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

You Couldn't Make ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ Today

Revisiting the 2006 hit, and what it says about the state of work in America.

The movie The Devil Wears Prada lingers in the public consciousness, even fifteen years after it first aired in 2006. We still see Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in memes, as people quote gifs of her oneliners, such as “You have no sense of fashion” or “By all means move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me” to their friends in threads. The fanbase has remained active to this day, with the official page still maintaining over 2 million followers on Facebook.

It’s an IP constantly being tapped into and remade. The original author of the novel has published two sequels: Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns and When Life Gives You Lululemons. There will be a musical adaptation released in 2022, and there have been talks over the years from various studios trying to remake it — though none of these have come to fruition so far.

However, when we revisit the movie that sparked the phenomenon, the story is almost chilling in retrospect. It is not as light and fun as we remember but rather depicts an abusive boss, revered for her cruelty. Miranda is, quite frankly, a terrible person, and our glorification of her as an icon speaks to our society’s unhealthy norms regarding work.

Norms which, thankfully, might be changing for the better.

For those of you unaware, the movie is about a young twenty-something named Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway) who wants to be a journalist. Andrea, or Andy as she likes to be called, lands a job as the second personal assistant for fashion icon Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), editor of Runway Magazine. Miranda is sometimes believed to be loosely modeled after Vogue editor Anna Wintour in the books. The movie, and the book from which it is based, follow Andy through a year as Miranda's personal assistant and the ups and downs that that entails.

Watching the 2006 movie is disconcerting, to say the least. Miranda, and in fact, the entire work culture she fosters, is exceedingly cruel. She openly berates her staff, telling her employees that they are “incompetent,” “inadequate,” or “disappointing.” She does not take constructive feedback and often refuses to be questioned at all. Her leadership style is dictatorial, and she exercises that control in the pettiest of ways.

There is a scene early on where Miranda enters an elevator occupied by another woman at the company. This woman apologizes to her and immediately leaves the elevator so Miranda can ride it alone. The implication seems to be clear. She is a boss who does not care to interact with her subordinates, yet they must assume her whims and desires without her uttering a word. Throughout, the film Andy spends most of her time trying to guess the desires of Miranda, who does not expound upon her wants and treats failure with hurtful words and impossible demands.

This meanspiritedness filters down to everyone in the corporate hierarchy. The barbs' Runway staff members say to each other are likewise cruel, often replicating the worst aspects of the fashion industry. “Who is that sad little person? Are we doing a before and after piece I don’t know about?” the character Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) says upon seeing Andy for the first time. Andy faces repeated bullying throughout the film from nearly all of her peers. These comments are mean for the sake of it, and workers have taken their lives for far less.

The workplace of Runway is not just psychologically tortuous, however, but also physically dangerous. We learn early on in the movie that the phones must be answered at all times, which should take priority even over going to the bathroom. It should be noted that doing so is unsafe, as holding in human waste can lead to medical problems over time, such as weakening your bladder muscles or an increase in urinary tract and bladder infections. It’s generally not life-threatening, but it's not pleasant.

The movie doubles down on the alleged hilarity of this premise and has Miranda’s first assistant Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), tell us a story about how one time an assistant left the desk because she sliced her hand open with a letter opener. This resulted in Miranda missing an important call, which, Emily implies, led to the assistant's termination and blocklisting. “She now works at TV Guide,” Emily lectures, treating a chilling incident as frivolous.

Speaking of Emily, halfway through the film, she gets sick. In a scene that has aged very poorly in the age of COVID, she is required to not only keep working but attend a benefit with hundreds of people. It was difficult to watch Emily touch things and whisper into Miranda’s ear, as it's hard not to imagine all the people she was infecting. It reflects a not too distant time period when the expectation was for workers to work through sickness. One we have not entirely shed, even now, during the middle of a pandemic.

Miranda constantly uses her leverage over her workers as a cudgel to get them to do morally questionable things. When she decides to take Andy to Paris over her assistant Emily, she uses the possibility of blocklisting to get her to comply. “If you don’t go,” she says cooly, “I’ll assume you’re not serious about your future at Runway or any other publication. The decisions yours.” Miranda frames this decision as one of choice (a theme that comes up repeatedly in the film), but that framing ignores the power dynamics happening in this scene. One of the most powerful women in publishing is telling a young twenty-something she must do something or never work again in her preferred industry — there is no choice there.

In the original book, all the actions mentioned so far paint Miranda as the villain. Andy ends up losing her job during the book's climax because she feels like she can’t visit her friend, who is in a coma in the hospital, without getting fired. She tells Miranda, “F@ck You” in public after she is given the impossible task of renewing her daughter's passport in only 12 hours. Miranda fires her then and there on the spot.

In the movie, however, there is no friend in a coma. Her objections are more philosophical than personal. Andy politely leaves Miranda by going out the other door of a limo. She then throws her phone into a fountain, cutting her ties with her boss in a nicer and less confrontational way than in the book. Miranda ends up giving Andy a reference, and we finish the film with her smiling about Andy, something we are told she rarely does.

The context of Miranda’s abuse is, if not erased, massaged to give us the impression that she is not that bad. We are meant to view her actions as a necessary component of her success and the success of her employees.

Miranda is an abusive boss, but we as the viewer don’t walk away thinking that because of how work is framed in the movie (i.e., film speak for the intended message meant to be conveyed to the viewer). The film spends a lot of time validating the perspective that work should be totalizing and difficult. The main character is chastised several times for not taking her position seriously. She is told over three times that her job is one that a million girls would “kill for.” At one point, she goes to Art Director Nigel to complain about how hard of a time she is having, and rather than sympathize, he condescends to her about how she does not appreciate the job enough:

“…this place, where so many people would die to work, you only deign to work. And you want to know why she doesn’t kiss you on the forehead and give you a gold star on your homework at the end of the day. Wake up, sweetheart.”

Although Andy ultimately leaves this toxic work environment, the film is all about glorifying her hustle. We are meant to respect her learning the ropes in this grueling industry and think of her story as to how things are supposed to be done. After a lot of hard work, Andy gets a reference from Miranda and moves toward her dream job as a journalist. She lands a position working for a mid-tier newspaper, getting her that much closer to The New Yorker. She may not like Miranda, but she begrudgingly respects her, waving her an appreciative goodbye near the film's end.

Of course, in real life, abusive bosses do not always lead to career breaks. Many people give a lot of time to their work, only for them to be left with nothing. The source material recognizes this reality by having Miranda blocklist Andy after her breakdown in Paris. Andy suffers material consequences for resisting the whims of her boss and has to essentially restart her career, albeit in a very expedited fashion.

This has a real-life parallel to Anna Wintour, who has a long, whispered history about retaliating against those she has perceived as wronging her. The creators of The Devil Wear Prada film, in fact, had trouble getting designers to provide clothes or feedback for fear of angering Anna Wintour. They even had trouble securing New York apartment buildings as filming locations for Miranda's house for the same reason. “…the co-op boards wouldn’t let us in,” Director David Frankel said in an interview. “We went for weeks being unable to secure locations!”

The film doesn’t want to recreate that ugly reality, not only because it would have been a liability for them during filming but also because the main creative forces behind this film perceive the abuse we have talked about as a necessary component of creation. As the film Director David Frankel says of the original book: “Miranda was a witch, and Andy’s motivation was to get her revenge. There was a lot of conflict that ended with Miranda being humiliated. I felt that wasn’t satisfying. My view was that we should be grateful for excellence. Why do the excellent people have to be nice?”

It’s a position that ends up glorifying successful people regardless of the abuse they cause. This viewpoint means that the film has a near reverence for Miranda as a character. It frames her as a necessary force that gets things done. This is perfectly encapsulated in the infamous cerulean monologue where Miranda lectures Andy on how important fashion, and by extension, her directorship, is to the world at large:

“…that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room….”

This monologue was added at the insistence of Meryl Streep herself, who wanted to make the character more empathetic — a desire that perfectly fits director Frankel's vision to have Miranda be the heroine. Miranda may be tough, the film seems to argue, but she is making the world turn.

Since Miranda is a villain in the original work, however, that meant having to downplay and change many of the more critical elements in the book. For example, Andy’s friend Lily is a successful artist in the movie, whose critical of Andy for not spending enough time with her and her boyfriend. Her jabs come off as self-centered rather than empathetic because Andy is only doing this position for a year as a stepping stone to get her dream job: something you would think a true friend would understand.

In the book, however, Lily is Andy's roommate, and she has a worsening alcohol problem due to buckling under the strain of graduate school. Andy feels progressively guiltier for not being able to help due to her jampacked work schedule. Lily’s alcoholism culminates in a car crash that places her in a coma. Lily’s position in the narrative is a lesson in how “hustle culture” not only can harm ourselves but those we care about. It makes us withdrawn and forces us to rely on bad coping mechanisms to get through the day.

Likewise, in the movie, Andy’s boyfriend, Nate Cooper (Adrian Grenier), is a chef who comes off as spoiled and entitled to many viewers for his insistence that Andy spends less time at work. As Sana Schwartz writes in Entertainment Weekly: “…[Nate] is kind of the worst. He mocks [Andy] for her new interest in fashion, he trivializes the magazine she works at, and dismisses her hard work. And, perhaps most egregiously, he tantrums about Andy missing his birthday dinner because she had to work an important gala — a major step up for her at her job.”

However, in the book, her boyfriend Alex Fineman has an equally demanding job of his own. He’s a teacher in the Bronx working for Teach for America, which is often a very stressful position in its own right. His concern for Andy comes not from a lack of understanding over hard work but because she stops prioritizing him in the relationship. The event he throws a “tantrum over” in the books is not a birthday dinner, but Andy going to Paris last minute instead of going to homecoming with him. He had already booked hotel rooms for this event on a teacher's salary and moved around his schedule. It was the last straw in a year of hasty cancellations.

The film pulls these punches because it doesn’t want the viewer to think too deeply about the harm Miranda has placed on her workers. Her abuse doesn’t simply inflict emotional harm on her subordinates but has ripple effects that lead to physical and psychological harm. It's hard to think about these plot beats as merely trivial complaints when you center your empathy on beleaguered workers, rather than bosses who rule the world of fashion with an iron fist.

The Devil Wears Prada is a relic of a time when work was everything, and over the years, we have started to question the problems that can come from this type of glorification.

Two years after The Devil Wears Prada was released, the US economy tanked due to a collapse in the housing market in what would almost immediately be labeled the “Great Recession.” This happened because of the greed of certain financiers, many of which faced no penalties, as they inflated the housing market with toxic subprime mortgages.

The Great Recession was the beginning of a popular reckoning with the wealthy. We saw the emergence of Occupy Wallstreet, a protest movement against economic inequality that was the genesis for many modern-day movements, from the resurgence of the Democratic Socialists of America to the presidential run of Bernie Sanders.

One year later, during the middle of the recession, Confessions of a Shopaholic was released in theaters. It was a film about a woman with a shopping addiction who aspired to work for the fashion magazine Alette — an almost inverse of The Devil Wears Prada. The film’s producers agonized over the release as they reshot its ending to be more mindful of America's new economic woes, but it did little to quell critics. It was still panned in theaters as being insensitive. “This sickening ode to consumerist greed comes just in time for the recession,” quipped Anthony Quinn in the Independent.

In many ways, that anger has not gone away. Wealth inequality has only increased, metastasizing into a hustle culture that is not just necessary to get ahead in your career but to pay the bills at all. The rich are more hated than ever. The winners of film awards now appear to be class-conscious titles such as Parasite that skewer the rich. While billionaire Tony Stark launched the MCU over a decade ago, now our heroes are poor hustlers like Sokovian refuge Wanda Maximoff in Wandavision, orphan scavenger Rey in Star Wars, and more.

When I say you couldn't make The Devil Wears Prada, I don’t mean a remake of the property couldn't technically happen, but that the norms it embodied would not fly today. We are increasingly coming to question the idea that the alleged genius of the powerful justifies the cruelty toward those they command. The rich and powerful still have their blind followers, but they also must struggle against an emerging ecosystem of people who hate them.

It was a given that you didn’t question the abuse of your bosses in the 2000s, but today, the fashionable thing is to question why that abuse is even necessary in the first place.

Alex Has Opinions 8/24/21 Alex Has Opinions 8/24/21

There Are No Billionaires In Star Trek’s Federation

The rich would not be allowed into Star Trek’s utopia

The first time I considered that work could be different than it is today came from watching an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–1999). The protagonist, Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), was talking to his father, Joseph Sisko (Brock Peters), who I learned ran a Creole restaurant back on Earth in the 2370s. Joseph found it hectic to manage it, but he didn’t work because he had to pay bills or get health insurance. In fact, his chosen profession was technically obsolete. No one had needed to make food by hand in hundreds of years, thanks to protein resequencers and later replicators.

The citizens of the Federation did not need to work for subsistence. They lived in a post-scarcity, arguably socialist society where people performed labor simply because they enjoyed it. It was a conception of work that was a radical departure from everything I had ever known. All other discussions of work before this moment had been about how I could make money for others. My family spent my early years encouraging me to be a lawyer, accountant, or any position that made significant sums of money. Enjoyment was always an ancillary concern.

Star Trek showed me a world where I could produce labor free from the constraints of others. It is a source of inspiration for millions of people, and strangely enough, that often includes billionaires who are many times the ones dictating the constraints of our labor.

If we want to make the vision of this show a more tangible reality, however, we will have to create a world where they no longer exist.

It cannot be overstated how some of the most popular billionaires on the planet love Star Trek. Bezos allegedly once considered naming Amazon MakeItSo.com after the catchphrase of Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard (Bezos also made a cameo as an alien in Star Trek Beyond (2016)). Elon Musk once said in an interview that he wants to make “Starfleet happen.” Bill Gates once dressed up as the character Spock to market a Windows launch.

However, in the universe of Star Trek, these men would not have the power and influence they have in our world. The Federation does not permit concentration of wealth among its citizens, a point stated explicitly in the Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994) episode The Neutral Zone, where the crew of the USS Enterprise-D unfreezes three individuals from the late 20th century. One of them is a financier, who is horrified to hear that not only do his financial assets no longer exist but that all of society has shifted away from capitalism. “A lot has changed in the last 300 years,” Picard quips at the financier after the latter demands to speak to his lawyer so he can get ahold of his bank accounts.

In fact, the races that do still engage in capitalism in the series are often depicted as barbaric and backward. The Ferengi, a group of short, orangish brown, lobed-eared aliens, are not only capitalistic but also incredibly sexist. They keep their women in a state of slavery. Ferengi women are barred from wearing clothes, traveling without a male escort, or earning a profit. As the Ferengi Quark remarks to Benjamin Sisko: “The way I see it, Humans used to be a lot like Ferengi: greedy, acquisitive, interested only in profit. We’re a constant reminder of a part of your past you’d like to forget.”

Humanity has abandoned capitalism and moved towards a socialist government where people work towards what they want rather than being driven by scarcity. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things,” Picard continues in his speech to the financier. “We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.” Citizens engage in work they desire, free from the limitations of the old world, and this radical vision is something we don’t see advocated for much in pop culture or society at large.

Billionaires will often ignore this message and instead point to the show's technology as a way to get to this future. Star Trek, after all, has technology like replicators and transporters that play with the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The argument goes that we need to expand our technological capacity and move out into space to achieve that futuristic standard of living. When asked to defend his space venture Blue Origin at the Living Legends of Aviation awards ceremony in 2019, Billionaire Jeff Bezos remarked:

“What sounds like freedom to me is moving out into the solar system, where we have, for all practical purposes, unlimited energy, unlimited resources. We’d have a trillion humans in the solar system, and then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. That’s the world I want my grandchildren’s grandchildren to live in.”

However, this point of view is not how the idealistic future in the show came to be. The origin of the Federation began before the emergence of replicators and transporters, to the very beginning of warp drive. The inventor of it, Zephram Cochrane, made First Contact with the alien race the Vulcans and chose to extend an arm out towards them in peace. That peaceful intention is the real basis for the Federation, as unchecked technological growth in the show had decades earlier culminated in a devastating third World War that decimated the Earth's population.

The Federation grew over the years because of a philosophy of valuing peace, multiculturalism, and equality. Admission into the Federation does not just require the development of advanced technology (i.e., warp drive) but also a level of political unity, equal rights, and the removal of a caste system. When, for example, the Bajorans in the season 4 episode of Deep Space Nine, Accession, revive their ancient caste system of D’jarras, it causes the Federation to doubt their candidacy for admission. “You realize,” Captain Sisko lectures the new Bajoran Emissary, “That caste-based discrimination goes against the Federation Charter. If Bajor returns to the D’jarra system, I have no doubt that its petition to join the Federation will be rejected.”

Our world would not qualify for admission into the Federation either, and not simply because of a lack of warp drive, but because we also maintain a rigid caste system of our own. We have inequality structured through the accumulation of capital rather than by religion, with upper-class people at the top and lower-class people at the bottom. It would be considered barbaric by the future humanity of the show.

The majority of this planet's inhabitants have very little, while a few can dream of conquering the stars, which goes against the spirit of equality valued by Federation worlds.

Our current caste system exists not because we lack the resources to provide for our population but because we choose to allocate them elsewhere. Over the last couple of decades, the rate of food production has increased faster than population growth, but people still go hungry. Most food scarcity, in fact, involves a level of human complicity, where human organization, whether it be because of the disruption of war or economic deterioration, determines if something will develop into a full-blown famine. The scholar Amartya Sen published a famous work to this effect in 1981 titled Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. He outlined how “entitlements” (e.g., labor, property, or cash, etc.) give people access to food, not necessarily the production of food itself. If these entitlements are not widely available, as what tends to happen during periods of disruption, then people starve.

We see this same gap with housing. While America has an alleged housing shortage, this is not because we do not have the technological capacity or the resources to building affordable housing. Much of our approach to housing is devoted to palliative care, such as providing shelters for the unhoused or incarcerating unhoused people who interfere (or inconvenience) property holders. If housing were a priority, however, we could solve it rather effectively, something we see in pilot programs that purchase homes for the unhoused with great results (see Permanent Supportive Housing programs), which are not only more ethical but end up being cheaper than jailing unhoused people.

The same can be said of healthcare. At 17.7 percent of our GDP, the US spends more on healthcare than any other country, but that spending does not lead to greater outcomes. We proportionally have some of the highest numbers of preventable deaths in the developed world, and Americans likewise spend more on healthcare to obtain these frankly subpar results. This gap is because, unlike other developed nations, our government has not begun the administrative steps to regulate the costs of drugs and procedures. We have largely left it up to a hodge-podge of uncoordinated and sometimes unscrupulous actors.

This inequality is a political decision. We have developed impressive technologies, but our caste system prevents us from distributing them equally. Our institutions and leaders value preserving wealth inequality over solving the manageable logistical hurdles that would provide everyone with an adequate standard of living. If we were to expand our technological capacity to the levels of the Federation but did not change our policies, there is no reason to believe that it would push us towards a post-scarcity society — after all; it didn’t change how the Ferengi did things. It would just mean that some rich people would have replicators while others are still toiling away merely to survive.

This caste system impacts our ability to have citizens produce the type of labor seen in Star Trek. We know from numerous studies that a baseline of resources helps people be more productive, happier citizens. People have better outcomes when they have greater access to housing, food, and healthcare. When you don’t deny people resources, like food and a home, it frees them from the drudgery of surviving and lets them do other, more advanced forms of labor. This isn’t controversial, except maybe to the people who want to work against the spirit of the Federation and ignore scientific reality to maintain their power.

Imagine what you would do if the artificial scarcity of our world did not constrain you. If you knew with certainty that your very subsistence would not be threatened if you stopped selling your labor to another, what would you do? Imagine the projects you could start; the people that you could care for; the discoveries that you could make. The advocates of our caste system like to point to the innovation and jobs they have created, but the sad reality is that their hoarding has actually stifled generations of advancement. The potential of the many has been constrained so that a few bad men can go into space.

The Federation is not the world envisioned by men like Jeff Bezos. He is not fighting for greater equality but rather for a thousand or more lucky people to get to be successful because of economies of scale.

The Federation is a reality where everyone can work towards whatever form of labor that they wish, even if it's to work on a craft centuries obsolete. It is a world where we are all Mozarts and Einsteins, not simply a few, because the artificial scarcity of today does not exist.

It’s easy to call this vision utopian, but the barriers we face are logistical rather than technological or fantastical in many ways. As we have already covered, our society already has an impressive technological capacity. We have the ability to split atoms, fly through the void of space, modify our food, and soon even our DNA.

This is not reinventing the wheel. We have been perfecting the craft of agriculture, housing, and healthcare for thousands of years. There is nothing utopian about providing everyone a baseline standard of living on a planet that evolved to provide us with such things. Yet, there is something weirdly dystopian about claiming we do not have the resources for such efforts but can somehow simultaneously jumpstart a new, perfect civilization from scratch 244.05 million miles away.

In truth, billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk do not want to build the Federation, but rather a new Ferengi Empire, where we are not free to labor for anyone but them. A world that prioritizes the comfort of the few over the safety and happiness of the many, and if there's one thing a Star Trek fan should be appalled by, it's that.

Alex Has Opinions 8/24/21 Alex Has Opinions 8/24/21

How Society Colonizes Our Mind Space

We don’t have the mental space to do things that matter.

I spend so much of my time on numbers. I worry about how much I am spending. I fret over bills and filing taxes and whether or not I can meet a healthcare deductible. I look at my retirement accounts and chart out the thin red line on my computer screen, looking at a date decades into the future when I might not have to worry as much about money.

I then am pulled to the present and worry about the numbers for my job. I pore over click rates and read times. I study SEO optimizations and organic marketing strategies. I keep spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of application deadlines, hoping that this next listing will push me over the edge for that day, month, or year.

On my groggiest days, I do not have much mental and emotional space left. If I have time, I will watch a TV Show, send a quick meme to a friend, or play a video game. Sometimes I spend so much of my time thinking about these numbers and dates that I can’t go to sleep. I play them over and over again in my mind until my legs twitch and I struggle to breathe. I pound my fist against my chest, hoping to clear my mind — to push the white noise of facts and obligations outside my body into the world where they belong.

In the process of all this worry, I neglect many things I truly care about: I miss the ability to sit in on meetings for my local city council or activist organization; passion projects wither; birthdays pass me by; plans go by the wayside.

We are taught that this society improves our lives, and in some tangible ways, it does, but more often than not, it demands our time in exchange. We are forced to entertain so many useless endeavors so that we can live, and in the process, all of us lose out on the space not only to work on things that we enjoy but labor that could benefit society as a whole.

Chances are that you worry about the same numbers that I do. In the States, most of us fret about taxes and healthcare costs because not doing so will cost you even more time and money down the line. If you don’t figure out how to optimize your tax bill or spend hours researching healthcare plans, assuming you are even given the privilege to spend this time at all, it can cost you hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars in fees and penalties. Millions of Americans owe billions to the IRS in back taxes every year, and even more people struggle to pay medical bills and debts.

These systems, however, are overly complicated by design. It’s been revealed, in part thanks to brilliant reporting by ProPublica, that the corporations Intuit (the maker of TurboTax) and H&R Block have for years lobbied the US government to make filing taxes purposefully obscure. As Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel write in ProPublica:

“For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from [filing our taxes]…The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company’s motto should actually be “compromise without integrity.””

Many countries around the world prefill your taxes for you, leading to a process that not only takes minutes but is completely free. Yet because of a single company's greed, Americans spend over 15 hours preparing their tax returns. “Americans spend more time every year doing their taxes than playing golf — and golf takes ages,” jokes the website Quartz. We waste space within our minds tabulating numbers and figures so that two predatory companies can turn a profit.

The same can be said of healthcare as well. At 17.7 percent of our GDP, the US spends more on healthcare than any other country, but we do not see this in terms of outcomes. Our system is not only inefficient and expensive (with two-thirds of all bankruptcies citing medical issues as a key contributor), but it leads to a lot of wasted time. According to one study, we spend 45 minutes per health appointment traveling and waiting to be seen.

We then spend an inordinate amount of time navigating insurance companies to figure out what they do and do not cover and arguing for them to cover the medication and procedures that they should. “I consider myself a smart person, and my siblings are smart,” one person told Elemental on their difficulty in selecting an insurance plan, “but it’s just so baffling. So much is at stake. That’s why it’s even more horrible.” Healthcare costs remain frustratingly obtuse in the United States, with the cost insurance providers will cover often not learned about until after a patient has been billed.

Unsurprisingly, this confusing state of affairs is something actively maintained by healthcare companies and organizations. There have been decades of lobbying efforts from the likes of the Federation of American Hospitals and the American Medical Association (AMA), some of which are still ongoing, to kill government alternatives to private health insurance or even just greater regulation on the costs of drugs and services. As Jill Quadagno wrote in 2004:

“From the New Deal of the 1930s to the 1970s, the chief obstacle to national health insurance was organized medicine…Across two-thirds of a century, physicians and their allies lobbied legislators, cultivated sympathetic candidates through large campaign contributions, organized petition drives, created grassroots protests, and developed new “products” whenever government action seemed imminent.”

Once you see this pattern, you find it everywhere. Ever wonder why retirement accounts are so complicated or the fact that you have to buy title deed insurance when buying a home? Actors within those industries lobbied local, state, and federal politicians to make the world slightly more complicated. No one designed our system to be this way. It’s the result of thousands of smaller cuts made over time, forcing us to take in more and more nonsense into the recesses of our minds.

Deductibles. Premiums. 401(k)s. The numbers fill my head a little bit more every year, and the things I want to do seem to get further and further away. It’s like a fog settling into my brain. I begin to see everything through the lens of what numbers I need to give others.

And so far, these are only the problems hanging around the periphery of our lives. Most of us have to fill our minds with far more complicated facts and figures to survive.

The percentage of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, according to one poll, sits at 56%, and often this is after engaging in multiple sources of income. According to the Census Bureau, 7.8% of employed Americans in 2018 took on another job. And we know from other sources, anywhere from 37% to almost half of employed Americans are engaged in a “side hustle,” or an income stream performed in addition to their job. Although some of these side hustles are monetizing things that people love, most are geared towards making money.

These jobs or side hustles require that people absorb additional knowledge and invest more time and energy to keep them afloat. Some of the most popular side hustles, such as e-commerce, coaching, or freelancing, demand that you keep track of multiple contracts and bids to turn a profit. “Welcome to the wonderful world of freelancing :(,” one Reddit poster joked in response to another poster talking about how they had lost the majority of their clients. “These things happen, you cannot expect a steady paycheck every month.”

To be successful with an alternative income source, you have to fill your mind with a whole ecosystem of dates and numbers crammed into an already busy world just to survive, let alone thrive. On top of whatever familial obligations someone might have, these de facto businesses are being started while managing a job or two on the side — that’s literally what a side hustle means. It’s intense, and it leads to immense levels of burnout. “I’m totally overwhelmed at work,” begins another poster. “12 hour days, lots of risk for failure, everyone expects me to be flawless….My energy is sapped, can’t sleep, creativity is in the garbage and I have feelings of guilt for neglecting those in my personal life.”

We glorify the hustle in American culture, but it has morphed into a celebration of the loss of our autonomy. “There is no glory in a grind that wears you all the way down,” cautions Elaine Welteroth from the NY Times, but many Americans continue to grind themselves into nubs anyway — either for the glory of the hustle or simply because economic reality doesn’t leave many options. In the words of Isabella Rosario for NPR:

“The problem is, hustling still isn’t a choice for people who aren’t at the top. There’s a world of difference between staying late at the office to score a promotion and peeing in a bottle to keep your job at an Amazon warehouse.”

The lower you are in America’s racialized caste system, the less the space taken from you is a choice, even if you rationalize it as such inside the prison of your own mind. Many have to overextend their emotional and physical space to survive without ever deluding themselves into thinking they will be millionaires. They take in shift schedules, company rules, SEO targets, and many other useless numbers for the ability to exist and nothing more.

For those that do have the privilege to invest more fully in our capitalist system, it doesn’t always come with less stress. Middle-class “hustlers” may have a temporary reprieve from poverty, but they have to give more and more of themselves over to their schemes for financial independence. The side hustles that are the most profitable, such as renting property or investing in stocks or cryptocurrencies, require a lot of initial liquid capital and knowledge upfront. You not only need the money to invest, but you need the ability to know what to invest in, which is not something someone juggling a second job often has to spare.

The people that do try to enter these fields from outside the upper echelons of our society have to not only save the cash necessary to invest, but they have to spend months if not years of their lives learning about the investment — all to capture the value of a volatile asset that might take everything from them. Many crypto stories involve people liquidating their savings for a chance at wealth, and although some are successful, others are not. Some have lost fortunes to hacks where hundreds of thousands of dollars are transferred out of their wallets. Others have placed their life savings in assets that crash months later. And in the process, investors become hooked on taking all this information in. “[my phone] was cooking my brain,” one investor told The Guardian. “I’d look at it constantly.”

There is also the biggest drain of our time — our jobs. Most of us do not find profound meaning in our work. We see in poll after poll that many jobs do not make us happy. Many people work to get the money necessary to eat and live and are not necessarily doing work that matters to them or society at large. The pandemic proved rather viscerally that many of us are not “essential” employees. We engage in professions that anthropologist David Graeber would classify as “bullshit jobs.” Positions that “which even the person doing the job can’t really justify the existence of, but they have to pretend that there’s some reason for it to exist.”

Many of us are so focused on capturing whatever profits are available that in the process, we take up these bullshit jobs, which ends up creating an economy that isn’t very valuable. There is a shortage of teachers, social workers, nurses, and other essential positions that are needed to keep society turning; however, there is no shortage of people trying to invest in crypto, selling you get-rich-quick classes online, or plugging vitamin powder at the end of poorly researched videos.

This speaks to our society’s utterly perverted set of incentives. Some of the brightest minds right now aren’t working on improving our lives through greater affordable housing or food security, but rather they are adjusting the UI on predatory retail websites or figuring out how to make some stock numbers go up. “I loved teaching. I loved working with my students to improve their lives. But that wasn’t really my job. No, my job was to meet the common core requirements for reading and writing,” laments one person on why they made the plunge from teaching to programming. I have had so many friends leave nursing or teaching to become coders because they are tired of doing a thankless job for little pay. “Make no mistake: a teacher’s salary is awful,” remarks another poster who left the profession.

We fill our minds with the most useless of things so that we have the chance for a better future, and it's suffocating. We get so little time and space to live our lives, and we have to spend it calculating numbers and times that are not our own. We balance banks accounts, pay bills, invest in stocks and bonds if we are lucky, and take classes to fill our brains with ever more facts and figures.

Imagine all the breakthroughs and developments that did not happen because someone chose to build an app instead; all the teachers and social workers that do not exist because creating a business or being a programmer were considered more lucrative professions; the stories and songs unwritten by artists, who decided to become lawyers or bankers; the cures and machines that could not be tinkered on because they weren’t profitable. Most of all, imagine all the time that has been taken from you because your head is filled with a world of numbers and expectations that are not your own.

Sometimes the thought of how this society has taken my mind overwhelms me with anxiety and dread. I think of all the information still left to be acquired. My breath gets short, and I hyperventilate as I worry about everything I must do to fulfill my obligations. The taxes. The bills. The emails. They feel like they are sliding down my throat, clogging my windpipe so I can’t breathe.

Mostly, though, these expectations make me mad. I am angry that I have lost so much space inside myself that even my dreams are not my own. I dream of amassing wealth, where once I had plans to write novels and make games, and this transformation chills my soul. No to-do list can fix this injustice. No self-help article can reclaim the ever-expanding list of musts that we are required to do to hold onto the dream of a good life, and for many, to even exist at all.

The first thing we must do is notice that the colonization is there. We must take note of the thousands trying to claw away at our space. To trace the line inside our head to the people and institutions that are responsible so that one day we may demand justice.

Alex Has Opinions 8/23/21 Alex Has Opinions 8/23/21

Unpacking the Deadly Politics of Shame

The emotion that has led to the death of millions.

(Note From the Future: While I think this article has a lot of cool research, I do not agree with its conclusions anymore. See Historically, Shame Has (Sometimes) Been A Good Thing to read more about how I think today.)

I want to tell you about the time I almost died because of the shame of others. After a long shift, I was eating dinner at Whole Foods — one of the cheapest venues in the upscale neighborhood where I happened to work. I had taken a seat in the upstairs section amongst the plastic tables and chairs they set aside for shoppers to eat, scarfing down food I had hastily purchased from the hot bar.

I had not eaten lunch that day. I was so incredibly hungry that I swallowed a piece of Mongolian beef whole. It lodged in my throat, and I immediately started to choke. I couldn’t breathe, flailing about in my seat, watching people watch me die. No one approached me to help, and one person I scanned in the crowd was even someone I knew — an ex I had ghosted several weeks ago. I remember him looking at me, and then we both immediately looked away — embarrassed to be seeing an ex. So embarrassed I might die.

I didn’t approach any of these people either. Knowing I would have to vomit the food out, I proceeded to stumble to the bathroom — a thing they advise choking victims never to do. Thousands of people die from choking every year. If I had not been a former alcoholic who knew how to vomit on command, I might have joined them on that Whole Foods floor — too ashamed to inconvenience others with the continuation of my own existence.

As I emerged from the bathroom, I found a woman waiting for me at the door. Like many others, she had noticed something was not right, but she had not checked in on me because I was in the men’s room. It was a social custom she was not willing to circumvent, even if it meant my death, and so she waited by the door, hoping everything would sort itself out.

I told her I had been choking, and she hung her head in shame.

“I almost died,” I shouted to everyone in the room. Most were not even paying attention to me, having been trained to look away after a lifetime of uncomfortable encounters.

Even small social barriers can snowball into another's death. Many pointless social conventions were standing between the crowd and me: the norm to avoid people causing a scene in public; the norm to not inconvenience others; the norm to not cross gender lines; the norm to avoid bothering a lover who has spurned us.

Our society is united in a shared sense of shame, and it leads to a lot of needless death. Or, more succinctly, we use our customs — and the shame they are psychologically rooted in — as a justification for why we do not intervene in, or in some cases, even perpetuate others’ suffering. The politics of shame focuses not on emancipation or accountability but on subjugating a class of people through humiliation.

Like most worthwhile fields in academia, the debate over shame, or the intense embarrassment and humiliation we feel at ourselves for violating a social norm we believe in, is contentious.

Some have put forth the idea that shame is a social construct that is not present at birth and instead takes roots as we, as individuals, gain more self-awareness. This theory proposes that we start with primary emotions (e.g., joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, etc.) and develop exposed emotions (e.g., embarrassment, envy, empathy) and evaluative emotions (e.g., pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment, etc.) over time as the rules and standards of society become perceived by us.

Others advocate for the concept that shame is a product of our evolutionary psychology. People in this camp believe that it's an evolved process that happens when certain conditions have been met, such as losing perceived status, which under this branch of thought, we have a natural inclination to obtain. Some scholarship has even argued there may be a link between shame and the base emotion of disgust, casting doubt that we do not have a natural inclination for shame.

Regardless of where you stand on the matter, it’s not really disputed that the source of shame is contextual, from culture to culture and even person to person. The scholar Michael Lewis gives the example of a test, saying that a student's expectations of the results pattern whether or not they feel shame. An 85 may be an excellent grade for one person and suboptimal for another. The level of shame depends on the norms and expectations the individual has internalized.

When discussing my own near-death experience, something that might be brought up is the Bystander Effect, a well-documented concept in psychology claiming that people are less likely to intervene in an incident if others are present. The research on this appears to be holding, though the extent and application of this theory are argued about at length. People do have a desire to resolve conflict — that woman did approach me upon leaving the bathroom — but social customs also limit that intervention. Norms told her that she could not go into the men’s bathroom, which conflicted with her feelings of empathy, telling her to save my life. People feel shame over intervening (or not intervening) in an incident for distinct cultural and personal reasons, and, as we shall soon see, that emotional basis can become deadly.

To bring this point home, I want to examine the incident that caused public interest in the Bystander Effect — the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City. Genovese was a woman who was robbed, raped, and then stabbed to death outside her apartment building in Queens. 37 people, the story goes, allegedly watched or listened to the incident and did nothing to stop the attack. 37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police; Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector, went the title for an infamous New York Times story. The reporting at the time earned national attention by intellectualizing this incident as a part of human nature.

In retrospect, however, it's more complicated. The Times relied on an exaggerated police figure for the number of witnesses, and it's doubtful that everyone saw the incident directly. One woman, Sophia Farrar, rushed out of the building, cradling the dead Genovese in her arms, screaming out for someone to call the police. While the attack was on Austin Steet, another man opened his window and screamed at the attacker to ‘’Leave that girl alone!’’ While the Bystander Effect may make it less likely that an individual will intervene, that doesn’t mean that someone in the collective will not intervene in some capacity.

And of those that refused to intervene, it had less to do with human nature and more about the cultural norms preventing them from doing so directly. There was an obvious gendered element that accompanied this murder. Genovese and her murderer could be mistaken for a woman and man fighting at night, and that dynamic, especially during the far more conservative 1960s, was seen as normal. Several people in the Genovese case mentioned that they did not interject themselves into the fight because they thought it was a “lovers’ quarrel.” In the words of Sarah Kaplan in the Washington Post:

“Like some of Genovese’s neighbors, [the police] may have taken the woman’s screams for a lover’s quarrel that didn’t warrant their intervention. In 1964, marital rape was not a crime in New York, and domestic violence cases — in the rare instance where they were prosecuted — were considered in family, rather than criminal, courts. Beating would not become grounds for divorce for another two years.”

From a glance, it’s so easy to label the lack of intervention in the Genovese case as intrinsic to human nature, but the norms that restrained some of these bystanders were contextual. Some people ignored the fight because they were taught to prioritize the privacy of a romantic partnership over the potential harm done within that relationship— the comfort of not having to intervene in other’s affairs over the safety of a potential abuse victim. As Scholar Rebecca Solnit remarks in her essay A Short History of Silence, the same week of the incident, the United Press International ran a story about how a judge in Cleveland thought: “it’s all right for a husband to give his wife a black eye and knock out one of her teeth if she stays out too late.”

We actually see this bystander logic play out a lot in abusive relationships. Whether romantic or platonic, familial or fraternal, we treat partnerships in the United States as atomized spheres that perceived outsiders should not interfere with. How many times have you heard, in response to saying that a relationship is potentially abusive, that “it’s not our place to judge?” often being paraphrased directly from the bible verse “Judge not, lest ye be judged” (Matt 7:1). “Don’t judge someone’s Relationship…It’s their relationship, not yours,” reads one popular Facebook post. “Don’t tell me how to parent,” goes the title of a ranty mommy blog. The shame being employed by these posters is not to stop potential abusers but rather to keep people out of others' relationships.

Ignoring unhealthy relationships, however, has costs. The CDC estimated in 2015 that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 10 men would face some form of intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. Nearly 700,000 children in the US have officially documented cases of mistreatment a year, and the true number is expected to be well higher than that. Atomized relationships are not immune from abuse, and yet there are norms in our society pushing us to ignore potential red flags, which of course, lead to greater harm, and they are rooted in shame.

When you get down to many of the cultural norms we have talked about so far, a lot of them seem to prioritize comfort and inaction over the safety of others: the ability for a shopper to eat unperturbed by another person’s suffering, an onlooker not having to bother themselves with the childrearing of a parent; the building resident comfortably rationalizing why to ignore the screams outside. Shame, in these instances, seems to be propelling people to inaction, or worse, callous disregard, rather than preserving another’s life.

Shame is not always the best motivator for pushing people to action. It can sometimes become toxic, leading to intense self-loathing that is internalized to the point that it alters our self-image. We begin to develop shame-based beliefs that essentialize us as a person (e.g., I'm stupid, I’m a failure, I’m a bad person, etc.). Eventually, these beliefs don’t have to be triggered by an external event and can be brought on by our own thoughts of shame or the fear of experiencing shame.

When organizations have tried to use shame as a basis for intervention, its effects have often been devastating to those on the receiving end. Although we have focused on largely interpersonal dynamics, it should be rather obvious that this emotion can problematically be the foundation of a movement or even an entire society’s politics.

And when that happens, the body count quickly rises.

When I think of the politics of shame, the most obvious example comes from the pop culture hit Game of Thrones (2011— 2019). There is an infamous subplot where the machiavellian character Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) allies with the religious High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), only for him to subvert her control of the Westerosian capital of King’s Landing. He gets the poorer residents to rally behind him, and how he does that is through a combination of populist politics and shame.

Due to Cersei's influence, the High Sparrow, now the High Septon, reinstitutes the Faith Militant — a group of deputized followers under his command who enforce the Faith of the Seven doctrine. The High Sparrow uses his followers to impose the traditional laws of the Faith of the Seven on lowborn and highborn alike, leading to public trials where nobles confess their sins and receive punishment. He creates a government that, at its face, is centered on rooting out sin.

Sin is technically about judging the immorality of an individual's actions. It is not about shame at all but guilt, a similar, though slightly different emotion. As Annette Kämmerer writes in the Scientific American of the difference between guilt and shame:

“People often speak of shame and guilt as if they were the same, but they are not. Like shame, guilt occurs when we transgress moral, ethical or religious norms and criticize ourselves for it. The difference is that when we feel shame, we view ourselves in a negative light (“I did something terrible!”), whereas when we feel guilt, we view a particular action negatively (“I did something terrible!”). We feel guilty because our actions affected someone else, and we feel responsible.”

Yet, these two emotions are not mutually exclusive, with people sometimes experiencing both simultaneously. The High Sparrow, for all his divine intentions, weaponizes both guilt and shame. In one infamous scene, he has Cersei Lannister perform a walk of shame across the city's main street. Her hair is cut short, and a woman rings a bell behind her, yelling the word shame over and over again. The citizens of King’s Landing throw both vegetables and the vilest of profanities at her.

This scene can be seen replicated throughout history. The word shame was yelled repeatedly by anti-Trump protestors during the late 2010s. It can also be heard in the protests against former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in April of 2006, at Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for failing to institute a mask mandate, and so much more. It doesn’t even have to make sense or be too serious. Protestors yelled “shame” outside the headquarters of People Magazine for failing to label Ryan Gosling the sexiest man alive back in 2011.

Our very recent history has been one of demonizing political and cultural rivals, not just for their actions (i.e., guilt), but for being bad people (i.e., shame). The politics of shame do not just become the basis for words or inaction, but discriminatory policies that punish people for being intrinsically bad. We need to look no further than the Church of our world.

For example, the Inquisition was a series of institutions during the middle ages through the twentieth century where the Catholic church tried to root out sin, usually heresy — a catchall designation for anything the Church (and those using religiosity for political means) disagreed with. The Inquisition demonized entire swathes of people as much as it focused on any particular sin. Muslims, Roma, and Jewish people were often targeted for their faith, and laws were passed to discriminate and expel those who did not convert from whatever land the Inquisition operated within.

During the later half of the Spanish Inquisition (1478 — 1834 CE), punishments for practicing outside Catholicism were severe, including torture and capital punishment. Executions could often be a public spectacle called auto-da-fé or “act of faith.” These were a combination of religious ceremony and public sentencing that often took place in a main square and were surrounded by much pomp and circumstance. The guilty were often dressed up to represent their alleged sin, as the Inquisition attempted to extract a public confession. Although some autos-da-fé were non-lethal, many ended in ritualized burnings at the stake for all to see.

It was not simply non-Catholics who were affected by the Inquisition, either. To sniff out “fake” moriscos (i.e., former Muslims who had converted to Catholicism under the threat of force) and conversos (i.e., the same, but for former Jewish people), attendance for church and religious events was mandatory. Neighbors were encouraged to spy on each other, and those who did not engage in this activity could face penalties. This focus on ascertaining everyone’s guilt led to a lot of shame, as people wondered if they seemed like “good” Catholics.

Much like Cersei Lannister walking through the streets of King’s Landing, members of the Inquisition legalized this shame as a form of punishment. “Verguenza publica,” or public shamings, happened frequently. The accused was typically sentenced to ride a steed, usually a donkey, through town while their transgressions were read aloud to onlookers. The choice of steed was purposeful as the accused was meant to feel humiliated and ashamed of having to ride an ass through their community. They would also usually have to wear a hat known as a coroza, which were sometimes painted with the sin they had allegedly committed, as well as a garment named a sanbenito that they had to wear as a mark of infamy for a set duration of time.

This impulse to capitalize on shame as a form of punishment has never really gone away, though the target has evolved over the years. We even see this religiosity today in how doxxing (i.e., when someone’s private information is released to the public) or harassment campaigns are used by people online to punish those who have crossed perceived social lines, and are now considered to be morally compromised.

Harassment campaigns can theoretically be used to pressure an abusive person from a position of power or for an entity to adopt certain reforms, but they are often not so targeted. The primary objective of an overwhelming majority of them is to punish people for violating certain social norms, or, if we are being particularly dramatic, for committing certain “sins,” and then dragging the accused through the private-public square that is the Internet so that they feel deep humiliation and shame. Shame is not the byproduct but the goal.

As we saw during the Inquisition, these accusations do not have to target a powerful person or even be true. In one infamous example back in 2010, an 11-year-old was slut-shamed for allegedly having sex with a member of the band Blood on the Dance Floor. Since the band member, Dahvie Vanity, was 25 at the time, this would have constituted statutory rape. Indeed he has been accused by over 20 women of assault and is currently under investigation by the FBI.

Dahvie Vanity, however, was not the target of this Internet mob. Again, the target was an 11-year-old who was his alleged victim. This child, who was prolific online, would go on to make a tearful response video that got interrupted by an angry tirade from her father, who said the much-mocked line “You done goofed.” His tirade only egged on his child's harassers. Much like the equally infamous Leave Britney Alone video, it became an object of mockery and ridicule as harassers shared, memefied, and remixed it.

In the midst of all this harassment, the information of the child and their family was released to the public by trolls. The family endured multiple death threats and other forms of harassment as a result, yet part of the emphasis remained on the inappropriate behavior of the 11-year-old. “Why so much profanity in the videos?” a reporter asks the kid in an ABC exclusive.

Every year millions of people report being victims of online harassment. The major drive behind these behaviors is varied. People join in harassment campaigns because they don’t know how to regulate their own emotions or they are not worried about consequences, but regardless of the individual cause, in most (though not all circumstances), it does not appear to be a desire for justice or reform. The end goal is that the target feels humiliated and ashamed. No objective is met other than that the attacker takes glee in their victim's misfortune.

The weaponization of shame has been a consistent force in the political world. It’s not only used as a pretext for why people turn a blind eye to other’s suffering, but a justification used to discriminate, maim, and kill perceived offenders.

It’s a deadly tool, and we have to ask ourselves: is it worth it?

When I was choking on that bathroom floor, I was deeply ashamed of myself. “Is this really going to be the way I die?” I thought. My self-image was so toxic that I was more worried about the fear of experiencing shame over preserving my own life.

I have almost died several times, and although I retain some blame for my decisions, I have learned to be less and less hard on myself as the years have progressed. Every near-death experience was preceded by hundreds of different eyes looking away in embarrassment and shame: too exhausted to deal with a person emotionally breaking down; too embarrassed to deal with the discomfort of someone suffering in front of them; too ashamed to inconvenience another’s relationship.

The politics of shame are old, and they are centered on a characteristic that is integral to the human experience. Shame is an emotion, like any other, and I don’t believe it's helpful to shame people for having shame. We need to recognize that human beings are inclined to feel this, but that doesn’t mean it is a good basis for politics. In fact, shame seems to be a pretty destructive foundation for political organization. It is an emotion that demands self-flagellation and punishment over accountability and understanding.

Some would argue that it's the source of our shame that is the problem. Rather than building a world where we feel shame for inconveniencing others or violating Christian or conservative norms, we need to create a world where people feel deep shame for racism, sexism, wealth inequality, and the like.

As we have already covered, however, shame is often divorced from empathy. It forces the accused to look inwards rather than focus on how their actions have hurt others, which can be a selfish and paralyzing feeling. It does not necessarily lead to self-improvement where the shamed tries to minimize the reasons for that feeling, but rather to wallow in how bad someone is as a person. That feeling may be great for authoritarian governments who want to immobilize public action against them, but it's not the best for those who want to genuinely improve things.

If we want to build a world where fewer people are dying alone on a cold street or floor, we need to build politics of empathy and understanding over self-flagellation and retribution — and there is nothing shameful about that.

Alex Has Opinions 8/16/21 Alex Has Opinions 8/16/21

The Corporate Propaganda of the Film ‘The Tomorrow War’

Amazon strikes a propaganda goldmine with this flagship offering.

Image; Photo by Chuanchai Pundej on Unsplash

The slick sci-fi romp The Tomorrow War hits all the beats of a major Hollywood action film. With a budget of $200 million, the special effects and set pieces are impressive, though not particularly memorable. Chris Pratt, who earned his action bona fides in the Guardians of The Galaxy franchise and the Jurassic World reboot, manages to be a charming lead who propels the viewer through a dying Earth. It’s a bloated movie, filled with premises that are not particularly well-developed, but if you can turn your brain off for its first hour or so, it manages to be a tolerable ride.

However, underneath all this bluster is an insidious message about how governments would be unable to stop a planet-wide disaster. The proposed solution in the film instead appears to be a combination of rugged individualism and corporate benevolence — a weird irony given that just 100 companies are contributing to 71% of our species total carbon emissions.

The parallels to climate change in this movie are not subtle. Yet, since The Tomorrow War is being syndicated by one of the most powerful corporations on the planet (one that is contributing mightily to climate change), we should forcefully question this story’s message — one that appears to be a pretty intense bout of corporatist propaganda.

The premise of The Tomorrow War is that the planet is dying —in this reality, it’s because an alien presence known as the whitespikes has invaded the future and consumed almost all life. A desperate humanity figures out how to establish a wormhole to the past and convinces all the world's governments to send military forces to the future to replenish the frontlines. It’s this past where our main protagonist Dan Forester (Chris Pratt), finds himself in, as he is hurriedly sent into the future to fight evil aliens.

Much has been written about the inconsistencies in how both time travel and military strategy work in this movie. Yes, none of this makes sense. The act of sending troops to the future completely destroys humanity's ability to prepare against the whitespikes in the present (or past), but we are going to sidestep conversations on plotholes and instead focus on the problematic philosophical elements underpinning this film.

The Tomorrow War is an obvious metaphor for climate change. We see a sense of hopelessness in the air as people lament a future that is all but doomed. Early on, there is a scene where Dan, who's a teacher in his civilian life, is instructing a group of students in a classroom. He can’t get them to focus on anything. They are too despondent, thinking about the future they believe to be already lost. “What’s the point?… School, grades, college — it’s all bullshit,” says one student. “Yeah. We’ve seen the new number projections. We lose, period. The aliens kill us all,” chimes in another.

This very well could have been an actual classroom in the present day talking about carbon emissions rather than survival projections. Our current reality is very dire, and it’s also hard to process. The movie is clearly tapping into this widespread existential dread over the fate of our current planet when it comes to climate change. There is also not subtly a slideshow about climate change in the background as Dan is having this conversation.

Unlike in our world, however, in the movie, the governments of Earth were able to unite over their common threat (i.e., the Whitespikes), and they failed anyway. They could not figure out how to stop these aliens from destroying humanity in the future and are now throwing bodies at the problem in the hopes of stalling the inevitable. When we look at Dan’s present, the United States government has resorted to authoritarian measures to keep the draft going. Dan is informed that his spouse or dependent will take his place if he does not report for duty.

The government, however, does not have a solution that does anything meaningful with these bodies — in fact, the draft is portrayed as utterly incompetent. Soldiers are not trained, often thrown into battle with their civilian clothes still on. Their coordinators are all young twenty-somethings (apparently to avoid time paradoxes) whose leadership is so inept it falls apart under basic questioning. There is one hilarious scene where someone asks why they aren’t given pictures of their alien enemies, and the response (because it would demoralize people) ends up demoralizing all the recruits in the room.

“Look at all the Government will have us sacrifice to avert disaster,” the film seems to scream out, “and it will do us very little good.”

This movie is very clearly anti-government. Multiple characters possess a thorough distrust of governmental authority, including Dan’s father, James Forester (J.K. Simmons). “You have a master's degree in engineering and a general disdain for the US government,” Dan says of his father near the very beginning of the film, describing why the latter helps draft dodgers escape the clutches of the authoritarian US government.

There is a scene near the end where the main characters have figured out a plan to stop the aliens (more on this later), and they briefly consider letting the governments of the world in on the plan, only very it to be dismissed with a shrug. “Absolutely, go tell the UN,” remarks James, “and they can talk about it until we are all dead.” “Yeah,” agrees Charlie, a character we talk about in further detail below. “I hate to agree with conspiracy Santa, but if we get the governments of the world involved, it could turn into a nightmare.” The detest for government action in this scene is so visceral that it borders on a Randian monologue. The viewer is supposed to think that the very idea of involving the “government” is laughable.

Corporate actors are conversely portrayed very positively. The film's comic relief is played by a man named Charlie (Sam Richardson), the director of R&D of a geothermal energy company called Wallace Technology. He describes his company as “the Amazon of earth sciences.” Comic relief characters are supposed to be likable, and Sam Richardson does play Charlie with energetic flair — though the jokes do not always land. It's telling that the most corporatist character in the film is not only insanely likable but someone, as we shall soon learn, whose technical expertise allows him to help locate where the aliens initially landed.

There is also the main character himself — a biology teacher aspiring to be something greater. We start the film with Dan giving an interview for a job. “I found my passion in the Army Research Lab, I used my GI Bill…to go to Cal State, and I’m currently teaching high school biology,” he tells an interviewer over the phone. He is giving this interview while bringing beers to a holiday party, showing the viewer that he is an (overstretched) hustler. His voice deflates when he says “high school biology,” indicating that he looks down on this more public position. A more aware movie might have Dan come to terms with how toxic his worldview is, but as the movie progresses, it's clear we are meant to think of him as someone who is down on his luck and working towards something greater. In this case, saving humanity from aliens.

In the same classroom scene, Dan gives a passionate monologue to his depressed students about how to solve the alien threat (or really any problem) is through the spirit of innovation — a corporate buzzword that is often used synonymously with making products through the marketplace. “If there is one thing the world needs right now, it’s scientists. We cannot stop innovating. That’s how you solve a problem. Science is important.” However, in the film, we don’t see “science” — a globalized institution that involves hundreds, if not thousands of different people coming together to find the truth — but rather a ragtag group of individuals. It’s a corporatized version of science this movie promotes — stripped of its more communal ideals.

This brings us back to stopping the alien threat. The solution to halting the whitespikes is not a coordinated, collectivized approach from the people of the world. Instead, our leads bootstrap an end to the alien menace. Like a group of programmers founding a startup, Dan brings his smart friends and students together, and they brainstorm where to find the location of the alien threat before it arrives on Earth. Dan has learned vital information from the future — and rather than figure out how to get the governments of the world on board (they're just way too difficult)— he works on it privately.

Dan and his friends learn that the whitespikes are in a crashed alien cargo ship in Russia. They are buried underneath ice, which will melt by 2050 due to global warming and unleash them onto the world. We already know Dan refuses to inform the government of this information, which is frustrating even within the film's logic. The whitespikes breed so quickly that one mistake could unleash them onto a severely depleted Earth thirty years earlier than originally expected.

It would be a disaster, but the movie is not interested in taking its premise seriously but instead promoting the rugged individualism seen as the cornerstone of corporate ideology. “I feel like this is my opportunity to give [my daughter] and give this world a second chance,” monologues Dan before heading to the alien spaceship, somehow managing to make the fate of the world all about him. Like Steve Jobs and other tech visionaries before him, this is about what one man can do for the world. The film paints one person’s selfish call for redemption into a hero’s journey.

We should be skeptical of a movie that pushes business-friendly bootstrapping to solve a global problem (like climate change) because it has not been particularly effective in our timeline.

This is not the first time a movie has promoted such an ideology. The Tomorrow War joins a long list of films that depict government agencies or the government itself as an efficient or evil entity that must be defeated through the forces of rugged individualism (see the EPA in Ghostbusters, the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter, etc.). Amazon was not even the original distributor. It was originally scheduled for release in theaters by Paramount Pictures, but then the Covid-19 pandemic happened, and the company pulled it, leaving Amazon to pick up Paramount's sloppy seconds.

The context of this movie is still frustrating, though, especially when being promoted by a company such as Amazon that stands to benefit from trying to convince humanity to trust in its authority over the governments that can regulate it. When it comes to the existential threat of climate change, we don’t need more self-deluded men and businesses thinking that they alone can save the world (that’s what got us into this mess). We need to build narratives that foster genuine cooperation and trust among the members of our species.

Until then, a The Tomorrow War sequel is already in production. We are looking at an age of propaganda where megacorporations realize that the second-best thing to saving the world is convincing everyone else that you can.

Alex Has Opinions 7/29/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/29/21

Practical Steps To Prepare For Climate Change

In between outrage and hopelessness is a plan.

There is a lot of bad advice concerning climate change. Most of it pertains to what you can do on an individual level to reduce your carbon footprint (e.g., recycle, use less plastic, don’t fly, etc.). I even wrote one of these back in the day about urging people to fly less (be gentle).

This advice isn't all bad, but it individualizes a systemic problem. A third of the world's carbon emissions come from just 20 companies. You should still try to recycle, especially if you belong in a country such as the US that contributes to a disproportionate amount of those emissions, but it's madness to assume that consumer choices alone are going to magic this problem away. Climate change is perpetuated by some of the most powerful people on the planet, and stopping it will require removing them from power.

The enormity of this task causes many people to resort to nihilism, but that's not helpful either. We need practical advice, not simply to mitigate future climate change (an increasingly difficult task), but to deal with the number of carbon emissions we have already signed up for as a species.

This short list will not suddenly make the world better, but it might help you sort out some things when it comes to dealing with the catastrophe that is to come.

Know Your Neighbors

The first thing to consider with climate change is that it's a story of failure. Not just the political failure of our government refusing to act, but a failure of infrastructure. It is a power grid collapsing and leaving a household to face a winter storm with nothing but what it can burn to stay warm. It is a fire raging across a state, cutting homes off from firefighters. It is local governments not giving people the resources to start over after a tragedy, leading to a flood of internally displaced persons in towns and cities across America.

There is a chance that you will be impacted by a climate catastrophe over the next few years (if you haven’t already), and when that happens, public infrastructure will fail. At that moment it will help to have some friends. Not someone on the other side of town or the state, but someone on your street or in your building.

Our society has atomized us so much that many of us do not have a sense of local community. A new study out of Harvard claims that 36% of all Americans report serious loneliness. This isolation makes our response to climate change that much worse. Many of us do not have the connections and community bonds necessary to help us overcome massive disruptions, and it shows when disasters strike.

For example, during heat waves, organizations and governments often recommend checking in on vulnerable persons to see if they need assistance (e.g., seeing if their air conditioning is working, offering to drive them somewhere, etc.). The elderly, in particular, have poorer circulation and are hence more vulnerable to our increasingly warming planet, especially those who live alone. A 2012 study from the CDC reported that when it comes to deaths from excessive heat exposure, “most of those who died were unmarried or living alone,” and climate change is causing that number to rise even more.

A lack of human connection impairs people during moments of crisis. It not only prevents us from knowing the valuable information needed to prepare ourselves for disasters, but also prevents us from pooling our resources together to weather the immediate aftermath. People need more than a plan for climate change. They need a community so that a disaster does not have to be a tragedy someone suffers alone.

Get to know your neighbors (and expand your existing bonds with locals in your area if you have them) because these will be the people who you will have to rely on when the proverbial shit hits the fan. Make a plan to introduce yourself to them. If you haven’t already, knock on their door, say hi, and ask about their days.

Get Used To Less

Many times the way that cutting waste is advertised to westerners is reducing our carbon footprint so that we can do our part in stopping climate change. This idea is not terrible — just because our systems of consumption are awful doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to reduce your waste — but as we have already covered, individual consumer choices are not going to solve climate change. They are especially not going to do anything to mitigate the emissions we have already signed up for as a species.

There is another reason you should try to reduce your consumption, though, and it's because you will have to do so anyway. Climate change, at least in the short term, is going to mean fewer resources. It means less space, food, and all the other luxuries of life. I find it amusing that people have been pointing to shortages in things like lumber and asking when the supply chain will “correct itself.” It’s not. These shortages are the new normal, especially when it comes to food. As the United Nations cautioned several years ago:

“There is no doubt in the evidence and conclusions of more than 1,000 global and regional studies, that a temperature rise of 1 to 2 degrees Celsius will generally mean a loss in yield of a number of crop varieties, both in the tropical and the temperate regions. An increase of 3 to 4 degrees later on in this century will have very severe consequences for global food security and supply”

In the short term, we will have fewer resources, and since our economic system is very inequitable, it will mean most people will have to deal with less. It’s going to be far easier for you if you try to adjust to this future reality now, while you have the training wheels of “society” on, than during roving blackouts and water shortages. Try to change your patterns of consumption. Ask yourself if you really have to throw so much away? Are there items and tools that you can purchase, make, or ask for to supplement the things you do buy? The more you transition away from our fragile, global supply chains, the better.

This request is not one to reinvent the wheel. Poor black, brown, and indigenous people have had to deal with these challenges for centuries. I would look to these communities for knowledge. For starters, check out Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black, or Dina Gilo-Whitaker’s As Long As Grass Grows. There are centuries of wisdom in these texts, generously preserved.

This knowledge has been ignored by larger society at our own peril, and now we will need it more than ever.

Participate in Alternative Economies

Many economists and business leaders like to wax poetically about how the market is very good at adjusting to disruptions like climate change, but if anything, this last decade has taught me that capitalism is very fragile. The entire global economy was disrupted recently because a single container ship got clogged in the Suez Canal. The 1300-foot Ever Given prevented the passage of billions of dollars in goods, forcing ships to redirect around the tip of Africa and elsewhere. That was one disruption, and it exacerbated an already stressed supply change. What happens as this system gets pushed more and more to its breaking point?

Capitalism almost always fails in the face of disaster — supply changes get disrupted, power grids go down, and then very few people give a damn how much money is in a bank account that you cannot even access. I am sure there will still be people trading stocks and cryptocurrencies as the world burns, huddled in bunkers deep underground, but most people will not be in such a privileged position. Even if only for a couple of days or weeks, people will have to exist in a world where capitalism (briefly) no longer exists.

It will benefit you to begin engaging in economies that will survive disruption. The most obvious one is the gift economy, where people give and receive items freely without an expectation of exchange. Gift-giving economics are varied in size and scope from competitive ones where people try to out-give each other to charity to mutual aid, where there is a reciprocal exchange of resources and services for a group or communities mutual benefit.

To that last point, mutual aid is the one that most readily emerges in the wake of disasters. We see it time and time and again whenever calamity strikes. The early 20th century was filled with mutual aid groups, particularly from communities of color, trying to fill in the gaps in government services. Mutual aid societies swelled during the influenza pandemic, and we saw an uptick again with the COVID pandemic. When governments fail to provide their citizens with the necessary resources to survive, more often than not neglecting marginalized people in the process, these citizens are usually forced to step up to take care of themselves.

If you are curious, there are plenty of resources to help get you plugged into an alternative economy. You might want to check out Mutual Aid Hub to see if there is a mutual aid group near you, or just Google it. Other groups that might be engaged with such aid are Rotary Clubs, local charities, or even churches. I would also check out your local Buy Nothing Group to access a simple, online gifting economy.

Engage in (local) Politics

As less and less land and resources become available, there will be a strain on resources. Local politics have always been contentious, but they will get even more so as prosperous towns suddenly have to deal with influxes of internally displaced persons and refugees. The Institute for Economics and Peace claims that we will reach one billion internally displaced persons by 2050.

In many ways, this trend has already started. Tens of millions of people have become displaced the world over, including in the United States as well. In her essay A Climate Dystopia In Northern California, author Naomi Klein described how an influx of displaced persons from Californian wildfires (as well as other, slower disasters) had pushed one college town to resort to draconian measures. The town of Chico, California, moved from having a relatively progressive city council to going red. Within an election cycle, they began enforcing more stringent anti-homelessness measures that swept the unhoused out of the public eye. In 2020, an estimated 20 unhoused people died in Chico due to these policies—in essence, one local town’s city council election literally cost lives.

The political decisions happening on the local level will not only decide the resources allocated for refugees and internally displaced persons, but also resources that you will come to rely on in the days and years ahead. Will companies continue to be able to pollute in your local river? Who can access fish in them? Who will be able to pick and grow food on public land? Will your tax dollars go to sustainable infrastructure and renewables or economic developments that line the pockets of a few?

These have always been pressing questions, but as the hunt for resources becomes more heated in the years ahead, they will become matters of life and death for people not used to grappling with these questions in these terms. We are not going to be able to rely on fragile, global supply chains forever. The resources we have in our region are increasingly going to have to sustain us, and the distribution of these resources is under the purvey of mostly local governments. While some of my readers may have had the privilege to remain oblivious to the goings-on of local politics, that will quickly become less advisable in the future.

For example, governments have always leaned on individuals to access resources such as oil and natural gas. There is a long history of local governments weaponizing the power of “Eminent Domain” (i.e., the government seizing private land and converting it to public use) so that they can build pipelines or even private housing developments. We have no reason to think this policy will not be employed in the future for increasingly more scarce resources such as water and arable land.

Though many state governments have passed laws restricting this type of behavior, it’s doubtful this reticence will hold in a resource-starved world. As space becomes more crowded, businesses will feel the need to develop already owned land, and one of the few ways to do that is through the power of Eminent Domain. There will be immense pressure on local governments, both from the business community and activists seeking to increase affordable housing and other public infrastructure, to use this power. Who gets to wield this and other local powers will be something that will directly impact your day-to-day life, and this fight is still very much up in the air.

What do you know about your local government? Is it a city or town council? A county commission? How many members does it have, and which ones do you like? More importantly, what groups and organizations are petitioning these leaders to fight on your behalf? These are the questions you will need to answer in the months and years ahead or risk having your resources divvied up by others.

Don’t Move Alone

This point is not so much an instruction as it is a warning — if you can help it, do not move by yourself. There is a possibility that many of us will do all of the things I have already mentioned — consume less, become enmeshed in our local communities, participate in alternative economies, engage in local politics, etc. — and will still have to move. Climate change is massive. We cannot prepare for some things as individuals: oceans will rise, regions will burn, and some of us will have to pack our bags as a result.

If you have to move — and the possibility is high — do not move by yourself. The previous era of globalization glamorized the idea of traveling to a new part of the world. It made us believe that we could find a home in any city, even if that were only ever a true fantasy for the rich. Travel became so ingrained in pop culture that for many privileged people, it was part of their personality. Peruse any dating website, and you will see “travel” listed as a favorite interest or activity.

We live in a different world now.

If there is one point you get from this article, it’s that at least for the foreseeable future, we will be living in a more tense world. Fights for resources are getting more pronounced, and xenophobia is increasing worldwide, including in the United States. I pray that we will be able to reverse this trend — all is not lost — but it would be foolish not to be apprehensive about how this new world will treat outsiders, even privileged ones with money.

If you have to move, go someplace where you know people.

If you cannot do that, try to move with people that you do know.

Do not fall into the globalist fantasy that anywhere can be your home. You will fare better as a community than as an individual. The lie of the jet-setting citizen of the world has always been difficult to maintain for everyone, and I suspect it’s going to come crashing down in the next couple of years as xenophobic movements continue to push perceived outsiders out of their communities.

Find Joy In The Small Moments

This next decade is going to suck. I don’t think most people have truly processed the level of change and disruption that will happen in the years ahead. So many people are rushing to “get back to normal” or to “build back better.” They don’t realize that normal, such as it was, is not coming back — and there is a good argument to be made that we shouldn’t return to the conditions killing our ecosystem anyway.

2020, in many ways, was a great training period because every year going forward is going to be like these last few months. It will be an era of political instability, rising tides, burning forests, and constant death all around us. There is no escaping this reality, and although we might push towards a better future yet, the battle to get there will be immensely difficult.

Yet life cannot only be a struggle to survive. If the sole thing you are focused on is subsisting, then it will be a sad life. Take as many breaks as your economic circumstances allow: go to a party with a friend and complain about the world; journey to our shrinking beaches and do laps in the warming water; plan board game nights with your neighbors; crack a joke; dance; have so much fun that you briefly forget that we are all dying.

It’s going to be these fragile moments that sustain you through the hard years ahead. Please take advantage of as many of these moments as you can muster because we might not have that many of them left.

This list is not the most optimistic one that exists when it comes to dealing with climate change. The present state of neglect leaves little room for a rosy picture of changing the world through recycling and reducing plane travel. Humanity might eventually rebound and fix the mistakes that brought us here, but in the meantime, we will have to try to be practical. We are going to need to get to know our community, get involved in local politics, learn to do more with less, participate in alternative economies, and make sure we do not move into new communities where we are strangers, easy to be picked off and blamed by other more xenophobic towns and cities.

Notice that none of these bullet points are telling you to give up. Nor are any of these pieces of advice instructing you to hoard resources in underground bunkers. We should not take on the weight of the world by ourselves. It’s only through community that we have any hope of survival.

Climate change is terrifying because it's a word that tells us rather directly that the world we know is moving on to something else. The climate is changing —not only in terms of our ecosystem, but also politically, spiritually, and maybe even economically. That is scary, but change also brings with it the possibility of a better state of affairs, or at the very least, a less shitty one.

We shouldn’t pretend like things aren’t going to be terrible, but hope is there — if we can harness the change on the horizon.

Alex Has Opinions 7/22/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/22/21

The TV Show ‘Loki’ Gets Fascism All Wrong

The Disney+ show sidesteps fascism in its latest Marvel offering

Loki was a show that tried to cover a lot of things in its six-episode run-time: as with any Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) property, it continued the larger cinematic narrative, specifically the fallout following the end of Avengers: Endgame (2019); it introduced the concept of multiverses; forecasted our next big bad; on top of having a philosophical conversation about if free will even exist alongside nonlinear time. There is a ton to parse, here and not all of these concepts play nicely with one another.

Underneath all of this bluster, however, there is a rather interesting conversation about fascism. The main protagonist interacts with a fascist empire that arguably transcends the enemies of the previous films. We are given a rather visceral example of what fascism can look like, at least initially — something that should be applauded in any film representation when done right.

Unfortunately, Loki very problematically has constructed a narrative where fascism is needed to protect the universe from an even larger threat. This creates a story that undercuts its original premise and leaves the audience with an empathetic portrayal of fascism.

Loki is a show about the titular God of Mischief, on the run from a temporal time agency known as the Time Variance Authority (TVA), which is trying to create “order” across the timeline. The show immediately follows the events of Avengers: End Game, where a version of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in 2012 escapes the clutches of the Avengers and teleports away with the Tesseract.

This version of Loki is quickly captured by the TVA, who label him a “variant” to the “Sacred Timeline” (his teleportation was not “supposed” to happen). They threaten to “prune” him from existence if he does not help time agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) track down another, deadlier Loki (Sophia Di Martino) killing time agents across history. This setup leads to many fun shenanigans across time and space, but it also sets up a dynamic where we have a fascist organization employing a fascist to preserve themselves.

Before we go into that contentious claim, a quick aside on fascism, some will erroneously declare that fascism was a political movement that started and ended in the early 20th century. Fascism, however, has evolved over the decades to incorporate different rhetoric and iconography. These movements are varied, but they are generally united in an ideology centered around nationalism and authoritarianism. As fascist scholar Robert Paxton writes in his book Anatomy of Fascism (2004):

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

The Wikipedia-version of that mouthful of words is a nationalistic regime using extreme violence in the name of stopping some threat to kill others and expand their territorial holdings.

In the show Loki, our protagonist, definitely starts out as a leader with fascist aspirations. This version of Loki just finished trying to take over all of humanity in the film Avengers (2012). He is definitely driven by what scholar Umberto Eco describes in their essay Ur-Fascism (1995) as contempt for the weak. Loki believes that sentient human beings are incapable of making correct decisions and that a strong leader like himself is needed to make society right. “The first and most oppressive lie ever uttered was the song of freedom, “ he tells agent Mobius. “For nearly every living thing, choice breeds shame and uncertainty and regret. There’s a fork in every road, yet the wrong path always taken….”

This sets up an interesting dynamic because Loki is powerless in the high-tech city that the TVA is located inside. We are briefly led to believe that this will be a story of deradicalization as Mobius forces Loki to realize that his worldview is wrong. That deradicalization does happen, but mainly in spite of the TVA rather than because of it. We quickly learn that the TVA is also a fascist-seeming organization, almost a totalitarian one, for it exerts control over nearly all aspects of life. Unlike Loki, though, they are so successful that they actually conquered all of space and time, even if most people are not aware of it.

The TVA is an authoritarian organization steeped in almost religious fervor. It is allegedly ruled by three mythical timekeepers who are immortalized through dogma. The entire hierarchy of this organization flows in one direction, and followers have an unshakeable belief in the mission they serve. “I’m just lucky,” Mobius tells Loki, “that the chaos I emerged into gave me all this…My own glorious purpose. Cause the TVA is my life, and it's real because I believe it's real.” Members of the TVA are true believers. They believe that variants pose a threat that will destroy the sacred timeline, and that they are justified in resorting to drastic methods to preserve their temporal empire (i.e., pruning and resetting).

Members of the TVA are driven by what Umberto Eco would call a “fear of difference.” Their entire organization was created to protect the sacred timeline from any changes whatsoever. They prune all deviations without hesitation. Members of the TVA possess an intense xenophobia for these deviations, which they derogatorily refer to as “variants.” Trials are arranged for variants, but these are sham trials — the accused are not even aware of their offenses until moments before their slated executions.

In fact, the TVA maps over to most of Eco’s famous fourteen points in his essay Ur-Fascism. Members of the TVA are such steadfast traditionalists that they are literally devoted to making sure no changes to the timeline ever happen (i.e., a rejection of modernity). A constant sense of threat governs their lives as they send their soldiers to stop variants that allegedly pose an existential threat to all of reality (i.e., obsession with a plot and life is permanent warfare). They also speak in euphemisms that mask the horrors of what they do on a daily basis: killing someone is referred to as “pruning,” and genociding a timeline is labeled “resetting” it (i.e., Newspeak based off of George Orwell's novel 1984).

Yet, the TVA doesn’t map on to all of Eco’s points. While there are some areas of fascism that the show depicts with pitch-perfect clarity, others are sorely lacking. This absence represents a core problem with how the show treats fascism overall — mostly as an aesthetic divorced from the reality of how fascism actually develops and maintains itself.

The thing about fascism is that it involves buy-in. This blog has referred to it as a “group sport” before because it takes active support from a sizeable portion of the population to pull off. Eco described how fascism relies on an appeal to a collective frustration, usually a frustrated middle class. These are people who do not like their position in life and are urged by the fascist regime to blame a scapegoat that is perceived as powerful but also weak enough to overcome (e.g., the Jews during the Third Reich).

In the show Loki, however, members of the TVA do not hate variants due to some misdirected class, ethnic, or racial resentment. They believe the Time Keepers created them to perform this sole purpose and have unquestioning loyalty in their mission to uphold the sacred timeline. This hatred is logical from their point of view. The TVA is a sort of prefab fascism where a divine power was able to construct it from whole-cloth without having to do any of the manipulation and propaganda that involves bringing over converts to your side.

This setup becomes even more difficult to swallow once we learn that TVA agents were not created by the Time Keepers like we initially thought, but are actually the very variants they fight against. The entire organization was built upon a deception, where thousands of people were “tricked” into being fascists. We can see how this story beat problematically divorces the agents of the TVA from their sickening actions. It’s similar to the myth that the German people were not aware of the horrors that occurred in the concentration camps or that Southerners were oblivious to how slavery operated. It removes their complicity so that we, as the audience, can feel better when they do a turn in the final act.

The revelation that TVA agents are variants in the show leads to a domino effect of dissent once members learn the truth. People like agent Mobius and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) almost immediately defect, abandoning eons of propaganda in a very short period of time. “That’s not going to work out the way you think it is,” Mobius tells TVA High Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) when she tries to call guards to her office, indicating that the truth was enough to cause an open revolt among the rank-and-file of the organization.

The only person who remains loyal seems to be Renslayer, telling Mobius in a final confrontation: “I couldn’t let you get in the way of our mission. It can’t have been for nothing. That’s why I had to prune you.” We are supposed to view Renslayer as a bitter holdout, but in real life, most people under fascism act a lot more like Renslayer when exposed to the truth than Mobius and Hunter B-15. We know enough about human psychology at this point to be painfully aware of how set-in people’s ideologies can become. Germans in the Third Reich did not revolt against their government as the truth of the camps disseminated across society. Many supporters of Donald Trump did not abandon him as he mismanaged the response to a pandemic so badly that hundreds of thousands of people died. Fascism as an ideology has a way of distorting the worldview of supporters so much that they ignore reality — you cannot truth bomb your way out of it.

Worse, the show's narrative is constructed in such a way that the fascism of the TVA is portrayed as almost necessary. In another surprise twist, we learn that there aren’t three Time Keepers at all, but one person who sealed this timeline to stave off an interdimensional war from his other variants. This man, referred to as He Who Remains, tells Loki and another Loki variant named Sylvie that they cannot kill him off or it will lead to an incalculable amount of destruction:

“…You came to kill the devil, right? Well, guess what? I keep you safe. And if you think I’m evil, well, just wait till you meet my variants. And that’s the gambit. Stifling order or cataclysmic chaos. You may hate the dictator, but something far worse is gonna fill that void if you depose of him. I’ve lived a million lifetimes. I’ve gone through every scenario. This is the only way. The TVA, it works.”

It’s floated by Sylvie, who has spent her entire life running away from the TVA, that He Who Remains might be lying, but her well-warranted skepticism is proved unfounded. The last scene of the show is of our Loki in another timeline staring at an imposing statue of a He Who Remains variant (probably Kang the Conqueror), setting up this big bad for a future movie. The mechanics of this universe seem to imply that the fascism of He Who Remains was better than the total war that this new invader will bring.

This final twist is frustrating because, despite what the show is trying to claim, we have no idea if this future suffering will be worse than the countless genocides this current regime has already perpetrated. Eons of reset timelines have caused the deaths of an unknowable number of people, and it’s hard to compare that fate with the unknowable number of deaths this invader will bring about. You can’t really compare two limitless infinities. It’s an artificial Catch-22 that exists for no other reason other than to heighten suspense, and as a result, we end up feeling sympathy for the decisions of a malicious fascist.

This judgment call makes a mediocre portrayal of fascism into one that is quite frustrating. When the rules of your story — something that is made up — validate the oppression of an entire plane of reality, it’s fair to scrutinize those creative decisions.

Loki was advertised as a fun romp. There was an expectation that it would be in the vein of Thor Ragnorack (2017) or Ant-Man (2015). No one was expecting a story about fascism and free will, and that ambition is admirable, even if the end product was not very coherent. The fact that the series decided to tackle something darker and edgier was not inherently problematic, but it's very clear that its initial premise of variants struggling against a fascist empire was swept away in the last couple of episodes so that they could set up the franchise’s big bad.

We ended up with a very distorted portrayal of fascism, one where it's depicted as simultaneously both bad and necessary. We are not supposed to like the antics of He Who Remains and Renslayer’s fascism, but in much the same way fans applauded Thanos for his Malthusian ecoterrorism, we understand that there is a cold logic to it that we can empathize with.

It is “rational” fascism.

Fascism, however, is not “logical.” It is often incoherent, defying the utilitarian logic that He Who Remains allegedly represents. Germans did not scapegoat Jews, and Trump supporters did not scapegoat immigrants because such decisions were rational responses to the wealth inequality and white supremacy plaguing their respective countries. They were misdirected resentments egged on by nationalistic and authoritarian movements. Our media does us a disservice when it suggests otherwise. It’s very unsettling that Loki created a narrative that centers on a fascist organization, and yet has that fascism be justified by the “plot.”

Less cowardly media would be willing to tell the viewer that He Who Remains was lying. It would validate Sylvie's well-earned skepticism in the fascist organization that has been hunting her (and murdering countless others) for her entire life, but that would make the fascist sympathizers in the audience uncomfortable.

What does that say about our media when that is considered middle ground?

Alex Has Opinions 7/20/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/20/21

Are You Even A Capitalist, Bro?

A primer about what the words capitalist and capitalism even mean

Bro, if you have ever been in a heated conversation online, you’ve probably had a cringe-worthy debate defining political terms like socialism or capitalism. “[Socialism] Who’s Behind It, Why It’s Evil, and How To Stop It” reads the subheader for Dinesh D’Souza’s 2020 book United States of Socialism. “Socialism is when the government does stuff,” academic Richard D. Wolff infamously said at a talk. People have a lot of opinions on how we should structure our government, and as we can see, they can get very rough.

However, it quickly becomes apparent that most people simply do not know what these words mean. They are relying on a rhetorical boogeyman to blame all the world's problems on the hated ideological framework of their choice. As not chill politician Margaret Thatcher once said, “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.” Note she said this three years before she became British prime minister and used the powers of her office to implement policies that worsened wealth inequality overall. She was not interested in talking about economic systems as much as she was defining an enemy.

Nowhere does this ignorance become more obvious than with self-described “capitalists” who claim to be so, despite not actually being capitalists at all. Many people seem to be starting fights on the Internet (and in real life) to support a class of people they falsely believe themselves to be a part of, and we need to examine what that says about us as a people.

Now bro, before you scroll down to the bottom of this article to write an epic response, let’s define what capitalist and capitalism even mean. A lot of false definitions of capitalism will define it as trade (i.e., two people or entities engaged in the buying and selling of goods and services). “Capitalism has always existed in one form or another,” one Reddit user posted. “…the concept of ownership and economic markets has always existed even without modern currencies.”

While it’s true that humans have been engaged in trade for thousands (possibly even hundreds of thousands) of years, capitalism is a little more complex than a person hawking their wares at a marketplace. It is an economic system where private individuals, rather than governments or kings, control most of a society’s trade and profits. These private individuals are what we mean when we talk about “capitalists.” These are people who own capital (e.g., machinery, tools, equipment, buildings, railways, and all means of transport and communication, raw materials, people, etc., ), or what based leftists may refer to as “the means of production,” which then are used in the creation of goods and services purchased by consumers.

That’s a lot of jargon that basically means capitalists own the stuff, and people used to make the things that we will buy.

This way of thinking seems like second nature to us now, but capitalism is a very young economic system that has already had several iterations. Some bros will refer to mercantilism (roughly from 1400 CE to the late 1700s), or a country using protectionism and imperialism to maximize their exports and minimize their imports, as the origin of capitalism. Other chill dudes might point to the Dutch Republic (1588 to 1795 CE), more specifically joint-stock companies like the Dutch East India Company, as a proper origin. Many more begin the story in the industrialization of the United Kingdom and the United States (and then the world) starting in the 1800s. Even if we are going by the most conservative estimate here, we are still talking about less than seven hundred years. Not that long when compared to the roughly twelve thousand years of human civilization. Do the math, dude or dudette.

In western Europe, the previous era of economic development was known as feudalism. It was where land was divided up among the nobility and church and given to vassals in exchange for political and military support. Some merchants existed — selling and trading goods in whatever market would fetch the highest price— but most people in these polities were peasants who worked said land in exchange for protection. The virtues of business and financing that we today consider the bedrock of capitalist society were not well-accepted back then. Money-lending, in particular, was viewed quite negatively by some elements of European society. In England, for example, a Church prohibition on “usury” in the 1300s caused many lenders to conceal the interest charged in local loans. It would take centuries for the attitudes of the public to change into what we recognize today.

Now, mate, it also bears noting that we are, of course, speaking in broad strokes here. No place around the world has ever had one unified economic system. There have always been those that live outside the maps drawn by emperors, presidents, generals, monarchs, and High School Football Coaches. We have seen a lot of subsistence farming (i.e., people raising crops for personal consumption rather than trade) throughout history, including within the United States. In fact, subsistence farming continues to the present in all sorts of places around the world.

Even today, there is no purely capitalist economy. The United States is a “Mixed Economy” where the government fully or partially controls many industries such as defense, education, and infrastructure. The line between the private and the public sector is not always very clear-cut either, with many successful capitalists relying on the government for their wealth. According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times, Elon Musk’s various companies have drawn upon billions of dollars in government subsidies. He may be a Twitter savant, but he didn’t earn his billions without some help from Uncle Sam. The same can be said for Amazon, Google, and Facebook. In fact, most major US companies have enjoyed government subsidies at one point or another and continue to do so.

You may very well support this system — I don’t judge my bros — but something to make clear is that you are most likely not a capitalist within it. If you do not make the majority of wealth through capital (again, the things and people used to make the stuff we buy), then you are not a capitalist. Truthfully, only a tiny minority of humans in our system will ever be full-fledged capitalists. Class mobility has shrunk dramatically in recent years, and the situation does not seem to be improving.

What are you then, my man or manette?

Well, if you make your money by performing labor for someone else (we non-capitalists know this as a job) or you rely on someone who does (a spouse, child, student, etc.), then you would fall within the working class. Members of the working class are people who must rent out their labor — either to capitalists, other workers, and sometimes both — to subsist. If you or your loved one cannot ever stop renting your labor to others, then you are not a capitalist — you are a worker.

Some workers have to work all their lives. Others live in chill countries that provide a more robust safety net that subsidies their wages (and consequently the wages capitalists have to pay them). Whether you earn a small income or a large one, however, most of us were born into the working-class and, at the risk of sounding like a total bummer, we will most likely die as members of the working-class, especially in America where so many of us work into old age (totally not chill).

The conversation from here usually devolves into whether this divide between workers and capitalists is based or cringe. Capitalists would say that they provide innovation and greater inefficiency. Marxists would claim that capitalists are extracting the full value from the labor of the workers they hire. There is a lot of nuance between these two poles of thought, and they have been discussed in-depth elsewhere. If you want content that doesn’t require too much work to absorb, check out the based Philosophy Tube video Work (or, the 5 jobs I had before YouTube).

I am more concerned, however, with why so many people do not understand what capitalists even are and what that says about us as a society.

Americans have a weird disconnect when it comes to wealth and poverty. America has a deep mythos about meritocracy (e.g., the American Dream, and all that). We basically think hard work makes people successful, and so we tie our ability to earn wealth into our own value as human beings—the exact opposite of taking a chill pill. The divide between capitalists and members of the working class is often obscured by our own shame of not living up to that standard.

Most Americans don’t consider themselves workers, capitalists, lower-class, or upper-class, but middle-class — a mythical, everchanging center that falls between the wealthy and the working-class. A 2015 Pew Research poll found that 9 out of 10 Americans consider themselves middle-class. Another poll in 2018 had that number up at 70%. This perception is weird given how frickin’ unequal everything is in America. Most Americans don’t make a whole lot of money. Nearly half of working Americans work in low-wage jobs that are not enough to pay for their living expenses.

Capitalists also have this problem but in reverse. They don’t think they're in the upper-class and instead will cling to the middle-class label. A 2019 Ameriprise Financial Study, for example, found that a majority of people with one million dollars in assets or more did not consider themselves to be wealthy. As Barry Davret writes in Medium:

“Today, I’m what you’d call a middle-class millionaire. When I add up assets and subtract liabilities, the net balance exceeds the mythical threshold, but you’d never know it from my lifestyle. My house looks like a generic old home you’d find in Anytown, USA…The rest of my life mirrors common middle-class challenges: paying a mortgage, worrying about college for my kids, and nervously peeking at my credit card and bank account balances once a week.”

Barry Davret is calling himself middle-class based on an aesthetic, and not so much on comparing himself to the material conditions of the rest of America. He is an influencer with tens of thousands of followers who also invests in stock and other financial assets. Most “middle-class” people cannot generate that type of capital at the scale he is talking about. In fact, one comparison from Pew Research places anyone who makes $145,500 or higher (plus or minus regional differences in cost of living) in the upper class. Barry, middle class, you are not, bro.

As we can see, Americans are weird with the concept of class and wealth. In fact, as a general rule, Americans are uncomfortable with disclosing how much they make, and this bites many of us in the keister when it comes to things like salary negotiations. One contributing factor for why salary discrepancies exist in this country, particularly racial and gendered ones, is because people are not actively aware of how much their peers make. We don’t talk about it because money makes many Americans uncomfortable, and then we don’t know what to ask for (and capitalists don’t tell us) when selling our labor.

This taboo, however, is by no means universal everywhere. The writer Joe Pinsker gave one entertaining example in The Atlantic about how some cultures can be refreshingly direct, writing:

“Kimberly Chong, an anthropology lecturer at University College London, told me that when she studied the office of an American consulting firm in China, the mostly Chinese consultants “freely shared information about how much they earned with each other and also felt emboldened to ask senior executives how much they earned.” To the frustration of management, this made it difficult to sustain the pay differentials that are common at American companies.”

Pinsker, bro, “pay differentials” is a funny way of saying that these businesses are “willfully riping their workers off.”

We are generally in the dark when it comes to how much our peers make, leading to these perceptual bubbles. Working-class Americans are ashamed to admit that many of them are not part of that mythical middle-class and are being failed by society at large. Rich Americans, meanwhile, are comparing themselves to other rich people and don’t realize (or simply don't care) how little everyone else is making. There is a lot of shame over class in the United States. We are so deadset on internalizing all of society’s failings that we effectively try to pretend like class doesn’t exist, and if there is something a bro shouldn’t be, it’s in denial. This confusion leads to situations where a lot of people are fighting against their own class interests.

As an example, it’s not simply the rich who oppose unions. Despite high support from the public, as well as ample evidence that unions increase benefits and salaries, there is often a hesitancy from some workers to engage with new unions. “Everything they say they want from a union, we’ve already got by working directly with Amazon,” one worker remarked recently of their decision not to support a new union at an Amazon warehouse. Not every union is perfect, by any stretch of the bro-tastic imagination, but to think that you will have better bargaining power alone than alongside your other workers' ties into that belief of meritocracy we were talking about earlier. A lot of people still think that work is all they need. “I work hard here, and I think I’ll be rewarded for that,” said another worker of her decision also to vote no.

As we can see, this refusal to acknowledge what class we even are leads to tangible harm. It muddies the waters so that we don’t recognize where our interests lie. Most Americans lack what some based bros might describe as “class consciousness” or an understanding of where they are on the economic hierarchy.

Instead, we have a system where everyone thinks they are valued, and very few are.

There is no universal agreement on how to deal with this problem of class in America. Solutions run the gamut from education and awareness to passing reforms so capitalists cannot extract and hoard as much wealth to getting rid of capitalists entirely. The point of this article is not to convince you of a solution but rather to have you understand your position in this hierarchy.

You may believe in the ideology of capitalism (again, this article is not seeking to judge you for believing in the dominant ideology on the planet), but unless the majority of your wealth is earned from capital (i.e., stocks, bonds, commodities, capital goods, a business you own, cryptocurrency, etc.), not your labor, then you are not a capitalist. Just as peasants who support the monarchy are not kings, very few people who support capitalism are capitalists. You are a worker. You have always been a member of the working class, and you will most likely die a worker.

What you do with that information is up to you, bro.

Alex Has Opinions 7/18/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/18/21

Everyone Got The Movie ‘The Hunt’ Wrong

The political satire about liberals hunting conservatives has more to say than culture war shenanigans.

The movie The Hunt (2020) was controversial before it even aired. The social commentary about liberals hunting conservatives garnered criticism from far-right pundits like former president Donald Trump. It was pulled from its initial release in 2019 following the mass shootings in Gilroy, Calif., El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, and then aired during the pandemic when we all had more to worry about than a movie being insensitive.

As political satire, The Hunt is a story that, from start to finish, cautions against “political extremism.” This straightforward, admittedly reductive political commentary is nothing we haven’t seen before (see Braindead), but underneath the bluster is a rather insightful message about how politics is a game for the wealthy. While the creative team behind this film most likely didn’t intend to focus on class, we end up getting a message about one working-class woman struggling against a group of wealthy elites.

Based loosely on The Most Dangerous Game (1924), the plot is quite simply about a cadre of rich liberals capturing a group of conservatives that they drop into an unknown location to hunt for sport. Many of the victims quickly suspect they are part of a well-known conspiracy in conservative circles called “Manorgate,” which is an Internet rumor about this very scenario that allegedly happens every year, and in a certain respect, they are (more on this later). However, this realization doesn’t help them as they are killed by the likes of spiked pits, arrows, and cyanide-powdered donuts.

The narrative doesn’t have too much sympathy for either side of the alleged political spectrum. The deaths of liberals and conservatives alike are gleefully framed in ways that are as visually interesting as they are shocking. For example, near the beginning of the film, we are shown a perky blonde woman (Emma Roberts) who fits the archetype of many conservative figures like Tomi Lahren. At one point, as she is navigating a death arena, she narrowly dodges sniper fire. “That almost hit me,” she gasps before her head immediately explodes from gunfire. By killing off the type of person who, in another film, would be the protagonist, this scene tells you that this movie will take no prisoners. That it’s not interested in favoring the darlings on either the “left or the right.”

This irreverence suggests that the movie is favoring the political “center.” We see this textually supported in the film’s protagonist Crystal Creasey (Betty Gilpin), who goes the entire film not really offering up her political ideology, even when it might directly impact her life. When asked if she’s interested in understanding why people are trying to kill her, Crystal responds: “They're trying to kill me. I don’t give a shit why.” She is framed, for all intents and purposes, as apolitical.

Yet, she isn’t just another passive figure in the liberal death arena. Crystal looks damn cool fighting through it. The way she MacGyvers, her way through the death traps of these rich elites, often seeming like she is the only smart person in the room. We are very clearly supposed to trust her logic and opinions, and given that she’s the sole “contestant” who ends up surviving The Hunt, it's quite clear that she’s our moral center as well.

We see this preference for the political center indicated by the director of the film Craig Zobel, who wrote to Variety: “Our ambition was to poke at both sides of the aisle equally. We seek to entertain and unify, not enrage and divide. It is up to the viewers to decide what their takeaway will be.” This response is obviously a nonanswer. We can understand why it’s a position that might be offensive to those who consider the asymmetrical polarization that has overtaken the Republican party to be worse than the “wokescolding” that permeates some leftist and liberal circles. In the words of Peter Debruge, also from Variety:

“The danger of “The Hunt” isn’t that the project will inspire copycat behavior (the premise is too far-fetched for that), but rather that it drives a recklessly combustible wedge into the tinderbox of extreme partisanship, creating a false equivalency between, say, Whole Foods-shopping white-collar liberals and racist, conspiracy-minded right-wingers.”

This perspective is valid; however, we will soon see that The Hunt accidentally provides a far more nuanced depiction than “moderates” good, “extremism” bad. There is an unintended message broadcasted here that has everything to do with why Crystal is “apolitical” and what her politics actually are in the film.

The thing about politics is that no one is really apolitical — everyone has opinions. While we don’t get many stated political opinions from Crystal, we are repeatedly shown her positions. Crystal is insanely practical and down-to-Earth. She hilariously figures out that two rich liberals are faking their characters based on the price of cigarettes in Arkansaw. She seems to have spent her life just trying to survive, and she doesn’t have the time to engage in the bs both her peers on the left and the right do in the film. She has to get the job done and values “hard work” and “common sense.” In other words, she is coded as a member of the working class, specifically the white working class.

Compare Crystal’s positive traits (e.g., resourcefulness and common sense) to the negative ones of the liberal elite. The film certainly takes a few superficial jabs at cancel culture and political correctness (jokes that often don’t quite land, in my opinion), but the thing that mostly demonizes them is their immense impracticality: these people barely know how to use the weapons they are firing; they hired a movie star actor to train them how to fight; one of them even leaves a bunker during the middle of a fight to pee. This hunt is not a matter of life or death to them but a game.

The showdown between Crystal and the liberal leader Athena Stone (Hilary Swank) doesn’t focus on a grand debate over ideology. Athena takes the time to instead monologue about how to make the best grilled cheese (hint — it allegedly involves Gruyere). She then reads Crystal’s bio, judging her for having a broken home, using welfare, and not being able to get a job.

“Crystal May Creasey. Born in Missippi, Whites Crossing. Fitting. Dropped out of school at 12, right around the time your daddy was killed by the police when they raided the methamphetamine lab. Your mother joined him soon after that — overdose. Probably the last batch of Daddy’s stuff. Romantic…After your mom died you bounced from part time job to part time job, to welfare and back. More times than I can count honestly. The only consistency was your inability to stay employed.”

These insults say far more about Athena’s class resentment towards the poor than anything about her being on the left. A rich Republican could have equally said this monologue, the words unchanged.

In fact, the thing that prompted these rich liberals to go on a homicidal rampage in the first place was that initial “manorgate” rumor. It was a joke they said once on a text message thread — not something that, at the time, was real. The message was then leaked to the public, causing a scandal that led them to lose their jobs and positions in high society.

It was the loss of some of their status that led to this sick plan, not actually a political motivation. They enacted “manorgate” for real as a form of revenge. The politics were simply a rationalization these rich people used to feel better about themselves. Most of the liberals in the film even risked death by posing as elaborate characters to attempt to extract an apology from the people they were trying to kill. It had nothing to do about politics and everything about their egos.

This reading even changes the context for how we see the political correctness jokes throughout the film. These liberals are not coded as terrible for hating racism or talking about appropriation. It's because they are utterly detached from reality, perceiving politics as a game of sport (quite literally in this case) rather than an institution of power that affects people's lives. They see things like anti-racism as the language of respectability. In one chilling scene, they try to rationalize including a Black Conservative in the hunt so that it’s not “problematic.” They are so detached from the material conditions surrounding these political fights that they don’t understand what the words they are saying even mean.

In the end, we learn that Crystal isn’t even one of the intended “deplorables.” She was picked up by mistake. “You got the wrong Crystal,” she informs Athena shortly before their fight. And so the movie doesn't end up being a fight between the left and right at all, but one woman struggling to survive against the whims of the rich.

When Crystal finally succeeds in her fight against Athena, she patches up her injuries and heads to the plane these rich people arrived in during the start of the film. The workers there are in shock. “Oh shit,” the flight attendant gasps. They are briefly worried that Crystal will enact revenge on them for all the events that unfolded in the film.

This fear is unfounded, however, as Crystal holds no animosity towards them. “The, uh assholes you work for tried to kill me, so I killed them instead,” she says nonchalantly. The movie then ends cutely with the flight attendant, who has never had the caviar she serves on the plane before because she’s “not supposed to,” being given some to eat by Crystal. They barely know each other, but they are bonded by class, and that’s something Crystal seems to recognize instinctually.

There is clearly a class element that gets lost in the debate in this movie — one that I don’t think was intentional. Based on how writers Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse talk about this film, they most likely didn’t intend to make class a focus at all. They wanted the audience to sympathize with Crystal, and making her working class was the quickest way to do that, but by centering a working-class woman against a cadre of wealthy elites, that narrative is textually there.

Regardless of someone’s political affiliation, politics is often treated as a game by those in power. The rich wage fights that are utterly detached from the reality of everyday people, and it leads to a distorted worldview. It's great to see that absurdity reflected in a film, even if only by accident.

Alex Has Opinions 7/12/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/12/21

Gettr: The Conservative Twitter That Is Already Attracting the Worst Kinds Of People

The story of Gettr, Steve Bannon, gay erotica, and trolls

Gettr launched in the public eye on July 4th to much fanfare. The press immediately picked up on the story with gusto. “Team Trump quietly launches new social media platform,” wrote Politico on July 1st. The initial welcome post on the site has over 150,000 comments, and the Gettr app has quickly been downloaded millions of times the world over.

Immediately, however, it was clear that there were problems. The product that rolled out was confusing and eerily similar to Twitter. It was plagued with trolls and lax security easily exploited by said trolls. Worst of all, it attracted the very types of people it intended to — far-right reactionaries hell-bent on carving out space for themselves on the internet.

There are many problems with this app, some of which are sure to plague any startup venture this political in nature. Since Gettr was pitched to the public as an alternative social media platform for conservatives (the app’s slogan is literally “The Free Speech Network”), right from the start, it was plagued by trolls looking to trigger the intended user base.

That welcome comment we referred to earlier had far more comments than likes or reposts — a practice referred to in Twitter culture as “ratioing.” This is when people drag a post with funny or negative comments hoping that they will overtake all other engagement. When we peruse that comment section of that initial post, among the routine thank yous and spam, many posts are devoted to gay erotica and homoerotic anime.

In fact, trolls are posting this type of content all over the site. As David Gilbert writes in Vice’s Motherboard: “Unfortunately, whatever protections the site has in place to filter out such content aren’t working right now, and as a result, one of Gettr’s biggest potential user bases has sworn off the platform after it was flooded with porn and ‘bad words.’”

Some of these trolls (or social justice activists, depending on your perspective) have performed far more serious sabotage than just posting some salacious pictures. Several high-profile accounts were almost immediately hacked by a user who redirected people to their Twitter handle, along with the statement “free Palestine.”

Gettr has many unaddressed security concerns and appears to have lifted much of its code directly from Twitter. More of these hacks will likely continue in the future, especially since the foundation of this app is so shoddy.

However, one of the largest business problems for the platform is that, as of right now, the former 45th President of the U.S. is not on it. Donald Trump does not appear to be directly linked to the project.

Jason Miller, a former spokesman for Trump during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, is one of the forces behind the site, and he has so far been unsuccessful in getting his boss’s support. He claims that he has Trump’s former Twitter handle reserved for him, and yet the President still seems committed to working on some unidentified project of his own.

This lack of the former president has hilariously led to a situation where multiple accounts are competing to be the top “real” Donald Trump account. One of them — “@presDonaldTrump” — has nearly 100,000 followers at the time of writing this article. We know this account is fake because, unlike the white “v” and red background given to Gettr’s verified accounts, this account is unverified, placing a fake checkmark reminiscent of verified Twitter accounts.

And yet, despite the deception being rather obvious, @presDonaldTrump still posts consistent content that makes it seem like they are real. “Will be speaking live about our First Amendment Rights at my Bedminster golf club in New Jersey in 2 hours…” they posted on July 7th to thousands of likes.

Sometimes the interactions between these fake accounts can get hilariously pointed. “look at this f@cking liar,” the user @pres_trump wrote of user @DJT45Official. The former is a satire account poking fun at the obviously fake @DJT45Official account, which has less than 500 followers. There are a lot of these fake accounts circulating in the early days of Gettr. It’s easy to find fake or parody accounts of Dave Rubin, the video game platform Steam, and even Gettr’s own verification handle.

This is not to say that anything flies on the platform (although much does). As is standard on many platforms nowadays, keywords such as the n-word and “nazi” are hidden from search results. These efforts, however, seem less to do with removing hatred on the site and more about keeping on the good side of Apple and Google so they can remain on their app stores.

Gettr takes a very hands-off approach to content moderation. While Gettr reserves the right to modify or delete content in its Community Guidelines, it explicitly emphasizes that it does not “have any obligation to.”

As a result of this lax stance, the platform also attracts the very people it’s intended to — far-right conservatives. Among typical conservative pundits like Ben Carson and Dinesh D’Souza, are far-right fascist figures who have tentatively started to make Gettr their home.

Director of the anti-Muslim hate group Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer, has established a small presence here, using it as a backup repository for their Twitter. I also see small accounts for hate groups such as the Asatru Folk Assembly and the Proud Boys.

Additionally, the fascist Steve Bannon was verified on the platform as well as his podcast The War Room. “Speak truth to power on the Twitter Killer,” Bannon posted on July 4th, referencing a comment by xenophobic commentator Peter Navarro encouraging people to start downloading Gettr. Bannon, a man, banned on Twitter and YouTube, has mostly kept his account to reposting episodes of The War Room, but he may be directly involved with this project behind the scenes.

According to Miller, the family foundation of exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, who co-owns G-TV Media Group with Bannon, allegedly contributed seed money to the app. However, there is evidence that this may not be true (or at least not the whole truth). Bannon and Guo seem to have been involved in building this app from the get-go.

According to reporting from Politico, the app appears to have initially been an anti-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) platform that was then retooled as a pro-Trump one. In the words of reporter Tina Nguyen: “A POLITICO review reveals that prior to it being revealed on Thursday, GETTR had existed for nearly a year as a Chinese-language social media network linked to Guo and G-TV Media, and on which anti-CCP content had been promoted on a regular basis.”

The app has now pivoted to pro-Trump content, but it was always going to exist somewhere in the proto-fascist or fascist ecosystem. Since its inception, the G-TV Media Group is an organization that has notoriously been plagued by accusations of fraud, with a federal probe into the company initiating just last year.

Guo has been described as being at the head of a vast disinformation network. We have every indication that that energy will continue with this latest venture as well. Bannon and Guo clearly wanted to provide members of the alt-right a space to avoid the alleged “persecution” they claim exists on other social media apps.

As of right now, there doesn’t seem to be any major fascist organizing on the platform. The app is still growing, and most people are setting up their accounts and feeling things out, but the potential for extremist activity is very much there.

We don’t know what will happen to Gettr as it evolves in the days and months ahead. There are some pain points that could cause it to stagnate or fail completely.

Like Parler before it, Gettr could get pulled from Google or Apple app stores. It will have to manage a balancing act between the “free speech” it desires to maintain and the tech industry’s standards surrounding hate speech and violence. Many businesses also just fail. There are countless dead social media sites out there, littering the virtual graveyard.

It’s also possible, though, for Gettr to become a permanent fixture in the conservative media ecosystem. Its growth thus far has been explosive. As of right now, it remains on the top free apps list in the Google app store for one of the most downloaded applications in the past few days.

We do not know what this app will become, but given the large and growing alt-right presence on Gettr, it is definitely worth monitoring. Hatred always is.

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

The Conservative Conspiracy Theory About A Supreme Court Coup

Inside a conservative nonprofit’s attempt to ‘astroturf’ the fear of a Democratic takeover of the Supreme Court

If you have been on YouTube recently, you might have noticed a very peculiar ad. “Political elites from the radical left want to overthrow the Supreme Court,” an imposing voice booms. “The cost would not only be our founding principles but our civil liberties as we know them.” The ad claims that a Supreme Court “coup” is underway and that Americans must be vigilant to stop radical leftists from overtaking the country.

This hysteria is very clearly not true on multiple levels that we will go into in more detail later on. The left is nowhere near capturing any federal branch of government, let alone one as recalcitrant as the Supreme Court. These ads are not about a real threat to America, but rather signal a concerted effort from one overly litigious nonprofit to fire up the conservative base so that it can rake in plenty of dollars in donations.

Right off the back, I want to clarify several points about this alleged “Supreme Court coup.”

Firstly, adding more seats to the Supreme Court via legislation isn’t a coup. A coup is when power is seized or displaced from the existing executive authority. This means a transition of power that is either illegal or “extra-legal” (i.e., goes beyond extraordinary measures included in the country’s constitution or body of laws, such as declaring a permanent state of emergency). The Cline Center for Democracy has defined 12 different categories of coups ranging from the military seizing power (i.e., a military coup) to the existing executive taking extreme measures to eliminate the power of their opposition (i.e., an autocoup), and none of these categories fit this current situation very well.

You would have to have a pretty ignorant reading of the law to assume that Congress changing the court's composition constitutes a coup. The number of seats in the Supreme Court is dictated by Congress, arguably as a constitutional check on the judiciary from the legislature. It would not only be constitutional to change the number of justices, but it historically has happened before. Congress established the Supreme Court in the Judiciary Act of 1789, originally with six justices. Since then, the number of seats has shifted six times, settling on nine justices, 80 years later in 1869.

Changes to the Court’s composition may not have happened in over 150 years, but something being irregular is not the same as something being illegal or even unconstitutional. No one is proposing that the Democratic Party remove the existing justices by force or bar Republican justices from serving on the Court. They are proposing the political majority in Congress, elected by the people of the United States, vote on a law to amend something that they are constitutionally permitted to do.

Secondly, this entire conversation is academic because Congress is nowhere near adding seats to the Supreme Court. Thanks to conservative Democrats such as Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrat majority can barely pass an increase to the minimum wage, let alone distorting the laws of the land to prevent Republicans from holding power. The image presented in this ad is hyperbolic, at best, and far better describes the Republican Party’s efforts to suppress voter turnout.

So what’s brought on this Supreme Court panic showing up in your YouTube feed?

The Biden Administration has created a 36 member commission to study the debate around reforming the Supreme Court. They publicly met for the first time in May of 2021 and are expected to release a report sometime in August. These findings will not be binding in any way. Sadly, there has been a long history of presidents convening commissions to study issues they have no intention of fighting for politically. There is a remote chance this study might incite more serious political reform, but given the composition of the Senate, it’s more than likely to lead nowhere.

Conservatives are playing into the mostly unfounded fear that this commission will be used as a pretext to expand the number of seats in the Supreme Court via legislation (sometimes pejoratively referred to as “court-packing”). Again, this decision is legal and will probably not happen because of the previously aforementioned conservative Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. However, something being unrealistic hasn’t stopped conservatives from making a big deal out of it (see, as an example, the debate on Critical Race Theory).

Specifically, these ads come from the First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal nonprofit founded by lawyer Kelly Shackelford. This organization is infamous for fighting for “religious liberty” cases, a term that sadly often translates to people trying to impose their religion in secular spaces or using religion to discriminate against marginalized people. Examples of the organizations' caseload include representing a high school football coach, who was dismissed after he refused to stop praying at the 50-yard line after games, and Melissa and Aaron Klein, owners of an Oregon cake shop that in 2013 refused to do a cake tasting for a same-sex couple. All of these cases are highly sensationalized, tending to attract the attention of conservative media.

We do not know who funds First Liberty because they do not disclose their funders, but according to their 2019 filing from ProPublica, they get most of their revenue from individual donations and grants — a large portion of which seemed to come from funds likes the Schwab Charitable Fund, the National Christian Charitable Foundation, and the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund. These funds facilitate these donations, but it's the donors themselves who are making the individual decision to donate to First Liberty. This fact implies that First Liberty might actually rely on individual supporters for a chunk of their revenue.

This need to reach out to small-time funders ties directly into their content media strategy. The content they put out is all about creating meaningless conflicts in the culture wars. First Liberty releases hyperbolic, fearmongering videos and ads regularly so that they can drum up support (and money) from triggered conservatives.

In one recent video titled Marxism in the Military?, they interview a former Lt. Col. Allen West, who discusses “the creeping ideologies that are infecting our U.S. Military.” The video does not provide viewers with a serious way to combat this alleged “Marxism,” but an option to donate to First Liberty does periodically pop up onto the screen. “Donate: Text First to 474747,” the video asks as the two men drone on about an activity they are allegedly very concerned about but also not concerned enough to fight for a specific policy.

It’s all bluster and no substance. This “SupremeCoup” is not a legitimate political concern but an obvious fundraising tactic. The original “Supreme Coup” ad doesn’t give you tools to contact political leaders or fight for a specific law, but instead to the website supremecoup.com. The first thing that happens on the microsite is a popup asking you to take a heavily biased survey which, once completed, redirects you to a page that asks you for a one-time or recurring donation.

This isn’t a tactic unique to this organization. “Surveys” are a common fundraising tool used by both conservative and liberal organizations. However, it does speak to how this is a non-issue. If a coup were actually on the horizon, the only organization talking about it would not be trying to raise money first and create political change second. This conspiracy theory is all about “astroturfing” outrage over a nonissue so that this one organization can continue funding its “religious freedom” vanity projects.

Conservatives in US politics love exaggerating issues so that they can paint themselves as victims. They control so much political power — both in terms of people in political office and agenda-setting — and yet they still perpetuate these outlandish conspiracy theories about Democrats conspiring to take power from them.

Democrats have no interest in overthrowing the Supreme Court or really usurping political power in the same way Republicans do (an article for another time). If Democrats were halfway competent, Conservatives would not have all this time on their hands to be inventing fake plots against them. They would be playing defense like the rest of us. It reflects their ingrained privilege and power that they can create such an outlandish narrative utterly divorced from our material reality.

It’s too early to tell if this narrative will catch on in the wider conservative media apparatus (First Liberty’s bank account certainly wants it too). It could very well be something that dies soon, replaced by some other absurd battle in the culture wars. Yet, given that the commission will not release their report for another month or so, we should expect some level of buildup over the next couple of weeks.

It may not be a real threat, but reality has nothing to do with conservative anxiety.

Alex Has Opinions 7/3/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/3/21

The Frustrating Queerbaiting in Disney Pixar’s ‘Luca’

The queer community deserves more than subtext.

Disney released the animated film Luca around the world in late June during the height of Pride month. It’s a movie that features two prepubescent boys in the Italian countryside. They have an incident that prompts them to leave home, sending them on a journey of self-discovery. The film is fairly standard in the coming-of-age genre. You are probably well familiar with the drill at this point.

Since some of the themes in the film focus on hiding your identity and accepting who you are, a lot of queer viewers have picked up on what they perceive to be a queer allegory. Articles such as Richard Lawson’s “Is Luca Pixar’s First Gay Movie? Maybe” have populated the Internet speculating on whether this is one of Disney’s first “gay” characters in a mainstream release (the show Andi Mack takes that title on the Disney Channel). Yet, the fact that this queer interpretation is only subtext has some people frustrated by what they perceive to be queerbaiting.

The problem here, however, is far more systemic and insidious than a single film. Disney does not care about its queer viewers . We are so starved for representation that we are willing to see it where it’s frankly not there.

This conversation naturally asks us to define what queerbaiting even is in the context of media. For our purposes, it’s when a franchise purposefully creates cues that can be picked up on by the greater LGBTQIA2+ community but can easily be discredited by the director or creative team so that a work can be more marketable to a larger (more homophobic) audience.

A classic example of this would be Teen Wolf (2011–2017), where characters Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin) and Stiles Stilinski (Dylan O’Brien), had a “frenemies” dynamic that is quite homoerotic. This tension was something that the marketing team of the series definitely leaned into. In one promo for the Teen Choice Awards, Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O’Brien are on a boat, seductively wrapped around each other. “We are on a ship, pun intended,” Dylan O’Brien says, referencing the fan culture word shipping, which is about fans pairing two characters together romantically. Despite using queerness to pique the interest of queer viewers starved for representation, this relationship would never be defined in the text as anything more than a friendship.

Disney also queerbaits a lot. They will often generate a bunch of goodwill in the press by announcing the inclusion of a queer character, only for those characters role to either be small and inconsequential or for the scenes that validate their queerness to be easily ignored. We saw this in 2017 when the character LeFou (Josh Gad) had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, same-sex dance with a minor character at the end of the film. We saw it again in Avengers: Endgame (2019), where director Joe Russo portrayed a gay man in a support group run by Captain America. This trend continued in Zootopia (2016), Toy Story 4 (2019), The Rise of Skywalker (2019), Onward (2020), and Cruella (2021). The scenes that confirm these characters' queerness, assuming that they are explicit at all, are so tiny that they can be cut for releases in countries whose governments are openly bigoted.

Source: The Rise of Skywalker; some groundbreaking shit apparently

Some believe that Luca falls within this trend. There are arguably queer cues sprinkled throughout the movie. The tension between Luca Paguro (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto Scorfano (Jack Dylan Grazer) is palpable. There are many scenes where they hug and show affectionate handing holding — something I am glad we are seeing between two boys in a film, regardless of their orientation. There is one comical scene where Luca has to tackle Alberto for plot reasons. The two fall underneath the table and then re-emerge awkwardly as if nothing has happened.

A queer subtext is also present in the “hidden world” or “masquerade” trope that is the cornerstone of the film. Luca and Alberto are both sea monsters who have the ability to transform into humans but revert back to their underwater form if they touch any water. They have to hide their identities from the human world. Luca faces heavy judgment from his parents for wanting to live more openly. In response to his decision to spend time on the surface, his parents literally threaten to send him to his uncle, who lives in the watery deep, which is a pretty apt metaphor for the proverbial closet. To escape his parent's decision, Luca runs off to the nearest town with his new friend Alberto so that they can live a freer life.

While these sentiments are not exclusively queer (the masquerade can loosely map over to any marginalized identity), it's not hard to understand why many queer people may have felt a subtext here. Many LGBTQIA2+ people have also had conservative parents resorting to drastic means to control their desires, forcing them to flee to a more tolerant nearby city so that they can live more openly. The ending moral of Luca is for you to live among your chosen family, regardless of the hatred that might bring — a message many queer people have had to internalize as an act of survival. “Some people, they’ll never accept him,” remarks the Grandmother near the end, “But some will. And he seems to know how to find the good ones.”

Finally, there is the indirect association with the 2017 film Call Me By Your Name — an Italian film about two gay men having a budding romance in the countryside. This film was a big deal in the queer community, so much so that singer Lil Nas directly referenced it in their hit 2021 song MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name). It was also a popular film from a prestige perspective, snagging an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Disney — a corporation whose job is to be aware of the cultural zeitgeist — definitely would be aware of this film and how themes in Luca might draw some comparisons.

The promotional material never directly validated this subtext, but there were certainly nuggets to satiate representationally-starved Disney fans. The trailer released in February of 2021 had a scene of Luca and Alberto wrapping their arms around each other as they stare off into the sunset. An Italian cover of “You Are My Sunshine” — a song often used as a romantic overture— plays in the background.

Who is Luca’s sunshine, I wonder?

The queer subtext is clearly there, yet we are supposed to believe that all of this is incidental. When asked by a reporter from Polygon at a press day back in April of 2021, the director for Luca, Enrico Casarosa, explicitly stated that this was a movie that didn’t talk about sexual orientation at all. He says: “I was really keen to talk about a friendship before girlfriends and boyfriends come in to complicate things…This was about their friendship in that pre-puberty world.”

While there is nothing wrong with making a film centered on a platonic relationship, this concept of sexuality is inaccurate. Romance and sex are not the same things. Many straight and queer people have romantic desires at an early age, including during their early teens (and even before then). There are also queer, asexual romantics who remain so throughout the course of their lives. Luca and Alberto sit at the ages of 13 and 14, respectively, meaning that they very much would have been at the appropriate age for such a love story to unfold. Like, you know, the dozens of other Disney movies with teenage characters in heterosexual romances (see High School Musical, The Sound of Music, etc.).

It’s impossible to know what director Casarosa really intended with this statement. At its best, his position seems clueless and screams of unexamined homophobia. At its worst, he (and by extension, Disney’s marketing department) used cues easily recognizable by the LGBTQIA2+ community without ever intending to follow through on them. Disney, as a company, knows that they have an intense queer following at this point. There are gay days at Disney World. There are also articles and online communities trying to sift through debatable subtext and turning it into queer gold.

None of this should be a surprise.

Worse, Disney knows that people are annoyed by this pattern of queerbaiting. This exact dynamic was replicated with Frozen II, where there was a queer subtext picked up by fans in the first movie, only for the company to actively deny it. “Elsa is gay” became such a meme that SNL even had a skit where Elsa comes out as gay in a deleted scene. “The lack of any romantic interest doesn’t bother me anyway,” an obviously bothered Elsa, played by Kate McKinnon, sings to her sister Anna.

There are literally countless articles talking about Disney’s queerbaiting problem. As Ask’s Senior Managing Editor Michael Kasian-Morin remarked following Luca’s release: “Are they really giving us a story like Luca and then completely denying it’s about our community? Will there ever be any actual storytelling about young queer romance? Don’t tease us like this — it’s almost more offensive.”

This situation is frustrating — chiefly because of the obvious hypocrisy. As we have already mentioned, there are stories of heterosexual romance in Disney products. Disney also creates many stories involving male-on-male friendships (see Toy Story, The Lion King, The Jungle Book, etc.). There are no queer protagonists, though, and fans are so starved for representation that they are willing to see it in the most bare-bones of subtext.

Luca is a cute film about friendship and self-discovery. There is nothing wrong with making films about platonic relationships. If you feel “seen” by Disney’s Luca, that’s great. I constantly impose themes into works I know are not there. I have spent hours looking for cues that Leia from Star Wars is a lesbian, and I am currently writing a fanfiction that validates this desire. Believe me; I get it.

Let's make one thing abundantly clear, though, Disney as a corporation does not see you. They are a conservative company that has a record going back a decade of perpetuating obvious queer-baiting. They will eventually get to a point where they are comfortable with openly queer characters (see Out, The Jungle Cruise, etc.), but it will only be after teasing us for years. Stop giving them credit for representation they do not intend to deliver on. There are studios such as Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Animation (Mitchell vs. the Machines), Laika (ParaNorman), and DreamWorks (She-Ra and the Princess of Power) that will treat you better than this.

You deserve to be someone’s sunshine, not the chum they toss into the bottom of the ocean to attract bigger fish.

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

Yes, You Are Afraid of Queer People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pop Culture Seems To Think Polyamory Is Just About Sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, polyamory is mainly talking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because healthy communication transcends labels.

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

Heterosexuality Isn’t Natural

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

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

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

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

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

That sounds pretty queer to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debating the Morality of Heterosexuality

We need to question heterosexuality as an identity

Photo by Wedding Photography on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Confederacy Is Alive & Well on Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Confederate live’s matter trump 2024

But right how?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Americans Are Very Weird & Immature About Sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Anger of Realizing America Isn’t Free

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of this feels like freedom to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hit MCU show gets social justice all wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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