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

The Trope of the ‘Good’ Abusive Mentor

We might want to retire this character for good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father of the year, right there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Most Exhausting Part About America Is The Pretending

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YouTube’s Copyright System Was Designed to Be Broken

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

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

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

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

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

YouTube Policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content ID System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding Our Queer Obsession with Childish Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Victim Complex at the Heart of Conservative Cancel Culture

We need to talk about how conservatives love to be persecuted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Perfect Video Games for Your Next Virtual Vacation

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

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

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

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

Final Fantasy VII Remake — Best City Crawl

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

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

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

Minecraft — Best Procedurally-Generated Expedition

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

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

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

Subnautica — Best Maritime Outing

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

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

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

Uncharted Series — Best Indiana Jones-style Romp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside the Hateful World of White Supremacist Fashion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Travel Guide to the Best Video Game Escapes

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

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

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

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

Horizon Zero Dawn — Best Post-Apocalyptic, Backtripping Adventure

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

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

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

80 Days — Best Page-Driven Exploration

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

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

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

Mass Effect Franchise — Best Vay-Kay in Space

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

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

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

Night in the Woods — Best Small Town Excursion

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

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

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

Kentucky Route Zero — Best Road Trip

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

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

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

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

Our Society Is Determined to Forge New Monsters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The World of Online Comics Is Overwhelmed by Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Music of Hatred is Alive and Well on the Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Has Opinions 3/11/21 Alex Has Opinions 3/11/21

How Wanda Maximoff Became the Ultimate Karen

But her Black friend on the MCU show WandaVision forgives her, so it’s all chill, right?

The show Wandavision (2021) marked the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) Phase 4 — a master plan Marvel Studios and Disney have for over 24 movies and TV shows over the next 4 to 5 years. It also signifies the first live-action MCU show on the Diseny+ platform. Now that the first (and maybe final season) has ended, we are left deciding what exactly this show means, both for the MCU and as a standalone piece of art.

At the center of the show is the titular Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen). She is a magical being of immense power who drives much of the story's events. In her struggle to grieve her former partner, Vision (Paul Bettany), who was killed during the events of Avengers: Infinity War (2018), she transforms the entire town of Westview, New Jersey, into an idyllic sitcom community — replete with a theme song and comedic gags. Although fun to watch at first, the lengths Wanda goes to process her grief leads to some dark and regretfully problematic places. There is no line she will not cross to avoid acknowledging her pain, including treating the townspeople of Westview as playthings.

As the credits for WandaVision’s finale roll, we are left with a show that seems to excuse the many, many atrocities Wanda commits under the pretext of processing loss. Inflicting hurt, it seems to imply, is okay as long as the person doing it is hurting too.

An MCU property is always difficult to dissect because the franchise is so much larger than any one piece of media — something meant both literally and metaphorically. These works, by design, tie not only into a cinematic universe over a decade in the making (as well as almost a century of comic book lore) but also a much larger debate about the Disney company’s place in the media landscape. Many critics are not happy with how this company has shaped a bevy of topics, ranging from IP law to jingoist portrayals of the military. This subtext exists for any conversation about the MCU, whether we want it to or not.

Wanda further complicates this narrative because her portrayal has historically played into a series of sexist tropes as well. She was originally a villain in the comics — a child of Magneto, serving in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants — before becoming a member of the superhero team, the Avengers. The idea of her being a threat, however, lingered for decades. The early 2000s had several story arcs where Wanda goes mad and cannot properly handle her powers. The most notable examples of this are the Avengers Disassembled and the House of M storylines, where Wanda suddenly remembers her former children and warps all of reality to get them back. This power is depicted as being beyond her control, and ultimately she culls much of the mutant population on a whim.

This trope of the unstable, overpowered women is a common one in comic books, and really, media in general. We see it replicated with the character Jean Grey from the X-Men. She becomes possessed by the Phoenix Force in the Dark Phoenix Saga (1980) and loses control, accidentally exterminating billions of people. The sweet schoolgirl Carrie (Sissy Spacek) in the 1976 film of the same name goes on a homicidal killing spree with the emergence of her telekinetic powers shortly after her first menstruation. Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) in the HBO show Game of Thrones (2011–2019) annihilates thousands of people in the city of King’s Landing after losing several close attachments. When you look at our media’s recent and not-so-recent past, there are many examples of women going crazy and burning everything to the ground.

This idea in our collective mythology that women cannot control themselves ties into the archaic concept of hysteria, which itself is named after the Greek word for womb, hystera. Many ancient Greeks believed that the uterus roamed throughout the body, putting pressure on other organs. Women were believed to be weaker creatures as a result. Hysteria was blamed for everything from kleptomania to run-of-the-mill sickness. It basically became a catchall for everything men found wrong with women, and we are not far removed from that legacy. Hysteria remained a diagnosable mental illness in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980.

It’s obvious in retrospect that these views were guided by intense misogyny. Many of the classic “cures” for hysteria include such gems as placing good smells by the vagina, stimulating an orgasm, and marriage. Women were often treated as a thing to be cured, rather than people to be understood. When you blame all the evils of the world on a woman opening a box or jar, or biting into a fruit, it’s not hard to see how that mentality comes to infect not just our theories of medicine, but our stories as well.

In the comic book version of the marvel universe, Wanda fits the mold of Eve or Pandora. She restructured the universe by wiping away mutants from the world, and that impression has not left her character. We see a shell of this archetype in the WandaVision series as well. As antagonist Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) tells Wanda in the final episode, The Series Finale: “It’s your destiny to destroy the world,” hinting that the MCU may not be finished with using Wanda as a harbinger of destruction in the future.

While not abandoning all the tropes we mentioned, the creative team behind WandaVision appears conscious of the fact that making Wanda hysterical in the current era is not a good look. Showrunner Jac Schaeffer told the publication Total Film point-blank: “It was extremely important to me that we not do the lazy thing of having a superpower lady who can’t handle her powers and goes crazy.” The show tries not to portray Wanda as unhinged or hysterical but rather as someone suffering from trauma. This decision doesn't make her loss of control intrinsic to her wielding power (at least not entirely that) but related to unaddressed psychological damage. She regresses into the sitcom world of Westview not because she is a woman but because she has suffered abuse.

Yet the loose plot beats of Avengers Dissambled and The House of M still remain largely intact. The loss of a loved one — in this case, Vision, instead of her children — causes her to spiral out of control and reshape reality so she can have him back. Wanda may not be treated as a mad dog that must be put down for the good of the world, but she still loses control of her powers because of her emotions. She recklessly (and, one can argue, selfishly) projects her repressed feelings onto the material world. Though admittedly on a much smaller scale than in the comics, she hurts countless people in the process of trying to come to terms with this grief — and we do not see true accountability occur by the time the final episode airs.

WandaVision may have been trying to soften our perception of Wanda by pivoting to a story of her grappling with her trauma, but a new problem arises in the process. We are left with the portrayal of an extremely privileged woman, someone so privileged she can literally bend reality to her will, who hurts others to process her own feelings.

In other words, a Karen.

Wanda is very clearly buckling under the weight of years of trauma by the time we get to WandaVision. When we look at her participation in the MCU, she has very valid reasons for that pain: she was a refugee, a test subject and victim of Hydra’s weapon program, and a person who lost both her brother and her lover Vision. Deciding to center a story on that ordeal is not inherently bad, and we frankly need more narratives that talk about people processing grief and pain.

This account is complicated, however, by the fact that Wanda is not an ordinary person. She is so powerful she basically borders on godhood, and as we have already established, she uses that power to transform the town of Westview into an idyllic sitcom. She casts a magical Hex over the entire town that allows her to control every aspect of it, including the townspeople inside.

There are countless different ways people react to trauma. Sometimes people withdraw inwards. They isolate themselves from close attachments and engage in escapism through various means, including but not limited to narcotics, video games, television. One study indicates a correlation between binge-watching and depression and anxiety. Wanda is shown using sitcoms in such a way from a very early age, watching The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966) as an escape from the traumas of war-torn Sokovia. Her magical manipulation of Westview can be seen as her engaging in the ultimate form of media-driven escapism.

Another way people can react to trauma is to inflict abuse on others. There is a link between those who bully and those who are bullied themselves. Some research indicates that a minority of people who are abused will abuse others, and of course, the ability to perpetuate that harm depends on how much privilege you have over the person you are abusing. We see abuse is rampant in romantic relationships, workplaces, and really any relationship with an imbalanced power dynamic. A minority of abuse victims inflict harm on their own children, contributing to an intergenerational cycle of abuse.

Your ability to inflict harm directly correlates with the power you hold over someone else and Wanda holds power over everyone in the town of Westview. She controls what the townsfolk can do, where they can go, and even what they can think. She has actively suppressed much of their identities to fit her escapist fantasy, and they want to be freed. As one town member named Dottie or really Sarah (Emma Caulfield Ford) pleads to Wanda upon being temporarily released from her hold:

“I have a daughter. She’s eight. Maybe she could be friends with your boys. If you like that storyline. Or the school bully, even. Really anything, if you could just let her out of her room. If I could just hold her, please.”

There is a term for someone that controls every aspect of another individual's life — and that’s a slave master.

Wanda has enslaved this entire town, and it's horrifying to watch. Yet, we don’t see her truly grapple with the repercussions of that decision. She understands that the townspeople hate her, but she doesn’t stay there to be held accountable for her actions. She flies off, retreating to a secluded mountain cabin to learn more magic.

In fact, the situation is made more tenuous when one of the series regulars, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), tells Wanda that the horrors she has unleashed on the town are a natural outgrowth of her powers. “They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them…Given the chance and given your power, I’d bring my mom back. I know I would,” Monica reassures Wanda.

Monica, for context, is a Black woman, having to reassure a former white slaveholder that everything is okay. It’s an interaction that’s very painful to witness because it’s left ambiguous whether this woman of color is meant to be validating others' enslavement or merely bringing back someone from the dead. This problematically grounds the conversations in Wanda’s feelings. We are meant to think that her feelings of guilt are enough.

Wanda then vows to make things better. Not by trying to right the immense psychological trauma, she has caused to this community, but to gather more power. “I don’t understand this power, but I will,” she tells Monica. Taken out of context, this sentence is the perfect metaphor for privilege — someone unconsciously harming the community around them, not understanding what they are doing wrong, and then trying to right that harm by gaining even more power.

If she were truly interested in doing right by this community, she’d maybe start questioning if she should be free to wield so much more power in the first place.

WandaVision was an attempt by Disney to take Avengers Disassembled and the House of M's narrative beats and update them with modern sensibilities. They wanted to tell the same story, minus the sexist baggage and the vehicle they choose to accomplish that objective was an earnest exploration of trauma.

This idea was not inherently wrong, but the portrayal became a lot dicier when that person also enslaved an entire town to process said trauma. It created a story of both a victim and an abuser — one who ultimately does not do the work to repair the damage they have caused and yet still flies away as a hero.

This unresolved anxiety was not inevitable. We could have had a story where Wanda does all of the events in this series and then ultimately tries to make amends for that harm. It would have been beneficial to see the story of a privileged person who has undergone abuse, learning that that harm is not a justification for harming others. We could have seen Wanda pay a form of reparations to the Westview community she has harmed, providing a model to the viewer for how accountability should work in the real world.

Instead, Wanda blasts into the sky — the MCU setting up the pieces for some new fight — the town of Westview receding over the horizon.

This tension exposes a fault line that cut across the MCU before this show even aired. Someone like Wanda or Iron Man might seem desirable when they are firing off spells at a space tyrant or traveling through the multiverse to undo a galactic genocide, but decidedly not as much when they unconsciously trap an entire town or accidentally build a murderous AI. They have so much power that when they make mistakes, even unintentional ones, the consequences are catastrophic.

It’s not enough that our heroes process their feelings. They have to give up some of their power, too.

Alex Has Opinions 3/5/21 Alex Has Opinions 3/5/21

How Conspiracy Theories Took Over the World of Online Fashion

Online marketplaces like Etsy, Amazon, and Zazzle have allowed hatred and misinformation to be marketed to the masses

The world of online fashion has been going through the same reckoning with white supremacist conspiracy theories as the rest of the internet. Platforms such as Etsy and CafePress were skewered shortly after the January 6 insurrection for hosting merchandise celebrating the event, which caused them to scramble to take some of the incendiary content down. If you type “QAnon” into sites such as Zazzle or Etsy, you will not get any hits, except for maybe a parody “QaNOPE” T-shirt.

This more aggressive posturing, however, has not rid these platforms of conspiracy theory merch. With minimal effort, you can still find everything from dog whistles to direct overtures. “The Letter Q, suitable for any occasions, birthdays, Christmas, QAnon…” reads the description for one Q sticker on the site Redbubble. “All legal votes matter,” reads a button sold on the marketplace Etsy, referring to the erroneous belief that widespread voter fraud occurred in the 2020 election. “Handed them out to patriots last week in D.C.,” explains the first comment underneath this product. The date posted is January 13; the implication is that they were present in D.C. when white supremacists stormed the U.S. Capitol.

These companies have remained indifferent to the rancor swirling about on their platforms, refusing greater regulation for an ad hoc system that removes their worst items while leaving everything else up for sale.

For decades, the online fashion industry’s lack of accountability has allowed hatred and misinformation to be sold at a discount. These companies have remained indifferent to the rancor swirling about on their platforms, refusing greater regulation for an ad hoc system that removes their worst items while leaving everything else up for sale.

When I talk about online fashion, I am referring to digital marketplaces for goods, where the seller uses the platform to hawk their wares. Sometimes these are platforms such as Etsy or Amazon, where the creator uses it to manage orders, payment, and promotion but handles the production and shipping themselves as well as print-on-demand services like Zazzle or Society6. The user uploads an image to print their design on an array of prefab products like mugs, shirts, and phone cases, but leaves the platforms to manage production and shipping.

This flexibility has allowed users to advertise (and in some cases create) products with a click of a button. Almost from the beginning of this industry, users were testing the limits of modern sensibilities with obscene content. Redbubble garnered criticism back in 2011 when a group of designers used the platform to promote their Hipster Hitler clothing line, replete with slogans such as “1941: a race odyssey” and “Death camp for cutie.’’ Amazon made headlines in 2013 when one of its vendors promoted a series of pro-domestic violence shirts that spoofed the phrase “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Gawker ran an article about all the conspiracy theory merch on sites like CafePress back in 2015. Zazzle was dragged in 2019 for hosting a design that hatefully read, “At least I’m not Jewish.”

These scandals have never really died. A quick scan of the web reveals dozens of controversies that have popped up over the years across all the major platforms. As recently as February of 2021, Redbubble was under fire for a vendor selling a miniskirt with the image of a recently deceased British army officer. The company responded with a short explanation and then removed that individual design from the platform. A similar design can still be found from a different vendor.

This same pattern emerges on an alarmingly frequent basis. These companies note that the offense has been found, retract the individual post or user, and then move on. They might adjust their internal processes to monitor or flag certain posts or keywords more efficiently — as Etsy did following the January 6 insurrection — but the overall problem remains in place. Hateful rhetoric and misinformation are still for sale on these sites. It just has to be a tad more clever or distinct in its presentation.

For example, when Redbubble eventually pulled the Hipster Hitler line all the way back in 2011, one of the company’s founders, Martin Hosking, committed to adjusting the company’s policy so that they would prohibit parodies of genocide as well as other offensive materials. Yet to this day, the ironic content of fascist dictators is still for sale on the site. If you were so inclined, you could buy a “reich” T-shirt in the style of the Friends logo or a “Papa Joe’s” sticker with a cartoon Joseph Stalin advertising “Better Ingredients. Better Gulags.”

Minor scandals may plague these platforms, but for every piece of problematic apparel that breaks headlines, countless more go unacknowledged.

Likewise, when New York Times writers Sapna Maheshwari and Taylor Lorenz penned an exposé about how white supremacists were using sites such as Amazon and Etsy to sell merchandise glorifying the insurrection, many of the companies were quick to take those designs down. The article specifically mentioned a T-shirt with the text “Battle for capitol hill veteran” being on Amazon, which is no longer hosted there. However, the same design is still on the site Etsy, which was not mentioned in the article for hosting that specific design. If your industry is being grilled in one of the most widely read newspapers in the country for hosting insurrectionist content, you’d think you have someone, at the very least, check to see if none of those designs are on your site. And yet, that clearly did not happen here.

This oversight represents a problem systemic to not just online fashion but really all digital platforms across the tech space. The high volume of content on sites such as Amazon or Zazzle means that they cannot have humans monitor all the content they house. They have to rely on algorithms, and because human language is constantly evolving, often that means mistakes like the ones we have mentioned slip through. As Tom Simonite writes in Wired regarding the difficulty with automating the detection of hate speech:

“Defining and detecting hate speech is one of the biggest political and technical challenges for Facebook and other platforms. Even for humans, the calls are tougher to make than for sexual or terrorist content, and can come down to questions of cultural sensibility. Automating that is tricky, because artificial intelligence is a long way from human-level understanding of text; work on algorithms that understand subtle meaning conveyed by text and imagery together is just beginning.”

The same logic applies to conspiracy theories. We might eventually reach a point where A.I. can automatically sort through all problematic content, but ultimately doing so effectively will require both better A.I. and firmer political stances. Companies will have to decide that certain stances are wrong, even before they break headlines on our news feeds — something that is far from our present reality. While companies might constantly be tweaking their algorithms to better detect hate speech and misinformation, they seem largely content to label the slips up we have noted as the cost of doing business — simply more data points to perfect their A.I.

This has created an environment rife with conspiracy theories for sale, and we have to ask ourselves if it’s worth it.

The problem with online fashion is really the problem with all major digital marketplaces.

One thing that cannot be underestimated is the scale of this problem: We are not referring to a mere one or two conspiracy-driven designs, but thousands scattered across the web. Minor scandals may plague these platforms, but for every piece of problematic apparel that breaks headlines, countless more go unacknowledged.

One prevalent type of conspiracy theorist merch is flat-earther ideology, which is the false belief that the Earth is flat. All other evidence to the contrary is believed to be part of a “round Earth conspiracy” perpetrated by our world’s major governments. If you wanted to, you could buy a “The Earth is Flat Do the Research” T-shirt on Etsy or a “Flat Earth Awareness” postcard on Redbubble with minimal effort. There has not been a serious attempt to curtail flat-earthers in the same way as anti-vaxxers and other more scrutinized conspiracy theories. This conspiracy theory is considered relatively benign by these platforms because it mainly generates misinformation as opposed to promoting neglect or violent action.

However, this merch is not as benign as it first appears. Not only do they serve as a funding mechanism for conspiracy theory platforms such as the Flat Earth Podcast, but they are also an entry point for adherents to expose others to these conspiracy theories. As one commenter wrote underneath the description for a model of a flat Earth they bought on Etsy: “I have it sitting on my dining table and people visiting me have been questioned me about it, which leads into interesting discussions and me explaining the geocentric flat Earth model to those who aren’t aware of it or who have a misconception of what it’s truly all about.”

The belief in one conspiracy theory makes you far more likely to believe in another one. This overlap is because conspiracy theorists are generally not trying to prove one scientific theory right or wrong. According to sociologist Ted Goertzel, they are instead trying “to prove that nothing is provable, that all assertions are arbitrary.” It’s a general distrust in our current systems of knowledge that belies a lot of conspiratorial thinking. This is why even nonviolent conspiracy theories such as those promoted by flat-earthers should be viewed with great caution.

Another area in online fast fashion rife with conspiracy theory merch is anything related to the coronavirus pandemic. The widespread and false belief that the coronavirus is fake has led to the creation of products that discourage mask usage. Ironically, many of these products are masks. “I’m only wearing this mask because I have to,” reads one mask on Zazzle. “Pointless placebo,” explains another. And again, there are hundreds of these items:

We see a similar skepticism with the vaccine. Many items encourage people to skip the vaccine altogether. “I do not consent,” explains the text for a long-sleeve T-shirt on Amazon, paired with the image of a person in a mask and surrounded by needles. This skepticism has even translated into merch perpetuating the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates is using the vaccine to insert microchips into people. “Bill Gates Eugenicist — Evil Vaccine Pusher,” exclaims another shirt on Redbubble.

In an age where there is an active political movement to prevent people from vaccinating against this deadly pandemic, these platforms permit far too much misinformation on their sites. It would take months to catalog all the various conspiracy theories easily searchable on the web, like the many bracelets featuring the words “Epstein didn’t kill himself,” stickers pleading for people to stop chemtrails, and placards challenging the credibility of the 2020 election.

As long as this merch doesn’t call for direct violence, these companies seem content to continue to host it — only removing items if they earn negative attention in the press or social media. Most of these platforms do not have community guidelines preventing the spread of misinformation (for example, check out the guidelines for Amazon and Zazzle). The ones that do (see Etsy and Redbubble) do not seem to be more effective at preventing conspiracy theory merch. Even if these policies were implemented across the industry (and that would be an excellent first step), it would not resolve the core issue.

All of the above platforms do have guidelines that discourage harassment and hate speech, and yet flat-out hatred is sold on them all the time. Want a “feminism is cancer” T-shirt? Buy it on Amazon. A sticker valorizing confederate general Robert E. Lee? Currently in stock on Redbubble. How about a shirt calling liberalism a mental disorder? Etsy has several in stock. If these guidelines were effective in stopping hateful products, you would think these examples would not be so easy to find.

The vastness of these platforms, coupled with an ad hoc editorialization process, means that gaps like the ones already mentioned will continue to exist for some time.

The problem with online fashion is really the problem with all major digital marketplaces. Whether we are talking about Etsy or YouTube, there are too many designs being published at any one time for there ever to be enough oversight. YouTube has over 500 hours of content published every minute. Etsy has over 2.5 million active sellers.

These companies rely on A.I. to filter out some of the most egregious examples. Still, the ever-changing nature of conspiracy theories and hate speech means that some examples will inevitability slip through the cracks. For example, the “I do not consent” T-shirt referenced earlier may have been used to virtue signal skepticism over the Covid-19 vaccine, but that same terminology could appear on anti-sexual assault merchandise. The acceptability of symbols changes depending on their context — a reality that alt-right groups have been very good at navigating. It’s all too common to see hate groups adjusting their language or appropriating new symbols to bypass censors.

Automatic censorship also has the drawback of potentially hurting marginalized creators who use similar language but under an entirely different context. Many LGBTQIA+ YouTubers, for example, noted their videos being demonetized when the platform attempted to regulate hate speech in 2019 more stringently. A.I. may be more efficient, but that efficiency can cut both ways.

The problem with conspiracy theory merch epitomizes a problem fundamental within the online industry. Companies are torn between their desire to turn a profit and their alleged desire to act ethically. They have built up these massive “unmanageable” systems under the assumption that they will one day be easier to control, and in the meantime, the purchasing of hatred is just a click away.

Alex Has Opinions 3/2/21 Alex Has Opinions 3/2/21

Why Can’t Disney Let Biological Parents Be Evil?

Behind the bias that pushes out perfect parents and wicked stepmothers

As a kid, my favorite Disney movie was the 1997 animated classic Hercules. It’s about the titular Greek hero (Tate Donovan) trying to prove his godhood so he can be reunited with his family in Mt. Olympus. However, he ultimately rejects his mantle so that he can stay with his love interest Megara (Susan Egan) back on Earth — in essence, repudiating the divinity of his biological family for a romantic partner he doesn’t even marry by the time the film comes to a close.

Even as a child, I remember being struck by how different this ending was from the normal Disney formula. We not only have a rejection, albeit a soft one, of the main character’s biological family but a positive portrayal of Hercules’s adoptive family. Amphitryon (Hal Holbrook) and Alcmene (Barbara Barrie) love their son until the end and are never depicted as anything but great parents. There is also Hercules’ trainer Philoctetes (Danny DeVito), who has a de facto familial role. “That’s Phil’s boy,” one character says of the hero Hercules.

If I had to sum up Disney in a single word, then that word would be family. When I look at the vast library of content they have produced over this last century, it’s overwhelmingly been devoted to stories glorifying this institution. It is a company that actively describes itself as a maker of “family entertainment.” We have hundreds of heartfelt tales of fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters, but rarely do we see loving stepmothers, step-fathers, adopted parents, and found family members given center stage.

When we step back and examine this larger trend, it’s hard not to see a bias towards biological parents in Disney’s utter reluctance to make them anything but good.

During the early years, the majority of the nonbiological parents in the Disney-verse were flat-out evil. We see this most prominently during the Golden (1937–1942) and Silver (1950–1959) eras of Disney, where wicked stepmothers dominated the Silver Screen. The Evil Queen (Lucille La Verne) from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) detests her step-daughter so much she tries to kill her. Cinderella’s step-mother Lady Tremaine (Eleanor Audley), treats her more like a servant than a daughter.

Birth moms were regularly absent during these eras, often dying off-screen or very early in the film (see Bambi, Cinderella, Snow White, etc.). This trend would continue into the Disney Renaissance (1989–1999), where characters such as Princess Jasmine (Linda Larkin) in Aladdin (1992) and Belle (Paige O’Hara) in Beauty and the Beast (1991) are likewise motherless. We would sometimes see mothers alongside their husbands, such as Mrs. Darling (Heather Angel) in Peter Pan or Fa Li (Freda Foh Shen) in Mulan (1998), but never as distinct people outside their roles as a wife, mother, or lingering memory.

Dead parents make some sense narratively. Orphaned children are a common story trope in media because they create tension and allow for children to see themselves as the protagonist without the messy interference of adults. It stands to reason that parents would be removed in a lot of children’s stories, but what doesn’t hold up to scrutiny is for that absence to be frequently gendered female. As Celeste Mora wrote in Bustle: “Disney’s legacy with parenthood is a mixed bag, and often it favors fatherhood over motherhood or guardianship of any kind.”

Left behind were often fathers, who, although sometimes clueless, distant, or even cruel, were never really bad. King Triton (Kenneth Mars) in The Little Mermaid (1989) may wreck Princess Ariel’s (Jodi Benson) treasures and whatchamacallits, but he’s ultimately supportive of her marriage to Prince Eric (Christopher Daniel Barnes) at the end of the film. The Sultan (Douglas Seale) in Aladdin is a clueless dote who lets his advisor Jafar (Jonathan Freeman) usurp way too much control over Agrabah, and yet he is also there for his daughter in the end. These eras were a time of missing mothers, wicked stepmothers, and okay fathers. It was a period in filmmaking that upheld patriarchal norms while simultaneously demonizing non-normative family structures.

It would take decades for the evil stepmother trope to be used less frequently, and it has truthfully never died. We would see a modern incarnation with Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) in Tangled (2010), a witch who actively gaslit her adopted daughter into thinking the outside world was a dangerous place so that she would never leave. Regina Mills (Lana Parrilla), in the TV series Once Upon A Time (2011–2018), plays an updated version of the Evil Queen. Although she is eventually redeemed, her initial portrayal is of the cold, domineering stepmother we are so used to seeing in Disney films.

Even as the Wicked Stepmother trope diminished, biological parents remained at the center of most Disney families. We would occasionally observe exceptions to this rule, such as the adoptive parents in Hercules, the stepfather in Onward (2020), and arguably Grandmother Willow (Linda Hunt) in Pocahontas (1995), but these examples remained on the periphery of their respective films. Pocahontas still has her father, Chief Powhatan (Russell Means), and the entirety of the film Onward is about the main character reckoning with the loss of his biological father.

Nonbiological family members are very few and far between in these stories, which goes against many viewers' lived reality. This objection may sound obvious, but it bears noting that millions of families have children who are adopted or are in the care of non-immediate relatives like grandparents, aunts, or cousins. Millions more are stepchildren from other marriages. Some of these relationships are good — others are not — and we don’t really see Disney reflect that reality. They are a company that has a clear preference in their filmography for one type of family structure. Unlike evil stepmothers, biological parents are rarely portrayed as anything but good. With the notable exception of Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer) in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), it's hard to find an evil birth mom or dad who comes anywhere close to Lady Tremaine or the Evil Queen.

If evilness is found somewhere on the family tree, it's almost always placed up a branch or two so that some psychological distancing can take place. Uncle Scar (Jeremy Irons) is the villain in The Lion King (1994). Grandfather Runeard (Jeremy Sisto) is the imperialist in Frozen II (2019). Grandfather Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is the mastermind in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). Seldom are the protagonist's biological parents ever bad — it's always the distant uncle, aunt, or grandparent.

Some biological parents, though, are bad. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that the number of maltreated children (e.g., children who endure physical, sexual, and emotional abuse or neglect) is roughly 9 per one thousand. Those are the numbers that the government catches. There are probably millions of parents that skirt that line of abuse who never get caught, and children need narratives that allow them to label that mistreatment as evil.

In fact, this unwillingness to portray biological parents as evil reeks of a discriminatory trend that not only is inaccurate but often undercuts the very stories Disney is trying to tell.

When we look at Disney’s filmography, this refusal to demonize biological parents can take their narratives to some unusual places. For example, the central conflict in Frozen II is about how Anna (Kristen Bell) and Elsa (Idina Menzel)’s grandfather, Runeard, exploited the magical land of Northuldra to benefit his kingdom of Arendelle. He constructed a dam that weakened the Northuldra people and allowed Arendelle to build their capital in the newly drained lowlands. The story makes it painfully clear that no one else in the royal family was aware of this sleight so that they can lay all the blame on the grandfather alone.

Imperialism, however, is hardly an activity that a single individual can do by themselves. You don’t secretly perpetuate war crimes without your larger population willfully choosing to ignore them, especially members of the royal family who benefit from said war crimes. This narrative would have been better served by reflecting that emotional reality and making Anna and Elsa’s parents less than perfect, especially since their actions are largely responsible for the first movie's problems.

One of the main reasons Elsa had so much baggage over her powers in the first film, Frozen (2013), was that her parents decided to lock her away as a child. She was not able to control those powers initially. So they focused on isolating her as they worked on a cure — a decree Elsa internalized even after their untimely deaths. In the words of the blog Lady Geek Girl: “Elsa’s and Anna’s parents don’t abuse their daughters because they want something from them; they abuse them because they want to protect them, and they believe that this seclusion is the best way to do that.”

Frozen II could have reflected on how that trauma — although guided from a place of love — was ultimately wrong. It would have been a chance to contemplate how sometimes loving parents do terrible things out of misguided concern, but the movie isn’t willing to live in that shade of gray. The scene we have with her parents in Frozen II is a memory of them committed to curing their daughter until the end.

Another recent example of being unable to demonize biological parents is the animated movie Coco (2017)— a tale of a boy named Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) as he finds himself in the Land of the Dead. Miguel has to race his way back to our world before being stuck in the Land of the Dead for good, and the only way to do that is to get a blessing from a deceased family member. A central tension is that Miguel’s great-great-grandmother, Mamá Imelda (Alanna Ubach), had a husband who walked out on his family to pursue his career as a musician, and she will not let Miguel leave the Land of the Dead until he renounces music for good.

Unable to give up on music, Miguel tries to track the spirit he believes is his great-great-grandfather, a talented musician named Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). When the two of them finally meet, Ernesto talks about how leaving his hometown and family was difficult, but ultimately that he is happy he pursued his dreams. We are left with a complicated portrayal far too common in our day and age: a parent forced to grabble between being fulfilled and raising a child in a society that doesn’t make it easy to do either. Ernesto selfishly chooses to follow their dreams to get what they wanted in life and has accepted the costs.

This complicated and refreshing portrayal is undone, however, by the time we reach the final act. We learn that Miguel’s real relative, Héctor (Gael García Bernal), wanted to go back to his family, but he was killed by Ernesto, his former singing partner, who sought to take credit for the songs they wrote together. The more human depiction of a man doing something selfish and having to make peace with the fallout is swept aside by a simplified tale that values traditional family values above all else. “Family comes first,” Miguel says to his great-great-grandmother shortly after the truth of Héctor has been revealed.

Once you start looking for this bias, it’s hard not to see how Disney will go out of its way to contort the narrative to favor biological parents. Sometimes these pivots are not as subtle as in Coco and Frozen II and can be downright offensive. For example, the main protagonist in the most recent Star Wars trilogy, Rey (Daisy Ridley), has an entire subplot around her lineage, and its conclusion is infuriating.

We are led to believe in the second film, Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2015), that her parents were people of no importance. They left her on the planet of Jakku to be an indentured servant, and they never returned. Since that realization upset some people for reasons too many to cover here, this conclusion was retconned in the sequel, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), so that Rey had more influential parents. Her grandfather became Emperor Palpatine — the evil antagonist who ruled the galaxy in the previous trilogy of Star Wars movies.

Her parents, however, do not fall within that orbit of evil because that would violate the norm of biological parents always being good. Rey has an entire flashback scene inserted into the narrative where we are reassured that these characters — people the viewers have never met — loved her all along. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), her nemesis and eventual friend, tells Rey that her parents “sold you to protect you.” It’s a cringe-worthy line that tries to justify slavery just so the narrative doesn’t have to cast her parents in a negative light.

There may be countless directors and creators behind these various properties; however, it's evident that the Disney company has implicit norms that it is hesitant to deviate from — and the divinity of biological parents is one of them.

When we talk about these movies, it's important to note that we are not trying to disparage one film or director specifically, but criticizing a trend decades in the making. There is nothing wrong with portraying biological parents in a positive light — in the same way that there is nothing wrong with putting water or trees in a story. They are simply a component that can be used or not used.

It’s the absences across a filmography and industry that are bothersome. The problem is the willful decision to center biological parents above other family structures on top of a history of demonizing alternative ones. That is the issue here. There are so many different, valid family structures that deserved to be seen — families with adopted children, stepchildren, and caregivers such as grandparents, family friends, uncles, and so much more.

Additionally, there are a lot of shitty parents too. Many people had biological parents who didn’t treat them well, and those children (and adults) deserve to feel like others shared their upbringings. When you are a company that claims to make family entertainment and don’t attempt to show the diversity of what a family can be, you end up making countless people feel alone.

As paradoxical as it sounds, the quickest way to put a smile on some viewers' faces is for Disney to allow their parents to be evil.

Alex Has Opinions 2/25/21 Alex Has Opinions 2/25/21

The World of Far-Right Social Media Thinks Everyone is a Clone

Inside the rationalization that keeps the QAnon conspiracy ticking.

After the January 6th insurrection, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the major social media platforms started to ban groups that promoted conspiracy theories. These recently booted alt-righters flocked to alternative sites such as Telegram and MeWe, where they continued more or less the same as they did before, claiming that a vast government conspiracy had taken over America.

On these fringes of the Internet, it’s common to see far-right conspiracy theorists allege ideas that border on the truly bizarre. Many are still convinced that Trump never lost the election. Entire groups are devoted to conspiracy theories such as QAnon, which supposes that an elite cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles controls the world. Some believe that liberals are extracting an imaginary substance called adrenochrome from children to keep themselves young.

Stranger still, many believe that politicians such as Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton are actually clones or elaborate deepfakes. These theorists exist in an alternate reality where nothing we see on the news is actually true — clues of which can be “discovered” in between the frames of government videos and decoded in the words of public statements.

This desire to “uncover the truth” is an old impulse that is not limited to the Internet's conservative peripheries. When we look at the annals of history, people have blamed clones for their problems for hundreds of years.

“More Arrests, Deaths & Resignation/Terminations. Down they go, one by one!” writes one user on the Telegram group Q-Tip. They posted this alongside a series of screenshots of news articles of various deaths and resignations, implying that these are people Trump has taken out in his war against the “deep state.” This post has been seen by over 67,000 users, with over 170 comments, and it's one of the thousands of similar posts on the Q-Tip page.

A major component of the QAnon theory is that Trump will eventually overtake these elites in an event called “the storm,” which is depicted as a biblical experience when he finally does drain the swamp of all of its nefarious elements. In the meantime, he is waging an allegedly secret war against this cabal of Satanists, who then use their influence in the press to “misconstrue” these events as resignations and deaths. Many of the posts on QAnon feeds are reposted screenshots users claim are “evidence” of the latest body count in this unseen and fictional battle.

Like most conspiracy theories, none of this information holds up to scrutiny. For example, one of the articles Q-Tip mentioned earlier in that post was an associated press piece about how Pennsylvanian state senator John Blake recently resigned his seat to work for US Representative Matt Cartwright. John Blake resigned at a public event covered by press outlets ranging from CBS to FOX.

Somehow we are supposed to believe that all of this was a ruse — reasoning that falls apart the moment you think about it more deeply. If an organization was powerful enough to control members of Congress and the Associated Press (as well as the half dozen press organizations present at this event), why would they still make the details of the cover-up public? Why not stage a heart attack or a car crash or, at the very least, a cover-up that doesn’t require a convoluted backstory with a sitting member of congress? And, of course, that’s the logical inconsistency from a relatively obscure person. This line of questioning becomes even more absurd for public figures such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who have come into contact with thousands of people.

The answer that has emerged from this corner of the Internet is that these people are fake. They are either cloned in some seedy science fiction lab controlled by the “deep state” or digital deepfakes (i.e., synthetic images or videos). “They are using clones. A technology that they have had for 50 years…But it’s not just Hollywood, it’s Washington, [the] Vatican, Royals, World Leaders, Famous People! From all over the world!” remarked one QAnon adherent on Telegram.

“BBC literally ran a story during…Christmas stating that the message from the Queen was a deep fake,” reads another post from the group We The Pepe. “Do you think the Queen is still alive, or do you think she’s 6 feet under?” This post implies that Queen Elizabeth the II has died and has long since been replaced by a series of deepfake videos and images. As of writing this, the queen is very much alive, but a scroll through these groups would have you believe that a host of living, breathing celebrities are actually a part of the conspiracy.

From Nancy Pelosi to Jeff Bezos, nearly every mainstream political figure has been accused of not being real by members of QAnon. Clones, doppelgängers, and bodysuits have been a facet of this ideology since the onset. QAnon is often cited as starting in October 2017 when a poster called Q made an obscure post on a 4Chan message board about how Hillary Clinton would be arrested by the end of the month. This event obliviously never occurred, and so adherents filled in the dots. According to some, she had been captured, and the deep state had replaced her with an actor or clone.

Even before Q’s first post, the idea that Hillary Clinton was not “everything she appeared to be” had been circulating for years. When Hillary collapsed of pneumonia on the campaign trail in 2016, conspiracy theorists took it as “evidence” that she was something else. Some claimed that she was relying on a body double. While others ludicrously asserted that in 1998 the entire Clinton Family had been eliminated and cloned beneath Camp David.

What compels someone to believe in something so truly bizarre?

We cannot know from a single post why an individual might cling to a conspiracy theory. Researchers have come up with a variety of explanations. Conspiracy theories correlate with higher social media usage and lower education levels (though all education levels are affected). A person might adhere to this way of thinking due to a desire for knowledge and certainty or maybe out of a longing for security. They may wish for a sense of cognitive closure. There’s even evidence that narcissism can also correlate with conspiracy theories, as individuals and groups scapegoat their failings onto a fictitious or real enemy.

A common element that seems to tie a lot of these disparate threads together is a longing for control. Conspiracy theories are prevalent in groups that do not have a lot of power or conversely perceive themselves as deserving of more of it. Some research indicates that conspiracy theories are prevalent in societies with less successful democracies, where trust in institutional authority is low. Others have argued that conspiracy theories are prevalent among disenfranchised groups rebranding themselves as “heroically in the possession of secret information.” Members of a dominant group, such as the white supremacists on the far-right, can use conspiracy theories as a pretext for why they should have even more power (e.g., we need to stop the clones).

Of course, none of this starts or ends with ludicrous claims on online message boards. Believers of QAnon have been linked to over a dozen violent incidents ranging from attempting to derail a freight train to kidnapping to trying to stage an insurrection of the US Capitol. QAnon adherents were there alongside other white supremacists on January 6th, and they will undoubtedly be participating in similar actions in the future.

While there may be a genuine sense of anger and grief among far-right conspiracy theorists, they are ultimately rationalizing the preservation of an authoritarian regime. They are clinging to any justification that lets them maintain the fantasy that Donald Trump is a hero, and the thing a lot of them have chosen to explain away all of his inconsistencies is that clones are real.

This theory may seem far-fetched, and it is, but as we shall see, the psychological foundations are centuries in the making.

“They also replace people with doubles. For many years they recruited look-alikes who would serve their ends. Now they are perfecting cloning technology that will let them replace anybody.”

That comment is not QAnon-related but is a post from a message board speculating whether actress Meagan Fox is secretly a clone. The self-proclaimed Doppelganger and Identity Research Society is a forum dedicated to unearthing the clones and body doubles of our society’s most rich and famous. This forum is filled with examples of people arguing that a wide range of celebrities, from Paul McCartney to Beyoncé, are not who they appear.

Spotting doppelgängers is a favorite pastime of these commenters, and it's a trend that’s been happening a long time. We talk of actors and politicians having clones and body doubles in the modern era. Yet, hundreds of years ago, the go-to explanation among many people was supernatural beings such as fairies, trolls, spirits, and elves. The word Doppelgänger, in fact, was a term coined by writer Johann Paul Richter in 1796 to describe a concept in German folklore of how all living creatures have an identical, invisible spirit acting as their double.

When we look at folklore traditions across Europe, we see these larger-than-life figures as forces of nature. Spirits such as fairies are blamed for everything from weather patterns to the success and failure of crops. For example, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the queen and king of the fairies, Titania and Oberon, are so powerful that their marital quarrel has disrupted the natural world. Their fight has caused rivers to flood and crops to wither.

One thing fairies and other supernatural beings were commonly accused of doing was abducting children and replacing them with an imposter, known popularly today as a changeling. These creatures were considered to be evil by many, and they were a cause for anxiety. As a character remarked to a concerned parent in J. F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860/62): “It is not your son you have got. The boy has been carried away by the ‘Daoine Sith,’ [spirits], and they have left a Sibhreach [changeling] in his place.”

Many parents were not happy with these alleged abductions and performed any task to get their original child back, ranging from animist rituals to tactics that were far more brutal. J. F. Campbell’s story starts with a father collecting empty eggshells to detect if their child is a changeling and ends with them tossing their “fake” boy into a fire. It was normal for parents to inflict intense abuse on these “imposters” in the hope that the faeries would feel bad enough for the changeling to bring the original child back. In the words of Richard Sugg in their essay Fairy Scapegoats: A History of the Persecution of Changeling Children:

“To the end of the nineteenth century, and probably later, such children were ritually abused by their own parents to this end. Immersed in rivers or placed at the margin of coastal tides, stood on hot coals or hung over fires, exposed in freezing weather, bathed in poisonous foxglove essence, beaten, threatened and subjected to forms of exorcism, these babies and children sometimes survived, sometimes not.”

A sad truth we must acknowledge with this history is that many of the changeling stories are of children who were sick, disabled, or neuroatypical. The child depicted in the Popular Tales of the West Highlands, for example, was discovered to be a changeling because he fell ill and “ took to his bed, and moped whole days away.” Other stories depict changeling children that are deformed or behaving erratically.

We see this in the etymological lineage of the word oaf (archaically spelled auf or alfe), which today means a stupid, uncultured, or clumsy person, but was originally used to describe a changeling child. The word is believed to trace its roots to the Middle English alven and elven, meaning fairy or elf. Its usage may have changed over the years to generally apply to an unintelligent person, but the original, ableist meaning survives in the words historical evolution.

The changeling myth was used as a subconscious pretext to give some parents “an out.” It gave them a sense of control in a world ruled by diseases and genetic disorders that they could not understand. It doesn’t make the routine torture of changeling children acceptable, but it does allow us, in a small way, to understand what was happening. These parents were using this conspiracy of faeries as a defense mechanism to reckon with suffering, and in some cases, as a way to misdirect their anger and shame over having a child with a disability onto the child itself.

That impulse to use conspiratorial thinking to explain away “bad things” has never left us. We see it today in how parents are convinced vaccines have given their children autism, condensing a complicated process we do not fully understand (i.e., why someone gets autism in the first place) to a single source they can control and ward against. It’s present in how people blame the coronavirus on 5G technology. Conspiratorial thinking is quite natural. As social psychology professor Dr. Karen Douglas remarked on the American Psychological Associations’ podcast:

“People have always believed in conspiracy theories. As far back as we can remember, people have been having these conspiracy beliefs and having these suspicions about the actions of hostile collectives of individuals. This is just the way that we are wired up to some degree.”

There is nothing particularly unique about the conspiracy theories we see promoted by white supremacists, including the clones they believe control the world.

As we have just shown, people have been blaming their problems on a duplicate other for centuries. Fairies and other spirits may have been the justification hundreds of years ago, but now it’s a perverted understanding of science via clones and deepfakes. Members of the alt-right have used this mentality to create a world where they are the valiant heroes in a struggle against an all-powerful deep state.

There will undoubtedly be some adherents who abandon this justification now that Trump's power has diminished. Much of the QAnon worldview is centered on Donald Trump, and despite what many may claim, he is no longer in office. There is only so much cognitive dissonance that some individuals will be able to maintain before setting the QAnon conspiracy away for good. As one of them recently posted in the group R Trust the plan:

“I feel abandoned. Trump was supposed to save us from communism. I put my trust in him. It is now gone. There is no plan. It’s finally hitting me.”

It’s unlikely, however, that this burnout will affect the majority of adherents. After the attempted January 6th insurrection, a staggering 8% of Americans claimed that the QAnon conspiracy theory was “very accurate” in a Morning Consult poll. If the online activity we have noted is any indication, many will continue to believe in it. Once someone can explain away every inconsistency by saying, “a clone did it,” it becomes tough to argue with them.

We need to understand that this has nothing to do with facts and logic and has everything with finding a worldview that gives people a sense of control. Conspiracy theories are about allowing individuals to make sense of events and feelings they do not understand or wish to process, and it has been happening for a long time. People on alt-right message boards cling to the screenshots of newspaper headlines in much the same way parents of alleged changelings clung to discarded eggshells to identify evil. They are rituals meant to alleviate unrelated stress and anxiety.

While we have started to make some headway in combatting this distorted way of thinking, there is no magic bullet. Debunking campaigns and education efforts may be effective as a form of prevention, but conspiracy theories are generally hard to combat once they have become firmly entrenched within an individual’s mindset. We still understand so little about people's susceptibility to conspiracy theories over time. Some research suggests that improving people’s material well-being is one of the best ways to combat them, which means that conspiracy theorists will require robust support networks to change their behavior.

If we want to mitigate conspiratorial thinking, we need to recognize that this is not a conservative anomaly but a modern iteration of an ancient impulse. No one is immune to it, and unless we start developing some social tools to combat it, the specter of clones and doppelgängers will continue to haunt us for years to come.

Alex Has Opinions 2/19/21 Alex Has Opinions 2/19/21

Beware the Privilege of Demanding an Explanation

The entitlement in requiring that people answer you

Years ago, I was temping at a racial justice nonprofit. I was helping to staff their annual conference on the social determinants of health when a middle-aged white man darted straight towards our table, which was set up in a convention center of a trendy hotel chain. He swung his arms wildly from side to side as he walked up to us and immediately addressed the woman sitting next to me—a Black woman in her early thirties who was a full-time employee for the nonprofit.

“Excuse me, where is the lobbying meeting taking place for the pediatric conference,” he asked abruptly.

For context, that was not our conference, which he would have known if he had bothered to read the large sign draped from our table. The person he was addressing was one of the nonprofit's fellows. She was there to help oversee the speakers for the conference, and at that moment, was taking a short breather at my booth. She had no idea what was going on on the convention center floor because it wasn't her job.

“I am afraid I don’t know, sir,” she responded with all the politeness she could muster at that moment.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” he shot back cooly.

“Sorry, sir. I’m afraid you are at the wrong conference,” I interjected.

“Oh, forget it,” he said before storming off.

The fellow then turned to me, a white person in my young twenties, and said: “Be sure to never be like that.” And I nodded, not knowing what else to say.

I see many privileged people, particularly privileged white people, act like that older man a lot. They demand that people tell them the information they want when they want it, regardless of whether it's convenient for the person they are asking. It’s an expectation so ingrained in them that they don’t even realize that demanding an explanation is not something they are entitled to.

If you are like many people, your first response to this article (maybe even your first response to the title) will be to question the premise. “Isn’t learning a good thing?” you might ask. “Shouldn’t I educate myself about things I do not understand?” And, of course, the answer to all of these questions is yes; you should continue to learn about subjects you do not understand, especially uncomfortable topics such as racism, sexism, and other aspects of bigotry.

The problem is that a large subset of people will assume that because you have a position they do not understand or agree with, you must be willing to explain it to them, usually right there and then. This request is at the center of the online “debate me” culture. It’s common to see men such as Dave Ruben demand that people they disagree with come onto their platform to discuss their objections. If the person refuses, these pundits will label that person a coward. For example, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy implied that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a frightened child because she refused to debate him.

There are countless reasons, though, why someone might not engage with a person in a debate. These causes range from the personal to the political. Maybe they don’t have the time or energy to engage with you at that moment. Maybe they are dealing with an unrelated personal crisis. Maybe they just don’t feel like it. Even if you have the perfect counter to their argument, it’s unreasonable to assume that you are entitled to that person’s time. Dialogue is supposed to be a two-way street. If someone doesn’t want to talk to you, they do not have to, and vice versa.

This issue of “debate me” culture is further complicated because when someone points out behavior that hurts them, the accused tends to get defensive. People sometimes conflate their feelings of guilt and shame over being called out with their feelings of being hurt. They will demand that their victims explain themselves for this imaginary injustice, which leads to a situation where victims have to rationalize their pain to those who have harmed them. As an antiracist educator, Nora Samaran wrote in her fantastic essay about how privileged white people sometimes react negatively when learning about the hard truths of racism and colonialism:

“…we expect that it is somehow normal that we can go on the attack, and expect the people experiencing harm to coddle and apologize to us, rather than being responsible for our own feelings and making ourselves accessible and available to finally come to hear and see things that are happening every day to human beings all around us that our privilege lets us ignore.”

Unsurprisingly, people who hold a marginalized identity stumble into this problem a lot. The mere articulation of their boundaries, and in some cases their very identities, triggers defensiveness. There are countless stories of people telling someone more privileged than them about their reality, only for that story to lead to hostility from the listener. It’s not uncommon for a simple conversation about a trans person’s pronouns to devolve into a “debate” over whether their identity is even valid, or for a Black person’s description of racism they have personally experienced to be used to depict them as difficult, unreasonable, or even racist.

This brittleness translates into marginalized groups often having to do a lot of emotional management. Many marginalized people end up suppressing their own feelings to assuage the egos of “debaters” who cannot recognize the harm they inflict upon others. Many debaters think they are operating in good faith, but really they are dumping their unprocessed feelings about a subject onto a person under the guise of a discussion. A description of a person’s own identity becomes interpreted as a “why won’t you debate me” or “explain this to me,” which depending on the subject matter being discussed, can be exhausting to explain or even downright offensive. In the words of Parker Marie Molloy for Slate about asking questions of trans people:

“While these issues may be very new and interesting to you, the process of explaining them may be exhausting to the trans person you’re asking if they’ve been asked to, in effect, explain themselves 100 times before.”

This reality is why the phrase “Google It” has emerged in activist circles. It’s not because people don’t want you to learn about these issues, but because many are tired of being expected to explain things to someone merely because their opinions or existence makes that person uncomfortable. It’s work many marginalized people are expected to do by default, regardless of their circumstances, and it’s not something a lot of them want to do anymore (and truthfully, never really wanted to do in the first place). However, many privileged people are so used to taking advantage of that forced hospitality that they don’t realize how intrusive their calls for an explanation can be.

Some people have expressly signed up to do that labor — i.e., activists, therapists, educators, etc. — but these people usually are getting paid for their work or willingly donating their time to do it. Just as you wouldn’t go up to a scientist and demand that they explain quantum mechanics to you because you find the subject matter confusing, it’s not fair to demand that a transgender person explain their identity simply because you don’t understand how pronouns work. There is a time and a place for everything, and asking a stranger to justify their existence is not it. Seek out the people who want to do that work, preferably the ones who are getting paid for it.

Sadly, even here, it's not so simple. This situation is further compounded by the fact that not every person who asks for this information is doing so in good faith. Some people have weaponized their privilege to railroad conversations and sabotage movements.

Most people who demand an explanation are not doing so maliciously. This obliviousness doesn’t mean the harm they cause is nonexistent, but it’s generally not intentional. The debate rages on whether that even matters. However, we will sidestep that conversation, for now, to talk about how there is an entire subset of people who do mean to inflict harm. That’s what a “troll” is — someone who purposefully tries to upset people on the Internet — and not all of them are overtly offensive.

Some trolls will use the pretext of wanting to learn more as a way to attack others. For example, the tactic of “sealioning” (a word based on a Wondermark comic) is when a commentator pretends to engage in “good faith” questioning, only to wear their interlocutor down with inane or offensive questions. As Amy Johnson wrote in Harmful Speech Online: “Sealioning is an intentional, combative performance of cluelessness. Rhetorically, sealioning fuses persistent questioning — often about basic information, information easily found elsewhere, or unrelated or tangential points — with a loudly-insisted-upon commitment to reasonable debate.”

Imagine a six-year-old asking the question “why” over and over again to annoy you, but instead, they are a 34-year old man questioning the validity of your pain. The point isn’t to be informed, but rather to steal away your attention — to make you feel tired and to question your sanity.

Sometimes these trolls can seem sincere in their line of questioning too. There is an entire subset of people called “concern trolls” who pretend to care about a user’s point only to undermine that position secretly. The textbook example of this was in 2006 when a staffer for Republican Charlie Bass created a sock puppet (i.e., a fake account) on a progressive-leaning site to foster distrust in his opponent Democrat Paul Hodes. Blogger Laura Clawson, who co-ran the blog the aid concern trolled on, ultimately deciphered the ruse, leading to the staffer’s resignation. She commented to the press, saying:

“You see this all the time on political blogs, some elaborate act where someone says, ‘Now, I hate to say something against a Democrat, but.’So you develop an eye for it. And this poster definitely tripped all the wires.”

These interactions occurred online, but it’s possible to sealion and concern troll people in real life. For example, Markos Moulitsas wrote in The Hill in 2008 about how then-House Minority Leader John Boehner concern trolled when he claimed that Democrats “miscalculated” over their support of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Amanda Marcotte likewise cautioned Democrats in 2018 not to listen to “concern trolls,” belittling their concerns about Donald Trump’s presidency. Although these tactics are not as easy to use in real life as on a keyboard, it’s definitely possible to lie and manipulate others under the pretext of concern and education.

Now, as a reasonable person, you might not use either of these tactics intentionally. Still, there’s no real accurate way for your interlocutor to know that, especially online, where anonymity eats away at the presentation of good faith. As the YouTuber, Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints fame remarked in her video Canceling about commentators harassing her due to her perceived support of adult film actor and alleged enbyphobe Buck Angel: “How can you tell the difference between a trans-anarcho-socialist with an anime avatar and a nazi pretending to be a trans-anarcho-socialist with an anime avatar? Well, you can’t. Anonymous is anonymous is anonymous. ”

Modern discourse has become so toxic that it’s difficult to tell the difference between an earnest question and an abusive one. There are plenty of commentators who receive so much negative attention that it has closed them off from even the vaguest hint of distrust. That context exists in the background of every conversation, both online and off, especially for marginalized people, and it's one you should be cognizant of before asking a question that might be easily Googleable.

Furthermore, even if a person's questions are in good faith, that doesn’t make their line of questioning any less offensive. As any marginalized person who has had to deal with invasive questioning about their identity can attest to, someone can be genuinely offensive. You can ask and say hurtful things without trying to engage in a duplicitous, bad faith campaign. You can even engage in techniques such as concern trolling or sealioning without being directly conscious of them. A lot of people unload their baggage onto others because they can.

For your conversation to not be viewed as exploitative, it's not enough for you to want to come in good faith. Your questions need to be grounded in consent and mutual respect, or your partner will not believe you.

Those many years ago, the older man who came up to my coworker was most likely not trying to ruin her day. He probably didn’t care about her either way. He had a question he wanted to know the answer to and used her to get that information — used being the operative word. He didn’t treat her with the respect that a person deserves. He saw her as a receptacle of information that he felt entitled to, and that’s not how any conversation should work.

It may sound obvious to some, but it sadly bears repeating: a good conversation must be grounded in consent. Your partner must want to talk to you.

Do you ask the people in your life if it's okay to proceed with a type of questioning or conversation before talking about it?

Have you presented yourself as someone open to criticism?

Are your conversations a give-and-take where you listen to your partner's concerns as well?

You’ll know by the silences in your life if the answer to the above questions is no. Far too many people do none of these things. They spew all of their unprocessed anxiety and rage upon their partners in a seemingly unending, one-sided monologue. They treat their interlocutors as empty vessels, worthy of neither humanity nor respect, and give them nothing in return.

There is a privilege in demanding an explanation. It is a selfish state of affairs built on silence, and many of us need to stop and listen to the quiet trauma we have caused, seething at a whisper.

Alex Has Opinions 2/17/21 Alex Has Opinions 2/17/21

The Construction of a Queer, Gaming Utopia

An inclusive, queer, leftist scene is just one click away.

Ona typical day, the server is abuzz with activity. Gamers are sharing their favorite memes and songs, coordinating sessions, and promoting their Twitch streams. The discord server is dedicated to over twenty games and counting, and most of the players are queer, so much that there is a macro in one of the introduction rooms reading “React below if you’re some kind of straight (unfortunately).”

The gaming scene has never been the most inclusive space, which is what makes this queer server so refreshing. In between scheduling for pathfinder games, there is a macro that lets players choose their pronouns. There is an entire channel dedicated to sharing bathroom selfies where nerds of all persuasions can brag about their cool, nerdy swag. With a few simple clicks, these gamers have solved a problem pervasive in the industry for decades, and their solutions are ones anyone can adopt.

This server's story begins years earlier with Dragonfire, a cooperative card game with a heavy Dungeons & Dragon aesthetic requiring around five or six people to play. The couple Jake and Wyatt (whose names, like all names in this article, have been changed to protect their privacy) traveled to meet a friend in Boston, and while there, they played Dragonfire for the first time. Jake and Wyatt liked it so much that they decided to host regular sessions back at their Maryland apartment.

One day they didn’t have enough players, so Jake started to use gay social dating apps to promote their gaming sessions. “So Jake,” recalls Wyatt, “got on Grindr and started, you know, finding nerdy people and inviting them over to play.” Queer people have long used dating apps to build out robust social scenes, and Jake and Wyatt quickly discovered that the allure of genuine connection trumped a sexual one in many cases. “We got a surprising amount of people,” continues Wyatt, “who said I don’t care if there is sex, yeah I’ll come to play Dragonfire with you guys.”

Soon people were driving down to play Dragonfire every Friday night. Some regularly came from several states over to make the trip. Jake and Wyatt's apartment became a nexus of activity. Some nights two or three sessions of Dragonfire would occur simultaneously, and not everyone who attended played. Others would socialize as they watched their nerdy peers play rogues and wizards well into the night — happy to be in a space that accepted them. People would often stay over into the next morning or even the entire weekend.

When the pandemic hit, there was a fear among participants that this space would die like with so many other things. These events had always required a fair bit of organization to coordinate. Still, the group had fortunately relied on Facebook Messenger as their de facto communication tool for nearly half a decade. There was no need to transition online because everyone was already there. Wyatt knew how to organize digitally. For years, he had been involved in online spaces such as World of Warcraft as a guild officer. He and his friend Henry set up a discord server to better interface with Tabletop Simulator — a digital interface that lets you play tabletop games online. Weekly Dragonfire nights continued as they had before, albeit a little further apart.

The discord's evolution from a Dragonfire-only server to one dedicated to over 20 games started with a conversation Wyatt had with his friend Stuart. Stuart was frustrated with the gaming scene. He was annoyed not just because of the blanket homophobia common in online chats and forums but also because of the lack of resources within the queer gaming scene. A lot of the queer-only servers he found were either defunct, or they felt impersonal and toxic. As Wyatt remarked to me later: “You can join…all queer guilds or whatever, you know… sometimes they can still be shitty for other reasons. [They can be] douchebags like any other regular douchebag. You know, being vitriolic to people who make mistakes and things like that.” Stuart wanted a space online that didn’t feel like a queerified-version of the toxic straight spaces he had left.

In Wyatt’s mind, he had the solution. The discord server already existed: why not expand it?

After getting the Dragonfire group's permission, he worked with his friend Henry, a longtime ally and Dragonfire player, to grow it out. Some of this involved setting up the infrastructure with easy-to-use macros, but mostly it was about spreading the word to the large community of leftist, queer nerds they had already built. They added not only people from the Dragonfire group but also people from Wyatt’s World of Warcraft days, friends of his partner Jake, and of course, one or two people they have met off Grindr and other queer dating apps.

The server now encompasses groups ranging from Animal Crossing to League of Legends to Borderlands 3. It continues to evolve with little of the harassment and abuse typical of the gaming scene. It’s just as normal to see players there to reassure each other after a bad day of work as it is for them to talk about the games they love. “Thanks for all the memes,” types one user, “I feel better now than I did!”

Much of this empathy has to do with the intentionality Wyatt, Jake, and Henry have put into the server's development. They built up a community, not just a product. A safe space that’s rare within the LGBTQIA+ gaming scene, and if we are honest, the gaming scene in general.

The larger gaming community has been struggling with issues of harassment for decades with mixed success. A recent study from the Anti-Defamation League found that 65% of players have experienced severe harassment while playing games online, including physical threats, stalking, and sustained harassment. Many of these players claim they were targeted for their identity — the LGBTQIA+ community being one the highest self-reported groups. “In Overwatch,” remarks one player in the study, “I’ve seen hateful players call others gay slurs and tell them to kill themselves many times. I always report it but rarely feel like I’m taken seriously.”

There have been many attempts to solve this problem, but these solutions have predominantly been technocratic and piecemeal. Companies will often attempt to tweak the interface of a game or put out PSA’s and not really address the underlying issue, which is that these instances of harassment are not isolated instances. Discrimination is not an ancillary component of their games but one systemic to their industry and their user base.

For example, Riot Games, the maker of the arena battle game League of Legends, has been researching this topic for years. Their findings provide a far more complex understanding of harassment. They have found that their consistently toxic players make a fraction of their platform’s overall toxicity— in essence, disproving the “don’t feed the trolls” argument that has been so prevalent on the Internet. As Jeffrey Lin, scientist and game designer, remarked of their research for the company: “The vast majority [of harrasment] was from the average person just having a bad day.”

A lot of bigotry online is perpetuated by people who do not consider themselves discriminatory or bigoted. Their hurtful language comes out when they are frustrated or upset and is not part of a targeted campaign to harass or dox a player. As Wyatt says of homophobia in particular: “I don't think people realize you can be homophobic or transphobic or whatever by accident…A lot of people get very defensive, and it can be hard to find a group of people, who [aren’t] just surface-level not homophobic, but actually not homophobic.”

It’s that subtle bigotry that lies at the heart of most online discrimination, and most companies are not willing to address it. Going back to the example of Riot Games, in response to their research on harassment, they initially set up a volunteer tribunal system that allowed players to review and judge reported violations from other players anonymously. They then issued ‘reform cards’ that allowed punished players to understand why their accounts might be suspended in the first place. This review process was meant to encourage community buy-in, and it appears to have had some initial results, with informed players having a reported decrease in destructive behavior.

However, Riot Game was not willing to commit these resources indefinitely. The turnaround for reviews from volunteers was not as quick as they preferred, so they opted for a more “efficient” AI that automatically made judgments. The tribunal system was disbanded, and that stinginess impacted their community. As one user remarked on the League of Legends fandom page: “I miss the Tribunal. Power aside, it really helped me become a less-toxic player. I’ve felt the Dark Side creep up on me further and further since then.”

The issue of harassment remains for League of Legends. A 2020 survey reported that 98% of players had experienced harassment within the game. The company Riot Games has also been reported to have a very toxic workplace, paying out a $10 million gender discrimination lawsuit in 2019. Their issue of harassment was not ancillary to their community but struck at the core of how they operated as a business.

We see here how has it’s not enough to claim that you are concerned by harassment. You have to be willing to form a community centered on accountability. As Wyatt and Jake have proven, there is no technocratic solution to doing this — the answer comes from open-communication, hard work, and empathy.

If the world of gaming wants to create spaces that provide genuine acceptance — and not just on the surface — they need to create intentional communities that are actually dismantling players’ bigotry. Whether they be players, discord members, or forum commentators, this goal requires that community members have actual buy-in. Passive members are one bad day away from taking out their anger and frustration on players they do not know.

Most importantly, community leaders need to be willing to fund these spaces with time and resources. Riot Games’ tribunal system was a great idea, but its decision to shutter it for a more “efficient” (i.e., cheaper) AI system was a step in the wrong direction. The anonymity of the Internet means that non-toxic systems require work to create social norms that foster trust. You cannot expect that a small policy tweak will do away with decades of player harassment.

The good news is that people want those spaces, and many are already actively building them. These include larger actors such as activist Anita Sarkeesian (who just recently created a game and online harassment hotline) as well as small-time people like Wyatt and Jake — energetic, queer gamers who built a community simply because they thought one was needed — and maybe, even people like you.

With enough work and time, a queer gaming utopia is just a few clicks away.

Alex Has Opinions 2/10/21 Alex Has Opinions 2/10/21

The Conservative Obsession with Political Correctness

Conservatives also love PC Culture and it’s dangerous.

For decades now, there has been a frustrating conversation around the concept of political correctness. The narrative that we hear repeatedly is that certain Americans, usually liberals and leftists, are trying to censor what the rest of us say in our day-to-day lives. Those arguing against political correctness claim that “liberals” want to track our language for implicit biases and microaggressions and cancel us if we say or do anything wrong.

There have been a string of studies, articles, and exposes claiming that Americans hate political correctness. It seems to be one of the few things that many people agree on both the right and the left. “Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture,” goes the title of an article by Yascha Mounk in 2018 for The Atlantic. “Bill Maher on the perils of political correctness” begins another article by David Marchese in The New York Times.

This branding, however, belies the fact that political correctness is not an exclusively leftist concept. It’s a term with a complicated history that has changed dramatically over the centuries. Yet, even if we were to accept its more modern definition, it’s not something done by the Left alone. Nearly every political ideology adheres to it, and conservativism is by far the biggest offender.

Conservativism is an umbrella term describing a general reverence for social traditions and institutions. It is an ideology that encompasses many different types of people (e.g., Christian fundamentalists, pro-business globalists, libertarians, war hawks, white ethnonationalists, etc.), and unsurprisingly, there is no universal agreement among them or even really a clearcut divide between these groups. For example, while the 48th Vice President of the United States Mike Pence was fervently religious, 45th President Donald Trump was decidedly less so, secretly mocking religious believers while in office. Yet, they both served side-by-side.

Despite some noticeable differences, some unifying norms bring these disparate camps together. Specifically, they all hate similar types of things. The most obvious is a disdain for multiculturalism. Whether it's former president Donald Trump calling Mexicans ‘drug dealers, criminals, [and] rapists’ or the fact that nearly half of all Republicans are bothered by hearing a foreign language spoken in public, conservatives are not the best at incorporating other cultural strands into the American tapestry. Many of them even tend to get angry and offended when these new traditions threaten their hegemony.

In recent years one of the easiest ways to trigger a religious conservative in America was to use the more inclusive phrase “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Ever since former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly promoted the book ‘The War on Christmas’ by John Gibson in 2005, the season's greeting has become a sort of shorthand over what conservatives perceive to be a larger cultural battle against Christianity. “Do you remember they were trying to take ‘Christmas’ out of Christmas?,” Trump remarked to a crowd in 2019. “Do you remember? They didn’t want to let you say ‘Merry Christmas.”

To be clear, there is no compelling evidence that such persecution has occurred. The majority of the US population is Christian, approximately 65% according to a 2019 Pew Research report. The majority of our political leaders in Congress are Christian as well. Most people continue to use the phrase Merry Christmas without incident, including former Democratic President Barack Obama.

The War on Christmas has less to do with reality and more about entitlement. Many conservatives are angry that their traditions are being challenged by what they perceive to be foreign influences. As conservative commentator Dennis Prager wrote for the National Review in 2015: “Of course it’s a war on Christianity — or, more precisely, a war on the religious nature of America.” Prager here is conflating Christiandom with America itself — a definition that implies that all other denominations are invalid.

We see this disdain of otherness reflected not only in the holiday debates over Christmas cards and Starbucks cups but also in the regular xenophobia and racism expressed by many conservatives both inside and out of the Republican Party. Trump grew to prominence partly by advocating the conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was a secret Muslim — something that would only be “controversial” if you found the very idea of non-Christianity offensive. A more recent example includes conservatives being angry that House rules were amended so congresswoman Ilhan Omar could wear her hijab on the House floor. These conservatives were enraged, not by another religion, but by the perceived otherness. As triggered pastor E.W. Jackson said in response to the rule change:

“We are a Judeo-Christian country. We are a nation rooted and grounded in Christianity, and that’s that. And anybody that doesn’t like that, go live somewhere else. It’s very simple. Just go live somewhere else. Don’t try to change our country into some sort of Islamic republic or try to base our country on sharia law.”

The mere inclusion of a non-dominant identity was enough to send this conservative snowflake into a tailspin, and it’s important to note that this hatred of multiculturalism has never been an exclusively American phenomenon. Far-right leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orban, or Benjamin Netanyahu have consistently expressed utter disdain for all people outside their chosen group. “Indians are undoubtedly changing … They are increasingly becoming human beings just like us,” Bolsonaro remarked of indigenous people on a recent Facebook broadcast. We could spend this entire article; hell, we could make a series of books, simply chronicling the xenophobia and racism that drives conservative movements across the globe.

This hatred doesn’t pertain to a particular religion or political party. Some conservative figures, such as white supremacist Richard Spencer, aren’t even very religious. Nor are all conservatives united in a shared hatred of the same group. Conservative hatred tends to evolve over time. Benjamin Franklin was concerned about German immigrants diluting America's whiteness, and yet today, a white ethnonationalist would hardly be concerned by someone’s German heritage. Likewise, pro-business Republicans are not as upset with immigrants, as they are “socialist” influences seeking to reform capitalism. A key part of conservative political correctness is not about a specific ideology or group but rather about expressing your contempt for that ever-shifting other.

Unlike leftists or liberals, however, conservatives typically hold a lot more power overall, and so that disdain can translate into outright supremacist policy. Mike Pence was not simply triggered by members of the LGBTQIA+ community but advocated for a religious “freedom” law, which allowed people to discriminate against queer people under the lie of religious tolerance. Donald Trump did not only rant about Obama being a secret Muslim but, among many other things, signed an executive order that banned foreign nationals from predominantly Muslim countries from coming to the United States. A dangerous part about conservative political correctness is that it does not stop and ends with words. That judgment translates into policies that hurt other people.

And once conservatives decide an authority or law is necessary, it can be decades or centuries before they are willing to let go.

Another element that tends to trigger conservatives is anytime there is a challenge to power they respect, running the gamut from institutions like the police or military to symbols like a nation’s flag. Conservatives do not like it when people question these traditional power structures, even if those criticisms are grounded in facts and histories that are valid.

In America, we have seen this issue frequently unfold with the national anthem. The most prominent example in recent years was when former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the anthem to protest black Americans' mistreatment. Many conservatives were enraged by what they considered to be an act of disrespect. As triggered conservative Marc A. Thiessen wrote of his hurt feelings in the Washington Post:

“When players disrespect the flag, they disrespect that sacrifice. And it would not matter if they had done so to protest Donald Trump or Barack Obama — their actions would be equally offensive.”

This tension over the anthem has a history well over a hundred years old. As early as 1892, a Black congregation at the Bethel African Methodist Church refused to sing ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ (one of the de facto national anthems at the time)’ to protest, among many things, the recent People’s Grocery lynchings, which had led to the loss of several Black Americans detained in police custody. “I don’t want to sing that song until this country is what it claims to be, sweet land of liberty,” remarked one man, according to the Decatur Herald. The article was quick to reassure readers they joined “heartily” in singing the abolitionist song “John Brown” instead.

These protests over symbols of American patriotism have been a very heated part of the discourse. Some have even become a vital part of legal precedent. For example, the decision in Minersville School District v. Gobitis declared that schools had a right to compel students to salute the flag. Some of the legal arguments are quite similar to the ones Thiessen made eighty-something years later, the majority writing:

“To stigmatize legislative judgment in providing for this universal gesture of respect for the symbol of our national life in the setting of the common school as a lawless inroad on that freedom of conscience which the Constitution protects, would amount to no less than the pronouncement of pedagogical and psychological dogma in a field where courts possess no marked and certainly no controlling competence.”

In essence, the Court believed that the promotion of national unity was a good in of itself. Yet, the Court did not believe it had the right to intervene in how state legislatures and local municipalities decided to promote that sense of national unity — in this case, children saluting the flag every morning.

Even though this decision would eventually be overturned several years later in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), the argument that we must pay deference to national authority would come up time and time again throughout public life. We see it in the way conservatives have advocated for blanket respect for police officers, the military, and all the other authorities they deem sacred, even to the point of threatening those who refuse to surrender that respect. Former Attorney General William Barr, for example, infamously remarked: “[that Americans] have to start showing more [respect] than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves. If communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.”

Unsurprisingly, this is not a uniquely American experience. Conservatives all over the world caution deference when describing institutions of authority. For example, in France, police protested en masse when the government attempted to implement anti-racism reforms within the national police force. The police alleged that part of these protests had to do with high suicide rates and lack of resources, but it was clear that disrespect was also a huge sticking point. As union official Eric Defremont stated of the protests: “It’s about the lack of respect for us. Yes, there’s a malaise in the police. They don’t even give us the proper tools. Nobody in France tells their children, ‘I want you to be a police officer.’ We just want to be respected.”

From conservative British people insisting on toasting to the queen to billionaire Elon Musk’s rabid fanbase, if you are a conservative, then chances are you will be triggered when someone inevitability challenges an authority that you respect. This blind deference, however, can be problematic because not all of these institutions are universally good. For example, many police departments have been plagued with systemic racism, especially in America and France, where study after study has shown biases in both countries.

When your worldview prevents you from critically examining traditional power structures, then it makes it very difficult for you to do the work necessary to reform or roll them back. This political correctness results in a lot of obstructionism as conservatives refuse to critically examine broken institutions.

Conservatives often lambast liberals and leftists for political correctness, but as we have seen, there are several areas where they are quite vocal about their norms being violated.

Conservatives generally get very upset when people attempt to change what they perceive to be the dominant culture. This shift can be as trivial as a season’s greeting or as significant as what types of people are admitted into Congress. These hatreds are inevitably intermixed with a person’s xenophobia, racism, and bigotry. The other may change from person-to-person and era-to-era, but the contempt for multiculturalism remains the same.

Conservatives also get triggered over what they perceive as disrespect for institutions of authority they care about. That respected authority can change depending on the person, place, and era we are referring to. For some, it's the monarchy. For others, it's the wealthy businessman who has amassed billionaires of dollars in rightfully earned wealth. You can tell you have found the right person from all the hurt conservative feelings.

Your local strain of conservatism might have more triggers as well. American conservatism, for example, tends to be very individualistic. It’s the reason why putting on a mask during the Coronavirus pandemic was so difficult for many here, but go over to Japan, which also has a conservative government, and mask-wearing was not much of an issue.

‘Disdain for the other’ and ‘outrage over disrespect’ are two aspects universally applicable to conservative movements. Still, they are by no means the only things to trigger conservatives — for that, we would need a much longer article.

Alex Has Opinions 2/1/21 Alex Has Opinions 2/1/21

Moderates Should Want to Abolish the Filibuster the Most

The filibuster makes reasoned debate impossible.

The filibuster is a Senate tactic where one or more Senators block legislation through “unlimited debate.” They do not yield their time and effectively kill the legislation by not letting it advance to a vote. The only way to prevent this obstruction is to end debate through a procedure known as “cloture,” which requires a three-fifths majority (currently 60 votes) — a virtual impossibility in our modern political climate.

The filibuster is one reason that legislation with the support of a simple majority is rarely passed anymore, which has caused a fair amount of consternation on all sides of the political spectrum. A lot of ink has been spilled on why progressives and conservatives should abolish the filibuster, and as someone on the Left, I certainly see the appeal in some of these arguments more than others.

Yet not nearly enough effort has been placed into making the moderate case for abolishing the filibuster, which is a shame because moderates have just as much a reason to want this archaic procedure gone as anyone else. When you really dive into the nitty-gritty of how this procedure operates in the real world, it's hard not to view it as a barrier to efficient and responsible governance.

It Was An Accident

When we talk about the filibuster, there is this widely held misconception that it was an intentional product of the Founding Father’s grand plan. We see this sentiment, for example, reflected in an article David Shuster penned in 2005 for NBC News, writing:

“…[filibusters go] all the way back to our Founding Fathers. To break a log jam at the Constitutional Convention, their compromise was this: The House of Representatives would be the popular body representing the will of the people, while the Senate, as the deliberative body, would protect small states and minority views”

Yet, this assumption could not be further from the truth. The House of Representatives and the Senate used to have very similar procedures, including the House’s “previous question” motion, which currently allows a simple majority to end debate. This motion had been copied over from the British parliament, but American representatives at the time didn’t really use it to end debate like they do in the House today.

To simplify Senate procedure, Vice President Aaron Burr removed the previous question motion in 1805. People were not aware of the ramifications because the country was relatively new, and lawmakers were still experimenting with how the rules work. The previous question motion would not be used to terminate debate in the House until several years later in 1811 (and would only be added permanently to the rules in 1840). Still, by then, it was gone in the Senate, and there was no serious vehicle to replace it.

The door was open for any disgruntled lawmaker to disrupt proceedings. The first filibuster happened in 1837 when Whig Senators tried to stop Andrew Jackson's allies from erasing or “expunging” a resolution of censure against the President. The Whigs were ultimately unsuccessful in this endeavor, but the filibuster remained, popping up now and again from issues ranging from a charter for a national bank to civil rights legislation. Despite multiple attempts to reform it in the 19th century, the majority was never successful in passing it for the same reason as today — the minority threatened to filibuster it.

We probably would still have no cloture procedure whatsoever if it had not been framed as a “war measure” in 1917. After a group of Senators used the procedure to obstruct President Woodrow Wilson’s effort to arm merchant ships, the President demanded reform, labeling the obstructionists “a little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own.” We were in the midst of World War 1, and the public was enraged that a few Senators could block a measure framed as vital to the country's safety.

Even with widespread support, negotiations to curb the filibuster's influence were difficult because the filibuster acted as the ultimate bargaining chip. Since one Republican Senator supported a supermajority to enact cloture, the Senate ended up adopting a high two-thirds majority in March of 1917, so they could get assurances from Senators in the opposition not to block the proposal. The filibuster would later be amended again in 1975 to three-fifths (where it currently sits today), but support for bringing it down to a simple majority like in the House have always stalled: the minority enjoys the luxury of being able to nuke popular legislation too much.

In the last century, we have seen the filibuster be used as a radical tool of obstructionism. The Senate's political minority has adopted it to prevent votes on anti-lynching legislation (something that has still not been passed), civil rights legislation, and legislation meant to block workplace discrimination. To this day, the record for the longest filibuster goes to segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in his attempt to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In the words of David Litt for The Atlantic:

“Today, the filibuster continues to hold back progress on civil rights. Because the chamber’s two-senators-per-state structure favors smaller-population rural states, disproportionately white states have disproportionate power in the Senate.”

Many moderates have claimed that the filibuster engenders pragmatic discussion, but it has acted more as a regressive tool than one of reasoned debate. There is nothing pragmatic about preserving what effectively is a glorified typo that has prevented over a century of sound legislation.

Kills Genuine Compromise

Even knowing this history, people's instinctual argument in favor of the filibuster is to ask what happens when “your side” loses. If Republicans or Democrats win office in the next election cycle, won’t that make “your side” vulnerable to undesirable legislation? It’s all well and good to press your political advantage when you have it, but the situation becomes dicer admittedly when you are in the minority. As Aaron Blake writes in The Washington Post:

“The 2022 elections also loom large: They could well install Republicans back in control of the Senate and the House. Midterms are generally very tough on a president’s party, and Republicans need only the most modest of gains to take back both chambers.”

However, the whole point of being a moderate is that you allegedly do not fall prey to tribalism on either the left or the right. Moderates are supposed to weigh the merits on all sides of the ideological spectrum and advocate for commonsense initiatives that make sense both politically and financially. They claim to want a substantive debate, something the filibuster fails to provide at nearly every turn.

Think about what the filibuster practically means. Regardless of how radical or self-serving a Senator’s viewpoints are, that one person can delay the proceedings for the entire chamber. For example, Senator Huey Long infamously filibustered for over 15 hours, where he read the constitution, lambasted colleagues, and gave out his recipe for fried oysters. Although he was trying to ensure Senate confirmation remained for some New Deal employees, his protest's main objective was to prevent political enemies in Louisiana from obtaining those jobs. Huey Long was able to take advantage of this archaic practice to temporarily halt negotiations from happening just to spite a political rival.

This history is not ancillary to the filibuster but ties directly into what the word means. The word filibuster's entomology has origins to the buccaneers of the 17th century, most likely the Dutch word vrijbuiter or freebooter. This word was adapted into French (“flibustier”), Spanish (“filibustero”), and eventually English. It’s not hard to see how a metaphorical throughline can be traced between men stealing gold on the open waters and the men hijacking a government's political proceedings.

Filibustering was not a term of pride crafted by the Founding Fathers but a pejorative. We gain nothing pretending otherwise. Many moderates claim to have a desire to incorporate the thoughts and views of both the minority and majority into legislation via compromise, and yet letting one actor consistently stall negotiations entirely is not how proper debate should work. The filibuster prevents genuine compromise from happening because it lets more fringe positions control our entire political conversation.

For better or worse, most of this country prescribes to policies that are closer to the political center, and their leaders reflect those preferences. The Democratic party is not filled with a legion of Bernie Sanders lookalikes waiting to implement singer payer healthcare. It’s composed of conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin, Dianne Feinstein, and Kyrsten Sinema. Moderates should want a political system that reflects the world those leaders would build. There are plenty of Senate Democrats who would be more than willing to come together with Senate Republicans to pass policy. “They know we all have to work together,” remarked Joe Manchin of the Republican Party to NBC News.

However, that ideal remains out of reach if Congress continues to let opportunistic people preside over a tyranny of the minority.

Encourages Bloat

Another core problem with the filibuster is that it encourages large, unwieldy legislation. Since it mandates that you need a supermajority to squash any dissent at any time, our leaders often scramble to dump everything into the one or two bills that have a chance of actually getting passed.

These pieces of legislation are called “Omnibus” bills (they can also be broken up into several smaller ones referred to as “minibus” bills). These are appropriation bills that only require a single vote to pass the floor, but they wrap hundreds of measures together into a single package. Omnibus bills have become a necessity in an age where the threat of filibuster is the defacto tool of negotiation. The need to enact cloture (the procedure used to end a filibuster) has gone from something that occurs several times a congressional term to over one hundred. Less substantive legislation is making it through the pipeline, which means omnibus bills tend to get very long and enigmatic.

For example, the 2019 minibus bills totaled over 2,300 pages and were passed while many Americans were on Christmas break. Most legislators did not fully comprehend the substance of the laws they had passed. The sheer scope of these bills was too much to process, and these bills were not a one-off experience in Congress. The appropriations process has created a situation where legislators routinely remark on their inability to debate (or even read) everything within an omnibus bill. “How fast can you read? Can you read 2,232 pages in only 18 hours?” begins an article in GovTrack, “If you can’t, then you’re like most members of Congress and nearly every other human being.”

Furthermore, since these are laws spearheaded by the majority party, the minority routinely has little influence on their overall direction, especially when the President and the Senate belong to the same party. The negotiation becomes one between whoever controls a filibuster-proof majority and the President, with their power to veto legislation. As the Center for Effective Government remarked on the omnibus negations for the 2004 Congressional Term:

“…the minority party has not been privy to the discussions of compromise for the omnibus bill. In fact, balance of power has shifted to the executive branch, leaving compromises between the President and his party.”

This lack of accountability creates a situation where the public is routinely oblivious to the details of Congress’s most important legislation until well after the fact (if ever), which creates an environment ripe for abuse. Omnibus bills are routinely criticized as legislation having too much pork (i.e., earmarks that benefit special interests or donors in a congressperson’s districts). In between the 2017 and 2019 Congressional terms, the group OpenTheBooks, an admittedly conservative organization, reported hundreds of millions of dollars going to Fortune 100 companies such as General Electric, Boeing Corp, and United Technologies. The Ivy Leagues similarly received over $9 billion in federal grants during this time.

While some of this money is being allocated for the common good, the lack of transparency in the omnibus process makes it very difficult to assess where that good starts and the corruption ends. The byzantine nature of appropriations is the perfect target for lobbyists, who are infamous for killing reforms in between the lines of an appropriation bill few will ever fully read. During the 2019 appropriation omnibus, for example, the health care industry successfully killed an attempt to curtail “surprise” medical bills — something it’s doubt the public would have agreed with if the issue had been debated in the public eye.

A common talking point we hear from moderates is that they want more straightforward, realistic leadership. “Pragmatism has never been more urgently needed in American politics,” writes David Von Drehle in the Washington Post. Efficiency is certainly a noble goal, but one not possible when the filibuster acts as a cover for disingenuous legislation.

Discourages Honesty

Lastly, the filibuster encourages politicians to back legislation they don’t genuinely support. The barrier for a law’s passage is so high that most politicians can vote on a bill they know will ultimately not pass in the Senate to signal to their constituents that they support an issue, even when they don’t really believe in it.

The debate over Medicare for All or single-payer in the Democratic Party is a perfect example of this fact. When Bernie Sanders unveiled a proposal for this policy in September of 2017 (and again in 2019), it received wide support from many members within his party, ranging from then-Senator Kamala Harris to Kristen Gillibrand to Cory Booker. The bill didn’t go anywhere, though. Republicans controlled the Senate, and it failed to pass committee, let alone go to the floor for a vote where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would have blocked it.

However, when these three Senators ran for president during the 2020 election cycle, they seemed to backtrack their support. Candidates such as Kamala Harris and Corry Booker became more resistant to the idea of eliminating private insurance in favor of our government financing healthcare. “I stand by supporting Medicare for All,” he remarked in an interview, “But I’m also that pragmatist that when I’m chief executive of the country … I’m going to find the immediate things that we can do.”

Now that Democrats control a slim majority in the Senate, these leaders are once again hesitant to push for single-payer. As Cory Booker recently told Edward-Isaac Dovere in The Atlantic: “I applaud Obama for doing health care and saving the economy, but a lot of Americans felt that that was them losing their autonomy over their health care and a big Wall Street bailout. Then we got demolished in the midterms.” It seems strange to advocate for an issue when it had no chance of passing in the Senate, only to backtrack when you are politically closer to that goal. It makes it seem as though Booker’s cosponsorship didn’t mean anything politically, only optically.

While the Republicans did not threaten to filibuster Bernie's bill in 2017 and 2019 because they were in the majority at the time, the tactic still plays a huge role in this culture of performativity. Many Democrats are well aware that the filibuster’s preservation means certain issues will never make it to the floor. Even if Democrats had had a majority in 2017, Republicans would have never allowed a vote on it. This reality means that many Democrats could signal their support of single-payer on a vote they ultimately disagreed with and let Republican obstructionism “tie their hands.”

Republicans employ this tactic as well. Democrats filibustered a series of policy initiatives during the second half of Trump’s presidency, including funding for the infamous border wall. Democrats blocked a Pentagon funding bill that would have financed it in 2019. As McConnell lamented shortly after the bill was blocked: “…over the past week and a half, we’ve seen our Democratic colleagues suggest that they may try to shoehorn their long-standing disagreements with President Trump into this appropriation process.”

If then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seriously believed in border wall funding, though, he would have either amended the filibuster (e.g., what Republicans did for Neil M. Gorsuch’s Supreme Court appointment in 2017) or used a procedure known as budget reconciliation (e.g., what Republicans did to pass the 2017 Trump Tax Cuts) to bypass the filibuster. He knew that that bill had no chance of succeeding on the floor — a fact even someone with a passing understanding of Senate procedures was well aware of. In the words of columnist Marc A. Thiessen for The Washington Post:

“More often than not, the majority doesn’t even bring up legislation that does not have 60 votes needed to cut off debate. Just the threat of a Democratic filibuster stopped Republicans from moving forward on a host of priorities.”

Instead, McConnell let a vote he knew would be filibustered into oblivion go to the floor for the very reason that it would die. He wanted to tell his constituents to “blame the Democrats” for Trump’s chief campaign promise failing to pass.

As we can see, the filibuster provides these parties political cover. It lets both parties pin the other side as “the bad guy” so they can continue business as usual. Many moderates claim to value honesty and pragmatism. “Honesty [is] always the best policy,” writes the Modern Moderate blog. “America has been served best by leaders who tell the truth.”

And so, it seems strange that so many moderates would cling to an idea that ultimately encourages mendacious leadership.

The filibuster was a procedural accident made more or less 200 years ago. We have been unable to remove it because it entrenches the political minority with the ability to obstruct reasoned debate and compromise. Leaders on all sides of the political spectrum have been attempting to undo this loophole almost since its inception. Yet, the mistake has persisted so long we now falsely assume that it's an integral part of this country's political fabric.

The moderates I have met in my day-to-day life claim to care about political ideals such as reasoned debate, integrity, and efficiency. I have seen moderates lecture about the need for this country to come together and support bipartisan legislation.

And yet paradoxically, many moderates are defending the preservation of the filibuster — a tactic that accomplishes the exact opposite of all of these principles. A filibuster is an act of obstructionism. It obfuscates the political process so much so that it increases corruption and the mendacity of our leaders. We gain nothing from defending it.

Be the types of people you claim to be — abolish the filibuster — and let Congress govern again.