a great post-apocalyptic bar crawl: drinks, dancing, and a sidequest to track down terrible monsters.
Most Stunning Vista: Nothing quite competes with the city of Meridian. The moment you walk across the sprawling bridge, you are treated to the sight of a vast city with marketplaces, an intricate elevator system, and a dazzling royal palace. Climb up to one of its many high vantage points and observe the clouds as they roll over the narrow mountaintops.
Best Grub: The world of Horizon Zero Dawn is rich in game to hunt. Find some wild turkey or trout to craft some delicious full-health potions.
Honorable Mention: If this fallen Earth doesn’t do it for you, I highly recommend Obsidian’s 2010 game Fallout: New Vegas.

80 Days — Best Page-Driven Exploration

80 Days manages to delight with only the written word. Often, visual novels are walls of text that the player finds themselves skipping through to get to the end, but writer Meg Jayanth tells a story that you want to savor every line of. You play the manservant Passepartout as he serves an eccentric aristocratic named Monsieur Phileas Fogg on his journey around the globe in 80 days or less.

Along the way, you encounter a rich world that honors the original Jules Verne novel while managing to be its own distinct creation. Steampunk inventions populate every corner of this planet, and anti-imperialist contingents are arising where ever you travel. There’s bound to be excitement no matter where you end up. Don’t think about the destination. Pick a direction that sounds interesting and go!

The Locals: Absolutely delightful. There is rarely a dull conversation in this game. Challenge yourself to place yourself in other people’s shoes as you learn about histories and people that have previously been ignored. You may be working for an uptight aristocrat, but that doesn’t mean you should be at Monsieur Fogg’s every beck and call. Say hello to the natives. A particularly stubborn engineer in the walking city of Agra remains a personal favorite.
Where To Sleep: Monsieur Fogg refuses to sleep anywhere that is not the best (though sometimes he has little choice). Many fine establishments are in your future, but a personal favorite is the one in Reykjavik with its luxurious hot springs.
Best Venue: If you can, try to stop by the tea house in Tehran. The locals will accept you with open arms and provide riveting conversation in the process. Be sure to try the tea.
Most Stunning Vista: Your first impulse may be to journey from West to East on your world tour, but it's the North where the real action is. Embark from Smeerenburg to experience the icy wonders of the North Pole. You will traverse the ice on a larger-than-life automaton. There’s surprisingly a lot to see and do in a landscape this desolate. Maybe you will even have the chance to uncover a mystery.
Best Grub: Tired and exhausted, eventually you might make your way to Honolulu. There you can come across a guide named Hilahila who will give you lodging by the shore and some superb poi, orange slices, and guava.
Honorable Mention: If your eyes are peeled for another travel-themed visual novel, might I suggest Wanderlust Travel.

Mass Effect Franchise — Best Vay-Kay in Space

It might seem strange picking an action-adventure space opera as a travel game. The plot of the original Mass Effect trilogy is about a human commander named Shepard running around the Milky Way Galaxy to stop an intergalactic threat known as the Reapers. The game involves a lot of shooting, ducking, and running from one orchestrated setpiece to the next.

Once you get past the opening tutorial levels of every game, however, Shepard pretty much has free reign of dozens of maps and side missions. You can explore planets ranging from ecumenopolis’ to recently founded colonies. The ending may be controversial, but it's hard to beat the open-ended nature of these games. Take your spaceship, the Normandy, and fly it to the closest starport.

The Locals: Charming or outright hostile: there is no in-between. You can either fly around the galaxy shooting up Blue Suns mercenaries and Collector drones, or you can engage in commerce and diplomacy. The game has plenty of opportunities that allow you to spy on politicians and romance your peers.
Where To Sleep: You can’t beat the spacious accommodations that Shepard receives after Cerebereus rebuilds the Normandy. The layout comes with plenty of room to walk about and even a large fish tank that you can place your own fish in (they will die if you don’t feed them). There is also a queen-size bed. With all the Romance options in this game, I am sure you'll need it.
Best Venue: Who doesn’t love a fancy cocktail party? Take up companion Kasumi Goto’s mission Stolen Memory and get the chance to go to evil mastermind Donovan Hock's VIP party on Bekenstein. You’ll get the opportunity to mingle with the galaxy’s richest and most despicable. You can even sneak into his secret vaults where he has such treasures as Michelangelo’s David and the head of the Statue of Liberty.
Most Stunning Vista: This game has a lot of stunning sights to see. The metropolises of Illium and Citadel are easy must-sees, but personally, I like the breath-taking sight of the giant waterfalls on Aite in the Overlord mission. The planet has two moons and a ring, easily making it a place of profound beauty.
Best Grub: To get the best food in the galaxy, look no further than Ryuusei Sushi. This hip establishment has all the amenities of an upscale restaurant: long lines, dim, blue lighting, and fish imported from all over the galaxy.
Honorable Mention: If you are looking for something a tad less action-packed, then might I suggest Outer Wilds. This game has a midwestern camping aesthetic combined with space exploration — a truly unique blend.

Night in the Woods — Best Small Town Excursion

Many of us are familiar with that awkward feeling of returning home for the first time after being away. Night in the Woods perfectly encapsulates that awareness of homecoming. You play Mae Borowski as she returns from college after a mental breakdown to live with her parents in the town of Possum Springs. Join her as she catches up with past friends, explores her old haunches, and possibly even solves a murder.

Not all travel games have to be about far-off, “exotic” places. Sometimes it's good to get lost in an environment that honors a place grounded in reality. A tour of Possum Springs may not be as imaginative as other games on this list, but it has its own understated charm.

The Locals: Mostly chill, except for the ones who want to kill you. The joy of Possum Springs is chatting with the townsfolk who are equal parts fed-up and affable. They are willing to give you some no-nonsense advice that strikes at the core of all the problems with late-stage capitalism, lol.
Where To Sleep: Most nights, you will want to spend some time in your old childhood bedroom: pick up that guitar you haven’t seen in ages; admire your high school posters; play classic video games you haven’t even thought about in 10 years. It can be fun to pretend to be a kid again.
Best Venue: Listen, Possum Spring has seen better days. You will have to head over to the nearby college town for a “proper” nightlife scene. If you are willing to stick around, however, might I suggest the local library. Not only has it been recently renovated with spacious seating, but it has a killer poetry night.
Most Stunning Vista: If you head east from The Church of the First Coalescence, you will eventually come across a cliff that looks out over the horizon. The music fades away, and you are just left with the sound of the wind as you contemplate your life choices.
Best Grub: Who doesn’t love a good donut? Head over to the Donut Wolf to have some tasty sugary goodness. Just pace yourself. You don’t want to overdo it.
Honorable Mention: If you want another game that focuses on wandering around a smalltown, might I suggest Everybodys Gone to Rapture. The plot is exactly like it sounds.

Kentucky Route Zero — Best Road Trip

The American road trip is an iconic aspect of our country’s zeitgeist: the open road. The idea of an endless expanse at our fingertips. It's the subject of rampant folklore and tall tales. Sights and stories that could not possibly be true dote our highways and roads: the world’s largest ball of yarn; that time, a couple skipped across a cliff; a forest where people can see lost loved ones.

Kentucky Route Zero takes on that spirit of the tall-tale and brings it to life. You play a truck driver named Conway who has to deliver a package, and the only way to do that is by traveling on a mythical highway called the Kentucky Route Zero. They discover some truly reality-bending places and people along the way. Get lost in these larger-than-life pieces of Americana as you take the best road trip this side of the afterlife.

The Locals: Truly bonkers. The inhabitants of Kentucky Route Zero are the most real kind of people you will meet, but at the same time, they are like ghosts, searching for things and people they have lost. It’s effortless to get swept away in the stories of their pasts.
Where To Sleep: Anywhere in the Echo. If you need a good, long rest so refreshing you might not ever awake from it, try this subterranean river system. Accessible via the very affordable Mucky Mammoth tugboat ferry.
Best Venue: If you want the perfect night out, go to the Rum Colony. It’s a fabulous tiki bar right on the water. They even have live music, and there are mesmerizing tiki torches everywhere!
Most Stunning Vista: There are few moments as striking as when you come face to face with Ezra’s brother. Picture yourself out in the middle of an old-growth forest staring at a translucent eagle the size of a house. That’s not a metaphor. It’s what actually happens (maybe).
Best Grub: Sam & Ida’s seafood restaurant is a delightful pitstop also right on the water. Ida is a local celebrity famous for her cooking. Try the sweet cave snail for a dish that really challenges your palette.
Honorable Mention: Another road trip game to check out is Jalopy.

Alex Has Opinions 3/25/21 Alex Has Opinions 3/25/21

Our Society Is Determined to Forge New Monsters

Many of our worst people exist by design, but is that an inevitability?

There is a song that I came across recently that I cannot get out of my head. It’s part of the lineup for the Broadway musical The Century Girl, which aired in 1916 during the midst of World War I. The title is You Belong To Me, sung by Edward Royce and Leon Errol, and it is quite literally about a man deciding he loves a woman and fixating on her, singing:

And now don’t imagine I’ll let you go
Because you say “No” to me
“No” often means “Yes”
I'll make you confess
In time, just wait and see

The thing about this song is that it’s being sung unironically as a romantic overture. We are not meant to think that the lead is creepy or obsessive but in love. It’s a reminder of the fact that a little over a century ago, men were literally being indoctrinated with media that told them it was okay to possess other women.

We live in the shadow of some pretty harmful ideologies, and they do not just hang in our past. Downright toxic worldviews shape our present. Some of us spend our entire lives trying to deprogram ourselves from these awful lessons, and many more learn to be comfortable with being monsters.

The United States has been experiencing a bit of reckoning when it comes to social justice. More Americans recognize the existence of racism within the US than they have in decades. The concept of feminism likewise is enjoying high popularity as well. It seems as though we are living through a political realignment, and although much work still needs to be done, conversations once thought to be impossible are beginning to occur.

Less than two decades ago, however, people were outright debating if well-documented problems such as racism even existed. “Are We Living In A Post-Racial America?,” began a segment for NPR. It may seem laughable in the wake of Donald Trump and the resurgence of neo-nazism, but shortly after the election of Barack Obama, there were those claiming we now lived in a post-racial society. As scholars, Michael C. Dawson and Lawrence D. Bobo wrote for Harvard University in 2009: “…the majority of White Americans have held for well over a decade: that African Americans have achieved, or will soon achieve, racial equality in the United States…”

For the longest time, America has been deadset on ignoring many of its foundational problems, multiple of which were in their very recent past. Slavery and segregation only ended roughly in 1865 and 1968, respectively — 156 and 53 years ago — and neither of those developments did away with racism. According to a 2018 estimate, a third of the US population was alive when the 1965 voting rights act was signed into law (i.e., the legislation widely cited as the beginning of the end for Jim Crow). Some Americans who fought for segregation are still alive today, and the same logic applies to the children they raised.

Likewise, many of the sexual assaulters we rightfully demonize now were raised in a society that actively reinforced these behaviors. Marital rape, or the idea that a spouse could have sexual intercourse with their partner without their consent, did not become an official crime in all 50 states until 1993. The concept of date rape, although used by academics decades earlier, did not even begin to impact public consciousness until the late 80s and early 90s. The sexual assaults committed by men such as Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump are chilling to many of us in the present. Still, they were very much products of their time, which isn’t an excuse as much as a condemnation of our larger society. These toxic men had their behaviors reinforced at every stage of their development, and that problem is still happening today.

Some of the battles we talk about being “over” aren’t even ten years old. A few commentators have labeled discrimination of same-sex individuals as a settled issue because of policies such as the legalization of same-sex marriage. The Struggle for Gay Rights Is Over goes the title for one article in The Atlantic. “From a legal standpoint,” the article states, “the movement has achieved nearly everything it needs for gay people to prosper as equal citizens. Instead of fighting this pointless war over wedding cakes, it should declare unilateral victory.”

However, same-sex marriage only became law-of-the-land in 2015 (less than six years ago) with the Supreme Court ruling Obergefell v. Hodges. Religious exemptions still exist for employment discrimination. Protections for housing discrimination are only tenuously maintained by executive order. Are we really expected to believe that the same people who claimed that same-sex relationships were a threat to the natural order have gone away?

We are not far removed from any of these battles. The people who fought them didn’t vanish into the ether. In some cases, they never left. They remain our politicians and business leaders. They were nominated to the Supreme Court. They raised a new generation of children content to believe in similar things that they did. Those youngsters are now on TikTok sharing racist memes and ranting about how being “super straights” lets them discriminate against trans people.

Yet, this problem does not stop and end with vocal bigots. It’s so easy to label homophobes and racists monsters, but no one escaped that indoctrination. These people also created laws and art that impacted how we see the world. You Belong To Me was not the last problematic song to grace our culture. The same message can be seen in James Bond movies, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and millions of other pieces of content across the decades.

We all internalized our society's problematic messaging, including even the most leftist and progressive among us.

At the risk of sounding paternalistic, there are toxic aspects of your worldview that you have not even begun to unpack. There is this tendency for people who are deprogramming themselves, especially those at the beginning of their journey, to want to delineate clear lines between themselves and those still indoctrinated.

I see this with the recent trend of my fellow white people dunking on other white people as the worst. “White people be like: Taco Bell is too spicy.” riffs a white Twitter user. This commentary is all over the web, and it comes from a real place. A paper released not too long ago in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General posited that when white liberals learn about the concept of white privilege, it doesn’t always generate more empathy for Black and brown people but rather creates less empathy for poor, white ones. As we can see here, even people who want to do better will sometimes find ways to psychologically distance themselves from proper accountability.

It would be nice if learning about our biases on an individual level was the only thing needed to destroy oppressive systems such as white supremacy, but this is work that cannot be done in a single lifetime. When so much of our worldview is toxic, you eventually realize that you will be unlearning this damage for the rest of your life. The bigger examples of discrimination (i.e., hate crimes, harassment, etc.) may be easier to ward against. However, in many cases, our colonized brains are still thinking monstrous thoughts — a reality that impacts some of the smaller things we do and say.

In the activist discourse, these are often referred to as “microaggressions” or brief words or actions that reinforce negative attitudes towards people with marginalized identities. Stereotypical examples include asking a brown person if you can “touch their hair” or asking a queer person “who in the relationship is the man and who is the woman.” I can’t say what these microaggressions are for you because they obviously vary by person. Maybe you talk in a condescending tone to blacker or browner people or ask trans people when they will have “the surgery.”

For me, I think misogynistic and racist thoughts all the time, especially when I am particularly hungry or having a bad day. The word “bitch” will come to the forefront of my mind a lot, and although I rarely say it, it will sometimes impact how I treat the women around me. Even if I am not ranting misogynistic tirades, I can occasionally be demeaning and condescending towards the women in my life in ways I do not intend. I will constantly have to push back at these impulses, and I need the people in my life to hold me accountable for this behavior.

I say all of this as a nonbinary person actively working to demasculinize their body. My brain is colonized by white patriarchy so much that I can harm those in my own community. Sometimes I will judge other nonbinary people for being too mannish or womanly. I will trivialize their identities for not adhering to norms that I actively hate. That indoctrination doesn’t go away simply because you wish it to. It sits uncomfortably in the back of your mind, slowly and painfully being chipped away over the months and years.

There are countless ways that we devalue others, and some of them only seem small. For example, a huge part of our society is founded on the belief that you must “earn a living” to subsist, and as a consequence, hundreds of thousands die every year in the United States to satisfy this norm. Tens of thousands of homeless people die every year in the US. Possibly hundreds of thousands die every year because healthcare costs delay them from addressing serious medical conditions. We are so quick to demonize the racism and sexism of the past, and we should, but many of us are not as quick to scrutinize how our core organizing principles contribute to that inhumanity. Our society would rather people die the right way than to live at all.

Even the ones who survive are left with intense psychological damage over having to prove themselves every moment of every day. “Today is just one of those shitty days where I feel completely hopeless,” reads one post on the Unemployed subreddit. “I’m sitting here crying again bc I just don’t know what else I can do to get a job or even a fucking interview. I can no longer visualize a path forward.” Another one goes, “This situation is closing in on itself. I’m going to either be homeless or in a prison.” We talk so much about increased burnout, depression, and suicide, but a bitter truth we must internalize is that many of these instances are byproducts of our society’s foundational beliefs.

In 57 years, maybe we too will be lambasting the darkness of this time for all the problems it brought (e.g., the people we killed, the planet we destroyed, the animals we slaughtered, etc.). The water we swim in is toxic: sometimes it weakens others enough for us to swallow them alive; other times, we are the ones left weaker for it; often, both are happening simultaneously.

The point here is not to nihilistically claim that humanity is terrible, but the opposite. Humans are the product of their environment, customs, biology, and norms. A realization that is as sobering as it is optimistic. It means that we exist in a society that churns out monsters but that that we have the potential to be something else too.

I want to stress that the burden of monsterdom is not shared equally. You should not walk away from this article with an Avenue Q-styled message that “Everybody is a little bit of a monster.” Certain groups of people have done more harm than others. Some people are the monsters rampaging across cities and countrysides, while others have been locked away in cages and malnourished, only able to harm those who stumble in. We have all been impacted by these toxic systems, but our proximity to privilege and power has increased our ability to harm others.

This society had two plans for you — to be a vapid monster snacking on others AND to be eaten. If you are fighting against that mold, it can be unsettling to realize all the hurt caused by that. You have to come to terms with both the scars you have and those you have inflicted on others. This task is painful and uncomfortable to do, especially for people who are bigger monsters. There is a tendency for people, particularly more privileged people who have eaten more than they have been eaten, to point to the scars they have received and use those as a protective shield against accountability. I truly understand that impulse. I can empathize with it, but it’s one rooted in denial.

Forgive yourself for being a product of this broken society. Realize that you were trained to be both monster and prey — to devalue and be devalued —and do the work to be better. Commit yourself to undo this terrible system. Give both yourself and others the grace to learn and heal from that indoctrination.

You were not born a monster. Society has done its best to make you into one, and like all roles, we can learn to be something else.

Alex Has Opinions 3/25/21 Alex Has Opinions 3/25/21

The World of Online Comics Is Overwhelmed by Hate

The hateful comics of StoneToss, Hedgewik, MadebyJimBob, and more.

For the longest time, the Internet has been a place for comic book artists to get their start. Comics such as xkcd and Homestuck inspired cult followings and fandoms. Artists such as Alex Woolfson of The Young Protectors fame proved that indie creators with marginalized identities could successfully express themselves — free of the barriers that plagued more intensive media such as TV shows, movies, and video games.

And yet, the Internet has always had a dark underbelly, where creators use their platforms to spread hatred and misinformation. While increased moderation may have curtailed some of the more direct examples of hateful comics, you will eventually see discriminatory content pop up on Instagram, Twitter, and more if you comb through the handles of white supremacist creators like Stonetoss.

Unlike other content, however, the issue here is not a barrage of creators uploading hateful posts that social media sites cannot properly moderate. The ability to ride that line between what is tolerated and what is effective is something only a handful of artists can do. If social media platforms wanted to, they could limit the spread of the vast majority of hateful webcomics out there with a few clicks of a button.

The decision not to remove these bad-faith actors speaks to a lack of desire to proactively curb hate speech in general.

Far-right webcomic artists occupy an interesting space on the Internet because many of their critiques are not always so dismissable when you examine them closely. Creators such as Gary Varvel will often post criticisms of liberal institutions that, at first glance, are very valid. On January 28th, 2021, for example, they posted an image of President Joe Biden dressed up like French Queen Marie Antoinette, parodying the infamous phrase “let them eat cake” and swabbing it out with “let them learn to code.”

Without knowing where this came from, it would be easy to believe that a leftist made this comic. There exists a widespread criticism that the more business-friendly nature of the Biden administration will prevent him from implementing reforms that truly lift most Americans out of poverty. Many people on the far-right understand that something is wrong with the current economic system, but they incorrectly identify the source. They don’t blame exploitative business practices or corrupt politicians, but rather, people with marginalized identities “ruining” society.

The comics they create reflect that repugnant worldview, even when what they produce, at first glance, is not visibly read as hateful. Often, alt-right creators will speak in codewords or innuendo so their hatred can be branded as “acceptable.” This approach creates art that is only offensive to those aware of the history, serving as a rallying call for those “in the know” and passive entertainment for everyone else.

For example, a Hedgewick comic released in July of 2020 on Instagram and other social media asks the reader why communists hate millionaires and billionaires, but not “International Bankers.” “Remember to always check your blind spots,” the description of its Instagram reads. The phrase International Banker has a long history of being associated with Jewish people. There is a malicious stereotype going all the way back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the early 1900s that Jewish people have secretly been in control of (or plotting to take over) all of the world’s major institutions.

This stereotype is rooted in the fact that for most of European history, Jews were excluded from professional guilds and denied the right to own land. This reality forced them into the financial realm, which at the time was seen as “dirty” (see usury). The stereotype of the Jewish moneylender or banker has been used in everything from Nazi propaganda to the current myth that Jews control the Federal Reserve.

When people employ this meme, they are tapping into a painful history, and sadly, it is easily deniable. The creator of Hedgewick comics, after all, isn’t telling readers directly that Jewish people are “the problem,” but by using the term International Bankers, that is the implication for anyone paying attention. And if you bother to explain the original context, you can be easily gaslit by the creator and his audience into thinking you are overreacting or misinterpreting their original intentions.

Even when the message is more direct, the branding of irony and sarcasm allows the creator to imply truly despicable things while simultaneously sidestepping responsibility. For example, a Stonetoss comic released in August of 2020 on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter shows a panel of a Black man holding up a bag asking for reparations. The next panel is of an injured white man holding up a similar bag, asking for the same thing.

Given that this was released during the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Uprising, the implication is that this white man was hurt during the protests. The webcomic is implying that Black people are the ones who deserve to pay damages for this violence. It’s a point that seems deceptively straightforward (e.g., that this violence is bad) when in actuality, it ignores the centuries of atrocities committed under White Supremacy.

This dance is all too prevalent in this space. Many of these artists will make an offensive claim that is ambiguous enough to sidestep when someone calls them out. Peruse white supremacist webcomics long enough, and you will see anti-immigrant posts under the guise of being concerned by the spread of COVID; anti-COVID posts highlighting vaccination as vast government overreach; as well as pro-segregationist posts discussing the “hypocrisy” of banning their content online while not letting businesses discriminate against people of color.

And, of course, these are the tamer examples. Some webcomics are just unapologetically hateful. There are ones removed from the subtext and irony so often used as a defense from criticism. It’s easy to find comics released on major platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter that depict black people as savages, use the N-word as a punchline, portray trans individuals as men who have mutilated their genitals, and glorify straight-up assault on Black characters. These creators are clearly putting out consistently hateful content into the world, and we have to ask, “Why are they slipping through the cracks?”

Publishers such as Facebook and Twitter have community guidelines that ban hate speech — a few of them even have guidelines that ban the spread of misinformation. Facebook explicitly bars the spreading of hateful stereotypes, which many of these posts embody. These companies have repeatedly expressed a commitment to stopping the spread of such content, and yet, as we have just seen, it's rampant on their sites.

The traditional justification often given for why hate speech slips through the cracks is that these platforms are too big to individually monitor every piece of information uploaded onto them. Social media sites prioritize our ability to self-publish, spurning the editorialization of traditional media companies in favor of the user. The methods they use to enforce community guidelines are a combination of ever-evolving algorithms and self-reporting from users. As Victor Tangermann writes in Futurism:

“Most sites use algorithms in tandem with human moderators. These algorithms are trained by humans first to flag the content the company deems problematic. Human moderators then review what the algorithms flag — it’s a reactive approach, not a proactive one.”

There have always been those who think that this system is not enough, advocating for these publishers to take more responsibility (by which they mean liability) for the content they host. Men such as Matt Rosoff have argued that Congress should amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (i.e., the law that removes liability from tech platforms in most instances for their content) so that companies face more legal responsibility for posts that incite violence. They want them to hold responsibility as publishers, and as the world becomes increasingly unstable, it's easier and easier to understand this impulse.

Yet, this debate, although necessary to have, almost seems beside the point. These platforms do not need the law to be changed for them to moderate content. Internet publishers moderate posts all the time and have implemented massive crackdowns in the past when there has been an incentive to do so. For example, when Congress created an exception for Section 230 in 2018 to curb prostitution (note: the law did not distinguish between sex trafficking and sex work), there was a mad dash from Tech companies to mitigate this new risk. Craigslist axed its personal section, which at the time was being used by many sex workers. Reddit likewise axed a series of pro-sex worker subreddits. A host of other websites shut down altogether.

In response to the law, Apple temporarily removed Tumblr from its app store after child pornography was found on the site. Tumblr announced shortly thereafter that it would remove all adult content from its platform— effectively destroying communities that had been using it to organize for years, including LGTQIA+ ones. The new changes to Section 230 created a ripple effect that started with trying to ban sex work and ended up purging pornographic and sexual content on sites across the Internet.

We see from this example how Tumblr was willing to regulate content when there was a financial incentive to do so (i.e., when Apple pulled them from their App Store), and yet we have not seen a similar purge of white supremacist content. While Tumblr allegedly doesn’t permit hate speech, it's there for anyone who wants to find it. Go over to the page of white supremacist webcomic Martian Magazine, and you will see that their profile picture is that of a dog waving the Nazi flag. In their bio, under Heroes, they have listed “Adolf Hitler.” Under Television, they have written, “I don’t watch jew-shit.” This is the same creator who right now has a comic where the n-word is a punchline (also hosted on Tumblr), and there are other similar creators on this platform.

In place of a financial incentive, Tumblr’s community guidelines don’t seem to matter much, and the same can be said for many of these platforms. For better or worse, they are only willing to enforce boundaries when required to do so by law or immense public pressure. The 2018 amendment to Section 230 was by no means ideal, but it signifies that changes can be made quickly when the proper incentives are in place.

It would be straightforward for these platforms to put a dent in white supremacist webcomics because there aren’t many of them overall. While anyone can upload a bigoted comic, it takes a lot of work and ongoing promotion to update one continuously. To gain traction in this industry, many creators have to create at least two comics a month, and then they have to plug them on social media. We are really only talking about a handful of creators in the English-speaking, white supremacist space who are meeting that benchmark (see MadebyJimBob, Stonetoss, Martian Magazine, Hedgewik, etc.).

If such creators were proactively removed, it would go along way to curbing this type of bigotry. The silence of major social media platforms on doing this type of work indicates where their priorities are in this area. They would rather wait for a hypothetical future where an algorithm can sort out this dilemma automatically than to do the work of banning bad faith actors preemptively in the here and now.

The reality is that white supremacist webcomic artists still have a robust reach on the web. Webcomics like StoneToss know how to balance the line between acceptable and hateful rhetoric. They rely on irony, subtext, and humor to diffuse responsibility for the terrible things that they create while cultivating an audience very much motivated by that hatred.

Likewise, companies often rely on the complexity of their platforms (and protections in the law) to avoid responsibility for some of the more hateful content they host. They only seem interested in curbing that content when changes happen in the law (e.g., the 2018 amendment to Section 230) or when there is immense public pressure to do so. It does not appear as though they are interested in enforcing their community guidelines to their fullest extent.

This situation creates a toxic cocktail of neglect where content is only removed when it becomes too large to ignore. These publishers have historically not taken a proactive approach in removing bad-faith actors. Maybe comics such as Hedgewik or Stonetoss will be de-platformed in the coming months and years ahead.

That moment of catharsis, however, comes after years of that hatred and bigotry spreading on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

In the meantime, hate can be found wherever memes are shared.

Alex Has Opinions 3/17/21 Alex Has Opinions 3/17/21

The Music of Hatred is Alive and Well on the Web

A look at fascist and white supremacist music on YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, and SoundCloud.

The Internet was a game-changer for white supremacist and pro-fascist musicians. They went from occupying the fringes of subcultures such as punk and heavy metal to publishing and interacting with new followers with the click of the button. Not too long ago, you could find some of the most hateful bands plugging their music on the web. If you wanted to jam to Peste Noire telling viewers to create carnage in retribution for an increasingly diverse world or buy tickets for the Militant Black Metal band M8l8th [pronounced mo-lot-kh], then you could do so on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Years of escalating conflicts have prompted the major platforms to kick these offenders off of their sites. White supremacist music, however, is still accessible to anyone willing to search for it. “Where thought and action synthesize into victory,” reads the description of one Spotify playlist. Its title has the phrase the ThirdPosition in it, which directly references neo-fascist ideology.

The music of the web is bristling with pro-fascist and white supremacist music and musicians, and its prevalence speaks to larger issues of content moderation and censorship.

Music that glorifies white supremacy and fascism is nothing new. As a former domestic, slave-based economy, the United States has a long history of creating such songs. Anti-abolitionist titles were common leading up to and even after the American Civil War (1861–1865). For example, the revisionist song I Am Thinking of My Pickaninny Days was published in 1901 and chillingly imagines a Black man looking back fondly on his days as an enslaved child. Slavery apologist propaganda like this could be seen well into the 20th century and still exists today.

As we got closer to the new Millenium, such hatred was no longer as acceptable to consume publically. White supremacist groups often were lucky to get 100 people to come to a live show, and obtaining a venue could be a tedious and difficult affair. These musicians were and continue to remain far from the mainstream. They often created subgenres within counter-culture movements such as Nazi Punk within Punk and National Socialist Black Metal within the Black Metal scene.

To this day, it’s possible to see remnants of all of these genres on platforms such as YouTube. A lot of this music is aesthetically nihilistic. These singers are mournful for our more progressive present. They view continuing diversity in apocalyptic terms. Alongside obvious fascist imagery, it’s common to see destroyed cityscapes and irradiated backgrounds in these songs' videos. These uploaders long to get back to a time of racial purity that never existed, claiming that their time will come again after “a fall.”

The songs are typically not hosted by the original artists. We instead have fan accounts uploading copies to their personal accounts. Some are claiming to do so for “historical” reasons. The user Sheet Music Singer on YouTube has made it their mission to consistently upload sung versions of old sheet music, and many of them are racist and misogynistic. The creator does provide some trigger warnings for these charged pieces, and their overall goal appears to be focused on preserving the history rather than disseminating the hatred within those songs.

Other accounts, though, are clearly attracted to the ideology that these songs espouse. Channel names such as Hatecore Inc and FashLoli are references to fascist symbolism and genres of music. A quick look in the comment sections of these songs reveals that many users are there for the same reason. “Defend Europe,” reads a comment under a song of fascist singer Peste Noire. “Times are changing. Democraxy will fall. Right wing will rise again,” reads a comment under the music video Death Squads.

The same can be seen on social media sites like Facebook, where there are groups dedicated to the appreciation of hateful music. The public group Hate Punk Czechia regularly shares these videos, and it's definitely coming from a pro-fascist perspective. “Punk not red,” reads its banner, which is a reference to the fascist slogan “black not red” — a 20th-century phrase praising the black shirts against the communists. A quick scan of its feed will show cringe-inducing music videos lambasting modern-day progressivism and posts cautioning against diversity.

This situation raises an interesting dilemma for these platforms. Many of these users are not actively spreading “original” hatred but reposting old content under the guise of appreciation. They are not necessarily directly advocating for the positions that these white supremacist and fascist musicians are pushing for. They are simply “fans” of the music or, more vaguely, purveyors of history.

Defining fascist music becomes even more difficult when the song's original intent isn’t about spreading white supremacist or fascist ideology — a problem we see on the web a lot.

Something fascists have been very good at doing is coopting otherwise benign symbols to represent their faith. A classic example of this is the Pepe the Frog meme. It originated from the Matt Furie comic Boy’s Club and had no connection to white supremacist or fascist ideology. The meme spread on the Internet from sites such as 4chan until it infamously became appropriated by the alt-right movement.

The same has been happening in music for a very long time. For example, the punk genre Oi! — derived from the British slang for “hey there” — has long been associated with neo-Nazi skinheads. This genre emerged in the 1970s as an alternative type of music for those dissatisfied with the system. Although some Oi! groups definitely had far-right leanings, many were explicitly anti-fascist. For example, the group frontman for the Cockney Rejects fondly remembers the band's crowd beating on Nazi skinheads, telling The Guardian: “The Rejects crew battered them all over the station. They didn’t come to the gigs after that.”

That legacy continues today with users on Oi! music appreciation groups having to stipulate explicitly that they do not condone Nazi punk. As one user wrote in the Facebook group Punk n Oi!: “Today it looks like I need to make myself clear, I BELIEVE IN PUNCHING NAZI’S! If you have any hate for any other person, please get off my posts and do not friend request me.” Not every member agrees with this perspective; however, it's endemic of a cultural struggle within the genre that we do not see with many other musical subcultures.

We observe a similar trend with electronic synthesizer music. Fashwave (a portmanteau of “fascism” and “wave”) or Trumpwave have emerged in recent years as a spin-off of Vaporwave music, which is a subgenre of electronic music that juxtaposes the lounge music sounds of the 80s and 90s with Internet memes. Fashwave songs will often take the standard Vaporwave aesthetic and superimpose fascist imagery on top of it. It’s common in these videos to see the swastika, Hitler, and references to fascist academics such as Julius Evola.

Fashwave and Trumpwave come up frequently on YouTube, Soundcloud, and Spotify for those willing to look. YouTube has users uploading this content regularly, and hundreds of Fashwave playlists are on Soundcloud. Interspliced in between electronic beats on YouTube are speeches to segregationist or fascist leaders. You can also find straight-up fascist speeches sometimes — as with this SoundCloud playlist with clips of the former leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley.

However, not all the music is coming from fascist musicians or DJs. “Let the wars begin. We’ll keep our pistols near,” go the lyrics of one song plastered on a lot of Fashwave videos. “…When the world falls into the flames. We will rise again.” Those are lyrics from Ubisoft’s satirical game Farcry 5, which directly parodies this mindset's culty nature. The song comes up frequently in self-declared Trumpwave or Fashwave music, where posters have reappropriated the lyrics to strip them of their irony. They want to go to war for real.

Much of Fashwave music comes from artists who are not fascists. Richard Spencer infamously claimed that the band Depeche Mode was the band of the alt-right, only for them to publically and swiftly denounce it. Richard Spencer remarked on how he likes the “existential angst, pain, sadism, horror, [and] darkness” of the band’s music — in essence, conflating the song’s reasons for existential despair with his own. Fascists are really good at reappropriating rebellious music and simply pretending that the artist is rebelling over the same thing (i.e., the irrational fear that a white utopia is slipping away from them).

Often, an artist will be curated on a fascist playlist, even if they have no connections to the movement or ideology. That Spotify playlist we mentioned earlier — “Synthwave | FutureWave | ThirdPosition” — is made up of fairly mainstream electronic synthesizer artists. The sole reference to fascism is “ThirdPosition” — a phrase only people aware of the ideology would be familiar with. It’s a bait and switch that allows converts to hide among the uninitiated or curious.

Platforms have come a long way with regulating white supremacist and fascist music. It’s not as easy as it once was for a hateful musician to profit off of the anonymity of the Internet. Music streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music do not let their users stream hateful bands anymore.

While these bands have been relegated to the dark corners of the Internet on sites such as Telegram or MeWe, their fans have not. The same people who used to buy hateful music off iTunes share reposted links of these songs on YouTube, Facebook, and SoundCloud. They are watching what they can say, always navigating that line of what is acceptable and what they can get away with.

The sharing of this information triggers some complicated questions on censorship. We certainly don’t want white supremacists to profit off their hatred, but in what manner should that music be preserved? If no one monetarily benefits from it, is a random person sharing hateful lyrics on YouTube ethical? We are left debating how far we should go in curation, balancing the need for de-platforming with a desire to preserve even the most hateful parts of our history.

There are no easy answers. Platforms ignored these problems for such a long time that now many are playing catchup, and there will probably never be a single set of policies that curb white supremacy and fascist music for good. It might be that this hatred will always be standing by. Fans forever waiting for the moment a hateful song can be more than just a share or a repost.