Alex Has Opinions 3/3/22 Alex Has Opinions 3/3/22

Politicians Aren't Your Boyfriends

Stanning over Volodymyr Zelensky, Justin Trudeau, & Barack Obama isn't hot

The moment the internet saw how Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy reacted defiantly to Russia's hostile invasion, it almost instantly turned him into a sex symbol. "So hot," someone half-joked in a TikTok video with over a hundred thousand likes. "BREAKING: every woman in your life now has at least a small crush on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it," quipped a viral tweet with an even greater reach on Twitter.

Regardless of whether these posts are ironic or genuine, many people are putting forth the narrative that Zelenskyy is a snack, and this type of reaction is exceedingly common online. We have seen the same response with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, where it's possible to find dozens of articles about how sexy he is. You could also point to former President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, and even Sarah Palin.

People on the internet love to turn politicians into romantic crushes, and it creates an unhealthy culture that deifies the very people who deserve the most criticism. The last thing we need is to treat our politicians like our boyfriends.

On the one hand, I understand why this obsession happens. The internet is built on parasocial relationships (i.e., one-sided relationships, where one person spends a lot of emotional energy and the other doesn't know they exist). The entire influencer profession is predicated on the idea that one person can maintain a one-way relationship with thousands, potentially even millions of people. Social media actively encourages people to prioritize these relationships because they are immensely profitable, which is why they have become so ingrained in our lives.

Politicians may have a different job from most entertainers (although even that gap seems to be lessening as more and more entertainers like Trump and Zelenskyy become politicians). However, they are still competing for the same social capital as every other influencer out there. Politicians have social media accounts. Many of the big ones tweet, create content, and pose for selfies. It makes sense that some of us would develop a parasocial relationship with them in the same way we do other "celebrities."

More so, many of us might seek a hero during times of uncertainty. Someone to turn complex issues like geopolitics into a straightforward narrative of good and evil. Russia is the aggressor in its invasion of Ukraine, but the debate surrounding how to respond to that aggression is complicated (i.e., the ethicality of sanctions, the "right" amount of mobilization, etc.). Although not impossible to understand, these issues require some work to figure out, but if you treat your politicians like celebrities you can worship, it removes the burden of having to do this work.

Why worry about geopolitics when you can stan Daddy Zelenskyy and Justin Trudeau instead?

Yet it's unhealthy to “stan” politicians (i.e. being an overzealous or obsessive fan of a particular celebrity) because, unlike other celebrity crushes, the stakes here are very high. Politicians aren't your boyfriends. They aren't even your friends. They are people who have power over you, and when we stop criticizing their actions and instead worship them, we remove them from accountability.

Infamously, a recent "politician boyfriend" was Andrew Cuomo. During the height of the first COVID wave, people were calmed by Cuomo's daily press briefings. Some people joked that they were "Cuomosexuals." Comedian Stephen Colbert quipped that he was "Andrew-curious." Influencer Randy Rainbow even put out a song about falling in love with Andrew Cuomo, remixing Disney Hercules' song I Won't Say (I'm In Love), with cringeworthy lyrics like "I hope they make you king."

However, this celebrity worship covered up a bitter truth: Cuomo wasn't actually handling the COVID pandemic that well. A scandal emerged in 2021 about his administration obscuring the number of nursing home deaths in New York. This coincided with a sex scandal where multiple women came forward and accused him of sexual harassment. He would resign shortly after the story became too big for him to ignore (later criminal charges against him would be dropped).

Yet none of this information was new to us in 2020 when this celebrity worship began. We saw critical reporting early on that accurately depicted his administration's problems with COVID. In the words of Russell Berman in August of 2020 for The Atlantic:

Cuomo's initial response to the coronavirus outbreak was slow and mistake-filled. He initially balked at issuing stay-at-home orders while cases mounted and then ordered sick elderly patients out of hospitals and back to nursing homes, where the virus spread like wildfire.

That last point became the central focus of the nursing home scandal, and again, this article was released over five months before the scandal would break major headlines in January of 2021.

We can see the same pattern for many "boyfriendified" politicians. People may have the hots for Trudeau, but self-inflicted scandals have plagued his administration. From being the only Canadian PM found to have formerly broken ethics rules to his approval of a controversial pipeline expansion, there are plenty of reasons to kick his ass to the curb. Obama likewise may have been considered sexy, but his administration was mired in mistakes. History has not looked kindly at his interactions with the GOP or how he did not press charges against many instigators of the 2008 financial crisis. The deification of politicians whitewashes these conversations of accountability that are always bubbling just below the surface.

Furthermore, these conversations are harder to have when we must first wade through an "ironic" discourse on how hot these leaders are. Some might argue that saying these "politicians are boyfriend material" is all just a joke, but the internet is a toxic place where no one ever knows when someone else is joking. It is filled with manifestos and memes of the vilest stuff imaginable, protected under the banner of "humor." One person's totally obvious "joke" is another person's call to action, and it's clear that there were plenty of people who took the "boyfriendification" of politicians like Andrew Cuomo very seriously.

Those "Cuomosexual" jokes were a symptom of a much larger cult of worship that the governor took advantage of for nearly a year. Since Trump's handling of the pandemic was so disastrous, even Cuomo's mediocre response was depicted as this masterful stroke of leadership. "Why We Are Crushing on Andrew Cuomo Right Now," wrote Molly Jong-Fast in Vogue. "Andrew Cuomo Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now," quipped Ben Smith in the NY Times.

It's incredible how a cult of worship can make even a milquetoast response to something into an act of genius. If Cuomo had politically survived his scandals, he'd still be kicking around — remembered fondly through the prism of the "Governor that got us through COVID" in much the same way Rudy Giuliani was "America's mayor following 9/11." And that would be a shame because, as we have seen, Cuomo's leadership wasn't particularly good.

In a way, all of this posturing is just an indirect form of hero-worship. The difference between fawning over how "Trudeau is your daddy who will always treat you right" and comparing more authoritarian figures such as Trump to Jesus is a matter of degrees. One of these is undoubtedly worse than the other (The Trump one is worse), but it's still leading in the unhealthy direction of worship. We are uncritically stanning our favorite politicians, and that road can get cringy quite quickly.

I will say it again: your politicians are not your boyfriends. They are not your friends. They're not your bros. They are not your heroes. They represent systems of power, and although sometimes you might be aligned with those systems, there will inevitably be times when you are not.

Sometimes you will have to fight against the very people who claim to represent you (and yes, even the ones you voted for). And when that happens, your imagined parasocial relationship with them inside your head will not help you.

Dump your imaginary boyfriends, and treat them like people instead.

Alex Has Opinions 3/2/22 Alex Has Opinions 3/2/22

Geralt of Rivia: The Little Liberal That Couldn't

It’s time to question the philosophy behind The Witcher 3

At the core of the game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the story of one man named Geralt of Rivia as he travels the war-torn lands of Velen and Novigrad to track down the whereabouts of his adopted daughter Ciri. Geralt is a Witcher, which is a mutated sword-for-hire who slays monsters. Witchers have supernatural abilities that make them both hated by the people they serve and also needed by them. This premise serves as an exciting tension as Geralt sorts out where exactly his loyalties lie: monsters or man.

I love this game. I binged it during the pandemic, and at level 65 and over 69 hours of gameplay (hehe) under my belt, I would say I have a solid grasp of the game at this point. I picked to romance Yennefer in my first playthrough, because like in the show, I love how headstrong Yen is. My favorite scene in the game involves you and Yen waiting behind a door, trying to listen to your adopted daughter Ciri talk to members of the Lodge of sorceresses. It shows warmth and tenderness to these two characters that you don't usually see in action games.

When we examine this game’s politics, though, there are a lot of internal contradictions: Geralt is an avowed centrist who hates politics but constantly meddles in the affairs of nations and kings; the misogynistic male gaze is present in nearly every scene, and character choice, but is coupled with some powerful female protagonists; the game allows you to decide the fate of entire regions and principalities, but all of them end up perpetuating a pretty awful status quo.

As I traveled on Roach across the lands of Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige, I came to understand more about this game's philosophy. The Witcher 3 is one of contracts, markets, and justice at the hands of a sword. Although it may be set in a medieval-seeming world, The Witcher's values are very contemporary — a celebration of liberalism, the philosophy that lays the foundation for our world.

So let's talk about the good, the bad, and the downright Nilfgaardian about the politics of The Witcher 3 and what that can tell us about our world too.

Now politically, Geralt as a character is a big ole' centrist. Witchers follow a code called the Path, where they are not supposed to be involved in politics. They are neutral. This gives him a narrative reason to constantly travel and not be very invested in the sides of man. Geralt serves multiple polities throughout the three main games, taking contracts for Nilfgaard, Redania, and more. His apoliticalness is a defining aspect of his character that remains unchanging. In fact, if you choose to spend your final days with Yen, the narrator, Dandelion, remarks that they "lived a calm quiet life far from all things political."

However, the main character's philosophy does not make it the same as the games. My favorite game is Disco Elysium (sorry, Geralt), and it allows the main character to adopt any philosophy you want: communism, neoliberalism, fascism. Take your pick. However, the game is coming from a leftist perspective. Even liberals in Disco Elysium call themselves "ultra-liberals," describing how they fight to preserve the powers of capital in a way that most real-life liberals would not. The game never shrugs from its perspective, especially when depicting opposing points of view.

Likewise, we know The Witcher game is not apolitical (if such a thing were even possible). From stumbling on vigilante thugs terrorizing elves to helping persecuted mages leave the city of Novigrad, Geralt is encouraged to fight against acts of injustice all the time. There are several moments where characters directly call him out on his apoliticalness. "Oh bollocks," chastises the former spymaster Sigismund Dijkstra when trying to get the player’s help in killing the xenophobic king of Redania. "That’s a convenient excuse [Witchers] try to hide behind every time the temperature rises. It’s grown hot, my friend." Dijkstra has moral standing in this scene. The music is soft and pleasant while the player patiently stands there and waits for him to finish monologuing.

It helps that Dijkstra's planning this assassination for a seemingly sound reason. He explains before this outburst that he's allegedly not doing this for self-enrichment but due to his ideals. "Any idea what made [Old Redania] strong?" he asks Geralt about why the old regime was better before Mad King Radovoid took over. "…[because it had] a strong state with healthy commerce, manufacturing, solid alliances, progressive science, and fair, independent courts that hand down just judgments."

This speech should ring some bells. You should be very familiar with how commerce and contracts control your life. These values are the ones a lot of viewers may agree with because they make up the bedrock of our current society: the enlightenment values of classical liberalism (e.g., believing that allowing someone to control private property is intimately tied to human liberty). Our world is currently ruled by an offshoot of liberalism called "neoliberalism" that heavily emphasizes using the marketplace to guide all human action. By waxing poetically about the philosophy of liberalism, the game is not only telling the player that their current political norms are awesome but signaling that Dijkstra shares them too.

In fact, if you choose to endorse Dijkstra to rule the North in the quest Reason of State, it leads to an ending where he triumphs against the Nilfgaardian invaders and economically industrializes the North. He is described by Dandelion in the closing narration as a ruthless but wise ruler, saying: "He knew that to preserve the peace he would need to prepare for war. Following Nilfgaard's example, he consolidated his rule over vast lands through a broad program of resettlement and industrialization. All for the good of his subjects — though often contrary to their will."

That's an interesting perspective because it subtly suggests to the viewer that although his rule is harsh, the tenets of liberalism (e.g., private property, courts that enforce contracts, a centralized state, etc.) do allow the country to "modernize." This framing is a moral choice the game makes to reinforce a specific worldview. It doesn't help that the other two options are letting the fascistic empire Nilfgaard conquer the entire continent, albeit potentially under the "benevolent" rule of Ciri, or allowing Radovoid to genocide all mages, nonhumans, and intellectuals from the North.

One of these three options is definitely framed better than the others.

Furthermore, Dijkstra's values of a strong economy and independent rulings are core tenets of the game. We see this through the contract-heavy focus of Geralt, whose trade requires that he take work and haggle for pay. Contracts are the highlight of the game for many players because they turn into mini-CSI episodes. You have to track down various leads using your supernatural "Witcher Sense" and try to determine what monster is terrorizing the local area. These quests are enjoyable, and occasionally they even end as de facto courtrooms, where you get to pass rulings and judgments.

Another way we see this philosophy emphasized is by the types of enemies the game chooses to focus on. There are many monsters to destroy in this game (looking at you drowners). Still, when it comes to our human enemies, we don't spend much time mowing down the warriors of Nilfgaard or Redania — that would require the game to frame certain sides as unlikable mechanically. Instead, we spend much of our time chopping down deserters, bandits, and pirates: enemies who are pillaging the local economies.

A mini-quest you can do in the game is to liberate areas occupied by monsters and these human pillagers. A satisfying animation happens when these quests are completed. Geralt sits down to meditate, and as time passes, the former occupants return to the area. With peaceful music, it’s always framed as a good thing regardless of whether this lets Redanian or Nilfgaardian forces recapture the land. I always found it strange to celebrate these moments because I despised both of these forces in my playthrough. I honestly would rather a strategic point be occupied by drowner monsters than given to either of these fascist empires. Yet, those considerations are not what’s thought of as essential mechanically. The fact that violence has ended, and that current landholders can restake their claims to this land is what’s celebrated.

And so when Dijkstra monologues about the need to create a healthy economy and independent rulings, I found myself nodding along with him because these are the values the game has subtly been reinforcing the entire time. Geralt's livelihood as a Witcher depends on fair contracts being enforced. He's also spent half the game restoring the local economy by clearing out bandits, pirates, and monsters. If there is one person who values healthy commerce and fair judgments, it's our protagonist.

Now there are a lot of criticisms of liberalism as a philosophy. Someone more on the Left might say that this system prioritizes those who hold favorable contracts to property rather than the workers who produce much of that value. In contrast, others on the Right would probably devolve into incoherent ramblings about nationalism and racism (you can probably see where I stand on this spectrum). But while we see the Right firmly represented by Radovoid, who is rightfully (pun intended) portrayed as a monster, we never really focus too much on the affairs of peasants and workers, outside of haggling for payment (and making sure they deliver on their promised coin).

Why focus on those who do not hold property or wealth in a game that's not really about them?

Liberalism is a very individualistic philosophy, but it's also one that celebrates a particular type of individual: i.e., the property owner or what a particular German philosopher might call the Bourgeoisie. So it's unsurprising that we instead end up focusing on a Great Man version of history. The game places a premium on the choices of a few individuals, especially during narrator Dandelion's closing monologue. We learn that if Radvoid lives, the North wins the war, despite him purging the land of all of his intellectual and magic users because he's a "tactical genius." If Ciri takes the throne of the fascist Nilfgaard, we are meant to believe that things will be better for the world because she was taught "simple human decency" by Geralt. It all comes down to what a couple of actors choose to do, and not so much about breaking down the systems of power that make this world turn.

We walk away with a celebration of the dominant ideology — inside the body of a snarky mutant who always asks for his money upfront.

All this being said, I still love this game and how it sometimes subverts your expectations. Throughout this series, you make many decisions about what quests to take and what people to let live or die. Yet the most crucial choice of who gets to save the world is not one you can make at all. Ciri is the one who saves all of reality from the entropic force known as the White Frost (a metaphor for what is effectively climate change), telling Geralt when he asks her not to sacrifice herself: "What can you know about saving the world, silly? You're but a witcher. This is my story, not yours. You must let me finish telling it."

That's probably one of my favorite lines in all video games. I get a particular joy imagining people's reaction to it when it was first uttered back in 2015, during the height of Gamergate. It must have been something to see a bunch of gamers being told that the world didn't revolve around them.

However, this fleeting moment of catharsis aside, for most of the game, you are in the body of a centrist navigating through a liberal world. Our Witcher continues to take contracts (predominantly for the wealthy) and tacitly fight for the powerful, albeit begrudgingly so, all while delivering some very misogynistic humor. He is kind of the perfect avatar of our world's dominant philosophy. And given where we are right now, we have to question if that's something that should go unchallenged? If not even his own daughter considers him a hero, why should we?

Because unlike in the game, our own White Frost (i.e., climate change) isn't some natural force brought on through magical entropy storms, but one caused by our society and its ideals. The values of liberalism and neoliberalism have brought upon us an impending existential crisis, and we don't have a Ciri to save us.

Instead, we have to question the avatars of the Carbon Age. And unfortunately for the aspiring Geralt's of our world, that means caring more about politics and the people that it affects.

Alex Has Opinions 2/16/22 Alex Has Opinions 2/16/22

Exploring The Alleged White Savior Trope in 'The Book of Boba Fett'

What does whiteness even mean in the Star Wars galaxy?

The first season of the Disney+ show The Book of Boba Fett has come and gone. The Space Opera-meets-Western about a bounty hunter named Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) running a crime family in the desert city of Mos Espa, Tatooine, brought with it plenty of nuggets to deconstruct. We saw impressive set pieces, incredible fights scenes, and cool CGI droids that looked like Droidekas (They're called Scorpenek Annihilator's, by the way). I personally loved the character Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), who can assassinate me any day.

However, along with these fun elements came a heated conversation about white saviorism and how Boba Fett did or did not embody it. The Book Of Boba Fett Is Not A White Saviour Story, went the title of an article in The Gamer that was released before the series had even finished airing. "Did anyone else find that the latest Boba Fett episode has white savior vibes?" complained one post on Reddit.

When examining these claims, it becomes apparent that critics might have stumbled onto something worthing deconstructing, even if the "white savior" trope might not be the best label to describe it (I am still conflicted personally). The Book of Boba Fett does replicate some harmful tropes that warrant scrutiny — something that hits a lot of raw nerves over media representation and whose voices matter in the Star Wars universe.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, we should probably define what we mean when using the term "white savior." This phrase is used to describe stories of both real-life and fictional white people, who make the suffering of an oppressed group about that white character's desire to help. As Fariha Roisin writes in Teen Vogue:

“Hollywood has a trend when it comes to these films in general. It’s most commonly seen in Oscar-bait movies; the white savior complex is a constant leitmotif. Hollywood supposedly inserts these roles for complexity, for drama. But what ends up happening is that they perpetuate an idea that is essentially a historical banner of colonialism: People of color need white people to save them.”

In media, this perspective translates into films where the white person "goes native" (an offensive term where a colonizer assimilates into a non-dominant culture), leading oppressed people to victory against their oppressors. It's a narrative that focuses on the otherness of the colonizer protagonist at the expense of the people they are "saving." A quintessential example of this is the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. This work fictionalizes the life of the real T. E. Lawrence, making the story all about how this one man led the Arab people against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.

In a more fantastic example, James Cameron's 2009 Avatar is about a former marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), going to the world of Pandora to help Earth mine the planet for natural resources. Through his interactions with the native Na'vi people, Jake eventually grows to disagree with Earth's colonial extraction of Pandora's resources. He learns and masters the ways of the Na'vi people and unites their disparate tribes against their Terran oppressors.

White savior films are problematic for several reasons. For one, they usually suck up all the oxygen in the room in focusing on their colonizer protagonist. White audiences are pretty familiar with T. E. Lawrence, but they do not know Prince Faisal nearly as much, despite him having an essential role both in the traditional "T.E. Lawrence" story as well as King of Iraq in the postwar period. There are important areas of history that, for a long time, we chose not to focus on because the white savior arc was deemed more attractive.

They also simplify history so that the colonizer can be the hero at all, when that alleged saving may have never have happened. When the war ended, much of the Arabian peninsula was divided up as imperial holdings by France and the United Kingdom. T. E. Lawrence was against this action but ultimately failed to lobby for Arabian independence. Bitter and defeated, he changed his legal name and, according to Smithsonian Magazine, told a friend he "never wanted to be in a position of responsibility again." He then reenlisted in lowly military positions over the next 14 years on bases in Britain, suffering from what would now be classified as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The reason people have made this claim of white saviorism for The Book of Boba Fett is because the main character has an arc that involves Tusken Raiders or sand people. Those "primitive" seeming aliens who attacked Luke in the first movie over four decades ago, and since then, have been mainly depicted as xenophobic monsters for defending their ancestral land. Boba Fett gets captured by the Tusken Raiders but slowly earns their trust. He is given a gaffi stick and then teaches them how to use technology like speeder bikes (something the writers would have us believe they have not figured out how to ride in their thousands of years of occupation). He then builds them up into a force that can challenge groups like the Pyke Syndicate, who are moving Spice through the sand people's territory.

Now even though this doesn't go well for the sand people in the show (sort of like how British victory didn't bode well with for Arabian people in real life), you can see from afar how this general outline maps onto the white savior trope. You have a man teaching the sand people how to assert themselves, albeit failing fantastically in the end. The narrative then focuses on that man's struggle and pain when he loses his newfound "tribe" once the Pykes wipe them out.

It can be argued that the sand people in The Book of Bobba Fett aren't so much fully formed characters as objects to be "fridged" (i.e., killed off) for Boba Fett's character development. We don't even know the names of a single sand person by the time they die in episode three. In fact, if you look up the two major sand people characters on IMDB, they are referred to as Tusken Warrior (Joanna Bennett) and Tusken Chief (Xavier Jimenez), which complicates this whole narrative. In-universe Tusken is a colonizer name for the sand people after they raided Fort Tusken in 19 BBY (i.e., Before the Battle of Yavin).

Would using the word Tusken here (which in-universe is the oppressor's framing) be a creative decision that would happen if the show's writers cared about respectfully elaborating on this fictional culture?

At the very least, you would think we would learn essential details like the name of the tribe or the names of these two characters who allegedly had such a profound impact on Boba Fett's development. Hell, even subtitling the Tusken language like they do other alien races on the show would go a long way in fleshing these characters out. Why give this alien race the same treatment the Star Wars universe does for droids?

Now proponents of the show have been quick to point out that although this might seem like a white savior trope, it's not because both the main character and the show do not qualify as white. As Stacey Henley writes in that aforementioned The Gamer article: "Boba Fett is played by Temuera Morrison, a New Zealander of Māori descent. He's a person of colour, just as the Mandalorian played by Pedro Pascal is. This already reduces the White Saviour trope…." One Navajo Star Wars fan says this more bluntly in an article for the Inverse: "It's playing with that white savior trope, but it's supposed to undermine it by having a Native man in that place. And therefore it can be changed and is useful."

Your acceptance of this argument will depend heavily on whether you think Temuera Morrison's heritage of Māori, Scottish, and Irish descent "decolonizes" this role. This argument brings us into a complicated conversation about colorism and white-passing privilege that I don't think is relevant here—deciding how white an actor has to be before a role becomes a colonizer work shields the company making that work from criticism. We should be focusing on how Disney is a colonizer company. They tried to trademark the phrase Dia de Los Muertos to sell Coco swag, and their appropriative nature has continued to the present day. This series was created and written by white showrunner Jon Favreau. Disney is not a champion of indigenous representation in this or any work.

In the same vein, in the context of the Star Wars universe, Boba Fett is a colonizer, no matter who plays him. While Star Wars may operate under white supremacy on a metatextual level (its creators and owners are primarily white colonizers, after all) on a textual level, whiteness is not the central divide. The main tensions between people in the Star Wars galaxy have nothing to do with whiteness and fall more along lines between the rich vs. the poor; the core worlds vs. the outer rim; humans vs. aliens (though it should be noted that no one gives a f@ck about droids). These are where the lines between oppressor and oppressed are in Star Wars, and Boba Fett was a slaver, bounty hunter serving a xenophobic, fascist empire when we last see him in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. He then turns around in The Book of Bobba Fett to save the groups he would have slaughtered and enslaved several years earlier.

Again, this is a narrative where the colonizer is the focus in our interactions with this indigenous group (something that rings some Lawrence of Arabia-sized alarm bells). Your acceptance of this trope's usage here will depend heavily on how respectful you think Boba Fett's interactions are with this sand people tribe. Is this rehashing an old trope or subverting it? Is he offering the sand people aid or salvation? Considering the tribe is fridged by the third episode to focus on the protagonist's pain, does it even matter? This sand people tribe could have benefited from more character development before they were genocided because that decision isn't helping Disney's case here.

It's also important to note that Bobba Fett doesn't do this "saviorism" just for the Tusken Raiders, but nearly every divide we are talking about here. He's helping the poor mod kids of the worker district by giving them a job (note — they look more like models than street urchins). Boba Fett is tolerant of alien species ranging from the Wookie Black Krrsantan (Carey Jones) to the Rancor given to him by the Hutts. He helps unify the more rural Free Town with the residents of Mos Espa. The show paints Boba Fett pretty explicitly as a champion of the downtrodden.

Yet his politics aren't liberatory but self-centered. He's not trying to free these people from the systems that oppress them but to create a crime Family of his own. As Boba Fett says in episode four: "I'm tired of working for idiots who are gonna get me killed." His analysis of past problems boils down to him not being the one on top, claiming his leadership will be fairer for the people below him. That's paternalistic as f@ck, and precisely the type of narrative I would imagine an out-of-touch screenwriter would think of when imagining a folk hero (stares at Jon Favreau).

Furthermore, his politics are also very conservative, which is a core component of white saviorism or "colonizer saviorism" if you find that term more fitting. It simplifies systemic problems into something our colonizer protagonist can overcome through force of will. When the mod "kids" complain about a lack of economic opportunities in the worker district, Boba Fett doesn't bother to understand why this is the case. He gives these individuals jobs and stops thinking about improving the economic circumstances for the people of Mos Espa — the ones he's allegedly governing. He turns the problem into something he can personally solve rather than a complex system that will require structural reform.

When he grabbles with an increase in a drug named Spice, the narrative implies that the solution boils down to removing the drug traffickers from the planet, essentially replicating the dynamics of The War on Drugs. The causes for drug usage in real life are far more complicated than simply attacking the big bad drug dealers. They involve dealing with cultural and socio-economic factors — none of which Boba Fett seems particularly interested in or even capable of dealing with. Instead, the narrative gives us a reality where Boba Fett can solve this issue, leading the charge on top of a Rancor, which, although looking incredible, is not a recommendable solution for solving your community's local drug problem.

The narrative goes out of its way to make sure all of these complex, systemic issues can be solved individually by this former slaver, who is finding himself through helping others. To me, that doesn't sound like the progressive narrative on "found family" that many fans are touting it as, but one that uses the aesthetic of progressive politics to sell a conservative story.

Now I love Star Wars. I personally found it awesome when Boba Fett rode that Rancor into battle. I geeked out when Cad Bane entered the scene in his cowboy getup, and I have loved the chance to see all sorts of classic aliens in the CGI flesh.

And I know there will be a particular type of person out there triggered by me "coming" for their beloved Star Wars. "It's just a show," they will say. "Stop being so serious." I could give the classic spiel about how criticizing media is not the same thing as attacking it, but I think that would be sidestepping the issue at hand. This criticism I'm making is sort of an attack — it's an attack against the idea that certain types of people, or really anyone, get to be the savior.

When I look at the last couple of decades of nerd culture, I think it's fair to say that white saviorism is rather prominent. From Commander Shepard (a pretty on-the-nose Jesus allegory) in the Mass Effect trilogy saving the galaxy from the Reapers, to Tony Stark snapping his fingers to right all the wrongs of the last five years, we have these narratives that deify our heroes and that's not healthy. I want protagonists to help others, definitely, and sometimes be the hero, but I do think it's unhealthy for them to be our saviors.

I want to push back against the paternalistic narrative that one person can stroll into town and solve all of its problems. It takes a lot of coordinated effort between a broad coalition of people to solve the sorts of issues that The Book of Boba Fett does, and often that work isn't sexy. This show makes overtures to that idea (see the poorly developed "city and Freetown folk coming together" plotline). Still, they fall flat, as all the large problems are dealt with by the Mandoralians guns, Boba Fett's Rancor, or Fennec Shand's impressive moves (seriously, I will die on the hill believing that Ming-Na Wen deserves her own show).

If Disney wants to make a show about these liberatory politics — something it's in no way required to do (this could have just been The Sopranos of Tatooine, and it would have been fine) — then it needs to do better in showing it. The narrative needs to be less about Boba Fett and his feelings and more about him assisting the people of Tatooine in their struggle: the Sand people reclaiming their ancestral land; the worker's district gaining economic and political autonomy; there being genuine democracy in Mos Espa.

Because at the end of the day, the season one story in The Book of Boba Fett is about one former slaver's rise to power, and I fail to see how we walk away with anything more than a friendly dictator with cool armor.

Alex Has Opinions 2/10/22 Alex Has Opinions 2/10/22

How 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' Gives Us A Masterclass In Using Repetition

This catchy show about mental health can teach you how to be a better writer

I love the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019). It combines many of my favorite elements: strong female protagonists, "problematic" women, musical numbers, and uproarious comedy. I still sing the soundtracks to this show three years after it has ended. Some of its lines have become inside jokes between my partner and me. No other show has so much staying power in my head.

The show is about a young lawyer named Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) moving across the country to pursue her obsession with a guy. We slowly learn that this fixation is not because of some inherent awfulness but due to unaddressed mental illness partially brought on by familial abuse. Rebecca has been attempting to mask these destructive behaviors her entire life, and throughout the show, her primary coping mechanism is processing her feelings as musical numbers inside her head.

I normally deconstruct harmful things in media, but today I wanted to focus on something that this show does right, specifically how Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a masterclass in using repetition to make both great jokes and themes all in one stroke. If you love the show or want to learn more about using repetition in your work, stay tuned until the end.

Repetition of Theme Songs

The first significant repetition you as the viewer will probably notice is the show's theme song, which changes from season to season, but is repeated during the start of every episode. Most shows only try to capture the tone or aesthetic in their theme songs, assuming they even have one at all. These theme songs usually solely rely on visuals to convey to the viewer who our lead characters are and what the show is about (think Law & Order, Friends, The Simpsons, etc.).

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, however, does something rare in media — it forecasts its themes and character arcs in the lyrics of the opening theme song. The first season's jingle involves Rebecca in complete denial, describing how she has moved to West Covina because she's sad and not due to her fixation with hunk Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III). She's being called crazy by a chorus and reflexively rejecting those labels as "sexist" and lacking "nuance." In the second season, she has repressed this obsessive tendency even further with the lyrics, "I'm just a girl in love (La la la lovey dove). I can't be held responsible for my actions."

The third season is where we see a shift. She has gone from denial and repression to doubt. Her idea of crazy is buckling at the seams, highlighting Rebecca's own struggle with these terms. As the chorus of the song mocks beautifully: "You do (you don't!) wanna be crazy. And you don't (you do!) wanna be "crazy." To clarify: yes, no on the crazy. We hope this helps!."

By the time we get to the fourth season, the theme song's lyrics show us that Rebecca is a fully actualized person. She's not only capable of the emotion of love, but happiness, sadness, and cruelty. We have gone through an entire emotional journey, just through the evolution of the show's opening theme song, highlighting how it uses repetitive jingles (something that is usually an afterthought to most TV shows) and makes them a core aspect of its storytelling.

Take note, writers: no element of your story should be an afterthought. Even seemingly benign aspects of a work can be vital to the story you are trying to tell.

Repetition of Lyrics and Dialogue

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, however, is more than just its theme songs. This show put out on average three musical numbers per episode, and many of these are reprised in a way that recontextualizes the song so that it takes on a new meaning.

For example, the song "I am a Villain In My Own Story" was initially sung by Rebecca to signify how her obsession with Josh had caused her to do some terrible things to those around her, but it serves as the background music for Josh's ex Valencia Perez (Gabrielle Ruiz) as a way for her to process her breakup with him (see Why Is Josh's Ex-Girlfriend Eating Carbs?). Good musicals (and just good stories in general) know how to take an emotionally-resonate theme and remix it for the appropriate moment (see also Centaurworld season one for another example).

This repetition isn't always in the background of Crazy-Ex Girlfriend but is frequently included in the dialogue as well. The lyrics of the first season's theme song are repeated line for line as a joke between characters Paula Proctor (Donna Lynne Champlin) and her husband, Scott. We also see frenemy character Audra Levine (Rachel Grate) repeat the closing line of season 2's I’m Just A Girl In Love, symbolizing to the viewer that she is in the middle of a breakdown. "You can't call me crazy," Audra rationalizes, "because when you call me crazy, you are calling me in love. Blam." It's a funny button to a joke because we know exactly what that line means by this point in the series — we've only listened to it over a dozen times.

These repetitions can highlight serious themes, too, not just jokes. We learn that the lyrics of the second season's theme song are word for word what Rebecca's mother told a judge after Rebecca burned down a former obsessions house. "Your honor," her mother tells the judge, "She's just a girl in love. She can't be held responsible for her actions." We understand that these words are a justification imparted to Rebecca by her mother on how she should perceive her unhealthy attachments with men. It goes into this theme of how Rebecca is caught in this negative cycle that has detrimentally impacted her mental health.

In another example, when Rebecca texts her father in the season two finale to see if he will come to her wedding, it's the exact same message she sent to Josh Chan when she first arrived at West Covina in season one. It symbolizes how her obsession with Josh partly stems from the unhealthy attachment she has with her father, whose abandonment led to some significant insecurities about men.

This show is adept at first introducing a concept to the viewer in a humorous way only to reveal that that quirk is part of a larger, more dysfunctional form of behavior. We think her obsessiveness is just a quirk of her "craziness," but really, it points to a far more painful and poignant history.

This is good screenwriting 101. When you introduce something in a banal or humorous way, it lowers your audience's guard. When a turn happens in the narrative, it's not something that we can claim comes out of left-field — it was there in the theme song of the first season.

Conclusion

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is not the only show to use repetition to its advantage. The idea of a motif (i.e., a repeating feature or idea) has been around in literature for hundreds of years and used in art thousands of years before it went by that name. It's not revolutionary to suggest that you repeat resonating themes and symbolism for your viewers to make your work more impactful.

While all good stories should try to do this, it's awe-inspiring how much Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does with repetition. There's not a single scrap that the show doesn't seem to tuck away to build upon later. From the repetition of its theme songs to its score to its lyrics, I have always found myself continuously delighted by how things will return to me.

If you are looking for something to hone your craft, I highly recommend giving Crazy Ex-Girlfriend a binge. It might just be what the doctor ordered.

Alex Has Opinions 2/6/22 Alex Has Opinions 2/6/22

Does Disney Care About Diversity?

Eternals, Encanto, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Frozen.

I have been a Disney fan for a long time. My favorite Disney movie growing up was Hercules, whose songs I would sing on repeat (and can still do so to this day). When the character Megara (Susan Egan) sings her song I Won't Say (I'm In Love), I swoon with delight every time, and you can often catch me humming the chorus over and over again while at work. I love Megara. I admired her bravery and independence growing up, and as a trans person, I'd be lying if I said she didn't have a seminal impact on how I view gender norms.

Disney has been putting out a lot of "diverse" movies recently (more on this term later): Encanto (2021), Coco (2017), Moana (2016). Many of these films are good, great even, and the company has done some important work in fostering stories that have piqued viewers' interest. Luisa’s song Surface Pressure from Encanto has become one of my personal favorites, which I sing now even more than I Won’t Say (I’m In Love).

However, this recent success exists against a backdrop of nearly a century of regressive storytelling. Before the mid-2010s, Disney's past films were overwhelmingly white, eurocentric, and straight. There has been a lot of press given to Disney's strides towards greater diversity, but given its history of conservative and arguably racist and sexist messaging, we have to question the benevolence of this new strategy.

Disney doesn't seem to be focused on diversity in a progressive sense as much as it is trying to capture an evolving market. While that is a good thing overall from a societal standpoint, it should give us pause about assigning accolades to an entertainment company that is ultimately very conservative.

First, let's define what we mean when we say "diversity." In our current context, we are speaking about a catchall term for any representation that falls outside white supremacist patriarchy (i.e., anyone who is not a white, cisgendered, straight, neurotypical man).

So you know, the majority of the planet.

There is a narrative that Disney hasn't been the most diverse in the past, but now they are "doing better." For example, the piece The Year Disney Started to Take Diversity Seriously in Vanity Fair talks about how starting in 2016, they seemed to be putting out more "diverse" work. The article referenced films such as Moana and Queen of Katwe, claiming they represented a radical departure from Disney's previous filmography. As Yohana Desta writes in the closing lines of that article: "Though [Queen of Katwe] was outside the norm even for Disney, the studio's devotion to making it the right way is a sign that Disney really is committed to telling stories the world should hear."

We see this sentiment also in Disney's latest marketing. I think a great recent example of catering to this definition of diversity is the 2021 film Eternals: the superhero movie about ten immortal aliens protecting humanity from evil monsters. The advertising for Eternals was focused pretty heavily on this concept of diversity from the getgo. The lead-up to the film was filled with headlines of its star-studded cast members like Salma Hayek and Gemma Chan, as well as its producers and directors, hailing this one feature.

This persistent claim could be made because Eternals did include many non-white leads. It also had a lead with a disability, and one main character that was openly queer, which is a rarity for the MCU. In particular, the appearance of gay Eternal Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) and his partner Ben (Haaz Sleiman) had not been done before in the MCU or Disney's larger canon in general. This depiction created quite the stir, even if the movie overall was not very good. "How 'Eternals' Establishes the MCU's First Gay Superhero and Same-Sex Couple in a Movie: 'It's Life-Saving'" read the headline from a Variety article shortly before the film's release.

There were many think pieces like this one. The film's advertising heavily leaned into this concept of diversity, and defenders were quick to frame negative press as bigoted. "Looks like we're upsetting the right people," Eternals star Kumail Nanjiani said in a now-deleted tweet in response to the film allegedly getting review bombed by users criticizing its queer representation.

So is this claim true? Was Disney, as a studio, terrible with making diverse stories before the mid-2010s, and are they better at making them now? Has Disney become a #woke defender against bigoted mobs?

On the one hand, the answer to this question is kind of obvious. Of course, Disney has gotten better with its content. When we look at its past titles, it's undeniable that they were overwhelmingly eurocentric and white. Many of them also had terribly racist tropes. From the painful depiction of Indigenous people in Peter Pan (1953) to the offensive black caricatures in Dumbo (1941), you can quickly point to dozens of examples. The most infamous probably being the 1946 film Songs of the South, which has a "happy" slave character best remembered for their song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah."

However, comparing the Disney of now to the Disney of the past almost seems disingenuous. It's unsurprising that Disney executives of the 30s through the 90s were putting out racist content: that was the dominant culture. What we need to do is compare the Mickey Mouse corporation to contemporary standards, and by that metric, they are extremely conservative.

Let's return to the example of Eternals. The reason the character Phasto was such a big deal only makes sense when looking at Dinsey's past conservatism. For over a decade now, Disney has put forth the narrative that they would have queer representation in their films, only for that representation not to be very good or present at all.

For example, there was a lot of buzz around Disney having a queer movie in Avengers: End Game (2019), only for that character to be a minor one with not much dialogue. Other examples include a blink-and-you-will-miss-it dance between LeFou (Josh Gad) and some side character in the 2017 Beauty and the Beast reboot; a brief kiss between two same-sex extras in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019); a screenwriter claiming on Twitter that two male characters in Zootopia (2016) were gay; and many more.

These scenes, assuming they exist on screen at all (looking at you Zootopia and Cruella), could all be edited out or redubbed for foreign releases so that they didn't impact sales abroad. For example, the grieving partner in Endgame was redubbed for Russian audiences partly to not run afoul of a homophobic censorship law in that country. We saw a similar situation unfold when Disney clipped that aforementioned brief kiss in The Rise of Skywalker to avoid getting a higher age rating for its Singapore release. This pattern of behavior is not the sort of thing a company would accept if they cared about queer representation as a concept.

Disney may have an undeniably queer character on the Silver Screen now — 21 years after Will & Grace had their big kiss on TV, and 16 years after Brokeback Mountain — but that doesn't mean they are suddenly bastions of queer progressivism. The framing they used with Eternals, of conflating all criticism as "bigotry" when the movie is indeed very bad, speaks to a level of manipulativeness that makes this whole situation feel very icky.

I have always found the narrative around introducing diversity in Disney properties to be odd because it’s marketed as this significant progressive action. Yet as we have already seen, it’s only a big deal because they choose not to be inclusive for decades. As yet another example, in the MCU (which was purchased by Disney in 2009), it took over a decade for us to get a black lead with Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa in Black Panther (2018). This happened 20 years after Wesley Snipes’s Blade and 10 years after Will Smith’s Hancock. Disney wasn’t exactly breaking new ground with Black Panther anywhere outside the MCU. In the meantime, they made billions of dollars, mainly selling white, conservative narratives for over a decade.

This logic applies to most "groundbreaking" decisions within their repertoire. The "true love" narrative that Frozen (2013) subverted was revolutionary only because Disney marketed regressive narratives about Love for decades. It's not like narratives about putting yourself first over a man didn't exist. Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman was released in 1978. It was nominated for multiple Oscars. You could make similar arguments about having a woman protagonist in the MCU (see Captain Marvel), a Chinese protagonist (see Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), or any other "diverse" identity. These stories were progressive only in relation to the Mickey Mouse company's deeply ingrained conservatism.

Let’s be real here. Disney was the bad guy who decided that it would be more profitable to tell conservative narratives and ignore entire swaths of the world’s population than break new ground. And now, in the year of our Lord Gritty 2022, they are trying to act like this half-assed representation is the equivalent of making bold strides in diversity, when in the current environment, it’s just the bare minimum. Most of us don’t want to see the White Aryan Power Hour anymore, and Disney is responding to a long-overdue trend.

And even this attempt to meet the bare minimum is usually a struggle. When I look at some of the most progressive works the company has put out in recent years, it's clear that there are still significant internal struggles between the company's more conservative elements and their more progressive creators. For example, the TV show Owl House, which has been heralded for both its queer and Hispanic representation, seems to have had a lot of internal resistance from company executives. The creator Dana Terrace has been open in the past about how executives tried to forbade her from adding queer representation, and sadly the show will now be canceled after a significantly shortened third season for "reasons." As she wrote on Reddit in late 2021:

At the end of the day, there are a few business people who oversee what fits into the Disney brand and one day one of those guys decided TOH didn’t fit that “brand”. The story is serialized (BARELY compared to any average anime lmao), our audience skews older, and that just didn’t fit this one guy’s tastes. That’s it! Ain’t that wild? Really grinds my guts, boils my brain, kicks my shins, all the things. It sucks but it is what it is.

This happened in 2021, not in Disney's far-off history. Terrace insists this cancellation wasn't because of homophobia, and we will honestly never know for sure because it's not like she can be any more direct. It's noteworthy that Disney has a history of blocking queer representation. Similar comments were made by Alex Hirsch, creator of Gravity Falls, about the company forbidding him from adding explicit queer content in his show. And these are the comments that escape into the public. There's probably a whole unspoken history of homophobic, racist, and sexist conservatism behind the scenes that we will never know about because few would risk their career by being open about it.

Given this company's history, it seems weird to be lauding Disney for projects they barely want to put out and are only socially relevant because of their deeply rooted conservatism. We are rewarding a company's recalcitrance over the creators who actually break ground in this area, and then allowing Disney to pretend like this representation means anything more to them than dollar signs.

I think a scene that highlights this tension perfectly comes from the MCU movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The main character Xu Shang-Chi or "Shaun" (Simu Liu), is at a dinner with his fascist father, Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung). Wenwu monologues about how racist American audiences were for fearing The Mandarin villain in Iron Man 3, and by extension, the viewer for not criticizing that narrative earlier:

Xu Wenwu: “A funny story. Some years ago a terrorist from America needed a boogeyman to bring your country to its knees. So he appropriated The Ten Rings. My Ten Rings. But because he didn’t know my actual name, he invented a new one. Did you know the name he choose? The Mandarin. He gave his figurehead the name of a chicken dish. And it worked. America was terrified. Of an orange.”

This scene is an indictment of America's indifference to the racism of the previous phases of the MCU, and it's funny for multiple reasons. Within this film universe, it's sort of hypocritical of Wenwu to pretend like he is somehow apart from the racism of American Empire when, as the immortal leader of a secret organization that governs the levers of the world, he has 100% upheld American imperialism. The opening monologue shows the Ten Rings organization assassinating political leaders. If anyone has had a say in how biases have shaped up on Earth, it's this man.

The same logic applies on a metatextual level as well. This commentary is disingenuous because it ignores the power dynamic between the typical MCU viewer and the studios that make films and push culture. America did not make the Iron Man movies. That was Marvel Studios. They choose to make a racist narrative because they deemed it profitable, and like Wenwu, they haven't done much to change the circumstances that led to that bigoted example. The same people who created that racist narrative are still in charge of the MCU today. Kevin Feige was the head of Marvel Studios back in 2007, and he's still in charge now.

Rather than try to push for genuine accountability, films like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings are blaming "America" as a whole for this racism. It was merely the racist American markets, the studio seems to be arguing here, so don't hold us responsible for perpetuating that racism. That's how the market works. Whether racism goes up or down, you meet viewers where they are.

Does that sound like a company that cares about diversity?

Does it sound like a company that will combat white supremacist narratives if and when our country's opinions on "diversity" change?

Listen, I am still a huge Disney fan. I would not be penning a 2,000 word-plus article if I was not invested in this brand. I love Pixar. I love the MCU. I only constantly complain because I care.

Yet if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that Disney is a traditionalistic entity primarily concerned with making money by appealing to the conservative values of the time. It might employ individual creators who care deeply about progressive or even leftist values, but it's never going to adopt those as a matter of principle.

That's simply one wish that won't come true.

Alex Has Opinions 1/22/22 Alex Has Opinions 1/22/22

The Weirdly Conservative Politics of ‘The Expanse’

Spaceships, "bad" revolutionaries, and incremental change.

The Syfy, and later, Amazon property The Expanse (2015 — 2022) was a space opera set several hundred years in the future. It was about a group of people navigating the geopolitics of our solar system, particularly the crew of the "Roci," a ragtag team of mercenaries-turned-freedom-fighters who come from the three major polities (i.e., Earth, Mars, and The Belt, as in the Asteroid Belt). The lead of the show is arguably James Holden (Steven Strait), who tries to lead the crew to a middle ground so that they can do the "right thing."

This series had a lot going for it. It falls into what many nerds like myself would call "hard science fiction" for its willingness to portray space travel as it would actually be with our current understanding of science. Ships are designed so that they can move backward and forward in the directionless void. Characters strap in to deal with the effects of thrust and gravity. It's truly an incredible sight to behold for any lover of spaceships.

The show is also great from a representation standpoint. There are countless strong (and weak) female characters, from UN Representative Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) to Belter administrator Camina Drummer (Cara Gee) to Martian commando Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams). These characters come from a wide range of races and ethnicities, which is refreshing given how white traditional hard science fiction has been in the past (and now). These characters have a spectrum of sexualities and political ideologies that make them three-dimensional and enjoyable to watch.

It's the show's politics where we start to run into some problems. Even though gritty political realism is supposed to be a selling point, we end our final season with a political message that is ultimately very conservative: align with "nice" establishment types or stand aside.

The crew of the Roci fights against various threats throughout the series, but it's the last major one that highlights the problem here. The antagonist isn't a corporate CEO manipulating alien technology or a high-ranking Inner, but a Belter dictator that rises to power by taking advantage of "anti-Inner" sentiment from Belters. Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) establishes a free Navy that, with the help of superior technology from rogue Martian separatists, begins to chuck asteroids at the Earth, killing millions of people. To recap, the Belters, the formerly oppressed group, gain political autonomy, and one of the first things they do is an attempt to genocide their oppressors.

If you follow any conversations online about “land back” (i.e., giving land back to indigenous people) or black nationalism, this trope is probably familiar. Whenever people advocate for redistributive policies, one of the most common counterpoints is to bring up the strawman of "White Genocide." We see this, for example, in South Africa, where conservatives are erroneously claiming that land seizures, which have mostly been nonviolent, are the result of some plot to kill white farmers. These false claims are made all while ignoring why there is such a massive disparity between white and black landowners in South Africa in the first place. "The violent, ethnic cleansing of white farmers by armed, black gangs is infuriating & heartbreaking," falsely claimed columnist Katie Hopkin in 2018, "And the world doesn't care. Or at least the mainstream media doesn't care. Do you?" Conservatives have a habit of portraying any attempt at redistribution as being just as bad as the original stealing of said resources (context be damned).

We see the same logic sometimes used in the US with conversations of giving land back to tribal governments, and this example is even more ludicrous. While any group of people can do horrible things (people are people, after all), the idea that an oppressed group is materially capable of performing a genocide against a country like the United States is laughable. The US has both larger numbers and has one of the most advanced militaries on the planet. Also, Native American tribes endured a genocide under United States rule. They cannot turn around and do the same thing in kind, even if they want to. It's a pointless hypothetical because it's simply not possible under current material conditions.

In the realm of fiction, however, such strawmen narratives can be entertained, especially in science fiction, where the oppressed group can gain control of some magical technology to level the playing field. The "oppressed being no better than the oppressor" is an all-too-common trope in pop culture. We see this in the video game Bioshock Infinite (2013), where protagonist Elizabeth (Courtnee Draper) uses her powers of being able to move between alternative realities to find the one where anti-racist freedom fighter Daisy Fitzroy (Kimberly Brooks) has overwhelming odds against the technologically superior state of Columbia. Daisy uses that advantage to press for white genocide.

We see it again in Black Panther (2018), where N'Jadaka AKA Erik "Killmonger" Stevens (Michael B. Jordan) threatens to destroy the current white supremacist political order using Wakanda's magical-seeming vibranium weapons so that he can establish Wakandan imperialism. "The sun will never set on the Wakandan empire," he monologues in the thrown room as he prepares to distribute arms across the world to topple white governments. The pen allows writers to create a world where this conservative strawman can come to life.

The Expanse falls into a similar pattern. The people of the Belt have suffered under exploitative capitalism for generations. We start with Earth and Martian polities (and corporations) controlling Belter resources, and as a consequence, Belters have to pay a premium for necessities like air and water. Even with some independence following efforts by Fred Lucius Johnson (Chad L. Coleman) and Anderson Dawes (Jared Harris), they were still massive inequities between Belters and Inners that would take generations to fix. If current history is a guide, there would be even more suffering from the fallout, as corporate actors and corrupt Mars and Earth officials try to sabotage equipment and resources as they pull out of the Belt.

Colonizers are very petty when it comes to giving up power. For example, Haiti was, for years, forced by the US and France to use their national income to service debt repayments. These debts were mainly reparations to French slaveholders — something it took more than a century for the former slave colony to pay off. Yes, you heard that correctly: these governments forced formerly enslaved people to pay back their tormentors. It's straightforward to imagine resource-starved Inners demanding a similar arrangement with the Belt, where they lock them out of critical systems and infrastructure and establish blockades and embargos unless their former subjects pay an obscene amount for leniency.

Yet The Expanse creates a narrative where everything falls into place just right so that this oppressed group, which before the rise of fascist Marco Inaros barely had the resources to feed all of its people, forms a new Khanate that challenges the great powers of the solar systems. Reality is filled with stories of imperialists massacring, genociding, and assassinating emergent independence movements, but instead, we get a story where a population of tens of millions, scattered across the void of space, oppresses a civilization in the billions. It's not that the narrative isn't beautifully constructed or that it doesn't make sense within the logic of the story — it is, and it does— but that so much had to go right in this show just so that we could get another metaphorical "White Genocide" trope.

This narrative is reactionary, and this conservatism doesn't stop and end with the show's villains but with the characters, the show chooses to focus on.

The most powerful POV character we focus on in the show is UN Representative Chrisjen Avasarala, who has a high role in Earth's government throughout the series. Avasarala starts out as an awful human being. She's a military hawk who contributes to the Belt's exploitation in the first season. She is racist against Belters and freely tortures OPA operatives (one of the main factions of the Belt) to maintain Earth's imperialist hold in the region.

Yet we are also supposed to like her. She has some of the best lines in the entire series. I was mesmerized whenever she was in a scene, and her witty one-liners only get better when Martian Bobby enters her orbit, and the two have a playful back and forth (seriously, I ship them). And while I am all for lovable villains, I don't think we are meant to entirely disagree with her positions, even in her most xenophobic first season. Avasarala is portrayed as practical and reasonable. That firm head on her shoulders helps her uncover Chairman Jules-Pierre Mao's plot to weaponize the alien protomolecule in the first season. As written on Syfy's website (the network producing the show at the time):

“Avasarala is the Deputy Undersecretary of the United Nations, but the only reason she hasn’t risen to the very top of the ego-powered political hierarchy is because she like getting shit done. We’d say she’s a “walk softly and carry a big stick” type of politician, but she doesn’t walk softly, and her stick is more like a rail gun. Most importantly, she can walk manipulative circles around anyone she deems an adversary (or a friend for that matter), and she swears like sailor.”

We as the audience are meant to think that she gets things done, but until she evolves to become slightly less racist in the last two seasons, that trait was being used to perpetuate imperialism. The show seems to initially want us to admire this person who can work the system, even though the system itself is toxic. We are worshipping a political fixer, an upholder of the status quo who would most likely be the villain in real life. The person who embargos the Belt so that rich Inners can receive reparations from the loss of profits they suffer during the Belt's independence — all while convincing everyone that it's for the common good.

Yet the show truly wants us to believe that an individual like Chrisjen Avasarala can work against the system from within, even as she serves it. The show talks a lot about "good" and "bad" apples in the final season. There is a scene near the end where Avasarala is talking to a reporter named Monica Stuart (Anna Hopkins) about a botanist, Praxideke "Prax" Meng (Terry Chen), who leaked information about experimental biotech to the Inners. When learning about this selflessness from Avasarala, Stuart replies, "Well, one good apple, sometimes that's all it takes."

The show's talking about Avasarala here. She is one of those good apples who will reform the system. Yet this entire sentiment misappropriates the original saying, which is "one bad apple can spoil the barrel." The phrase is talking about how negativity is not an isolated incident but can be systemic. The concept of a practical politico who alone bends the system for the common good is fiction. You do not get that high up, on your own, without already being bent.

However, in the fiction of The Expanse, they seem to suggest that imperialists can change the system by being friendlier and having better values. Avasarala becomes less awful, and she uses the same tactics she employed to bully the oppressed to bully fellow imperialists. "The government would fall if I even proposed the debate," the Martian Prime Minister threatens over the possibility of Belters controlling a new trade union administering trade outside the solar system — a plan Avasarala eventually endorses. This dissent and hatred from the Prime Minister seem very real to me, but it never really happens because the plot dictates that we wrap things up. Avasarala quiets the PM, and nothing comes of his fear. The political and corporate actors who would oppose her in our world are somehow silent.

This magical thinking gets even worse in the closing moments. The other main protagonist Holden helps establish that aforementioned trade union to govern the pocket dimension that connects the solar system to thousands of other habitable worlds (it's this whole thing). He is appointed to head it under the condition that Drummer, a Belter, be the Vice President. He then immediately resigns to give Drummer, and by extension, the Belt, greater political autonomy, but no one does anything to subvert this action because Avasarala has decided to be nice.

Avasarala: I will undo this.
Holden: Don’t. Please don’t even try. It was the only way to secure the peace. The only way we all move forward together. And you know it.
Avasarala: Oh, James I hope you’re right.

And she doesn't resist Holden's decision. The Belt gets equality because one powerful, arguably conservative woman chooses to be agreeable. I am being facetious here. Other people fought for this future too, especially Drummer (who sacrifices so much throughout the series), but Avasarala's consent is still central to the Belt's independence.

It happens because colonizers let it happen.

The narrative of The Expanse does try to highlight some interesting dilemmas. I loved its depictions of oppression and its representations of queer life. For me, Drummer's polyamorous family was a highlight in the entire series because it's a rarity in modern television. There are many good gems here, but its foundation is still built on conservative politics, even as it makes overtures to progressive identity politics.

I think a scene in episode five of season six highlights this well. Drummer and the Roci member Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper) argue about what to do in the war against Marco Inaros. It comes down to a binary — fight against him with the Inners or do nothing. Drummer wants another option, but she cannot find one. Naomi drives home the point that there isn't one, pushing Drummer to help her in the fight against the Belt's Free Navy:

Drummer: so what is it for me? I can choose to wait for the bounty to go high enough that someone kills me, or I can put a collar on my neck and hand the Inners the leash. This universe has no place for me.
Naomi: I wish there were another way. I tried to find one, but there isn’t.

Ultimately, despite the revolutionary rhetoric, this show is very invested in the status quo. Its solutions to inequality boil down to either helping the "good apples" in the system or ejecting yourself from it entirely. Entities that attempt to go against the grain, such as Marcos Inaros or Fred Johnson, are all washed aside when this series comes to a close. The only workable solution we, as the viewer, have is working within the system through the creation of government institutions that the Inners will respect. The Belt wins power through negotiation and fealty and by letting principled Inners make space for them.

I think that's a fascinating message to close out with because, again, it is a conservative one — maybe not conservative as we think about it in a US context, but one that ultimately reinforces the status quo. Work within the system and let friendly privileged people lead the way — either on Earth or amongst the stars — or stand aside.

But hey, at least Avasarala looks fabulous doing it.

Alex Has Opinions 1/12/22 Alex Has Opinions 1/12/22

The MCU is for Rich People

The global franchise is propaganda by the wealthy and for the wealthy

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is the most well-known franchise in the world. Even if you have never seen a single movie, you've probably have learned something about its overall scope and premise. It's about heroes coming together to stop larger-than-life threats with witty one-liners and technology that rivals an entire country's military arsenal. You would think that a property this large would be relatable to most viewers, and in some respects, it is: the action is fun, and most people find the comedy entertaining.

Yet when it comes to class, the relatability of these heroes is often lacking. As we look at the income level of many of the MCU's heroes, the wealthy are disproportionately overrepresented. We see this inflation both in terms of characters as well as the ideologies that these films represent.

This franchise is not relatable to the working class at all. It's for the rich, which should give most viewers some pause as they watch this allegedly harmless entertainment.

When I say that the rich are overrepresented in the MCU, I mean that quite literally. People with wealthy upbringings make up about a third of all protagonists (see my data here). Characters like Iron Man's Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), the new Hawkeye Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), Shang Chi (Simu Liu), or The Wasp's Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) grew up obscenely wealthy. The same can be said for Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Loki (Tom Hiddleston), and Black Panther's T'challa (Chadwick Boseman), who are all wealthy members of nobility or aristocracy.

An additional 18% are protagonists who may not own businesses, have inherited family fortunes or titles, but are upper-middle-class, working professionals. Doctor Stephen Vincent Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) was one of the top neurosurgeons in the country before he became the Master of the Mystic Arts. Doctor Robert Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), AKA the Hulk, had a successful, top-secret contract with the U.S. military. Even Ant-Man's Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) had a master's degree in electrical engineering that he used in a successful career as a criminal.

Some of these characters were coded in their films as being working class. Scott Lang was fired from a service job at the beginning of Ant-Man (2015 ). At the start of his movie, Shang Chi was a valet, living a simple working-class life with his friend Katy (Awkwafina). However, when we look at their backgrounds, they didn’t grow up poor. Scott Lang was a middle-class, working professional stealing money from upper-class criminals. And as the leader of the Ten Ring’s organization, Shang Chi’s father was secretly one of the richest men on the planet (probably). Bruce Banner was working in a bottling plant in The Incredible Hulk (2008) because he’s on the run — not because that’s where we think he should be. He was a successful scientist. These characters were (and are) well-off people going through rough times.

Once we exclude characters who do not qualify for class analysis because they had non-traditional upbringings (think Vision, The Watcher, Natasha Romanoff, etc.), about 32% percent of MCU leads had a genuinely working-class background. These include men and women like Peter Parker (Tom Holland), Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) of Falcon fame, Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), and refugee Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen). They are people who textually are shown struggling with poverty growing up and often in the present as well. Sam Wilson, for example, has an entire scene in his show where he can’t get a bank loan.

He's definitely no Iron Man.

Many of these figures, though, are already beholden to the status quo in some way by the time we meet them. Nearly 60% of these working-class heroes have a military background with a long history of serving the state. Carole Danvers was an Air Force pilot. Steve Rogers was a WWII recruit. Clint Barton worked for the intelligence agency S.H.I.E.L.D.. Sam Wilson was an airman. These figures seemed to have loved the branches they served and never delivered genuine dissent against the state in a tangible way. The closest we get to actual conflict is the movie Captain America: Civil War (2016), and that film is not about our heroes protesting the injustices of U.S. society, but rather them upset that the U.S. government wants to regulate their vigilantism.

Furthermore, the narrative often frames these characters so that any class commentary from the source material is defanged. For example, in the early 2000s Spiderman trilogy, Peter Parker is shown struggling with poverty. He's behind on his rent. His apartment is shitty, and he cannot get ahead in his chosen industry of photojournalism, despite secretly being the subject he is photographing.

Yet, in the MCU version, while he is described as poor (Peter allegedly had to dumpster dive to build his first suit's tech), we don't see that reality on the screen. His apartment is very nice for something in N.Y.C. He goes to a great school, and his most significant problem seems to be asking out a girl. His mentor moves from being Uncle Ben (the working class mentor who infamously said the line "With great power comes great responsibility") to the Billionaire Tony Stark — a man that seems to be framed as his father figure. "…nice work in D.C.," Stark congratulates Parker in Spiderman: Homecoming (2017), "My dad never gave me a lot of support, and I am trying to break the cycle of shame." If that's not the line of a metaphorical father figure, I don't know what is.

In the MCU, we have moved from the rich C.E.O. being the villain in the 2002 Spiderman movie (see Green Goblin) to being the hero. Peter Parker ends the second movie, Spiderman: Far From Home (2019), far removed from his alleged poor roots. His aunt effectively becomes a philanthropist, raising money for those displaced by the Blip. Her son stands behind her in a hundred million dollar suit worth more money than what was probably raised at the event.

That's not a working-class narrative.

The only two working-class protagonists I can see that genuinely are not active agents of the state or sycophants of the wealthy are Wanda Maximoff and Peter Quill — two people on the edges of Earth's society. Peter Quill is a criminal-turned-hero zipping through space in The Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, far removed from the politics of our planet. And Wanda is a former freedom fighter who, after the results of WandaVision (2021), is more of an anti-hero than a true hero (she enslaved an entire town). We are talking about two leads in a list of over twenty, and they are not the capital "H" Heroes that we think of when the word "Avengers" is brought up.

In fact, many of the people with actual class commentary in the MCU are coded as downright villains. Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman) from the show Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021) wants to create equality for the people of the world and prevent our governments from returning to a pre-Snap status quo, and she is depicted as a monster. N'Jadaka (Michael B. Jordan), AKA Killmonger, wants to dismantle white supremacy, and he is portrayed as going "too far." Adrian Toomes AKA Vulture (Michael Keaton) from Spiderman: Homecoming rightfully identifies that Tony Stark, a billionaire, should not be getting paid to clean up the fallout from the battle of New York (see Avengers) because it is a mess he partly caused. Yet Toomes is the movie's primary antagonist.

No one who criticizes the status quo is a hero in the MCU, and as a consequence, our leads are often literally fighting against the people who want to change things.

I still like the MCU. I can quote monologues from Thor: Ragnorack (2017) and Black Panther (2018), but I also understand that this franchise is not for me. The MCU is a very conservative entity that ultimately perpetuates narratives that affirm the status quo. It's hyper militaristic and values the opinions of the rich over anyone else, and that stops me from getting too wrapped up in it.

If you like the MCU, that's fine. As a trans leftist, I like many properties that aren't for me. I am currently binging the Witcher 3 (2015) on Playstation (and loving it), and I am not a straight centrist who grunts at everything, and I still play it. I don't for a moment, however, think that my values are reflected in this game, and the same sentiment applies to the MCU.

It's for the rich, and if that's not you, maybe start questioning your attachment to this iteration of heroes. The rich already have enough. You don't have to give them your definition of a hero too.

Alex Has Opinions 1/7/22 Alex Has Opinions 1/7/22

Disney’s ‘Hawkeye’ Proves Accountability Is Impossible in the MCU

Arrows, revenge, & the impossibility of social progress in the MCU.

Hawkeye (2021) is a cute buddy comedy about the titular Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) passing on his title to a new generation. His protege is a rich trust fund kid named Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), who has idolized him since seeing him swing out of a building in the first Avengers movie. Cute Christmas decorations are everywhere, making it similar to the action movie Die Hard, only funnier. Running gags like the mob using “Bro Delivery Service” vehicles to transport its goons keep things moving enough for you not to think too deeply about the premise.

Yet the moment you start thinking, things fall apart almost immediately. One of the biggest problems with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has always been about accountability. The series has been more than willing to bring up important issues such as racial justice, wealth inequality, and government overreach, only to drop them to focus on the next big bad: the conversation about greater government oversight from the Civil War film was sidestepped to deal with the fallout from the Infinity War saga; the new Doctor Strange 2 trailer makes it’s pretty clear that Wanda Maximoff will not be held accountable for enslaving an entire town; and of course, every villain in the franchise is depicted as having a valid point, only for that point to be discarded for going too far (see Killmonger, Ultron, Karli Morgenthau, etc.).

We see this trend continue in the Disney+ show Hawkeye, where former spy and Avenger Clint Barton is being pursued by the New York criminal underworld for the terrible things he did following the first Infinity War movie. The narrative alludes to a deeper conversation about collateral damage only for Clint to walk away, facing zero accountability for those actions. We stop focusing on these deeds so that we can instead shift our attention to the “real” bad guys that run New York City’s criminal underground.

For those who need a refresher (something that increasingly is necessary when breaking down any MCU property), Hawkeye was one of the first Avengers (AKA those superpowered people who saved the world over ten years ago). He first appeared back in the original Thor movie in 2011. He is much older now — hence the need to reluctantly bring in new blood — and this makes for a premise you’ll recognize if you’ve watched any old school buddy cop movie.

Clint and Kate meet after she prevents goons from crashing an illegal auction. The hilariously named Tracksuit Mafia is trying to steal the suit of the mysterious vigilante, the Ronin (whose long since been MIA). Kate wears the suit to have some anonymity to stop the mafia from stealing it, and shenanigans ensue. This last-minute decision prompts the criminal underworld to believe that the Ronin is back on the scene, causing them to go after the inexperienced Kate. This forces Clint to come back into the world of vigilantism so that he can keep her safe, leading to a wacky and emotional set of fights scenes and revelations.

To add to the intrigue, we soon learn that Clint was the original Ronin. This fact is not so much a spoiler as a thing that happened over six movies and three shows ago, so you might have forgotten. He lost his entire family after the events of the snap (i.e., that thing that killed half of all sentient beings in the universe), and this sent him down a murderous rampage where he indiscriminately killed anyone he believed to be a criminal.

This history sets up an interesting premise, as we first believe that we will be earnestly exploring the fallout of those actions: the collateral damage that comes with doling out justice indiscriminately. The first primary antagonist is a mob lieutenant named Maya Lopez (played by Alaqua Cox), who claims that the Ronin killed her father. She understandably wants revenge for this extrajudicial killing, and much of the first half of the season is our leads trying to get her to stop her bloodthirsty rampage.

The second (sudden) villain is the assassin Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), an MCU character first introduced in the movie Black Widow. She is resentful over the loss of her adopted sister Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson). Yelena blames Clint for Natasha’s death and ideologically serves as the voice of dissent. As she says to Kate in episode 5:

“I have a question for you….Why do you risk your life for him, Clint Barton? How has everybody forgiven him for his past?…You are so fond of him. It tells me you don't really know who he is….He came here to protect his reputation. Do you know how many people he has killed? The trail of blood that follows him, you could wrap around the entire world. ”

I would love to exist in a world where this criticism was treated seriously, but unfortunately, that world is not the MCU. Kate quickly justifies Clint’s collateral damage as necessary to save the world. Like every MCU property before this one, the nuance brought up by this show’s antagonists is sidestepped by the narrative. These two characters turn out to not have valid criticisms of Clint after all. Maya’s father was actually killed by Wilson Fisk, AKA Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio). Yelena’s hatred for Clint is ultimately a misunderstanding, as he didn’t kill Natasha at all. She chose to die in End Game so that the other Avengers could get the Soul Stone. These two people didn’t really disagree with Clint because the narrative isn’t willing to let us genuinely question his “good guy” status.

The series ends, not with Clint having to grabble with his decisions (and the ideology that led him to make those choices), but him ending pretty much where he started: with his family loving him and him being respected by the world-at-large for his perceived heroics. There is no greater oversight as he hands the equivalent of “WMDs-in-arrow-form” off to an entitled trust funder. There are no reparations to the victims he has killed in his long career as a spy and vigilante. Clint symbolically destroys the Ronin suit, as if symbolism can somehow make up for his past actions. His emotional change meant to stand in for accountability.

It turns out that all the depth the show first foreshadowed was never really there, to begin with: merely an aesthetic used to give viewers the illusion that they are watching something more meaningful.

In many ways, this show has broken my perception of the MCU completely. It has made me doubt I will ever see any form of accountability from these characters — No matter how many people they kill. No matter how they violate the sovereignty of nations and the personhood of “nonpowered” persons — it seems there will unfailingly be a big bad to justify these characters’ actions. Whether we are talking about tyrants like Thanos, or the criminal mastermind Kingpin, our heroes will always have to table conversations of accountability for another day.

Ultimately, this is a story about avengers — a word that comes from the Old French word avengier, which means “to take revenge.” The only justice these figures will ever know is retributive violence. They dole out “eye for an eye” punishments that categorize people and things into good and evil. Their methods are largely divorced from the systems of poverty and inequality that drive most people’s actions. Hawkeye was never going to be forced to question his actions following the Snap, and I was a fool for thinking that would happen for even a moment because that story would involve a solution more significant than simply punching and shooting at things.

Retribution is not accountability, and yet it is all these heroes seem to know, which makes me sad for our world. If the greatest heroes in our stories only know how to take revenge, what does that say about our models for justice?

Alex Has Opinions 1/1/22 Alex Has Opinions 1/1/22

'Don't Look Up' Is A Documentary

The satire about climate change might as well be reality

The political satire Don’t look Up (2021) is about a planet-killer comet headed for Earth, but it’s so much more than that. With the United States government choosing to downplay and ignore the existence of a comet that will wipe out all life on Earth in six months, it’s really about our society’s inability to handle systemic issues like climate change. The response to Comet Dibiasky (named after the women who discovered it) becomes bogged down with misinformation and a vapid media ecosystem which makes dealing with "negative" topics like humanity’s imminent death almost impossible.

So you know, exactly like real life.

There are a lot of good ideas brought up in this film, even if they do not always have the best execution. The writing can be brilliant at times, the acting is poignant, and the ending brought me to tears, as it viscerally shows the viewer everything we will lose if we do not fight for this planet. I genuinely love this movie, and I think you should watch it.

At its core is something we rarely see in cinema— a movie that not only skewers the types of people screwing over the planet but the systems that make real dissent difficult. We are directed to hate, not humanity as a whole, but the pundits, wealthy elite, and politicians preventing real change from being implemented, as well as the systems that empower them.

As a result, it creates a movie so emotionally impactful that it might as well be real.

The movie's central argument is that people don't listen to science because they are too wrapped up in toxic systems vying for their attention. "But it's all math," lead Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) says when his colleague Dr. Teddy Oglethrope (Rob Morgan) tells him to keep things simple on his media tour about the comet and to avoid boring the public with "the math." This simple, it's implied, seems to be part of the problem. As Mindy says in a riveting monologue directed at the American public:

“Would you please just stop being so f@cking pleasant? Im sorry but not everything needs to sound so goddamn clever or charming or likable all the time. Sometimes we need to just be able to say things to one another. We need to hear things….”

The world does not listen to Mindy and his colleague Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) because we would rather hear about celebrity breakups and sex scandals. Superficial concerns like these are a constant throughout the film, as personified by news anchors Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett) and Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry), who would instead spin the end of the world as a neat science experiment than the cataclysm that it is. The movie ends with a white house staffer Jason Orlean (Jonah Hill), streaming that he is the last man on Earth, asking people to like and subscribe to his video even if no one is left. The movie argues that if the human race doesn't stop our obsession with these trivial things and start embracing the truth, then it will lead to our end.

Usually, this is where most movies would finish — blaming humanity as a whole for our vices (a damaging trope I have written about extensively elsewhere). Yet, Don't Look Up goes the extra mile by highlighting the systems that make it so difficult for people to listen to the truth (e.g., predatory capitalism and misinformation, etc.). The people we are directed to hate or not the public, but the power brokers acting in their own interests over the common good, and this nuance is what makes the film so realistic.

The film has an entire subplot about how the United States' Lauren Boebert-esk president Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) undermines our planet’s efforts to deflect the comet out of her own self-interest. She does this in part to appease a super donor in the vein of Elon Musk named Sir Peter Isherwell, (Mark Rylance), who wants to mine the comet to make cellphones. The two of them then spent their political capital convincing Americans that the jobs from the comet would end all poverty. The government seems more concerned with creating adverts that justify their decisions and hotlines that ease people’s discomfort than doing the difficult work of saving the world.

Given that we are, as of writing this, undergoing a pandemic worsened through neglect, incompetence, and greed, it's hard not to see this movie as anything less than an indictment of our present reality. Donald Trump killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in denying the disease's severity so that he could help his political chances. Bill Gates has probably killed millions by lobbying to keep the vaccine's IP in private hands. Millions have died to serve these interests, and the same thing will happen with climate change unless something radical is done very quickly.

Our planet dies in the film because of this selfishness from the powerful, not due to some Machiavellian plot. As Kate Dibiasky says of the powerful, "They’re not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for." The movie’s rage is always directed at the rich, and it never lets up, not even at the end. Its second-to-last scene involves the wealthy survivors of our planet landing on a new world thousands of years in the future and immediately being killed off by aliens — unable to imagine that maybe they wouldn’t be at the top of the hierarchy wherever they went next.

And yet hundreds of recent movies have criticized the rich. What makes this movie strike such a chord is that it's not simply the rich who are to blame but the systems they benefit from as well. President Janie Orlean and CEO Peter Isherwell are two figures responding to clear incentives. Orlean wants to win reelection, so she initially denies the comet's existence because it will interfere with the midterms. Isherwell interrupts humanity's initial plan to destroy the comet because he wants the chance to mine the trillions of dollars in resources, even if his greed will potentially kill everyone.

No one is depicted as immune from these incentives, not even our protagonists. Near the end of the film, there is a concert they host where fake celebrity Riley Bina (Ariana Grande) sings about how everyone needs to embrace the science and "look up" at the comet — a meaningless statement harkening to the "science is real" slogan surrounding climate change. Our leads, Mindy and Dibiasky, are not trying to overthrow our corrupt political leaders as the world ends but are instead selling tickets to a concert. They have created a brand, nothing more. We hate rich assholes like Isherwell, but the film clarifies that they are part of a system that coopts all dissent, making our ability to handle systemic problems using legitimate tools next to impossible.

We come to understand as the viewer that the belief in science is never as simple as repeating "the math," something Don't Look Up highlights expertly. We see firsthand all the shortcuts and cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world as it is. In real life, the science of the day has been used to justify everything from eugenics to sexism to climate change denialism. This reality doesn't mean the scientific method is wrong or erroneous, but we must realize that how we interpret "the science" is always dictated by the politics of the time. Dr. Teddy Oglethrope is right. The story matters too, and those who simplify science to a slogan or hashtag ignore this critical dynamic.

They are also ignoring the dynamic of power by making the belief of science, math, or looking up at the comet a matter of virtue rather than one of force and violence. We do not always choose things freely but are made to, and science is no different, which, again, this movie demonstrates brilliantly. There is a running gag in the film where characters who step out of line have a bag placed over their heads and are disappeared to an off-grid location until they agree not to do media appearances (I promise, it's funnier than it sounds). We are meant to laugh during these moments, but, if anything, these bits are tame compared to what happens in real life. Those in power have done far worse to preserve the status quo. Entire governments have been toppled to secure mineral rights.

Why not the world?

Our belief systems are not always a matter of our personal choices but are often imposed on us through violence directed at us by the powerful. The violence and coercion shown in the film feel more emotionally accurate than any David and Goliath story in pop culture about rogue troublemakers triumphing over our system to save humanity. Real heroes rarely receive their day in the sun. They get a bag thrown over their heads, are tortured, exiled, or worse. They are also usually only recognized as heroes decades or centuries after the fact — if they are remembered at all.

In the end, the government’s plan to destroy the comet doesn’t fail because of the public but due to the whims of the powerful. Billionaire Isherwell is the primary person who scrubbed humanity’s best hope for survival, and it’s not out of any brilliant innovation, but because he’s just selfish and ignorant. He’s so stubborn that he fires all scientists who interfere with his mission because they tell him that his plan won’t work. He’d rather focus our survival on a plan that has less of a chance of working but will make him wealthier.

So you know, kind of like real life.

Don’t Look Up may be fiction, but it feels real. It feels like a documentary from both the future and now. Almost immediately, the same cycle of denialism and infotainment was replicated in the critical response to this film. When I look at the abysmal Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film, it’s fair to say that Don’t Look Up was not well received by critics (the public loves it, however, which is very ironic given the subject material of the press downplaying negative subjects). Many critics claimed that it ended up replicating the very aspects it was trying to criticize (i.e., creating very vapid and superficial entertainment) or, worst of all, was too earnest and blunt. As David Fear laments in the Rolling Stone:

“…[both leads] take turns channeling the voice of the movie’s creator, yelling and bellowing and losing their cool repeatedly over the fact that No. One. Seems. To. Get. It! We keep blowing whatever little chances we have to fix this. It’s a sentiment familiar to a lot of us, so much so that, at a certain point, you want to throttle this movie back and match it decibel for decibel: No. Need. To. Keep. Screaming. This. In. Our. Faces.”

Except, films about climate change sort of do have to be blunt, David.

Given that this film is talking indirectly about climate change denialism (a thing that also threatens our current civilization), being too direct might be impossible. If anything, it was not explicit enough. I watched this movie with my parents, and when I brought up how our planet is on a similar, albeit slightly longer, time-crunch, I was called too negative. And we see that response with a lot of the reporting in the movie. You know you've upset the right people when corporate-backed media is complaining about you being too negative about the impending collapse of modern civilization.

If anything, what this movie does wrong is not its directness or unpleasantness (I applaud it for those), but how it sometimes focuses too much on superficial symptoms like social media addiction or infotainment over their causes (i.e., capitalism, corruption, etc.). The world is not ending because we all are glued too much to our screens, but because powerful people hacked human psychology to make us all addicted to our phones so that we would be easier to control. There's a difference. We are not all destroying the world in equal measure. In fact, in our current system, most of us have very little say in policy at all, something the film highlights at every available opportunity.

Our protagonists tried their best to get the government to change course but ultimately failed because the rich and powerful have more say over our lives than we do, and that isn't right. I wept at this film's conclusion because if we don't do anything — if we do not tear down our predatory system of capitalism to the ground — its ending might as well be the final b-roll in a somber alien documentary about the once bright human race.

Our planet is dying. The question now becomes what you will do about it: continue to expect our leaders to do better or take the decision out of their hands?

Alex Has Opinions 12/29/21 Alex Has Opinions 12/29/21

How To Stop The Left from Losing Social Media

Critical Race Theory, Defund the Police, and Online Activism

There is this false narrative among conservatives, that they are systemically discriminated against online. “I’m just going to cut to the chase”, Republican congressman Jim Jordan said during a congressional hearing. “Big Tech is out to get conservatives.” This persistent narrative has been echoed by the right for years and has been a central topic of debate and frustration.

The first thing people on the left do in response is to usually point out that conservative influencers dominate engagement on many mainstream platforms by every conceivable metric. As sociologist Jen Schradie wrote for NBC back in 2020: “Platforms heavily favor conservatives, who not only have war chests of funding but also a swath of digital boots on the ground. And they will marshal their forces if they perceive a threat to that advantage”

And while this correction might make a good clap back in the moment, when we step back, it's more of a self own. It emphasizes the extent to which the left is not doing a good job capturing attention and engagement among users — a failure that prevents us from controlling the conversation™, and makes our efforts reactive, rather than proactive. We are so used to attacking the opinions and people on the Right without really bothering to put out a narrative of our own.

We are going to take this time to highlight the extent of the problem at hand, and more importantly what we can do to reverse the tide.

Social media’s conservative bias

Something to note is that every platform is different. Some platforms have an obvious conservative bias, where conservative influencers dominate. When we look at Facebook, for example, conservative voices consistently capture engagement more than any other. Content creators such as Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino are so frequently securing the top-performing posts per day that, if you were to map out engagement in any given month, they would be their own categories.

In fact, conservative content overall makes a disproportionate amount of engagement on Facebook, Returning to the month of November, a little over 64% was conservative-leaning content, with more liberal content only taking up a little under 5% of the top posts. There is unquestionably a conservative bias here. My spreadsheet doesn’t care about your feelings.

Other platforms have a more neoliberal bias (e.g. favoring participation in the marketplace over an overtly ideological stance). On these platforms, corporate actors selling a product or brand is what succeeds the most. When we look at the top retweets or most liked posts on Twitter or the most-watched video on any given day on YouTube, we mainly see content promoting music videos (especially BTS), Marvel movies, and the promotion of other brands.

In other words, shit people want to buy.

The most popular TikToks are slightly less corporate (though not by much), and not overtly political. The posts that tend to succeed are comedy videos (see Khabane Lame, whomst we stan), celebrity vids, or cute ones with animals in them. It should be emphasized that even though they don’t often break to the top in terms of engagement, conservative influencers do have a robust following on TikTok. Ben Shapiro is on every conceivable platform, including TikTok, as well as other users such as the Real Conservative Guy, conservative barbie, and more.

There is no parallel to Ben Shapiro for the Left. Leftist content creators certainly exist on all mainstream platforms, but they do not have the same success, and in fact, often face systemic barriers for mobilization. Leftist content creators routinely report being censored when creating content on difficult topics such as LGBTQIA+ rights or violence. BreadTube creator Mia Mulder, for example, recently did a video describing drug decriminalization but had to speak in code for the entire video due to YouTube’s censors, cheekily titling her video Why Can’t We Talk About “Drinks?”

Conservatives face censorship as well, but when they get banned from major social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook, their movement has a tendency to build or coopt other platforms in response. Telegram, Signal, and Rumble didn't necessarily start out with the explicit purpose of becoming breeding grounds for far-right voices, but that’s what they have become. Over the past few years, these platforms have received a major influx of cash from conservative billionaires, something that makes them hesitant to cut ties with their new user base completely.

There are also new platforms such as Gettr that have been built by conservatives from scratch, to give users who have been purged from platforms like Facebook and Twitter a place to go. Trump is also allegedly building a social media platform as well, though, given his past business ventures, we aren't holding our breath for its success. Regardless, it underlines the point that the right has a lot of money to throw around when it comes to organizing on social media.

Yet, the Left doesn’t have the same resources to pick up and leave when these platforms refuse to accommodate us. It takes years for Leftists to do what the people on the Right can achieve in a matter of months. There are some projects out there like Nebula and Means TV that leftist creators have slowly built up over the years, but these are just starting out, and do not have the same reach (or pockets) as these other platforms.

What we can do about it

Well, that was a downer.

It’s not the most optimistic thing to hear that the right is dominating social media. Engagement is a core value for how our society operates. If you don’t have people watching you, you aren’t going to get the money, manpower, and political capital necessary to make your vision of politics a reality.

Leftists need more eyeballs and so the natural question becomes: What can we do to reverse the trend?

See what works & copy it

The first and most obvious strategy is to see what ideological competitors (and your peers) are doing and to copy that formula. By copying the right, I do not mean to adopt the same lies that they do. We do not need to fabricate falsehoods for the sake of convenience (we, fortunately, have the truth on our side, Ben), but we do need to be wary of the aesthetics and tones that do well on our platforms of choice.

Branding, honey. It’s all about the brand.

One of the few leftist brands to do well on Facebook is Occupy Democrats, which is occasionally able to break the Top 10 in terms of engagement. The way they manage to accomplish this task is the same way that conservatives do — they push “outrage porn,” which is not nearly as fun as it sounds (i.e. content intended to make consumers angry). In the same way that Ben Shapiro is always complaining about how liberals are ruining society, Occupy Democrats posts spend a lot of time dunking on people like Trump and Fox News. Facebook, as a platform, is set up for this type of engagement, which means if you want to be successful there, serving up a hot dish of outrage porn on a consistent basis is a great way to amass a following.

In another example, The Gravel Institute marketed itself explicitly as the left’s answer to PragerU — a conservative education channel that attempts to radicalize people to conservatism through short explainers. The Gravel Institute does the exact something, also putting out short explainers that break down topics from a leftist perspective. They didn’t reinvent the wheel here. They saw what their most popular competitor was doing and they copied the basic idea, albeit with a slightly nicer polish. And with over 300,000 followers, they are having a lot of success.

As fun as it is, it’s not enough to simply “dunk” on conservatives. We need to break down what they are doing and copy it.

Be entertaining & relatable

Leftists have a reputation for being unfunny killjoys. We are not the kinds of people you invite to a party. There is a joke among leftists that a typical leftist meme is a long, unreadable wall of text.

Just, no thank you. Next. Give me the bill, please. I am ready to leave, thank you very much.

The Gravel Institute created partial success by doing the opposite of this strategy. They launched their channel with a trailer narrated by H Jon Benjamin of Archer and Bob’s Burgers fame. This video has hundreds of thousands of views. It was a minor success and how they achieved this was not by monologuing about the need to join Leftism, but rather having Benjamin interweave jokes throughout the video that made it actually entertaining to watch.

Arguably some of the most popular Leftist content creators are Abigail Thorn of Philosophy Tube and Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints, and how they have achieved this fame is by being very entertaining. It’s not that they don’t talk about important or heavy topics — the two of them have tackled everything from white supremacy to islamophobia — but they do this by creating elaborate set pieces, great jokes, and plenty of understandable references. Their content is #relatable. I do not need a degree in philosophy or political science to understand what the fork they are saying, and that sort of relatability makes them approachable.

There is a new generation of leftists who understand that it's easier to radicalize people through memes and pop culture references than it is to have them immersed in theory that will take months of study to understand. It’s not that theory is bad, but it's more the thing you pull out after someone is comfortable with leftism, and not the opening salvo in a conversation.

Don’t let the right control the conversation

We are going to have to talk about the right. It’s inevitable. They are unfortunately everywhere, and that is a bummer. If you are going to debunk the rights’ nonsense, however, I implore you, don’t just make it about them. They already have enough. Link it to an issue you care about, or you will find that your brilliant fact-checking was for nothing.

We saw this phenomenon with the Critical Race Theory (CRT) debate, which is an academic concept that studies how racism is embedded in our legal system and policies. The right turned this obscure theory of legal study into a boogeyman, where they claimed that, well, a lot of contradictory things, but the primary objection was that CRT teaches white people to feel ashamed of themselves. A ludicrous claim that has been repeatedly debunked (see Tim Wise’s essay on the subject).

In fact, many people on the left have spent (and are continuing to spend) a lot of emotional energy trying to debunk this topic, and so far it hasn't had a lot of success because the issue was never really about CRT. As the original conservative agitator, Christopher F. Rufo explains on Twitter, “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” This was always about branding and power. The right was successfully able to use this nonsense as a wedge issue to help them win the Governorship in Virginia and probably more seats in 2022.

When you only talk about your opponent's framing, you cede ground, and you allow them to define the debate. It’s great that fact-checkers exist, but because no dominant counter-narrative was established with CRT, every frustrated tweet and takedown also served as free advertising for the right. This is a great reminder that if you have to talk about a topic proposed by the right, it's necessary that you link it to something else. Don't just debunk something like Critical Race Theory. The right never gave a frack about the specifics of CRT in the first place. Link it to an issue you care about. Briefly discredit their framing and then segue onto something else more important.

For example, it's well known that concern for CRT was astroturfed by billionaire Charles Koch, who used their vast think tank network to create fear about it. Use that fact to advocate for a need to tax the wealthy. Billionaires like Koch have far too much say over policy and this is yet another example of why we need to redistribute their wealth. In three sentences, you have moved away from the conservative framing of CRT and towards the more leftist conversation of wealth redistribution. Carlos Maza does a great job doing this segue in their video Critical Race Theory And “Moral Panic,” saying:

“While immigrants, people of color, and working-class whites are exploited in different ways and for different reasons, they are often exploited at the hands of the same powerful elites and have reasons to look out for each other. To treat racial justice and economic justice as part of the same struggle.”

Bamn a video about CRT really turns out to be a video about class consciousness.

This tactic shifts the conversation to debating your policy, instead of the nonsense being proposed by the right. Use whatever issue or topic is in the zeitgeist and reappropriate it for your own purposes. That is how you win. By refusing to play on your opponent's terms.

Be persistent

One of the greatest problems that the left has had to grabble with in recent years is how some people within the coalition (mainly liberals) rely too heavily on polling. There is a tendency among leaders in the Democratic party to claim that an issue should not be pursued because it doesn’t poll well — an argument that can be seen in every debate from Single-Payer Healthcare to gay marriage.

For example, one of the greatest narrative coups in recent memory was Defund the Police. For a brief couple of months, the left controlled the media conversation. You might not agree with this policy, but it’s hard not to argue that it was all anyone could talk about for a few hot months.

However, an argument emerged from Democratic Party leadership and pundits that this was not a good narrative. Soon people began talking about how “defund the police” was bad, and while you may believe that, something we have to reckon with was that no alternative narrative was established by critics to take its place. The conversation moved from arguing how to “defund the police” to how “defunding the police is bad,” which is a reactionary take not helpful for advancing policy. You can’t build a constructive movement on the word no — change requires articulating a solution.

The right soon captured the conversation to talk about nonsense like CRT because they are very good at “agenda-setting” (i.e. controlling the framing of an issue to influence public opinion). The right doesn’t let a poll stop them from fighting for something. Conservatives will repeat a policy or issue over and over again, no matter how unpopular, until they capture enough support, even if it takes years of struggling in the wilderness to do so (see abortion). There is a famous saying by Republican Strategist Frank Luntz that goes like so:

“There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.”

The biggest takeaway the left needs to understand from the right is to never let anything go. If you believe in something, no matter how unpopular it is at the moment, you need to fight for it. Social media requires a constant backlog of content that users can tap into. Completely throwing out your entire volume of content because the public’s perception has shifted is a terrible way to gain a foothold on the web

Polling should not be used to kill the promotion of an issue, but as a guide on how to campaign for it, and that remains just as true in online content as it does with political organizing. If Americans don’t like an issue, you call it something else. Republicans do this all the time. They didn’t stop campaigning for the privatization of the education system because it polled badly but reframed it as school choice. They didn’t stop pushing for mandatory pregnancies but reframed them as being pro-life.

I will say it again: branding is everything, honey.

It’s this ability to rebrand that we need to adopt from the right. Successful leftists know that it's their words that need to change, not their positions.

Conclusion

None of this stuff is new. Activists have been arguing for all of these points for years. The Right’s playbook is not really theirs. They just have the money and wherewithal to do whatever it takes to get their desired policy passed.

If you have the time and money — something the left is admittedly at a disadvantage online (and in real life as well)— then you too can establish a foothold online. You simply have to copy what works, be engaging, don’t let the right control the conversation, and do your darndest to remain consistent — not just in terms of content production, but with your general objectives.

We might never have the pockets of the right, but we have the numbers, and online, eyeballs are everything.

Alex Has Opinions 12/19/21 Alex Has Opinions 12/19/21

Gay Dystopia Finds a Home in the Christmas Comedy ‘Single All The Way’

Christmas cheer, wage exploitation, & toxic love.

I love gay trash. I know I have a reputation for being a little too critical, but there is nothing I enjoy more than shutting my brain off for a couple of hours while watching some homoerotic love stories. I was excited to watch Single All the Way (2021) because it had all the ingredients I needed: cute men, Jennifer Coolidge, Schitt's Creek Jennifer Robertson, and cringe-worthy Christmas puns.

Bring on the holiday cheer!

When I started watching this movie, however, I realized that it was not cute at all. While this film has the outward appearance of light-hearted fair, it has a central relationship dynamic that is pretty messed up. The plot started to make me think — a big no-no when it comes to trash — and I was left unhappy with how this movie ends. So let’s talk about the problems undermining Single All the Way, and how this movie not only romanticizes a toxic relationship but also ends up being an ode to the gig economy (yes, you read that right).

Single All the Way is about a will-they-or-won’t they duo named Peter (Michael Lorenzo Urie) and Nick (Philemon Chambers) as they go home to Peter’s family in New Hampshire for Christmas. Peter and Nick are roommates in LA, and they consider themselves to be best friends. Peter’s family is also obsessed with getting him a partner. Half the family wants him to go on a blind date with newcomer James (Luke Macfarlane), while the other half is team Nick. This is a pretty basic plot, and that’s okay. I love Lord of The Rings and Mad Max: Fury Road, and those movies can pretty much be summed up as a group of people moving in one direction for hours and then coming back home. There is nothing wrong with keeping things simple, especially for a trashy Christmas Romcom where most viewers are there to ogle at the leads.

The primary element that made me uneasy was how possessive and selfish Peter is throughout the film. My first hint of this comes early on when his roommate doesn't want to go out to a party, and we learn that Peter's already laid out a suit for him and prepared an Uber. It's not the worst thing, and if it were the only sign in the movie, I wouldn't think twice about it, but it's the first ding in quite a long list. It was supposed to show how in sync the duo is, but to me, it simply read as them being way too co-dependent.

When Peter calls off his relationship with hunk Tim (Steve Lund) because he learned the latter was secretly married to a woman, he tries to convince his roommate Nick to not only come home with him for Christmas but to pretend to be his boyfriend once there. Peter is able to accomplish this by convincing Nick that this action is for his own good, saying: "Nick, I don't want you to be here all by yourself, reminiscing about the great Christmases you had with your mom as a kid. I know she will always be in your heart, but you shouldn't be alone with those feelings on Christmas." The line is supposed to read as Peter looking out for Nick, but it instead seems to be Peter using his intimate knowledge of Nick to push him towards something that's quite selfish. This trip isn't about self-care for Nick. It's about Peter saving face with his family.

And to make matters worse, Peter doesn't offer to pay for the last-minute Christmas ticket to his family but convinces Nick to spend his own money on this pity party. "You have Saving Emmett money….The first book you wrote became a best seller, and now you have all this money that you're saving for a rainy day. And look, it's pouring." Peter says, gesturing to himself. Yet while Nick does seem to have a nest egg, he's not wealthy. Nick spends his days completing jobs for the application TaskRabbit (more on this later), making this whole ordeal very selfish. Peter's already asking his friend to lie on his behalf, and he wants him to pay for it too.

This possessiveness never really ends. Peter refuses to commit to Nick until the movie's very end, telling his niece that he's not willing to confess his feelings to Nick out of fear of loss. It's only when Nick prepares to leave early from the trip— showing the first bit of agency in the entire movie — that Peter decides to commit. In fact, Peter doesn't say the words "I love you" until after Nick reveals he has purchased him a lease on a store, so Peter can live out his dream of selling plants. It's a scene framed as endearing but comes off as quite transactional.

Nick is not the only person Peter treats selfishly. There is a whole subplot where his mom Carole (Kathy Najimy) or Christmas Carol (whomst we stan), is proud of this white plastic tree that she has purchased, and Peter goes behind her back to purchase a real one. He also treats blind date James somewhat terribly as well. Peter never commits to him, refusing to communicate honestly with James about his feelings (see the pageant scene). No one is owed a relationship, but the way Peter strings James along is pretty self-centered. Peter is so bad at communicating his feelings that James is the one who has to tell Peter that the latter doesn't seem interested in him. None of these behaviors are terrible on their own, but taken together, and they form a pattern of behavior where Peter acts very selfishly to most of the major characters in this film.

Returning to Nick for a moment — i.e., the only significant Black character in this very white film. This movie's ending sets off all the red flags. Nick offers up his life savings to Peter — someone who is middle or upper class and appears to have a nice job — so that he can live out his #valid career of selling plants to overprivileged white people. Nick gives this money before Peter confesses his love for him. His alleged virtue is that he is willing to sacrifice everything for love to a man that frankly doesn't treat him that well. Nick only gets his happy ending after Peter gets every he wants, on his terms.

Yet, this problematic framing is not just about Peter's possessiveness but Nick's portrayal as well, and the best way to highlight this is to talk about his view on work. Nick is a writer, but he also loves doing odd jobs for the application TaskRabbit, and the way this movie upsells the app is ridiculous. "I have [my dog] Emmett and an endless stream of TaskRabbit jobs," Nick says, rationalizing why he's comfortable staying at home for Christmas, "which is all about helping people, which brings me joy. And if that isn't the Christmas spirit, I don't know what is." The movie is literally equating working in the gig economy with holiday cheer.

Nick goes on three gigs throughout the film, and they are all portrayed with a surreal coolness. They should call you "Task Elves," one client gabs excitedly. There is nothing wrong with a person liking to do manual labor — I love to garden, and my partner loves to sew — but TaskRabbit is an exploitative company. "Working for TaskRabbit is just a fantastic way to always stay at the poverty level, right?" one Tasker said in a study. "…[it is] "actually really a race to the bottom… .it's almost exploitative the things [you] can get people to do for $10," commented someone who pays for Tasks on the platform. This company has created a climate where workers are underpaid and overworked, and its positive portrayal here during a romantic comedy movie is a type of malicious propaganda.

The way Single All The Way is trying to gloss over a business with very ugly practices and make them seem cool is unsettling. When you have your only Black character take a certain glee in serving the exploitative systems around him, a system that disproportionately hurts people of color, it rings some alarm bells you could even hear in the Sunken Place. Nick isn’t just this way with TaskRabbit and, throughout the movie, does a ton of free labor for Peter’s family — a trip, I remind you, that was initially pitched to him as self-care. This movie’s portrayal of Nick is dystopic. You have a Black man serving as the positive face of a very predatory system, and that’s manipulative.

Drag Queens Trixie Mattel and Katya recently did a reaction video of Single All The Way in their series I Like To Watch, and they called it the "gay Get Out" — a joke that feels very accurate to me. This movie is trying to be a cute romance, but it ends up being a reflection of some frankly toxic values. However, unlike Jordan Peele's masterpiece Get Out, which satirizes the predatory racism within many white liberal circles, Single All The Way isn't a commentary on white gaydom. It's a celebration of it, and that's unnerving.

The movie isn't so bad it's good. It's just bad and horrifyingly so. The thing about trashy TV is that it actually needs to be done well for you to enjoy it, or it comes off as quite offensive. Schlock can often replicate the most toxic elements in our society if its creators do not understand what they are trying to say. Some of the campiest movies out there put a lot of effort into their humor and aesthetic (see But I'm A Cheerleader, Serial Mom, etc.). Single All The Way wanted to be fun and campy, and it had all the right ingredients, but it put them together in a way that reinforced existing systems of oppression — and there's no holiday cheer in that final dish: only pain and lots of cringe.

Like seriously, wtf movie, Merry Christmas, I guess.

Alex Has Opinions 12/10/21 Alex Has Opinions 12/10/21

The Inescapable Neoliberal Bias Behind ‘Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell'

Examining the philosophy of the adorably cute science YouTube channel

The YouTube channel Kurzgesagt [kurts·guh·zaakt] — In a Nutshell advertises itself as a science-based educational platform. It has over 17 million subscribers, and each one of its videos averages millions of views. It's one of the most-watched science channels globally, and it covers every topic, from the origins of consciousness, to how to create solar engines. CEO Philipp Dettmer claims that the channel's goal is "to spark curiosity….to inspire people to do very, real research for themselves." This aim is undeniably a good thing. We should encourage people to learn more about our world.

It should also be noted that the quality of these videos is beyond superb. Each one involves a narrator breaking down complex topics as cutesy animated ducks act as our visuals (seriously, I love these ducks). I have found their videos to be an excellent place to start for certain topics. The research underpinning them is far more in-depth than your average YouTube video — something that should be applauded.

However, there is a philosophy underpinning most of these videos that's more than simply "the scientific method." While they claim to be science-driven about the positions they have taken, the Kurzgesagt company that makes these videos has a worldview that fosters market-based, arguably "neoliberal" solutions when it comes to tackling humanity's biggest problems.

They are not "objective" — if such a thing is even possible — when it comes to the presentation of the stories they tell, and that is something viewers should be mindful of when they watch these videos.

When we talk about science, it's very easy to devolve into a "well, that just what the data says" kind of argument. This position is where proponents try to divorce the philosophical assumptions baked into how people interpret the data from a particular source, and we see that sort of reasoning happening here with Kurzgesagt videos as well. As the narrator in the video Can You Trust Kurzgesagt Videos? says of the company's process when forming opinions:

“When we express an opinion, we market it as such. That’s not saying that we don't draw conclusions from the research. Homeopathy does not work and meat is really bad for the planet. Climate change is real but organic food is not a good way of solving it. If the facts clearly support a conclusion its OK to present it as such.”

The problem with this assertion is that the use and study of science is never objective, especially when new information conflicts with well-established worldviews. Facts can retrospectively turn out to be very subjective. One infamous example is scientist Charles Darwin's position on sex. Darwin argued that evolution made man "superior" to women (he was an incel before it was cool, you guys). None of his arguments were particularly compelling, even given the information presented at the time, but his ideology warped his reading of the data to reinforce existing biases. In this case, that only Chads could get laid.

No one is immune from this type of distortion. Our ideologies always affect how we see the world, including Kurzgesagt, which uses its platform to often reinforce the current political and philosophical consensus (i.e., the promotion of "neoliberalism" or the belief in free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending.). This stance leads to overwhelmingly technocratic and market-oriented positions, often excluding all dissident opinions out of hand as unrealistic (if they are mentioned at all).

For example, in their video Overpopulation & Africa, the narrator describes how promoting education, better healthcare, and contraception will reduce poverty. The video asserts a direct link between "overpopulation" (a term as nebulous as my dating life) and poverty. This theory is a popular, albeit highly controversial position; we don't have time to go into depth here.

In short, focusing on "overpopulation" is a framing that ignores the impact of those populations' economic systems. Maybe it's not the population itself that's the problem, but how those societies distribute resources. And, you know, maybe how they have been taken advantage of by other societies (cough, cough imperialism) to obtain said resources is also a problem. For those curious about learning more about the problem with the "overpopulation" framing, I recommend reading Martin Empson and Ian Rappel's essay on the topic for more details on why this position might not be so straightforward.

What's noticeable here is how Kurzgesagt describes this reduction in population. The most prominent example given in the video is about the population decline in Bangladesh, which is described as being in service to economic productivity rather than to reduce human suffering:

“This also changed [Bangladesh’s] demographics and the economy. Before, many children were born but died before they got to contribute to society. As fewer kids die and fewer kids are born, things change. Kids get an education and turn into productive adults. The government was able to shift some of their resources from lowering child mortality to boosting the economy.”

The ingrained assumption in this example is that increased economic production in a capitalist economy is a natural good we all should be striving for. The problem presented here is not that children died — although I'm sure they would agree child mortality is awful — but that they died before becoming workers, preventing productivity from "trickling down" to the rest of society. The video touts how Bangladesh is expected to move from being one of the "least developed countries" to "developing" as the successful endpoint of this strategy.

Now you may agree with that as a goal, but the point here is that it's more about pushing towards a particular ideological outcome than about being objective scientifically. Poverty is not like the study of physics: its solution and even its definition are hotly debated by different economic schools (something this video ignores completely).

Some other examples in Kurzgesagt’s repertoire are far more explicit about their support of neoliberalism. In the video What do Alien Civilizations Look Like? The Kardashev Scale, the narrator goes in length explaining how traits that allow humans to be successful in our current economic system are "natural." They then speculate, with some caveats, about how these traits will most likely be shared by any advanced alien civilization as well, saying:

“We know that humans are curious, competitive, greedy for resources, and expansionist. The more of these qualities our ancestors had the more successful they were in the civilization building game. Being one with nature is nice but its not the path to irrigation systems or gunpowder or cities. So its reasonable to assume that aliens able to take over their home planet also have these qualities.”

This perspective is not in any way scientific. The anthropological and biological data about humans being inherently greedy and expansionist are inconclusive. There have been a diversity of different social structures throughout human history. We have no idea if all of these structures would lead to our present reality, and short of running a simulation of all human civilization and going through all the variables, finding out is impossible. Those sorts of experiments are well beyond our capabilities at the moment (that is unless Elon Musk has some projects he hasn't let us know about yet).

Here, Kurzgesagt is working backward. They are starting with the assumption that humans are inherently greedy and expansionist, using contemporary, western civilization as a template, and then advancing that spurious claim to talk about how all sentient life in the universe will behave this way as well. These assumptions, of course, reinforce current models of colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism, making them appear natural and commonsense.

This logic not only ends up creating videos that uphold the values of neoliberalism but serves as the mouthpiece of the very powerful as well.

A video Kurzgesagt released recently called Can YOU Fix Climate Change? talks about many of the problems and issues they perceive with the climate change discourse. This video has many good points, such as how the idea of a carbon footprint is conservative marketing, but things get very wishy-washy when we come to the Solutions section. They quickly dismiss any solution outside of capitalism, saying:

“Some argue that a move away from capitalism is the only solution to this mess. Others insist that markets should be freer without any interventions like subsidies. And some suggest that we need what’s referred to as ‘degrowth’ and to cut back as a species overall. But the truth is, at least as of now, no political system is doing an impressive job of becoming truly sustainable and none have really done so in the past.”

This dismissal doesn't make much sense since we only have one major economic system right now. It is not a serious attempt to weigh the merits of different approaches but rather is meant to segue the video to more traditional, neoliberal solutions. Despite claiming that you cannot make an individual difference tackling this systemic issue, the video ends by saying: "So this is basically what you can do. Vote at the ballot, and vote with your wallet." The video further argues that more affluent viewers should spend their money on emerging technologies like electric cars and solar panels. It's using the rhetoric of more radical movements while advocating for very conservative policy proposals.

Unsurprisingly, the sponsor of this video is billionaire Bill Gates's blog Gates Notes, which just so happens to be advertising a book on the front page called How To Avoid A Climate Disaster. And whaddya know? The book advertises many of the same solutions proposed in this video:

“Although we have a number of cost-competitive low-carbon solutions today, we still don’t have all the technologies we need to get to zero emissions globally…[the solution] is [for the government] to invest in R&D when the private sector won’t because it can’t see how it will make a profit. Once it becomes clear how a company can make money, the private sector takes over.”

Here, Gates argues for technocratic, market-based solutions to climate change, ultimately advocating for more investment and innovation. His approach is divorced from any political or economic reforms that would challenge the status quo. Instead, he asks for the governments of the world to simply tweak the market so it can work better — an attitude that aligns very closely with the one that seems to underpin all of Kurzgesagt's content.

In fact, the similarities with Gates don't end here. Gates is an avid supporter of the channel. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided a $570,000 grant to the company in 2015, which led to the creation of at least seven videos (one of them being the Overpopulation & Africa video we already mentioned). These videos are rooted in the same philosophical foundation we see prevalent throughout Kurzgesagt's discography. To be clear, CEO Philipp Dettmer and his compatriots are probably not in cahoots with Bill Gates, scheming on ways to enhance this billionaire's chosen narrative. It's more than likely that they share a similar philosophical foundation, which creates a positive feedback loop where they are rewarded for advancing views palatable to the very powerful.

Gates isn't bankrolling other YouTube educators such as PhilosophyTube, and that's because the latter's aesthetic is far more critical of the wealthy as a class. I have seen no BreadTube creators getting a hundred thousand dollar grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We cannot pretend that this is simply about advancing the public's literacy with complex topics. The ideology they are advancing matters too, a reality that is reflected in how Kurzgesagt is funded.

While Kurzgesagt has a Patreon that partially funds their production, they not only get grants from the likes of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation but have also opened up an agency that creates video projects for the likes of Audi, NeverThink, and BitDefender. This content sounds educational, but it largely serves as ads for various products such as cars and security systems. Kurzgesagt has a material interest in producing content that doesn't offend these interests. So that limits the types of criticism they can levy — as their climate change video's hesitancy to explore solutions outside the market and voting aptly demonstrates.

Yes, the creators of Kurzgesagt probably aren't going to advance those solutions anyway because of their ideology, but the material conditions around them also reinforce it. This feedback loop leads to the creation of content distorted by our society's current biases (whether those biases are admitted to or not).

Educational content is tricky in our modern information ecosystem because it is often understood as being intrinsically good. We reward creators such as the VlogBrothers and Mike Rugnetta, who demystify topics so that everyday people can understand them. However, the ideology underpinning how that information is explained and demystified is equally important to the information itself.

As a more extreme example, PragerU is a conservative education channel on YouTube that attempts to explain political and economic subjects ranging from the Antebellum South to Climate Change. Their conservative ideology, however, often warps how they present that information. Much of the videos they put out there are wildly inaccurate, as the YouTuber Shaun frequently demonstrates.

Kurzgesagt is not as bad as PragerU — not even close (please don't at me in the comments). They have the genuine desire to demystify science, which is a good goal everyone should be able to stand behind. We need more scientific literacy, and I want to stress that I don't want readers to walk away with the message that Kurzgesagt is no better than other conservative "educators" out there. I bring this example up to highlight that your political philosophy impacts how you break down and simplify information. It's never as simple as presenting the facts — your ideology can sometimes make the facts.

In a nutshell, Kurzgesagt has several biases that they have not accounted for regarding economics and politics, which leads to them prioritizing technocratic, market-based solutions and framings over everything else. This perspective doesn't make them awful, but it does mean that they have noticeable blindspots we should keep in mind when watching their content.

P.S. — In the improbable chance that someone from the Kurzgesagt team has read this essay, know that I still think your videos are pretty cool, and I would love to discuss these issues further with you.

Alex Has Opinions 12/4/21 Alex Has Opinions 12/4/21

Why You Should Still Vote, Even If You Hate The Democratic Party

Tearing apart the idea that voting doesn't matter

If you spend enough time online (and in real life, too), you will inevitability come across people who believe that elections are futile. I am not referring to anti-democratic fascists who want to dismantle democracy, but those who fundamentally believe that our current system cannot guarantee meaningful reform.

From this perspective, it doesn't matter whether you vote for Democrats or Republicans; neither side will lead to any substantial change. In fact, this logic claims that there are many areas of policy where there is no substantial difference between these two factions. They are simply "two sides of the same coin." As one person laments on Quora:

“Democrats and Republicans are both funded and lobbied by the same banksters (s.p.), corporations, and financiers. Both mostly push for the same wars. THEY’RE ALL IN THE HANDS OF BIG BUSINESS AND CORPORATIONS, y’know? The people who run the nation. That’s what it means that they’re two sides of the same coin. It doesn’t matter who gets in. They all sellout.”

I am pretty adamant about being in favor of elections and disagreeing with the perspective that they are useless. However, I am also on the Left (AKA one of those radicals who goes bump in the night). Anyone who follows me knows that I am deeply dissatisfied with the United States and how our leaders govern. I want to have the systemic, revolutionary change that advocates of the above viewpoint claim is impossible to achieve through elections.

And so, I wanted to give my leftist perspective on why participation in electoral politics can be useful and how it might lead to that better world after all.

A Quick Disclaimer

Firstly, when we have this conversation, we need to highlight that those who defend elections can be very condescending towards those who are critical of them. Many conversations often devolve into name-calling, as lost elections are quickly blamed on those who refused to participate in them. "If you don't vote, that's a vote for Trump," former President Obama infamously said of nonvoters shortly before the 2016 election, and we all know how that strategy turned out.

Even if you agree with the sentiment that nonvoters are to blame, it should be stressed that it's not particularly helpful for convincing someone to come to your side (again, shame did not help Obama convince nonvoters to support Clinton). It's very hard to get someone to change their opinions once they have made up their mind, with group affiliation having a huge impact on their worldview. Some research indicates that correcting others can cause them to double down and might even worsen their misperceptions (see the much-debated 'backfire effect').

If someone believes that elections are a waste of time, telling them that they're wrong and should feel bad isn't effective — a statement I realize will not change the minds of those seriously invested in this strategy, but I am a glutton for punishment. If we continue to use this tactic, then know that it's more about making ourselves feel better emotionally than convincing someone that we are right.

Furthermore, we have to acknowledge that there is a lot of valid criticism coming from this disenfranchised wing of the Left. When we look at establishment Democrats, they often have an outright hostility towards leftist candidates. For example, when socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary in the 2021 Buffalo mayoral election, she was not met with a "vote blue no matter who" response but rather intense resistance from more conservative Democrats. They teamed up with Republicans to stage a write-in campaign that ultimately assured the incumbent Democrat, a moderate who lost in the primary, received victory in the general — a strategy that potentially cost the Democratic Party the general election for Erie County Sheriff. Conservative Democrats were more concerned with stopping leftists within their own party than expanding political power.

Plenty of these examples exist. From all staff members in the Nevada state party resigning after DSA members won seats to New York Democrats trying to eliminate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's seat, these antics do not make leftists feel listened to or respected within the party. You may not agree with the perspective that elections are inherently flawed (I don't either), but this resignation comes from a valid place. The Democratic establishment does not seem interested in allowing everyone in its tent to hold positions of power. This gatekeeping has created a lot of bad will within its coalition. Many leftists know that their vision of the future will not be listened to and will often be mocked and derided as childish by party members, so they have checked out. I don't think yelling at activists who have spent years fighting for social change, only to be belittled for those efforts, is going to win over any converts.

That's what we call a bad look, folks.

And so, if you are a leftist with the perspective that elections are futile, know that I am not here to judge you. I often agree with your frustration with establishment Democrats. If you are committed to the fight in other ways (e.g., mutual aid funds, direct action, etc.), I applaud your efforts and consider you a friend. We may disagree on the issue of voting; however, I do not think you are my enemy, and I will not treat you as such.

I am here to explain my perspective on why I think participation in elections, the system, electoralism, "bourgeois politics," or whatever you want to call it, can be effective.

The Arguments

I will not wax poetically about systemic reform because if such an argument worked, there would be no need for this article.

Let's assume for argument's sake that the "elections are futile" position is right: that elections within our current system will never seriously abolish institutions such as racism, sexism, capitalism. If you hold this perspective, I still think there are some vital reasons to participate in electoral politics.

Harm reduction

The most cited one is "harm reduction," or the idea that this will lessen the total harm done to certain people. The argument goes that even if Democrats are corporatist shills with no intention of passing systemic reform, there is still some good to be done in endorsing them in the issues where they are not absolutely awful. Democrats, the argument goes, mainly support the status quo when it comes to reproductive justice, queer rights, and preserving our imperfect safety net programs, as opposed to Republicans who will (and are actively campaigning) to overturn these issues at a moment's notice.

If the argument of harm reduction works for you, then great. It's probably partially true, depending on the issue being discussed. There are traditionally some material differences in Democratic and Republican leadership.

Abortion is a key one. For the past couple of decades, presidential administrations have used Title X funding, a federal grant program devoted to providing money for family planning and health services, to determine what type of "options" recipients like Planned Parenthood could advise. Ronald Reagan instituted a gag rule that prevented recipients from advising or giving out referrals for abortion to people with an unintended pregnancy, even if they explicitly asked for this information. Clinton repealed the gag order. Bush reinstituted it, and back and forth, this dance went like clockwork, continuing to the present day under Biden, who has recently repealed the gag order once again.

Another slight difference is healthcare funding. Democratic governors are far more likely to expand Medicaid funding under the ACA than Republican ones. Although that law may be imperfect, it still has given millions of people access to health care. In these states, this coverage translated to an increase in quality of care, particularly among adults without a college degree, patients with cancer, and patients with diabetes.

There are a lot of issues like these that aren't going to change the fabric of our society fundamentally, but they do make a material difference in people's lives. This reality doesn't make the Democratic Party perfect. There are plenty of issues where there is honestly no material difference between the two parties, especially in fiscal and foreign policy areas. Still, these above reasons are enough for some Leftists to resign themselves to vote blue.

From this perspective, harm reduction between Democrats and Republicans is like the option between a turd and an uncooked potato. Sure one of these options is difficult to consume and will kill some people who are allergic to it, but the other is a pile of shit. Most people can cook a potato with the right tools, and while we should seriously work on giving people other types of healthier foods to eat, no one can eat shit.

Despite harm reduction being the most frequent argument, however, I think it is the weakest one for convincing people to support elections because determining the harm a party can do is difficult in the moment. The repercussions for policy are not felt until years if not decades later. Bill Clinton was a Democrat, and he helped change our nation's safety net programs in a way that materially made them more difficult to access and use. The two political parties both support neoliberal fiscal policy, so harm reduction is not a very effective argument for mobilizing people who hate that paradigm.

Votes for us because we are slightly better than Satan is a terrible campaign slogan, even if it's true.

Successful elections make activism easier

No, I think you should vote because it lets you get away with more effective forms of activism (e.g., mutual aid funds, direct action, etc.) far more easily.

My problem with the "those in charge will never permit real reform" argument is that it's so hyperbolic to the point of not being helpful. To be clear, if "the powers that be" will not allow true reform through elections, they are not going to allow it through direct action or militia groups either. The United States spends more on its military than any other country in the world, and it has a long history of squashing leftist movements and organizations both abroad (see all of Latin America) and at home (see Project MERRIMAC, Project RESISTANCE, COINTELPRO, etc.). Any outright attempt to challenge that hegemony has and will be met with violent suppression.

That's how colonizers think pretty much across the board. Anything that makes them uneasy is often met with a disproportionate amount of violence. Rome didn't just defeat Carthage but, in what is often considered a genocide, destroyed the city-state (though the literal salting of the Earth probably didn't happen). No one will “call the manager” harder than a colonizer having their worldview challenged.

However, this reality does not mean that the type of government opposing you is irrelevant. While activists are never friends of the status quo, the response they receive varies dramatically depending on who is in power. Rome didn't genocide everyone who opposed it, and neither does the United States. There is a spectrum of violence used by imperialist powers to preserve the status quo. Longtime activists know that the enforcement of the law is not done so equally. Getting genuine leftists into power on the local level, especially in city council and sheriff offices, means more hesitancy to mobilize punishment against protesters.

Conversely, when we do not focus on winning allies in positions of power, the job of the dissident becomes that much more difficult. The city council of Los Angeles, for example, recently passed a slew of laws that restrict mobilization, such as requiring a 300-foot buffer around a private residence targeted for demonstration and limiting disruptions at City Hall. The LA police already have a history of misusing force, which means these laws will give them even more wiggle room to rough up protestors. As Peter Eliasberg, chief counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, told the LA Times: "I am concerned about this type of legislation that says, 'Let's make it that much harder to protest.'"

Protestors need to be involved in the political system to prevent this legislation from hindering their efforts. You may never get the entire political system to support your cause outright. Yet, that doesn't mean that active allies within the electoral system or even passive ones (i.e., people who willfully do not get in your way) are useless. Support is not a binary between enemies and allies. Even if someone isn't backing your cause explicitly, if they are not mobilizing the full force of the law against you, it becomes substantially easier to organize protests and other forms of political disobedience. In some cases, it can be the difference between an activist getting jail time or a bullet and walking away to fight another day.

The more people in power you get not using the full force of the law directed at your efforts — either through active support or indirect assistance — the more of your resources can go to other things. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year, are spent on bailing activists out of jail, and pretending like we would not be in a better position if those resources were directed towards expanding our base (rather than defending the existing one) is counterproductive.

We should want allies in the political system because it makes other political activism easier. I'd rather have people in the streets than behind bars, and elections can sadly make that difference for some activists.

They help with radicalization and engagement

Lastly, while you may think that elections might not change the system, they do perform the secondary objective of radicalizing people to your cause. Campaigns are hotbeds of political mobilization and one of the few areas of civic life where people can explore their political identities.

For example, thousands of people were radicalized by the Bernie Sanders campaign. He may have lost both the 2016 and 2020 elections, but it still had a material difference in what people believe. As one far-left anarchist said of Bernie's bid for the presidency:

“…let's go back to 2015. That's when I was starting to pay attention to politics again for the first time in years. There was an old bald guy named Bernie Sanders and he was saying things that I’d never heard a presidential candidate say before….Bernie Sanders energized me and pointed out flaws in my way of thinking that I never knew I had. I did something I have never done before and I donated money to his campaign. Not just once but over and over again. I was firing off campaign donations on an almost weekly basis. I couldn't shut up about him on Facebook. I had the zeal of a convert….He unlocked something deep inside me and I met people through all my online campaigning for Bernie and they exposed me to even more radical ideas and that is how eventually I became an anarchic communist and it didn't take long.”

There are so many people who have this story. The primary objective of winning the presidency did not happen for Bernie Sanders, but the secondary objective of radicalization did occur for millions around the globe (myself included). This emergent enthusiasm for leftist causes has made a material difference on the level of leftist mobilization in the United States. The Democratic Socialists of America, for example, went from having about 6,000 members before 2015 to now nearly having 100,000 (that's over a 1,500% increase), and we see a similar uptick with leftist groups around the country.

The truth is that non-radicalized people are far more likely to be amenable to politics during a campaign than they are during any other period in their lives. When we close ourselves off to those avenues of radicalization, it hinders our ability to recruit people. You have to meet people where they are, and modern "bourgeois" politics are where they are.

This support can also spill over into other things. Elections generally excite people, and it's very easy to link issues a person supports in a candidate to more direct actions like mutual aid funds and working groups. Suppose a person likes Bernie Sanders because of single-payer. What's more effective in this situation: 1. telling them that you are doing similar work and directing them to a healthcare working group within your organization or; 2. telling them that caring about electoral politics is pointless and that they are naive for bothering with it.

Belittling liberals for believing in the system is just as counterproductive as belittling nonvoters. Even if you are not into the idea of elections, engaging with people where they are is a great way to get them excited about the work you are doing. This outreach may not lead to the gains we want in the immediate (very few things will), but on top of all the other things I have mentioned, it is a great way to spur engagement in your group or organization.

Conclusion

In the end, no single set of actions will accomplish the all-encompassing task of overhauling our current oppressive system. That's going to involve countless different actions and tactics. It's going to be a slow and painful whittling away at this terrible regime until it comes crashing down, and we can get the system we want.

That work will be far easier with allies within the electoral system who can repeal laws that make organizing more difficult and prevent new, reactionary ones from being implemented. We need to mitigate not just the harm the system does to its citizens but the barriers the system creates to successful organizing in general.

Additionally, secondary objectives like radicalization and engagement became even more important because they are what is achievable in the short term. You might not be able to get a single-payer law passed or to create a lasting autonomous zone successfully, but you can convert people to your cause and fight for small changes on the local level. Those tangible victories can galvanize people to support your cause and funnel them towards the types of activism you consider more effective.

Of course, all of these justifications are based on the assumption that elections cannot lead to systemic change, and even with that in mind, we see here how participation in elections can still be effective. Changing systems of power is tedious work where progress is judged in the span of decades, not years. You will lose most of the time when you are going against the default system. I understand the frustration with the status quo. Trust me, I am there with you, but if we want to create a seismic shift in society, building temporary allies within politics can still be useful, even if it doesn't lead to the change we want in the immediate.

We might not get a new system through electoral politics, but participation in it can move us in the right direction.

Alex Has Opinions 11/30/21 Alex Has Opinions 11/30/21

How 'Arcane: League of Legends' Breakdowns Our Myths Surrounding Violence

Magic, steampunk, stunning graphics, & revolution

The RiotGames produced TV series Arcane: League of Legends is like watching a brilliant painting coming to life for six hours. Its artistic rendition of the hit game League of Legends, or LoL for short, is stunning. I found myself having to pause the screen on multiple occasions just to soak in all the details of the immersive world that series creators Christian Linke and Alex Yee (along with their very talented team) put together.

The series is not only visually impressive but has a compelling, and some would say controversial plot, about revolutionaries fighting against an oppressive society. The characters are truly multi-dimensional. I thought leads Hailee Steinfeld, and Ella Purnell did a great job making us believe the highs and lows that these characters experienced during their traumatic lives, which, given that they live within an apartheid society, are considerable. Seriously, hold onto your hats, folks, because this series is dramatic AF.

At this show's core is a discussion about revolutionary change and how it relates to violence. This subject doesn't come up much in media, especially not with the nuances that Arcane examines. In this article, we will delve into where this show reinforces preexisting media tropes on revolutionary figures and where it breaks new ground (spoiler alert, it does both).

The “bad” revolutionary trope

Arcane takes place in a steampunk city-state that is split between the upper-class Piltover, built on the ideas of technological innovation, and the destitute Zaun. The latter is an underground city that seems to make its living smuggling "illegal" goods and services into Piltover. Something that we have to keep in mind is that this is an apartheid state. Travel between these two areas is strictly limited across narrow bridges, and law enforcement has no problems going into Zaun and roughing up its ostensible citizenry. A key part of the plot is both protagonists and antagonists alike struggling against this oppressive system.

Normally when a similar situation is described in media, we have a distinction between the revolutionary that does things the "right way" and the one who goes "too far." For example, the Rebel Alliance in the Star Wars franchise is depicted as valuing life. It performs only tactical violence against Empire baddies who "deserve" it. Compare the rebels to radicals like Saw Gerrera, who are viewed as reckless and overly violent. As Senator Mom Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) describes to protagonist Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) in Rogue One (2016):

MON MOTHMA: Saw Gerrera’s an extremist. He’s been fighting on his own since he broke with the Rebellion. His militancy has caused the Alliance a great many problems. We have no choice now but to try to mend that broken trust.

These "bad" revolutionaries" are usually depicted as having the right objective, but their violent methods are too radical, often spiraling out of their control. Think of the character Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) in the film Black Panther (2018), whose mission to dismantle white supremacy is recognized as good. Yet, his grasp for power quickly has him trying to form an imperial empire of his own.

KILLMONGER: I know how colonizers think. So we’re gonna use their own strategy against them. We’re gonna send vibranium weapons out to our War Dogs. They’ll arm oppressed people all over the world, so they can finally rise up and kill those in power….The worlds gonna start over and this time we’re on top….The sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire.

Another example is the revolutionary Daisy Fitzroy (Kimberly Brooks) in the videogame Bioshock: Infinite (2013). She is the leader of a working-class, multicultural coalition called the Vox Populi. Fitzroy is portrayed as having a valid claim against the White Supremacist steampunk city of Columbia. However, this goal soon spirals into genocidal aspirations. "Cut 'em down, and they just grow back," Fitzroy says to the player as she holds a terrified white child in her arms, a gun by her side. "If you wanna get rid of the weed, you gotta pull it up from the root." Fitzroy becomes so hellbent on tearing everything down that she "twists" her original mission, making her revolutionaries the new villains in the game. The last battle the player has to fight is against the Vox Populi.

The lesson here appears to be that if you aren't careful with your violence, it can and will become worse than the terrible status quo you seek to supplant. Many times main characters in these series defeat the revolutionary antagonist, only to reset the status quo because radical change is depicted as going too far. This leads to a moral that discourages protagonists from seeking systemic change at all. The leads in Bioshock Infinite wipe White Supremacist Zachary Hale Comstock (Kiff VandenHeuvel) from the timeline, literally resetting everything to the base reality. T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) from Black Panther defeats Killmonger (with help from a white CIA agent played by Martin Freeman) only to implement incrementalist outreach programs that do nothing to challenge the system of White Supremacy outside of Wakanda.

And just like, no — we see how this trend in media is a problem, right? When all systemic reform is depicted as spiraling into chaos and authoritarianism, it makes fighting for any change in the real world next to impossible.

Breaking the trope…maybe

In Arcane, we at first seem to have this well-worn distinction between the "good" and the "bad" revolutionary. On the one hand, there is the character Vi (Hailee Steinfeld), one of the leads of the series, who is fighting to stop a brewing Civil War. She is a disgruntled Zaunite from the seedy "Lanes" who dislikes the more radical revolutionary Silco (Jason Spisak). Her adoptive father Vander (JB Blanc) tried and failed to uphold an uneasy truce with this world's version of a police force, which are called enforcers, and she rightly blames the show's revolutionary villain for his death. She even teams up with members of Piltover's elite so that she can dismantle Silco's operations.

On the other hand, you have Silco, a kingpin of the undercity who is coded as "evil." He raises Vi's younger sister Powder (Ella Purnell) when Vi goes to prison and doesn't do a good job. Despite having clear love for her, he repeatedly gaslights Powder, who also goes by the name of Jinx, and appears to worsen her mental issues (i.e., she is struggling with an intense form of PTSD and possibly even schizophrenia). Silco also lives in a dark nautical lair, visuals that are often linked in contemporary media to villainy. While the magical Hextech technology of the Piltovers is a divine blue, his main weapon, Shimmer, is a sinister, dark purple.

Silco is not afraid to hurt people on either side of the Zaun-Piltover divide. His revolutionary philosophy is that there is a base amount of violence necessary for change. A major plot point involves him releasing a drug called Shimmer into the undercity that allows users to essentially Hulk-out (and not in a good way). Shimmer is a substance that makes users who abuse it psychologically and physiologically dependent. Silco may have aspirations for Zaun's independence in using it, but ultimately this weapon serves as a detriment to the people of the undercity.

With all this in mind, I was ready to chalk this show up to being like all the other properties out there depicting revolutionary figures as inherently going "too far." Yet, something interesting happens in the series' midpoint that had me question this initial assessment: one of the main characters — an enforcer from Piltover named Caitlyn Kiramman (Katie Leung)— goes to the undercity and realizes that her worldview has led to this abysmal situation. Caitlyn shifts her perspective from not understanding how Piltover makes the undercity a living hell to thinking that Piltover's leadership has led to the growing civil war unfolding. The status quo is rightly depicted as unacceptable. At one point, Caitlyn remarks to her mother:

CAITLYN: You know what else reflects on the council? Its citizens living on the streets. Being poisoned. Having to choose between a kingpin who wants to exploit them and a government that doesn't give a shit.

You could interpret this as both sides (i.e., Silco and the Piltover elite) being equally awful, but there are multiple scenes where the hypocrisy and cruelty of Piltover society are highlighted for the viewer. When a Piltover Councilmember, Jayce Talis (Kevin Alejandro), for example, threatens to send Vi to prison, she scolds him for not understanding the cruelty underlying that threat. "So you just wave an arm, have someone dragged off, don't bother to find out what it does to someone being stuffed in a stone box for weeks, or months, or even years?"

As this scene clarifies, the Piltover elite is more than willing to punish those beneath them with disproportionate amounts of violence. If Silco is a monster (and it's hard not to argue that he is), it's because Piltover created an atmosphere where only the most ruthless in the undercity could survive (so sort of like Tinder). A peaceful way forward was not possible because Piltover violently suppressed all mobilization in the Lanes.

It also bears mentioning that Silco's philosophy is somewhat validated in the narrative. He threatens war against Piltover unless he achieves concessions and the Council appears to acquiesce to his demands for independence. "Get me Jinx, and I'll give you your nation of Zaun," Councillor Talis remarks, preferring to scapegoat this one character than to unleash a war between the two cities.

Here the show seems to imply that you do need a base level of violence to create change. Only the prospect of potential violence brought this councilor to the negotiating table in the first place — a refreshing message given the inclination from most media to portray all revolutionary forays into violence as ultimately self-defeating. Everything looks like we are on our way to an uneasy peace between these two city-states. That is until Silco's adopted daughter Jinx fires a devastating Hextech energy blast that seems to destroy the Council's chambers.

Silco's strategy may have led to concessions, but it also led to his undoing.

Violence is complicated

Jinx's destruction of the Council's chambers creates an interesting tension, where we are left questioning everything about the narrative. This action, which comes in the very last minutes of the last episode, made me deeply torn about this series. Everyone was so close to achieving peace, and it all burned down in blue flames.

Some might walk away with a "violence always begets violence" lesson — an easily available moral given how prominent it appears in our culture — but after much thought, I think that reading would be superficial. Without Silco's initial violence, no one would have been prompted to reassess their worldviews and offer up concessions. Caitlyn would have never ventured into the Lanes to investigate, Councillor Talis would not have attempted negotiations, and the apartheid state of Piltover would have remained unchanged.

The main characters are also very violent themselves. Vi perpetuates violence as a solution throughout the narrative. She even pushes for a raid on one of Silco's factories that leads to a child's death, yet she is never coded as evil. Her violence is almost always framed as justified in self-defense, or at the very least, understandable given her perspective.

The situation is slightly more nuanced than violence being always coded as bad and seems to be more about condemning continuous militarization, especially from the oppressor. There is a scene where councilor Mel Medarda (Toks Olagundoye) talks about weaponizing the Hextech technology to defend Piltover against the undercity, and her mother, a warlord, replies: "weapons can't be unmade, and they are always used." Her argument being that militarization prompts escalation.

From this perspective, Piltover's development and weaponization of Hextech, in many ways, forced the undercity to build up their arms so they wouldn't be left behind. Silco's side may have been brutal, but the upper city laid out the material conditions for that brutality. And yet, unlike the people of Piltover, his actions were theoretically to achieve freedom from oppression, something he was very close to achieving.

You don't walk away liking Silco, but you do end up mourning his and the Council's failure to achieve peace. Before the Hextech energy beam destroyed the Council's chambers, it looks like they would have voted Yes to Zaun independence. The Sting/Ray Chen song What Could Have Been plays in the background, and the main character looks on in stunned terror as this chance for peace goes up in smoke.

We understand then that Jinx is too far gone with hurt to ever forgive Piltover. The haunting lyrics "I want you to hurt like you hurt me today, and I want you to lose like I lose when I play" remind the viewer that she is trapped in a cycle of violence perpetrated for decades by the upper class of Piltover. The Council may have decided to "do better" in these closing moments, but it hurt people like Jinx for years before then, and that violence, more than anything else, is what truly sabotaged the peace here.

Piltover's militarization — not just with Hextech, but with enforcers on the Lanes to keep the poor in their place — prompted escalation.

Conclusion

This nuance on the ripple effects of violence in Arcane is refreshing for how rare it is in media. For far too long, we have had a very simplistic perspective regarding revolutions: either violence is coded as always bad, and the narrative sweeps the violence of the status quo under the rug, or it's naively portrayed as good. Spend enough time in leftist circles, and you will come across people justifying pretty much everything under the banner of revolution, treating it like you would a math equation: X amount of violence + revolution =systemic reform?

But violence, and consequently revolution, is neither good nor bad. It's a tool, and a messy one at that, that can create unforeseen consequences. In real life, the difference between "good" and "bad" violence is difficult to determine at the moment of its use, and even in retrospect, as anyone following the debate over "collateral damage" can attest to. Every year the US fires plenty of missiles at allegedly "bad" people. Yet even if we were to accept those aims as justified, many civilians who are supposedly not the targets of said violence are killed during these attacks. It's a messy situation all around.

The complicated nature of violence doesn't mean we shouldn't try to mitigate it. I believe we have a moral imperative to do so. Yet, when we offhandedly make sweeping statements about its inherent rightness or wrongness, it has the consequence of potentially worsening the violence around us. We end up either ignoring the violence that already exists through complicity or, we do not put into place procedures to mitigate harm because we are certain that we are in the right.

Arcane is willing to have a complicated conversation on where revolutionary violence can lead — both its positives and negatives. While the show is far from perfect, I am glad at least one mainstream property is trying to talk about it in a way that far more popular shows often fail to do (looking at you, Game of Thrones).

And that makes Arcane the kind of show worth binging in my book.

Alex Has Opinions 11/26/21 Alex Has Opinions 11/26/21

The Conservative Stance on Work in 'Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings'

The hit MCU movie has a problem with classism and power

The MCU movie Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings (2021) has a lot of good things going for it: the fight scenes are fantastic; the dialogue is funny; the CGI is likewise truly impressive (I never thought I needed to see a live-action Nine-tailed fox until this moment); lead Simu Liu is also a snack. I had a lot of fun watching this film the first time, and rewatching it repeatedly to write this article brought with it new details to mull over and appreciate.

The franchise also features a predominantly Chinese cast, which is undeniably a good thing given the MCU's overwhelming whiteness. The most popular film series in the world should have more diverse leads and more diverse mythologies to draw upon that aren't just the Aryan Power Hour (sorry Thor, you don't have the best friends). It's quite frankly disappointing that it's taken so long for multiculturalism to be a mainstream element in the MCU, but regardless, I am glad we have been seeing it these past few years.

However, beneath all these positive elements, there is a really weird classist message at the heart of Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings. The way this series treats work, while unsurprising, reinforces conservative norms about work and professionalism that I think warrants some scrutiny. So let’s get into it.

After a beautiful monologue setting up the story's mythology, this movie starts with our lead Xu Shang-Chi or "Shaun" (Simu Liu) in a spacious apartment doing pushups. He puts on a button-up as Rich Brian & Earthgang's banger Act Up plays in the background. The story's framing is alluding to the fact that this will be the story of a high-powered, super-successful badass.

We then cut to the next scene where we see a man we assume is Shang-Chi pull up in a fancy red car. Only when a different character hands our lead a set of car keys do we realize our entire first impression was a misdirection. Shang-Chi isn't a successful capitalist at all but a working-class valet who spends his days (and nights) with his friend and colleague Katy (Awkwafina). This juxtaposition is meant to tell us that we are getting a very different story from the likes of Tony Stark's Iron Man or Dr. Strange. It implies we will see a window into a working man's life and how they will handle herodom.

Work plays a huge role in setting up how the characters are framed in the first act. We are told several times that what the characters are doing with their lives is unsatisfactory. "Maybe there's a point where you're supposed to stop going on joyrides and start thinking about living up to your potential," a lawyer friend tells our leads early on in the movie. She is referring here to potential in a capitalist sense. It's them being valets that is something that this friend thinks should be changed. Katy's mom is even more explicit, bemoaning: "Waigong didn't move here from Hunan so you could park cars for a living."

In a different type of story, these characters might hate their lives as valets, and this dissatisfaction would serve as the basis for a transformation. We have seen stories like Star Wars or The Matrix where our leads resent their place in the world, and that desire for differences allows them to shed their perceived normalcy to become "special."

However, Shang-Chi and Katy don't resent their lives at all. They look happy. "How is it running to have jobs that you actually like?" Katy asks Shang-Chi after the dinner with their lawyer friend. It's hard to counter her question because nothing in the film disproves this assertion. They don't seem miserable at work, and when they spend the night "recklessly" singing karaoke, there are no material consequences like getting yelled at by their boss or being late for work. Their lives appear fine, healthy even.

In fact, Katy seems to love driving cars. She knows trivia about NASCAR — at one point calling herself the "Asian Jeff Gordon" — and is really good at driving. She skillfully manages to not only glide down a San Francisco street, but she takes over a bus while being attacked, escapes a warlord's garage while being shot at, and navigates through a magical forest trying to kill her. Katy demonstrates a skill level with cars that only professionals with years of driving experience could hope to obtain. She seriously is the Asian Jeff Gordon. She is the moment, and we love her.

With these characterizations in mind, we might expect that our leads take these aspects of their lives and apply them to their superhero identities. Maybe Shang-Chi moves back to San Francisco in the end and vows to maintain the city as a working-class hero like Peter Parker in New York. Maybe Katy learns to be a pilot, or an animal handler, showing that the skills she already loves were a vital element of her superhero identity (maybe, the capstone of her arc could be riding a dragon, for example).

Yet this doesn't happen. Shang-Chi's working-class aesthetic takes a back seat to his emergent one as a martial arts badass. We learn that he is the son of the warlord Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung), and the movie from that point onwards becomes about him grabbing with the trauma his father placed on him as a child. There's nothing wrong with that kind of story, but it feels disconnected from the first act. Shang-Chi hid from his rich, powerful father, using poverty as a vacation from those expectations. He didn't care about claiming his potential because he was born into a grand destiny of his own, and simply wants to escape it.

Similarly, Katy's character makes a complete departure during the midway point. She confesses to an elder over an hour into the movie that she isn't content with her work. She says she never sticks to anything —a pattern we didn't even know she had until that moment. She is then directed to pick up a bow by this elder to start "aiming" at something finally. A training montage ensues, where Katy learns how to master archery in under a day. Seriously, in under a day, she goes through an entire arc where she starts as a novice and then ends as an expert piercing the throat of a skyscraper-tall monster from a mile away.

This half-assed transformation, the movie implies, is her breaking old patterns, except it isn't because this is her glorifying a new activity she has shown no previous interest in. If she were going to stick with something, she'd commit to driving, the thing that textually she has been proven to be very good at and have an ongoing passion for. Since chauffeuring is a "lower class" activity, though, there is no attempt to incorporate that into her superhero identity.

In general, the film has a weird fascination with fetishizing capitalistic success, even as it also tries to set its characters apart from it. For example, there's a scene where Katy and Shang-Chi's sister Xu Xialing (Meng'er Zhang) have a heart-to-heart after being captured. Xialing confesses that she started an underground fight ring because she felt excluded by her dad, saying: "If my dad won't let me into his empire, I'm gonna build my own." To which Katy responds, "Hell yeah."

It's a response that has a very lean-in, "yaaaasss queen, you become that murderous warlord" sort of energy, and like no, that's the wrong lesson to take here. Their father, Wenwu, isn't a villain just because he's sexist, but because he conquered the world and bent it into violent submission. Xialing emulating that terror is not admirable, and yet by the time the credits roll, we are supposed to feel a sort of giddy joy with Xialing taking over the Ten Rings and integrating women into the organization. I am all for gender parity — and love a good female villain — but this framing felt weirdly out of place to me because her arc to become a dictator is portrayed as heroic.

The movie starts with the aesthetic of working-class superheroes before dropping that thread entirely to focus on the worship of the powerful. The condescending opinions of work that our leads endure at the beginning of the film are set aside. We stop questioning these accusations and instead focus merely on our leads' place in the hierarchy.

This film ends with Shang-Chi and Katy having dinner with their lawyer friend from the beginning, recounting the story's events. It's essentially them being able to one-up their friend who told them they had to realize their "potential." They have now realized it and are so much more accomplished than at the movie's start. This bit is followed by a refreshing moment of catharsis when longstanding MCU character Wong (Benedict Wong) teleports into the restaurant and validates Shang-Chi and Katy's story. I found myself openly clapping because I wanted the pair to succeed — to rub their success in their pretentious lawyer friend’s face.

I think it's interesting how this film decides to tell this friend off. In the end, they refute the initial accusation not by exposing how classist and judgy it is to look down on someone for their profession, as the film seemed to imply in the beginning, but by bragging about their heroics. Shang-Chi isn't disputing the nature of success. He is now successful. Whereat the beginning of the movie, he was contrasted against wealth and capitalist success; now, he has become an even more successful version of that persona. He and his friend have "made it." They started from the "bottom," and now they are saviors of the literal universe.

The moral of the story has the structure of a classic rags-to-riches success story, but even this is a distortion because Shang-Chi's destiny was technically thrust upon him due to his birthright. His wealth and family connections are what allow him to be such a successful fighter. While that might make for some interesting commentary, this film isn't deconstructing wealth inequality or nepotism. It's simply replicating those paradigms with no self-awareness. Shang-Chi and his sister Xialing are depicted as having earned their positions as hero and leader of the Ten Rings organization, respectively — even if that claim is ludicrous on its face. Shang-Chi had years of training paid for by his wealthy father, and he monitored both of them secretly for years, undoubtedly making sure they were okay.

Shang-Chi is not the working class hero this film initially portrays him being. If I were being uncharitable (and those who follow me know I am simply a peach), I would describe his story as follows: a rich boy runs away from his abusive father, tries to find himself for ten years by slumming it with creative, aimless types, and then comes home to reclaim his birthright. There is no rags-to-riches story here, and there is certainly no rejection of the hierarchy of work that we are initially set up to dislike.

Now, I don't want to paint this film as uniquely awful. We exist in an economic system where this opinion is the norm, and Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings honestly wouldn't have stood out if the film hadn't initially set itself up as criticizing that system. Other films perpetuate this norm far more heinously, and there are many elements here that I do enjoy: the fight scenes; the comedy; the animation (again, this movie has CGI Nine-tailed foxes, you guys).

All this being said, this presentation of work is still upsetting because it ultimately reaffirms the classist idea that you have to utilize your potential by finding a job that others consider useful. It's not enough to drive cars around because that makes you happy. You have to take on a profession or skillset that is valuable, whether that means picking up a bow and arrow or using your fists to save the world; just make sure that you are useful and not poor.

Alex Has Opinions 11/18/21 Alex Has Opinions 11/18/21

Is Abuse Ever Funny?

Dave Chappelle, Big Mouth, The Honeymooners, & abuse in comedy

The subject of abuse has long existed in comedy. A quintessential example of this is the cult classic The Honeymooners (1955–1956), where the character Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) repeatedly threatens to hit his wife Alice Kramden (Pert Kelton/Audrey Meadows). "One of these days, Alice," he says, to a laugh track, "Pow! Right in the kisser!" The implication is that one day his wife will frustrate him so deeply that he will punch her in the face.

The Honeymooners isn't an anomaly. There have been countless other examples in the cultural zeitgeist (see Bewitched, King of Queens, etc.) that often frame the prospect of abuse, or abuse itself, as a punchline to a joke. The humor from these properties comes from our society's willingness to laugh in the face of this trauma.

As we have progressed, however, this type of humor has started to come increasingly under fire. "To rationalize a punch in "the kisser" is to deny a crime," bemoaned an NYT Opinion piece in 1987, arguing that such humor normalized and affirmed real-world behavior. Critics who oppose this type of humor aren't just claiming these jokes aren't funny but that this humor does genuine harm to our society.

The divide between those who do and do not find these types of jokes funny reveals an interesting fault-line, not only in the world of humor, but how we perceive the nature of harm itself, and where we consider the limits of our empathy to be.

A recent example of a comedian laughing at potential abuse comes from Dave Chappelle's 2021 special The Closer. This special was controversial for many reasons (transphobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism, etc.), but something that did not receive too much attention was a joke he made near the beginning of his set about a preacher molesting a child, saying: "Last time I can remember feeling dirty like that, man I must have been a little boy. I was being molested by a preacher. But don't feel bad for me. I liked it."

This joke highlights a popular theory of how comedy is supposed to work — incongruity theory, or how some object or event we perceive violates our normal expectations. In the Chappelle example, the expectation is that this character will be scarred from being molested by the preacher, but the reality is that he enjoyed it (let's put a pin on the morality of this framing for now). Dave Chappelle is trying to get us to laugh at this incongruity between what we are supposed to be feeling in this situation (i.e., awkwardness, shame, etc.) and the recognition that everything is allegedly "okay" (i.e., this character is not in any danger).

Incongruity, though, isn't the only reason that we laugh. We do so for a variety of different reasons. Sometimes we laugh out of social obligation or due to immense stress (see Tanganyika laughter epidemic). We laugh when we are playing or having fun, or when we learn that some problem is not as serious as we first imagined (see Benign Violation Theory). Other times we laugh out of a sense of superiority to others, where we gain an almost visceral satisfaction in making fun of them.

This last point is where Dave Chappelle’s molestation joke also comes into play. We are not only laughing at the incongruity but at the taboo nature of the subject itself. It’s in the same vein as telling a racist joke or using ableist language such as the r-word. We are not normally meant to delight in mocking people in horrible situations, and this joke allows some viewers to transgress that boundary— to revel in the high we get from punching at a target.

In many comedic properties, we find a lot of jokes where the punchline is that abuse has happened — a subject that normally demands reverence and tact, but in these circumstances, is treated with glee. For example, the Netflix show Big Mouth (2017 — present) has two characters — Andrew Glouberman (John Mulaney) and "Jay" Bilzerian (Jason Mantzoukas) — who come from abusive homes. Often a punchline to a joke is that their parents and siblings do horrible things to them. Take this joke where Jay learns that his house was being fumigated while he was asleep.

Man: Holy shit there's a kid in there.
Woman: What? The whole family should be on spring break.
Jay: They Home Alone’d me? Hah! Classic Bilzerian move. Did they, uh…did they say when they’d be back.

That's it. That's the punchline. The neglect is the joke.

In this subgenre of humor, abuse does not always come from family members. Another common trope in TV is the abusive roommate trope, where a naive ingenue finds themselves sharing a living space with someone who routinely takes advantage of them. We, as the viewer, are meant to find this exchange amusing. The character Titus Andromedon (Tituss Burgess) from the Netflix show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–2019) is a great example. Titus repeatedly tries to get the protagonist Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper) to give him money or do chores on his behalf. We are meant to laugh at the cruelty of these interactions and see them as funny. We aren't meant to be horrified by his toxicity because that would pressure Kimmy to remove Titus from her life, and it would be hard to perceive him as light and fun in that situation.

Cruelty is a huge part of humor, in general, and everyone takes part in it in some capacity. If you have ever found amusement in a homophobic politician getting caught with a male escort, a COVID-denier catching COVID, or a "horrible" person getting their comeuppance in some way, then you have been susceptible to this type of humor. You are taking pleasure in the fact that a bad thing has happened to someone who has violated your morality, and how you, forever briefly, feel superior to them.

This reality is where the "punching up" vs. "punching down" debate comes from. People are not fighting over whether or not we should direct mean-spiritedness at all in comedy, but which person or group we should target. Some argue that when crafting cruel jokes, comedians should reserve their ire only at groups and people that are more privileged (i.e., "punching up"). In contrast, others claim that they have a right to target any category of people, including those most hurt in our society. Critics pejoratively refer to this action as "punching down." There are nuances, of course, but this is the divide in a nutshell.

The problem with the "I should be able to joke about whatever I want" crowd is that, when it comes to portraying abuse humorously, it is often very difficult to do. While not impossible (more on this later), this challenge is because evolving norms require us to empathize with abuse victims, and talking about abuse empathetically means recognizing the pain and horror surrounding it.

This dilemma is highlighted in Hannah Gadsby's special Nannette, where she talks about how using traumatic events in her set often has her papering over her own pain for the amusement of others. Earlier in the special, she jokes about how she was flirting with a girl, only for her boyfriend to get defensive. The punchline is a bit of self-deprecating humor. The girl says, "whoa, stop it! It's a girl," and this is enough to get the guy to back off because he "doesn't hit women." Yet, that presentation wasn't the whole truth. As she goes on to say later:

“Do you remember that story about a young man who almost beat me up…In order to balance the tension in that story. I couldn’t tell that story as it actually happened. Because I couldn’t tell the part of the story where that man realized his mistake and he came back. And he said, ‘oh no I get it. You’re a lady f@ggot. I’m allowed to beat the shit out of you,’ and he did. He beat the shit out of me and nobody stopped him. ”

When we start to tell abusive stories as they happened, it makes it very difficult to find them funny.

Another example of this is the show Kevin Can F**k Himself (2021). The series is about a woman named Allison Devine-McRoberts (Annie Murphy), who is in an abusive relationship. All the scenes with her husband are framed as a classic sitcom like The Honeymooners or King of Queens. When she isn't with him, we move to a single-camera setup. The show tonally shifts to a psychological drama that reflects her own inner turmoil. The sitcom scenes are no longer perceived as funny, but reframed in a new, horrifying light— a move that forces the viewer to recontextualize similar sitcoms and question if they were ever truly funny.

And this brings us to the ultimate problem of what often happens when we use abuse itself as a punchline — it is frequently dehumanizing. If you have any empathy for the group being targeted, as new norms tell us we should, these jokes don't come off as funny at all but cruel.

When you trivialize abuse and turn the act itself into a punchline, what you are asking your audience to do is remove their empathy for the victims of that act. The Dave Chappelle joke about molestation asks the viewer to set aside everything they have heard about molestation victims in real life to laugh at them. Big Mouth is asking us to set aside how horrifying Jay's living experience is so we can appreciate the joke. The humor problematically becomes an excuse to dehumanize others.

All this being said, I'm afraid I actually have to disagree with the sentiment that you can "never" talk about abuse in comedy. The show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019) manages to tackle abuse quite effectively, and it is, first and foremost, a comedy. However, the way this property tackles this subject matter is by giving us deep empathy for the protagonist Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom), and how that abuse has impacted her life. It's not that we are never laughing at Rebecca's antics, but we are doing so from a place of understanding and compassion. She is a well-rounded character who also happens to be "crazy." The show goes out of its way to tell the viewer that the abuse she suffered was not okay, while also destigmatizing her mental illness Borderline Personality Disorder.

You don't need to be an abuse victim to make these kinds of jokes, but it quite frankly requires work to do this type of humor effectively. The ability to broach this subject without lived experience is the mark of a very skilled comedian—someone who has put the time and research to understand something beyond a surface-level perspective. It's frustrating to see many comedians complain about how "they can't make certain jokes anymore" when they are just not putting in the work to update their humor. The subjective line concerning who you can target unempathetically in a joke has changed (and is continuing to shift), and rather than accept this fact, they are weirdly doubling down on the way things used to be.

But comedy is always changing. We are less than a decade removed from the idea that "acting" black, gay, or some other marginalized identity is somehow funny (and some people have still not moved on from this). The country's standup scene arguably had its start in Blackfaced Minstrelsy. The reality that this "humor" is no longer acceptable is a good thing because it means our collective empathy for Black people has (somewhat) expanded — something I think few would openly dismiss.

The line has shifted, and it's a comedian's job to stand directly on top of it. When it comes to the subject of abuse in comedy, it's not as simple as "yes" or "no," but how. Do you have empathy for the victim of that action, or are you making them into a dehumanizing caricature?

Because one of these is no laughing matter.

Alex Has Opinions 11/13/21 Alex Has Opinions 11/13/21

Unpacking the Subtle Misogyny in the Netflix show 'Midnight Mass'

An in-depth analysis of religion, angelic vampires, & misogyny.

Midnight Mass (2021) is a well-paced, brilliantly acted mini-series that manages to capture life inside a decaying town that has seen better days. The citizens of Crockett Island are constantly grappling with death — the death of their fishing industry, the death of their town, and pretty soon, the death of each other. There are a lot of great themes to untangle in this work. The piece manages to discuss religious fundamentalism, authoritarianism, and much, much more.

It was a great show that I couldn't stop binging. I loved the acting, the score, the writing, the cinematography, and everything in between. I can't remember a single episode that I didn't like. I never felt like it was being done cheaply or that it was simply a cash grab. The series has one of the most creative, and interesting casts I have seen in recent memory.

Unfortunately, one of the ways this TV series achieves this deconstruction is by ultimately placing the thematic blame of the town's downfall on one overly determined woman. We are left with a story that doesn't deconstruct the authoritarianism behind religious, fundamentalist cults, as much as it demonizes one woman's sociopathy — a framing that comes with some messy, misogynistic baggage.

There are a lot of villains in this series: the priest, Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater), who brings back from Jerusalem a homicidal monster to terrorize the town; a mayor, Wade Scarborough (Michael Trucco), who does nothing in the face of a growing vampiric cult; a handyman (Matt Biedel), who willfully follows the order of a cult leader without question; as well as all the other townspeople that see problems enfolding around them, and do nothing.

Yet the evilest character, and by far the primary villain, is Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan), a zealous church member who turns the town into a homicidal cult of vampires bent on the human race's destruction. Bev's actions lead to the deaths of countless people and, ultimately, the burning down of the entire town. She is not a good person, but as we have already established, many people on Crockett Island, cheekily referred to as the Crockpot, are not good people. The entire reason the events of the series enfolded is that the priest decided to bring a vampire (referred to as an angel in the show) back with him in some misguided effort to extend the lifespan of himself and his loved ones. Bev is hardly the only person whose actions kill others — although she is arguably the worst one.

Something interesting in this series happens in the story's "framing" or how the work is composed to impart certain values to the viewer. The majority of the shows "villains" all get narrative redemptions. By the end of the series, the priest, who is a full-blown vampire at this point, spends his final moments reconnecting with his secret lover Mildred Gunning (Alex Essoe). They share one last kiss before the sunrise kills them both. The handyman, who assisted Bev in some of her most heinous actions, literally asks forgiveness from the alter boy Ooker (Louis Oliver) and receives it, subtextually telling the viewer that he deserves it. The mayor, and most of the townspeople, for that matter, all spend their final moments awaiting the sunset (something that will kill them). They sing the hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee to signify that they have accepted their mortality.

The exceptions to this rule are Bev and the vampire, the latter of which is portrayed as a literal monster. Bev receives no calming send-off. She dies clawing her way into the sand, trying to escape death from the sun's rays. We are cathartically left laughing at her desperation and ultimately at the hypocrisy of her not wanting to meet the maker Bev claims to worship. She killed so many people for a perceived lack of faith, and yet here she is, faithless, and we are not meant to forgive her.

Forgiveness is a major theme in Midnight Mass. One of the main characters, Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), spends the first few episodes trying to grabble with whether he can forgive himself for killing a young woman in a drunk driving incident. Likewise, there is a poignant scene near the midway point where one person, Leeza Scarborough (Annarah Cymone), a wheelchair user, has just been "cured" of her disability. She goes to the trailer to confront Joe Collie (Robert Longstreet), the man who gave her the injury that resulted in her disability. What follows is a moving monologue about the nature of forgiveness:

“I forgive you, Joe Collie. I forgive you and I see you now. I see you. And I’m still angry with you. But it's different. Even now just saying it, it's different. Do you wanna know why it's different? Because the only thing standing between you and a better life is you. The only thing standing in my way was hate…So if God can forgive you, and He says He can, all over the place He says it, then I can forgive you. And if I can forgive you, Joe Collie, then anyone can.”

This motif of having to let go of internal and external hatred to achieve forgiveness is a constant throughout the series. When Sturge asks forgiveness from Ooker in the last episode, it's an affirmation of the idea of letting go of self-hatred. Anyone should be able to obtain forgiveness if they let go of their hate, but Bev cannot receive this absolution for herself because she is not willing to believe that all humans are worthy of love. As the character Annie Flynn (Kristin Lehman) says to Bev:

“Bev, I want you to listen to me. Because your whole life I think you've needed to hear this. You aren’t a good person….God doesn't love you more than anyone else. You aren’t a hero. And you certainly, certainly aren’t a victim…. Why does that upset you so much? Just the idea that God loves everyone just as much as you?”

In essence, the reason Bev cannot sing with the rest of the townspeople at the end of the series is that she is utterly devoid of compassion — both for others and herself. This lack of compassion is maintained throughout the series, serving as the genesis for many of its worst events. Bev is heavily implied to have killed one of the character's dogs — something that American audiences find less forgivable than murder. She serves as the show's TROT (that racist over there), throwing an immense amount of racism towards the town's Muslim sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli). She also is suggested to have poisoned Father Paul Hill, turning him into a vampire and beginning the cycle of vampirism that leads to the town's doom. Bev is entirely unempathetic in her actions, making her a hateable and entertaining character to watch (seriously, Samantha Sloyan does an amazing job playing Bev).

Yet, this framing leads us to some very messy places because it puts intent over action. The other characters did do terrible things as well, especially the priest, who willfully brought a homicidal monster into a community he allegedly loved. He already started to deceive the townspeople into drinking the vampires' blood via the communion wine well before Bev stumbled into his plan. If we were to remove Bev from this equation, it's hard to believe that the series would devolve much differently. The end plan seemed to be converting his flock to vampirism from the beginning.

But we forgive the priest because we learn that his actions were grounded in compassion. He wanted to reverse the dementia of his secret lover Mildred Gunning and spend more time with his daughter. It may have been selfish and reckless, but you can argue that his "heart was in the right place." We also forgive the mayor and the handyman because entirely human motivations drove their actions. The mayor didn't want to probe too deeply into why his daughter Leeza had been cured. Intentional blindness, and later, a purposeful callousness to protect his daughter, drove his evil actions. The handyman is likewise seen to be driven by a human, albeit misguided, desire to do good. He cares for others around him, even converting an unbeliever to vampirism because that man was nice to him.

We end with this story that lays the blame for this destructive cult at the hands of one person when countless people assisted in that destruction, many of whom were well aware of what they were doing. I am not here to defend Bev's actions (again, the character is despicable), but the way she is framed, compared to these male "villains," seems strange. While her demonization is valid, it leaves me uncomfortable because the story focuses more on the unempathetic nature behind her actions rather than the actions themselves. It disregards the awfulness of the men around her because of their intent. The men only have to try to care about others while this woman has to mean it.

It should be emphasized that very few bad people rise to the level of sociopathy Bev has demonstrated in Midnight Mass. Most people who perpetrate harm believe in their cause, or at least, they think they have little choice. They have rationalized their awfulness under the banner of protecting others, and that deserves perhaps even more scrutiny than the easily identifiable villains that clog up our screens.

Midnight Mass is an entertaining show — probably one of my favorite this year — and there is still a lot of good to unpack here. Despite everything I have said, I cannot understate how much I enjoyed the acting, cinematography, score, and more. This show deconstructs several worthwhile themes, such as racism (specifically Islamophobia) and mortality, that I did not have time to cover here. I recommend that you give it a watch, if you haven't already, for those reasons alone.

Yet all that being said, it feels odd and a little unsettling for the three male "villains" to be left off the hook, narratively speaking, because they rationalized their awfulness under the banner of helping others. Bev is reframed as the sole beacon of hatred in this small, bitter town, which doesn't sit well with me. The cold, frigid woman is an all too common trope in media, and its frequency is due to our society's larger misogyny, even in texts that do not intend to spread it.

While I was happy that Bev got the comeuppance she deserved, I found myself slightly uncomfortable by how much the text wanted me to revel in her downfall. It framed her clawing into the sand at the end as something I should relish, while simultaneously making me feel pity for Father Paul Hill and his accidental stumble into bloodlust. It speaks to a double standard, one I pray we move past as a society very soon.

Alex Has Opinions 11/5/21 Alex Has Opinions 11/5/21

The State of COVID Anti-Vaxxers on Facebook

Misinformation about COVID is rampant on the social network

With the rise of vaccine hesitancy, there has been a lot of criticism levied against the social media giant Facebook for not taking content moderation seriously. Its own oversight board has released a damning report, that among other things, criticized the company for letting more prominent users escape content moderation rules.

Already criticized for its mishandling of the 2016 election, Facebook has attempted to mitigate this perception through a series of half measures. Most posts concerning sensitive topics such as the 2020 election or COVID now have a disclaimer on them. The company also recently removed about 20 million posts for COVID misinformation.

While these recent measures the company has taken to curb misinformation are positive, they have been largely reactive and have not removed the presence of this misinformation on the site. If you were so inclined, you could still find groups actively devoted to spreading misinformation about COVID and the COVID vaccine, and that's not just bad for the platform but for the state of vaccine adoption across the world.

Facebook is Conservative

Something that you have to understand when looking at this topic is that Facebook has long held a conservative bent — something that is ironic given the claim that social media discriminate against conservative movements. When we look at the Top 10 performing posts via Kevin Roose and Fabio Giglietto's Twitter account Facebook's Top 10, conservative actors like Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and Sean Hannity consistently make the list, and often, even more accounts, depending on the day.

The only leftist group that can even compete with these pages is Occupy Democrats. Rather than radical leftist voices being King on Facebook, it's far more likely that content farms like I Love Paws or more mainstream news site like NPR take the number one or two slots over conservative voices. Facebook's information ecosystem prioritizes centrist and conservative voices over almost anything else, and that's simply the truth when we look at the data (see end of the article for compiled data). And unfortunately, because of the way political tribalism exists today, that translates into a desire among conservative users for anything that casts doubt on the validity of the COVID vaccine.

In recent months, content concerning COVID, particularly COVID-critical content, has performed very well on the platform. In September of 2021, one of the most successful publishers was the conservative outlet Daily Wire, whose top post was about governors pushing back against Joe Biden's plan to mandate vaccines among Federal workers. Similarly, Facebook infamously held back the publication of a report in August because it revealed that the most shared story during the first quarter of 2021 was fueled by COVID vaccine skepticism. The article in question suggested that the COVID-19 vaccine may have been involved in a doctor's death (note this correlation was later deemed to be unsubstantiated)

While these particular posts do not always violate Facebook's Community Standards — often critiquing policy or taking advantage of unsubstantiated speculation rather than spreading false information—they still can be harmful. This is because malicious actors use them to spread a false narrative. It's not simply the posts themselves that are problematic, but the context they are framed with, as bad-faith actors use them to cast doubt about the COVID vaccine to the larger public. Every day, users spread such articles, even if they don't in of themselves prove very much, and use them as a pretext to cast doubt on the validity of the COVID vaccine.

As with the recent purge of content in August, Facebook and most social media platforms will periodically remove these actors in an attempt to curb misinformation (and consequently improve their image with the public and with investors). And yet, curbing misinformation has never been as simple as picking off a few bad actors. Months have passed since that action, and as we have seen (and will continue to see), misinformation is still plentiful on Facebook.

For example, much has been written about the Disinformation Dozen — the group of twelve individuals who at one point allegedly spread 65% of anti-COVID vaccine content on the web. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, the group that helped author the Disinformation Dozen report, claimed that these twelve users had "leading roles in spreading digital misinformation about Covid vaccines." These individuals have and continue to perpetuate a lot of harm, but something we must grapple with is that the problem with disinformation is not as simple as booting twelve people off of mainstream platforms like Facebook. Many people in the original Disinformation Dozen report have been kicked off of various platforms, including Facebook, but that has not stopped COVID-related misinformation from spreading.

It's the incentive structures on modern platforms that make misinformation so infectious. Facebook has set itself up as a platform to value this type of content, prioritizing raw engagement over accuracy and safety. Whistleblower Frances Haugen alleged that the company removed safety systems put in place ahead of the 2020 election. In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, they said: "as soon as the election was over, they turned them back off, or they changed the settings back to what they were before, to prioritize growth over safety." The company may not directly set out to create a vehicle for misinformation, yet their focus on growth has certainly created an environment where that's an inevitability.

As we have already seen, COVID-related misinformation continues to be very attractive to Facebook's conservative user base. Rather than stopping the spread of misinformation, conservative content creators have adapted their language to make it more palatable for the platform. COVID skepticism that does not meet Community Standards has merely moved off of Facebook, or become more insular, keeping itself to hundreds of Facebook groups, both private and public, who are being helmed by nobodies who do not have the influence to garner serious scrutiny.

These groups — albeit smaller and less influential than the likes of Ben Shapiro — spread misinformation all the same.

COVID Skeptical Facebook Groups

Anti-COVID Facebook groups have membership sizes that often do not even surpass the hundreds. They also range in their goals but taken together; they make up a sizeable community that continues to spread misinformation and incite fear about the vaccine.

Adverse Side Effects

The first major category of these anti-COVID Facebook groups are ones committed to documenting alleged vaccine side effects. All in all, I counted at least thirty of these side effect groups, ranging from ones with members in the dozens to the tens of thousands. These often advertise themselves as objective or apolitical. Many of them claim that talk of anti-vaccination will lead to an instant ban from the group. They also have explicit rules that discourage people from posting negative comments or being critical of members' free speech. "[This] is not a group to bully anyone," reads the About section of the Australian Covid Vaccine Adverse reaction Group.

These groups often try to focus on physical reactions they believe were caused by the vaccine. Swelling in the arm is a common one, as well as the development of some kind of rash — and indeed, many of these track with what the CDC advises are possible side effects, albeit framed a little hyperbolically. "I took the 2nd vaccine Thursday night. Yesterday I started to break out," posts one user in the Covid Vaccine Adverse Reactions group. Another post, this time in the group COVID Vaccine Side Effects, claims: "I received a call yesterday from NIH asking me to participate in a vaccine allergic reaction study. The doctor said, 'We are seeing things with these vaccines like we have never seen before.'"

It's not unusual, however, to see even more extreme claims made about one COVID Vaccine shot leading to someone's partner collapsing or having a seizure. As one user posted of the alleged symptoms of their husband: "Within 2 minutes of his jab," goes one post, "[my husband] said he felt hot. Had ringing in his ears. His colour turned grey and the nurse asked him if he wanted to lay down. he said yes next minute, he collapsed in his chair…." Fainting during vaccination is not unheard of, but it's exceedingly rare in adults, and it's usually believed to be caused by pain or anxiety rather than the vaccine itself.

Yet this poster blames the vaccine. "…if you have a bad reaction, report it and make it publicly known ASAP. these people need to stop covering this shit up." It goes without saying that none of these posts can be substantiated. It's merely people claiming that they have received side effects from the COVID vaccine, and ultimately the correlation remains unprovable, assuming that these symptoms happened at all.

Despite these groups claiming to focus on alleged side effects al9ne, they are unsurprisingly flooded with political stances. It's possible to find posts decrying government overreach over vaccine mandates alongside obscure conspiracy theories and a robust black market for vaccine passports and fake vaccination cards.

Anti-Health Policies

The second type of group we see on the site is those committed to being against COVID-health policies like mask mandates. I counted over 80 groups, ranging from 29 members to over 12,000, with a total of over 100,000 in all. These are for people against mask or vaccine mandates and tend to be more political. The mission statements of many of the groups are explicitly against alleged government overreach, often framing it as an almost cosmic battle between liberty and tyranny. "Gathering those who believe in life liberty and pursuit of happiness," begins the description for the group No mask Oregon. "Those who believe in medical freedom, and want to preserve community."

Not all of the people within these groups take a blindly anti-vaccination stance. Many users narrowly frame their objections to being against this specific vaccine or a specific government policy. In response to a college student asking the group Christians Against Covid Vaccination about the "positives of the anti-vax movement," one user wrote: "Is this specifically about the cov19 vax or all vaccines. Some of us are very pro vax as long as its been studied properly and proven effective while being against the cov19 vax." In another post, the description for the group People Against Vaccine Mandates (PAVM) reads: "We are non-vax, not anti-vax. We value freedom not coercion. It's easy to generalize about people against COVID health policies, but there is a diversity of people within these communities, ranging from the skeptical to the ardently anti-scientific.

While some members within these groups make plenty of grandiose statements and hyperbolic claims, they are not just devoted to shouting into the void about the alleged injustice of health mandates. A common focus is users trying to figure out a way to get around mandates, usually via religious exemptions. As one post goes in the group Christians Against Covid Vaccination: "Along with backing my written [Religious Exemption] letter my job is asking me for a letter signed and stamped by my pastor, priest, etc. The bad part about that is I sought to find [one but] no church will back me up on my request. Does any one have any idea on how I can go about this?." The comment section is filled with recommendations from sites where pastors claim they can provide such a signed letter.

Unsurprisingly, many posters tend to be very political, amplifying conservative messaging about the vaccine. There are plenty of reshares of videos from "freedom" (e.g., anti-mask and mandate) rallies that have taken place all over the world. Sometimes the posts can get critical at the political end of the spectrum the user despises. "Biden: the quicker F@cker Upper" reads one meme in the group Anti-Mask and Anti-Vax. (note — based on the content I observed, the user base appears to be very conservative, though I could not find any quantitative data that backs up this observation).

There is also a lot of misinformation about both COVID and the vaccine. Facebook is generally good at flagging these with a disclaimer, but due to the insularity of these groups, they still received a lot of attention. "So sad," reads the response to a meme about a child named Charlie Zink, who is implied to have died from the vaccine (he actually died from drowning). Many of these conspiracy theories are circulating within these groups, where people claim that someone's death is linked to the vaccine when it's not.

Anti-Vaxx

The last and most extreme are people explicitly against the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine, and often, vaccines in general. These groups are not as prevalent as the others because many actively violate Facebook's Community Standards. I counted a mere handful, not even ranging in the thousands in total membership, but the members seemed to be more committed against vaccines themselves. Where the other categories we've mentioned attempted to hide behind a veneer of scientific or political credibility, these groups can safely be categorized as unapologetically anti-science.

We see many of the same sorts of conspiracy theories spreading through these groups. Alongside inaccurate medical information, we observe people regularly posting links of recently deceased individuals, particularly children, and then claiming that the vaccine is to blame. "Why is this not being talked about?!" one user posts in the group Anti Covid19 vaccine, alongside a link to a BBC article about two British children dying from yet-to-be-determined causes. "Surely it's time to stop the vax rollout to school aged children."

These members have immense paranoia that the COVID vaccine will cause them or their loved ones imminent harm. Commenters appeared to express many worries about the vaccine, ranging from believing that it would compromise their immune systems to thinking it would lead to their premature deaths. Sometimes these concerns lead to the perpetuation of truly absurd conspiracy theories. "I HATE THE VACCINE…AND THOSE DAMN MICROCHIPS RUINING OUR COUNTRY," one user writes in the group Anti-Vaccine 💪💪✊✊, alluding to the erroneous but common conspiracy theory that the COVID vaccine is being used to implant microchips inside everyone secretly.

To make matters more confusing, there is a fair amount of trolling within these groups, both from pro-vaxxers who want to disrupt these communities and anti-vaxxers who take great pride in "owning" the other side. For example, the group The Anti-Vax Flat-Earthers is filled with users both affirming these views as well as openly mocking them. "I ate flat bread again in ur face roundy" one person writes in open defiance of flat Earther ideology (a discredited ideology claiming that the Earth is flat).

This circle of the Internet can become toxic quite quickly. Although it has currently been mostly constrained to private groups on Facebook, the interest for this content is certainly there and building.

Conclusion

When it comes to the COVID vaccine, there is a lot of misinformation on Facebook. We are not only talking about influencers like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino but over 100 groups, with over 154 thousand members. There is undoubtedly some overlap with users between these groups, but keep in mind that this count is by no means exhaustive. These are only the ones that I, as an English speaker, was able to find cross-referencing several search results. Many more exist, and if they are like the ones I found, they filter users to less regulated parts of the web, such as Telegram and Rumble.

Now, to be fair, there is an entire competing ecosystem that is pro-vaccine. Organizations like UNICEF and the National Institute of Health often appear on top of the rankings, serving as a way to counter the anti-vaccine narrative prevalent on the platform. If you were searching for information on the COVID vaccine, it would be far more likely for you to stumble across a post by one of these groups than The Anti-Vax Flat-Earthers. Facebook has changed its architecture to value these sources in search results over other misinformation on the platform (for the time being).

Facebook is still a company that values engagement, however, over accurate information. Since influencers like Ben Shapiro are bringing in so much viewership with COVID vaccine skeptical content, it remains on the platform in spades. People are interested in hearing about how the world's response to COVID is wrong (whether it's because they think this vaccine is ineffective or all of them are), and they are willing to find it even if it means extra minutes wasted in the search bar. A pipeline exists where the skepticism fostered by men such as Ben Shapiro can filter down into private groups and possibly even offsite to more "open" parts of the web such as Gettr, Telegram, or Rumble.

Facebook claims that they want to stop misinformation, but based on how they incentivize that behavior on their site, it seems here to stay.

If you would like to see the data I used to craft this article, check out a copy of it here:

Anti-COVID Vaccine Groups on Facebook - Google Drive

Alex Has Opinions 10/30/21 Alex Has Opinions 10/30/21

The Problematic Christian Propaganda in Disney's ‘Hocus Pocus’

The beloved Halloween classic replicates some harmful tropes about witches.

Disney's Hocus Pocus (1993) is a movie much beloved by American audiences. Even more than Casper (1995) and Beetlejuice (1988), it's perhaps best thought of as the quintessential Halloween movie. The film is played on repeat across America every Halloween season and dutifully watched online on streaming platforms like Disney+.

However, after rewatching it as an adult, I couldn't help but notice all the religious symbolism scattered throughout the film. The movie is not only a fun romp but somehow manages to wax poetically about the sanctity of the immortal soul. When we examine this movie more closely, we begin to realize how it perpetuates a pretty harmful trope about the dangers of powerful women, reaffirming centuries-old Church propaganda in the process.

At its core, Hocus Pocus is about a naive, LA transplant named Max Dennison (Omri Katz) accidentally resurrecting the evil Sanderson sisters. These witches have a single night to brew a potion of eternal youth for themselves from the life essence of children, or they die forever this time. Max does his best to stop this grim fate from coming to pass, teaming up with his sister Dani (Thora Birch), his crush Allison (Vinessa Shaw), and a boy trapped in the immortal body of a cursed cat named Thackery Binx (Sean Murray). The movie is quite the trip, and all the while, there are fun one-liners, and of course, a brilliant rendition of the song "I Put a Spell on You," sung by witches Winifred (Bette Midler), Mary (Kathy Najimy), and Sarah (Sarah Jessica Parker).

Yet, for a movie this fun, there are many problematic elements bubbling just below the surface. The uncomfortable subtext surrounding it has to do with the concept of the witches themselves, and for that, we need to briefly contextualize what witches historically were in the real world.

In many European communities, witches used to hold a prominent place, interacting as intermediaries with local deities and mythological creatures to provide magical functions such as casting specific spells, brewing love potions, and the like, but starting in the 14th century, this identity was rebranded by Christianity to be demonic in nature. Witches went from being neutral and even benevolent in some cases to being agents of the devil, now responsible for curses, spoiled crops, and most importantly for our analysis of Hocus Pocus, murdering children. As a German Catholic Inquisitor wrote in the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches):

“A third and fourth method of witchcraft is when they have failed to procure an abortion, and then either devour the child or offer it to a devil…The former of these two abominations is the fact that certain witches, against the instinct of human nature, and indeed against the nature of all beasts, with the possible exception of wolves, are in the habit of devouring and eating infant children.”

This "rebranding" had deadly consequences. From the 14th to 17th century, it's estimated that somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 "witches" were killed (though some older estimates place this far higher), and overwhelmingly these victims were women. Some theorize that these purges were because witchcraft competed with Christianity's role in explaining the world. Others claim that it was a way for the Catholic Church to compete with its emerging protestant competitors (i.e., we kill your witches better than the other guy).

There are many competing theories, but regardless of the overall justification, assuming a singular one even exists at all, Christian officials took advantage of gender inequities to kill tens of thousands or possibly even hundreds of thousands of people. It's important to note that these practices have still not technically died. Thanks to imperialism, Christianity was spread all over the world, and witch hunts have been reported in places as far-ranging as Papua New Guinea and Sub-Sahara Africa.

Hocus Pocus takes this ancient myth rooted in misogyny and treats it seriously. The Sanderson sisters did sell their souls to the devil. They are creatures of pure evil who want to kill children. They hate wholesome things like a child saying "bless you." When they brew potions, it's only with vile substances such as newt saliva and a dead man's toe. Their version of soothing thoughts includes things such as rabid bats and the black death. The witches of this film are as bad as church officials claimed all those centuries ago when they sent tens of thousands of women to their deaths. The good townspeople of Salem (who in reality killed 25 people for no real good reason) are justified in the film when they hang them.

The movie not only doubles down on the fact that these women are evil but the misogyny these myths are rooted in. A component of the Christian demonization of witches in the 14th through 17th centuries is that they claimed witches fornicated with the devil and each other. Throughout the movie, the Sanderson sisters are hit on by nearly every male character they stumble across. The fact that they are vain and overly sexualized is coded as a component of their evilness. When their old, zombified lover, "Billy" Butcherson (Doug Jones), gets his voice back, he calls them wenches and trollops — two words that have heavy implications with sex work.

None of these examples are meant to defend the actions of the Sanderson sisters — they are undoubtedly made to be awful — but we are critiquing the way this text frames them as characters. We have a story validating a misogynistic myth (i.e., that witches are evil agents of the devil). It then advocates for us, the viewer, to dislike them partially by appealing to the misogynistic sensibilities of mainstream 90s culture. We aren't supposed to be horrified by Billy when he calls them wenches and trollops, but agreeing with him and probably thinking far worse.

These women are vile, and that demonization does not merely come in a secular, patriarchal sense but framed in a Christian one as well. As we have already mentioned, the devil is real in this movie's universe. There is a scene where they confuse a man in a devil costume with the devil himself and fawn over his very presence. They call him "master" and offer to do his bidding.

Another thing that exists in this movie is the soul — something that the Sanderson sisters traded for their unearthly powers. We are supposed to think that these witches are evil partly because of this trade. The character Dani tells us this explicitly near the end, saying: "It doesn’t matter how young or old you are! You sold your soul! You’re the ugliest thing that’s ever lived, and you know it!" The trading of the soul is framed in this sentence as the cause for that ugliness.

Compare this characterization to that of Thackery Binx, whose soul is very much intact by the time the film comes to a close. He is someone the witches cursed to live forever in the body of a talking cat. When he finally is given the right to die after vanquishing the witches, it’s portrayed as a positive thing because he is allowed to go to the afterlife. With a Christian cross around his neck, his ghostly spirit walks into the sunset hand-in-hand with the spirit of his dead sister through a gate, alluding to heaven’s pearly one. Heaven is not directly mentioned in the film, but it’s heavily implied that’s where he is headed.

Thackery Binx, who is seen as Christian, is rewarded, while the soulless Sanderson sisters are sent to hell.

There is unquestionably a religious framing in this film, and it's not merely subtext but woven throughout the text itself. When we look back and see the plot of this movie for what it is, we have three women rejecting God, albeit before the events of the film, and because of that choice, becoming evil child murderers. It's a film with a rather traditional morality that reaffirms centuries of toxic storytelling in our culture.

Hocus Pocus is not the only story that leans on the evil witch trope. We find this trope everywhere, from the Netflix movie Nightbooks (2021) to the childhood classic The Witches (1990). Disney did not invent the evil witch trope in media, but it does seem to replicate it a lot in its filmography (see Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Tangled, etc.), and it will probably do so in the future. There is something constant about our culture's fixation with power-hungry, evil, often over-sexualized women.

It’s fine to like Hocus Pocus — I rewatch it every Halloween. I also want to stress that this isn’t a dig at all of Christianity. We are criticizing the narrow conception of good and evil presented in this film — one that some religious organizations in the real world have tried to make a reality. This movie repeats archetypes that come from a very dark place in history, where entire swaths of people were condemned to satisfy those in power at the very top of Catholic and Protestant hierarchies.

Hopefully, by being a little bit more honest about this past, we can make space for media that's less patriarchal and even more magical.

Alex Has Opinions 10/27/21 Alex Has Opinions 10/27/21

Dave Chappelle's 'The Closer' Is A Warning For How The Rich Will Treat Us

Netflix, transphobia, & wealth inequality

I hesitated to watch Dave Chappelle's special The Closer because I am a trans person, and I thought it would be best to sidestep this moment altogether (something that should tell you how toxic this discourse has become for trans people). I have spent a lot of time documenting what the alt-right does for this blog, and I figured I didn't need to add more transphobia into my life. Many great writers from Scott Woods to Zuva Seven had covered the special already, and I didn't think there was much to add.

The discourse around the special, however, just hasn't ended. It's metastasized and mutated to the point where I don't think I can ignore it if I tried. And so here I am, giving my thoughts about The Closer, and you might be surprised that we are not going to focus on transphobia as much as we are going to talk about what this standup special means for how we interact with the rich.

And yes, Dave Chappelle is rich — “tens of millions of more dollars than you or I will ever have” rich.

About halfway through watching The Closer, I realized that this isn't really about standup or transphobia at all, but how those with means can construct entire realities around their own narrow conceptions of justice and pain. Dave Chappelle is not attempting to have a discourse about the intersection of queerness and blackness in his special. His framing is far too messy for that. He is the discourse, and that realization tells us something pretty poignant about where we are with the state of "cancel culture."

We are a culture fixated on the petty complaints of the rich.

Before we proceed with this analysis, yes, The Closer does have transphobic, antisemitic, and misogynistic jokes as well as a dozen other "problematic" things. I tell you this as someone who has analyzed the rhetoric of thousands of white supremacist posts: the transphobic arguments those malicious actors use (i.e., that gender is an unquestioned fact, using biology to claim transgender people aren't valid, misgendering, etc.) can be seen in this special. This parallel doesn't make Dave Chappelle a supremacist — that claim would be ludicrous — but it does tell you that he is susceptible to the same sorts of biases as everyone else in our society.

Early in the special, there is a point where Dave Chappelle asks if a gay person can be racist (note : this homophobic framing erases the intersections between gayness and blackness). He’s talking about how white gays can often use their whiteness to “punch down” (a phrase he allegedly has problems with) at members of the Black community, which is a valid criticism, albeit one said in a way that inflames preexisting tensions.

In this same vein, is it not also possible that a rich, cis, black man can be transphobic, and classist, and anti-semitic, and misogynistic, and a million other things?

The answer, just as in the special, is clearly yes. He affirms that he is a Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist (TERF) and compares transgenderism to blackface. It's apparent that Chappelle is working through his thoughts on gender, in real-time, with millions of Americans. His transphobia shows in these moments. He's not a terrible person, but he is a stubborn one, and unfortunately, his inability to truly listen has led to the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes. I have seen TERF communities share his lines like "Gender is a fact" with glee, and regardless of his intentions, it's obvious that some of his jokes probably would have been better left unsaid.

At this point in the discourse, you are either going to listen to this criticism, or you are going to defensively tell me that "it’s just a joke;" that "comedy doesn’t need to have limits;" that I, a trans person, cannot recognize transphobia when I have spent years having to notice it as an act of survival.

These deflections are, of course, naive. Anyone who has studied history knows that art can have a material impact on reality (see how A Birth of A Nation increased KKK recruitment, how Philadelphia helped destigmatize HIV/AIDS, how Blackfish caused SeaWorld to end its controversial "Shamu Show," etc.). Proponents of this special want Dave Chappelle to receive all the benefits of art— the recognition, the money, the fame — with none of the accountability, and it's frustrating.

When we jump into this discourse, we have to acknowledge that no one is above criticism, including the very people claiming to speak truth to power.

Yes, we will be talking about Dave Chappelle because that's where we are in the pop culture discourse, but we are not really talking about the special. We are talking about how he has constructed this discourse — saying things he very clearly believes in — so that he can speak truth to power about how the transgender community is "after him." How Chappelle, a rich person who was paid $24.1 million to create this special, and has full range over the construction of his set, somehow is the victim.

We see this phenomenon a lot, don't we?

Whenever rich people are accused of saying or doing "problematic" things, complaints of mobs and witch hunts resurface. It's the reason why everyone from former President Barack Obama to J.K. Rowling has bemoaned cancel culture. "I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people," Obama lamented during a summit in 2020, "and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: 'The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people.'"

When we look at how the rich interact with the world at large, it seems like criticism from the wider public on places like Twitter is what they complain about the most. This gripe is partially because this is the one type of media that is the most difficult to buy. The rich build entire ecosystems of news publications and foundations to give themselves positive press, or at the very least, to control the conversation. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, has given hundreds of millions of dollars to press organizations, and that has made critics reluctant to come forward about where his foundation has negatively impacted the world. Jeff Bezos likewise owns the Washington Post, and although that paper has released critical reporting of him, there is a concern about a potential chilling effect. Mike Bloomberg has built an entire media empire in his name. A host of rich men have attempted to reform our media ecosystems to suit their interests, and it stifles their ability to take criticism.

However, you cannot make every nobody online like you, which drives the rich up the wall. They often try to double down, using their influence to claw at the one place, usually Twitter, where they are receiving genuine criticism. This clapping back at critics is what this special was aimed to do for Chappelle — a way for him to control the conversation. "Twitter is not a real place," Chappelle laments in The Closer, allegedly claiming to an audience of millions that he does not care about what people on Twitter think.

Yet, he does care because he made this special about how Twitter users were mean to him. Suppose he was curious about mending his relationship with the transgender community, as this special claims he wants to do. In that case, he could have actually talked to activists about how to improve that relationship. This would have involved listening to those who do not have a vested interest in keeping him happy, and it would have been difficult and praiseworthy work to do. Instead, he chose to air his half-formed grievances to the world. He did the one thing you shouldn't do when trying to be a better ally— he made it about him.

It’s telling that the one trans person Dave Chappelle references being in dialogue with is Daphne Dorman, a woman who not only cannot speak for herself anymore because she’s dead, but was someone who idolized him. She was an aspiring comedian who Chappelle asked to open for him during his sets. Power dynamics would have made honest conversation between them difficult, yet that’s not something that Chappelle, an alleged truth seeker, wants to discuss. He would rather talk about how he is being attacked by the trans community — a group that is right now facing a lot of discrimination and violence. He is deeply wounded by the accusation that he could be "punching down," directing that anger at the larger LGBTQ+ community itself instead of doing the work to improve this relationship.

For all the rich people complaining about being canceled, historically, the politics of shame happen the other way around. The powerful use their positions of privilege, as Chappelle is regretfully doing here, to bully and attack those with less power (see the Salem Witch Trials, The Lavender Scare, etc.). The people who are genuinely hurt by weaponized shame are far more likely to be poor, brown, and queer, with trans youth facing some of the highest rates of suicide in the nation. They are the ones who endure all of the problems with cancel culture while having none of the wealth to insulate themselves from its ill effects.

Dave Chappelle even references this with the suicide of Daphne Dorman, who he alludes to possibly killing herself after defending his previous special Sticks & Stones. "I don't know if it was them dragging, I don't know what was going on in her life, but I bet dragging her didn't help," he claims, refusing to go into the specifics about why, at this moment in history, trans individuals might be feeling so terribly. He doesn't want to talk about the discrimination and high rates of harassment that trans people face on a daily basis, the overwhelming medical debt they take on to acquire life-saving surgeries, the job discrimination they face for being their true selves. He avoids mentioning the substance of his critics because that would make his anecdotes about being accosted by trans people while at dinner and being told to use the right pronouns sound very petty.

Instead, he waxes poetically about how we need to protect men like him. "Remember taking a man's livelihood is akin to killing him. Please do not abort DaBaby," he lectures in The Closer, talking about himself. He then bemoans that Kevin Hart was denied the right to host the Oscars for past homophobic remarks. He places this petty grievance of one rich man (Kevin Hart has a net worth in at least the tens of millions of dollars) on the same level as the trans community as a whole.

I need to stress that this type of detached reaction is common among the wealthy. It's well-known at this point that the empathy of the rich is stunted. For example, research from the journal Psychological Science has found that lower economic status people are better at reading others' facial expressions than wealthier people. Other studies have found that people in luxury cars are more likely to cut off other motorists or speed past pedestrians using crosswalks. It's a finding found a hundred different ways, all over the place.

We see the same thing here with Chappelle. He is a man with a net worth in the tens of millions, and this impacts how he interacts with others. He recently remarked that "everyone I know from [the LGBTQ+] community has been loving and supportive, so I don't know what this nonsense is about." And that's, of course, because he mainly interacts with people with similar class interests. Those that aren't on the same level as him have an imbalanced power dynamic, which makes providing him genuine criticism difficult.

Chappelle is a powerhouse in his industry, and he is so used to power and privilege that he cannot distinguish between criticism and attack. This reflex is not unique to Dave Chappelle, and so it would be unfair to pretend like he's somehow uniquely awful. Truthfully, when we compare him to other rich people, Chappelle is one of the #goodones.

But regardless, this response should alarm us. If the wealth of a man as progressive and insightful as Chappelle has stunted his empathy so much that he cannot admit he’s wrong about something as minor as a joke, what does that say about our future with the rich?

Dave Chappelle is not the first rich person to throw a tantrum about not being perceived well by the public, and he isn’t the worst offender. A standup special is a tiny drop in a sea of transphobia and hatred. It doesn’t help, but let’s not pretend that it’s the ocean itself.

Some white billionaires have done far worse and received far less criticism because they have the money to buy better press, their whiteness partially insulates them from criticism, and unlike Chappelle, their careers do not force them to be active in the spotlight. Men like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos have made decisions that negatively impact the livelihoods of millions of people. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have engaged in terrible anti-labor practices. Bill Gates has aggressively defended IP law, even to the point of delaying the COVID-vaccine rollout for countries around the world. They may be hated in activist circles, but rarely do they become parts of the discourse like Dave Chappelle has here.

However, that could soon change. I worry that as climate change and wealth inequality further metastasize, we will see the same sort of recalcitrance from these men, but we will not get something as benign as a hateful standup special in response. When you have spent a lifetime bending reality to your will, as men such as Gates and Bezos have done, what do you do when facing the reality that the public wants you to change?

If this special is any indication, we will be witnessing a decade of rich men telling the world that they are the victims, and then placing the most marginalized in the crossfire. And there’s nothing funny about that.