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

'Don't Look Up' Is A Documentary

The satire about climate change might as well be reality

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

So you know, exactly like real life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why not the world?

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

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

So you know, kind of like real life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Stop The Left from Losing Social Media

Critical Race Theory, Defund the Police, and Online Activism

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

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

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

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

Social media’s conservative bias

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

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

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

In other words, shit people want to buy.

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

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

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

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

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

What we can do about it

Well, that was a downer.

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

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

See what works & copy it

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

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

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

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

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

Be entertaining & relatable

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t let the right control the conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be persistent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Christmas cheer, wage exploitation, & toxic love.

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

Bring on the holiday cheer!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Examining the philosophy of the adorably cute science YouTube channel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tearing apart the idea that voting doesn't matter

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

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

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

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

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

A Quick Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Arguments

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

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

Harm reduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Successful elections make activism easier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They help with radicalization and engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Magic, steampunk, stunning graphics, & revolution

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

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

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

The “bad” revolutionary trope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking the trope…maybe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Violence is complicated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hit MCU movie has a problem with classism and power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Abuse Ever Funny?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because one of these is no laughing matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The State of COVID Anti-Vaxxers on Facebook

Misinformation about COVID is rampant on the social network

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

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

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

Facebook is Conservative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COVID Skeptical Facebook Groups

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

Adverse Side Effects

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-Health Policies

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-Vaxx

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-COVID Vaccine Groups on Facebook - Google Drive

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

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

The beloved Halloween classic replicates some harmful tropes about witches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Netflix, transphobia, & wealth inequality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Has Opinions 10/14/21 Alex Has Opinions 10/14/21

America is the Squid Game

We are all playing a deadly game to survive

The hit Netflix series Squid Game is a serialized drama about contestants participating in a deadly series of challenges. In the same vein as works like Battle Royale (2000) and Alice in Borderland (2020), the players participate in childlike games for the chance at fortune. The losers die, often brutally so, and the winner is offered an obscene amount of money.

However, it's more than merely a kitschy excuse to have people play deadly childhood games. The Squid Game is having a pretty extensive conversation about class and the lengths people will go to pay off their debts and secure a financial future. The game is an on-the-nose metaphor for the predatory nature of our current financial system.

The show has shot to the top of the charts in America, quickly becoming one of the most top-watched shows in Netflix history. This success is not only because of the compelling acting and the brilliantly surreal cinematography but because most counties, including America, have many of the elements of the Squid Game. The poverty and desperation among the show's characters are not just a grounded premise, but an emotional reality that we feel in our day-to-day lives.

All of the contestants are in this game because they "technically" chose to be there. All of them have racked up a substantial amount of debt for various reasons (e.g., gambling addiction, bad bets on the stock market, medical costs, etc.) in our capitalist society. They need the game's prize money— over 45.4 billion won (or roughly 37.9 million dollars) — to pay off their financial obligations. "Every person standing here in this room is living on the brink of financial ruin," lectures one of the faceless workers of the Squid Game.

Even after the murderous stakes are revealed to the contestants, and they temporarily decide via majority vote to leave, the bulk of them decide to come back anyway because this money to them is a matter of life and death. "Yeah, what they say is true," says one of the alleged contestants on his reason for wanting to go back to the games, "Out here, the torture is worse."

This level of debt is not fictional to many people in our capitalist society. According to one analysis from Money Geek, the average US household has more than $155,000 in debt, with about 76% of all households having some kind of debt. We know from other sources that the number of bankruptcies filed has steadily increased over the years, and most of them are coming from individuals, not businesses, usually due to some kind of medical issue. The Money Geek study didn't analyze medical debt, but one analysis coming out of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research claimed that medical debt exceeded all other forms of debt, writing in a takeaway:

“Between 2009 and 2020, total medical debt in collections decreased less than reductions in nonmedical debt. By 2020, individuals had more medical debt in collections than they had in debt in collections from all other sources combined, including credit cards, phone bills, and utilities.”

When characters like Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) fret about being unable to pay for their mother's diabetes treatment, it's coming from a place that many Americans know all too well. Many of us are drowning in financial burdens that will not be paid off in our lifetimes — certainly not with new debts being cumulatively added every year. This precarious situation leaves people just as desperate as the contestants in the show.

Sometimes that desperation manifests into the get-quick-rich schemes that have proliferated the Internet in recent years. Every year, millions of Americans fall for scams, legal or otherwise, because they are desperate for money. There is no shortage of people taking how-to-get-rich-quick classes that promise to make them independently wealthy, or in some cases, investing in actual Ponzi schemes and other financial fraud in the hopes that that will lead to a more secure future. However, these efforts are far more likely to only enrich the pockets of the scammers selling these offers.

We also see this desperation in how many Americans claw at any chance for fame. Millions contribute free content to sites like YouTube or TikTok in an attempt to translate that potential social capital into cash, but most users will never see a return in investment on their work. As Todd C. Frankel writes in The Washington Post of one 2018 study: "…the odds of striking it rich on YouTube — or even making a modest living — are small. Reaching the top 3.5 percent of YouTube's most-viewed channels — which means at least 1 million video views a month — is worth only about $12,000 to $16,000 a year in advertising revenue." People are fighting for a fraction of a diminishing pie, and in exchange, they are giving away much of their work for free.

This trend also applies to reality TV. Thousands every year sign up for reality shows so they can be rich and famous. Yet, these shows are often just effective vehicles to help producers get around union regulations. For example, the show RuPaul's Drag Race infamously required that their contestants do all the things actors do (e.g., reshoot scenes, enter the contestant's home or place of business to position cameras, participate in sponsorships, etc.), while also having fewer benefits, reduced pay, and having to provide their own food.

Most reality shows operate like this. They hire amateur actors who willingly sign up for labor exploitation in exchange for a slim chance at greater wealth and fame. It's in many ways the same dynamic in Squid Games, only not so much death. As former reality contestant Leonie McSorley says of their experience on the MTV show Ex on the Beach: "They basically sell you a dream and say you're going to be famous and it's going to be great, but they don't really emphasise enough how that's a slim chance."

Sometimes the things people are doing to get ahead are not even that glamorous. Its well-documented that Amazon warehouses are not great places to work. The benefits are mediocre, the labor is excruciating, and you can be fired at any time for not meeting increasingly difficult quotas. At $18 an hour for full-time workers, however, they pay people well more than many competitors in their profession, and that's incentive enough. When I visited the Baltimore Fulfillment Center years ago, more people were trying to sign up for work than those looking to inspect the facility. It's not that workers didn't know they were being exploited (though some were undoubtedly in denial). Many knew what type of economic system they were in, and we're trying to make the best of it.

The majority of us have an underlying level of desperation within our current economic system, which makes most of us disposable to those in power. At any moment, we can be swapped in for another, more pliant person who doesn't ask pointed questions about the status quo. In the past couple of decades, corporations have been more than willing to fire disgruntled workers en masse who try to unionize or protest.

This disposability is something Squid Game captures rather poignantly in nearly every frame. Not only are the contestant's disposal, marching to their deaths for the amusement of unseen VIPs, but so are the workers maintaining the facility. We learn halfway through the first season that the masked workers doing the labor to run the games are also treated indifferently by upper management. They are also called numbers and don't even have the privilege of taking off their masks or speaking with their superiors unless given permission to do so, or they risk being gunned down. "It's a huge problem when a player goes missing, but when it's a soldier, no one cares," says one worker to a player.

It's not simply an us vs. them dynamic within the Squid Game, but a system of oppression that traps most everyone to varying degrees. Some may be better off, as the workers in the Squid Game are compared to the players, but the moment someone takes off their mask, they receive a similar fate — they are discarded. They cannot reject their role any more than the players can.

This reality is the same in our world. If you are a middle-class worker making your money off the exploitation of the lower classes, you cannot stop showing up to work. Sure, you may "choose" to go someplace else, in the same way, the players were free to stop playing the game, but eventually, you will have to play someone else's game. Very few of us will ever get the money to check out. It is an illusory aim that many of us will die before reaching. Refusing to participate in American capitalism may not always be as quick as in the Squid Game, but it's death nonetheless.

The most ironic part of this series is that the person overseeing the Squid game, the mysterious Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), thinks this game is fair. When one of the workers assists another player in episode five, A Fair World, he monologues about how these actions interfered with the integrity of the games, saying: "you ruined the most important aspect of this place. Equality. Everyone is equal while they play this game. Here, every player gets to play a fair game under the same conditions. These people suffered from inequality and discrimination out in the world, and we're giving them one last chance to fight fair and win."

But the game isn't fair. It's an emotionally manipulative mess that purposefully hides its rules and objectives, so only the most manipulative and lucky players get ahead. It's a game that biases physical mobility, strength, and emotional sociopathy. Its essentially creating the perfect conditions to replicate the worldview of those in power — one that claims that people are inherently bad and that our system rightfully rewards those who embrace that component of human nature.

When the game's mysterious VIPs come to watch the final game in person, they are almost all rich, white businessmen who are there because they are bored. There is no greater purpose here, only terrible people rationalizing their own cruelty. The Front Man hasn't stumbled into a meritocracy but is merely facilitating a ruthless game arranged for the enjoyment of the very rich.

America is like this in many ways. We are not the only country that struggles with wealth inequality, but we have exacerbated it. We lack the protections of many developed countries (paid paternity/maternity leave, a livable wage, universal healthcare, etc.), and so many people are desperate, struggling to gain a foothold in a country that doesn't want to give it to them. Like in the Squid Game, many workers are so focused on hustling and figuring out their next steps that, out of survival, they ignore the fact that most of us will not win the game of capitalism, and far more will die trying.

In the meantime, the rich get to do whatever the hell they want. It doesn't matter if their desires are as absurd as restarting civilization 244.57 million miles away on a dead world, discovering immortality, or in the case of the Squid Game, having the poor kill themselves for entertainment, the rich have the right to do it. They can do whatever they want — the needs and wants of the many be damned.

And all the while, we rationalize this inequity by claiming that the system is fair — that anyone can get ahead if they truly work at it. We are a deeply unequal country that tricks itself into believing the game we play is meritocratic, ignoring that this fact is simply untrue.

But hey, at least you get to choose the unfair game that you play.

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

I'm So Sick of Stories Blaming Humanity for The End of the World

If the world ends tomorrow, it will not be because of all of us.

For as long as I can remember, movies have been telling me that the world was going to end. I saw it in disaster movies where the planet was wiped clean by storms and earthquakes. I witnessed it in alien invasion movies where cities and countries were leveled to the ground. I watched as zombie hordes consumed all of civilization. Over and over again, the world was destroyed, and I saw it happen.

It's not hard to understand where this angst is coming from — the planet is dying. Terrible people have been running things for a long time, and they have constructed systems of power that are f@cking everything up. Our feelings of hopelessness are externalized in films where we can revel in the end we feel coming. For the briefest of moments, we watch as brave protagonists triumph against it (or cathartically end up dead).

In recent years, some disaster and post-apocalyptic movies have used this premise to come to a startling conclusion. The inherent problem in many (though certainly not all) of these films is that they often blame the source of that disaster on humanity itself. It's a message that equalizes the blame, making it a component of human nature, rather than the narrow set of elite actors who actually cause disasters.

This takeaway ultimately fosters a form of detached nihilism that is unhelpful for combatting climate change, wealth inequality, and the other deadly problems plaguing our world.

The disaster movie comes in many forms. The quintessential one is that of a natural disaster leveling entire towns, countries, and even the world. Los Angelos is a favorite target for screenwriters, wherein films such as San Andreas (2015) and Volcano (1997), wipe Tinsel Town off the map. Worldwide disasters usually show up at iconic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Great Pyramids, and in some cases just as cataclysmic fireballs rippling across the face of the Earth.

Amongst the carnage and CGI horror, humanity is blamed for these disasters. "For years," begins President Raymond Becker (Kenneth Welsh), after superstorms caused by global warming have devastated the developed countries of the world in the film The Day After Tomorrow (2004), "we operated under the belief that we could continue consuming our planet's natural resources without consequence. We were wrong. I was wrong."

While The Day After Tomorrow, does a great job of highlighting some of the institutional barriers that prevent reform from taking place (e.g. politicians more interested in short-term gains, over long-term threats), this speech at the end places the moral blame on all US citizens. Never mind that most Americans are trapped in an economic system that provides them little opportunity to cut emissions while obtaining the resources they need to survive. Becker moralizes to viewers about the need to take climate change seriously, flattening the issue's complexities into a "we are all in this together" mentality. The world ended because developed nations as a whole let it die.

This theme of blaming segments of humanity, or in some cases all of humanity, for disaster, comes up a lot. Human war destroys the Earth in the original Mad Max series (1979–1985). Our wasteful ways make it uninhabitable in flicks like WALL-E (2008). Pollution cause plants to turn on us in The Happening (2008). And of course, our arrogance and destructive nature lead our robotic children to try to cull us in movies like the Terminator (1984) franchise.

Even when humanity is not blamed as the source of the cataclysm, they are often viewed as a distraction — a mob waiting to happen. "Telling the public we might all be dead in eighteen days achieves nothing but panic," says the president (Stanley Anderson) in Armageddon (1998) shortly before he instructs our protagonists to board a spaceship to blow up an asteroid heading towards Earth. He keeps the information secret until it cannot possibly be hidden from the public.

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." says the character Agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) in Men In Black (1997) as his justification for why their secretive organization doesn't share the existence of aliens with the public. During this series, aliens threaten to annihilate the entire Earth several times, and the public is never told. "There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet," quips Agent Kay. "And the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!"

In both of these situations, the public might have benefitted from this information, especially in Armageddon, where bits of the asteroid break off and end up decimating cities. The people in charge might have also benefited from the collective brainpower of the human race. However, the fear of public unrest was seen as a higher priority than harm reduction or innovation. Humanity is depicted as a detriment to the work that our protagonist must do. We are a burden, not a resource that can be used.

This distrust in people especially applies to the fall of society, once those "mobs" have taken over. In post-apocalyptic flicks, people are depicted as more harmful than the cataclysmic incidents themselves. For example, the biggest threats to our protagonists in The Walking Dead series (2010–2021) aren't the zombies (called "Walkers" here), but dictators such as Negan, Alpha, and the Governor. The protagonists in the series Sweet Tooth have to contend with the speciesism of General Abbot (Neil Sandilands). And of course, in media like The Road (2009) and The Last of Us (2013), human bandits can be far more destructive than radioactive fallout or zombie terrors.

That cynicism in humanity often morphs into full-blown misanthropy, where humanity's end is depicted as a good thing. "Nature doesn't want us back," explains Aimee Eden (Dania Ramirez) in the post-apocalyptic TV show Sweet Tooth (2021 — present) on why humanity should accept its obsolescence following a devastating virus. "We never gave her a good reason to keep us around in the first place," she continues. "If you look at the whole life of the planet, we, you know, man has only been around for a few blinks of an eye," lectures Sergeant Farrell (Stuart McQuarrie) in the zombie film 28 Days Later, "So, if the infection wipes us all out… that is a return to normality." "The Earth is evil," calmly states Justine (Kirsten Dunst) in the wake of our planet's impending destruction in Melancholia (2011), "we don't need to grieve for it. Nobody would miss it."

More than any cataclysm or super virus, humanity is the true villain on the Silver Screen. They are the harbingers of our destruction, or, at the very least, the people who make the aftermath that much worse. We are a toxic force that protagonists must struggle against — the barrier to be overcome. Our society has a very bleak outlook of the collective in media, and unfortunately, these pop culture stories are merely a reflection of our greater culture.

When we talk about real-world threats such as climate change, humanity as a whole is often blamed for them. On the Internet, this sometimes comes in the way of a Matrix (1999) quote by the character Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving). "Human beings are a disease," he laments, "a cancer of this planet. You're a plague, and we are the cure." It's a meme shared all over the Internet. Wherein the movie, this perspective comes from a robotic overseer who paternalistically thinks that humans must be contained and culled; the people on the Internet are saying that about themselves.

Another place in the cultural zeitgeist we see this logic resurface is the "Thanos was right" hashtag on Twitter. Thanos was the galactic tyrant in the MCU who decided to genocide half of all sentient life. Some fans of the series viewed him not as the villain but as a person who had a point. As JV Chamary writes in Forbes:

“Fewer people ought to mean more food and less hunger, and might lower the risk of an epidemic when overcrowding enables the spread of disease. Human activity is driving a loss of biodiversity, with about 25% of animals and plants now threatened with extinction, so halving the population would help other species. As a consequence, you could conclude that by eliminating 50% of all humans, Thanos did the Earth a huge favor.”

These perspectives are looking at recent problems like industrial carbon emissions and claiming they are intrinsic to the human condition — something that we cannot help but do because pollution and overconsumption are how we operate. "Wow…Earth is recovering," remarks one infamous tweet that received over 200,000 likes during the early days of the pandemic. "Air pollution is slowing down. Water pollution is clearing up. Natural wildlife returning home. Coronavirus is Earth’s vaccine. We're the virus." This misanthropic outlook is everywhere in our culture. The disgust for humans as a collective doesn't start and end with tweets and poorly-reasoned articles, but can translate into disastrous policy during real-life disasters.

For example, the response effort to Hurricane Katrina (2005) has been largely decried as an instance of political leaders placing property rights over preserving human lives. The image initially portrayed by those in power was a dire situation of uncontrolled mayhem, depicting a scene of over ten thousand dead. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin infamously went on The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986–2011) and claimed that evacuees were hurting each other within the Superdome (the place refugees from the storm were being housed). Mayor Nagin said: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

This statement would later be deemed an untruthful exaggeration, but this perception of "looters" negatively impacted the response effort. The private security force company Xe (now merged with Triple Canopy, and formerly Blackwater) was contracted out immediately by the federal government to "secure the city." As if during wartime, they were armed with automatic rifles and deputized by the Governor of Louisana to make arrests. The number of armed forces occupying the city would only increase as the National Guard, as well as private security forces hired by the wealthy, entered the fray. According to ProPublica, the police were also given orders to shoot looters on sight, and by many accounts, they did.

These private forces were an active detriment to the relief efforts in the days and weeks following the storm. Officers detained and, in some cases, harassed citizens distributing supplies. Vital space on boats and helicopters was often reserved for armed escorts. Very early into the recovery, the Mayor ordered the police to deemphasize search and rescue efforts to prioritize an end to the “looting.” The Mayor would later admit that reports of looting were exaggerated (and years later would eventually be convicted of corruption for an unrelated kickback scheme), but that initial perception of “mobs” cost lives.

Many leaders still treat people this way during disasters. When Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans this year, the police were very quick to assemble an anti-looting task force, yet not nearly enough effort was placed into recovery efforts. As one activist told the publication Grist: "I'm really pissed off that the most visible recovery 'effort' I have seen is a bunch of army boots with machine guns sitting in front of stores. They couldn't bring us food and water yet, but they have guns."

When we treat people as an intrinsic threat — like a virus, a plague, or simply as evil — rather than as human beings, it impairs our ability to develop proper solutions. During disasters, the real threat to people often comes down to breaks in supply chains (e.g., a lack of water, plumbing, heating, health care, shelter, and food). These are the services that need to be resumed if you want to stop people from "looting." On a wider societal level, they are also the services needed to help mitigate crime in general.

The idea that people are viruses needlessly consuming resources not only strips people of the context for why they need those resources in the first place (i.e., to survive), but it's ultimately ahistorical. Humans existed in a better equilibrium with nature for thousands of years before industrialization. And some, such as many indigenous groups, continue to do so now. The "humanity is a virus excuse" is convenient for those who don't want to think too deeply about how maybe our systems, rather than humanity itself, are what's making our Earth unlivable.

Indeed there are countless positive examples of "humanity" doing more than simply consuming resources. Hurricane Katrina was filled with acts of mutual aid. In one example, a group of activists and healthcare practitioners came together to form the Common Ground Collective, which formed a makeshift medical clinic and distributed food and other supplies to thousands of residents. In another, a makeshift flotilla of boats dubbed "the Cajun Navy" rescued thousands of people from their stranded rooftops. We see this reality also in films in the way survivors start to band together to rebuild San Francisco in San Andreas, or how workers and the rich come together in the film 2012 (2009) to rebuild society.

Both in film and real life, a competing narrative certainly exists, but it doesn't seem to be the dominant one. We are a society stuck in a rudimentary debate over whether people are "good" or "bad," and life is more nuanced than that. The people in the "humanity is a virus" camp use this simplistic logic to demonize everyone so they can sidestep the necessary work of examining our society's systemic problems (e.g. wealth inequality, patriarchy, systemic racism, capitalism, etc.).

If the world ends tomorrow, it will not be because of all of us. Most people are just doing their best to survive. There are monsters, to be sure (and some disasters movies do reflect that reality), but this trend of laying the blame for disasters — both systemic and immediate — on all of us is unhelpful. It reflects a culture that has not done the work to root out those people and organizations who are truly at fault. For its easier to blame everyone than to start holding those who maintain oppressive systems accountable.

The world ends all the time in media, sometimes wonderfully so, but if we want to avert our own apocalypse, we need to stop blaming humanity as a whole for its potential fall. Now more than ever, we need stories that focus less on misanthropy and more on modeling genuine accountability and justice. Ones that lay the blame where it needs to be (i.e., on the institutions preventing change) and show their viewers a potential path forward, away from disaster.

For in truth, the virus isn't humanity. It never was, and it's only through our collective humanity that we can indeed save the world.

Alex Has Opinions 10/4/21 Alex Has Opinions 10/4/21

Rumble Is Still Where The Right Goes To Play

The platform continues to be a bastion for conservative conspiracy theories

Image; Photo by David Guliciuc on Unsplash

There has been a narrative about the alternative video streaming platform Rumble that it's a place where conservatives spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. "Fact-Checked on Facebook and Twitter, Conservatives Switch Their Apps" goes one title for the New York Times. "The rise of Rumble, the conservative alternative to YouTube," read another title for Deseret News.

Recently the company has attempted to "diversify" its content by reaching out to alternative influencers such as Tulsi Gabbard and Glenn Greenwald, but this has had very little impact on the platform. Rumble still is a site where conservatives spread misinformation, and that's not something ancillary to the company's goals but strikes at the heart of how it operates.

Rumble has a reputation as the conservative YouTube. While this is something they foster directly through content moderation (or a lack thereof), they also try to be a site about more than simply conservatives ranting about politics. The Editors Pick section is usually of light content, such as a cockatiel not letting their owner use their laptop or of a dog performing ninja rolls.

Their CEO Chris Pavlovski went on record on FOX Business in April of 2021, emphasizing that the platform is focused more on "fairness" than on regulating their content. "We're not interested in taking any position on any type of content," Pavlovski said, "we just want to be a platform, and I believe that's why we've seen so much growth."

We see this strategy of trying to distance the platform from the conservative brand with the company contracting out alternative content creators such as Glenn Greenwald, who is allegedly being paid somewhere in the midrange of "six figures." As influencer Greenwald tweeted recently:

"One key person who moved to Rumble with me: Tulsi Gabbard. A 4-term Dem Congresswoman from Hawaii & a vegan. She quit as DNC Vice Chair to support Bernie in 2016. She endorsed Biden over Trump in 2020. Yet they still claim she's right-wing & Rumble is an alt-right site? How?"

Yet, despite these protests, it's hard not to escape the conservative bent on the website. As of writing this article, the Top Video, which appears at the literal top of the desktop version, is a live stream for a Steven Crowder video "debunking" a John Oliver segment about Voter ID laws being racist. Crowder is a popular, conservative content creator, not just on Rumble but all over the Internet. He appeared on the front page multiple times while I prepared research for this article.

This preference for conservative content is everywhere. For example, if you go over to the News section, one of the few traditional outlets you will find is Reuters. The closest thing after that is the center-left site Newsy. These channels provide more "traditional" news stories that you would see in any mainstream paper or program, and in fact, Reuters seems to be reposting videos from their YouTube channel.

Everything else ranges from the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post to the conservative Canadian rag The Post Millennial to Sean Hannity. The "stories" from these news channels fit the mold you would expect. "White liberal in gorilla mask attacks Larry Elder with egg," reads the title for one salacious clip from The Post Millenial. "Democrats hell-bent on hiking taxes, imperiling economy," reads the Devin Nunes Press, a channel simply rebranding all of the representatives' television appearances and public statements as "news."

Even tamer content is often backed by conservative influencers. The Entertainment section may have some stereotypical content from the likes of Page Six, but the section also has an exposé criticizing AOC's MET Gala dress from Glenn Greenwald as well as a skit about leftism being a virus from influencer Awaken With JP. "It begins to infect the brain by a process called Marxism," the influencer jokes in their video Beware of the Tyrant Variant!.

Most of the main sections under the front page, except for the Viral section, are like this: the Sports section has content like "Vaccine Lunacy: Passports and Packed Stadiums" from the OutKick; the Finance section has a video from Tim Pool lamenting that the entire Global Economy will meltdown because of Biden's bad job report; the Podcast and Battle Leaderboard sections are almost exclusively filled with conservative influencers from the likes of Dan Bongino and Matt Walsh.

Image; Rumble captured 9/29/21 at 12:09 pm.

And, of course, so far, we have been talking around the edges of the problem. If even the tamest content has a far-right conservative bent to it, then imagine what the "actual" content focuses on.

You can find pretty much every mainstream conservative influencer here, from Tim Pool to Ben Shapiro to even former 45th President Donald J. Trump. These actors engage in the usual culture wars content that has proliferated on the Internet since the early 2010s. There are countless videos about Antifa (e.g., anti-fascism), Black Lives Matter, or whatever social issue of the day happens to be the focus of the feed, but it doesn't just stop and end with anti-social justice warrior monologues. Many of these actors also spread a lot of misinformation (more on this later).

Rumble is not the only one that struggles with this problem. YouTube has long been cited as a major distributor of misinformation. Facebook still grapples with an array of issues, from anti-vaccine groups to white supremacist comics. Its subsidiary Instagram also struggles with this problem. A recent Washington Post article highlighted wellness advocates using Instagram to advocate against vaccine usage. Even now, several of the users they profiled still have much of their original content up.

Image; captured on Instagram on 9/28/21 3:06 pm

Even if they are not always successful, these companies have tried to compensate for these gaps. YouTube, for example, has removed millions of COVID-related videos for spreading misinformation and regularly auto-flags creators who use the word vaccine. The influencer nappyheadedjojoba recently did a video about vaccine hesitancy, and she had to use the word "vacuum" to get around the censor. There will most likely always be people like this finding creative ways around the blocks, but it signals that these companies are at least trying to mitigate the risk of disinformation (even if its taken them years to reach this point)

Rumble's hands-off approach, however, means that misinformation proliferates more quickly. It's long been reported that Rumble is rampant with COVID vaccine conspiracies, which remains true to this day. A quick search will reveal pages upon pages of information critical of the vaccine. The site is a hotbed of people advocating against it. It's easy to find videos with a veneer of credibility, which has the potential to confuse viewers uneducated in science literacy.

Image; Rumble, captured 9/29/21 at 10:38 pm.

For example, one recently published video, titled 33 Doctors Say DON'T TAKE THE VACCINE, has 33 alleged doctors claiming that the vaccine is unsafe for human use. "I would like to say," remarks one speaker, "that the new COVID-19 vaccine is not safe and that there is no global medical pandemic." This video first circulated in 2020 across social media, and all of its claims have been thoroughly debunked, but while it has been taken down on sites like Instagram, it remains on Rumble. Just one of the hundreds, possibly thousands of anti-COVID vaccine videos making the rounds on the site.

COVID misinformation is not the only unregulated area of content. It's also possible to find videos discussing the Deep State (a conspiracy theory about a secret, unauthorized network independently running things behind the scenes) or how Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election was a lie. In no particular order, I also found videos taking the Illuminati seriously, ones claiming that many famous people are, in fact, clones, videos about a mysterious New World Order controlling things, ones endorsing the idea that the Earth is flat, and many more.

YouTube also has Flat Earthers on the platform, but they are usually hidden from search results. If you type in the keyword "flat earth" into search results, you will get many videos debunking flat earth ideology. The one hit on the first page that appeared to be the opposite, 5 Facts That Prove The Earth Is Flat, ended up being a joke video making fun of the ideology. To find Flat Earther influencers on YouTube, you will have to search for their channel directly.

Yet on Rumble, all you have to do is search.

Image; YouTube/Rumble captured on 9/29/21 at 10:50 am

As for hate speech, in general, Rumble doesn't permit overtly discriminatory language. You won't easily find videos throwing around the N-word, endorsing the KKK, or telling trans people that they should kill themselves. The way discrimination occurs here is usually far more indirect. The majority of videos that do exist are discriminatory in how they frame marginalized groups and leftist issues. If you type in the acronym "LGBT," outside of reporting from Reuters, you will get hits about "LGBT mobs" and the "LGBT agenda." If you type in "Black Lives Matter," you will see videos about "abuses" from protesters. These videos aren't calling for active discrimination, but the Rumble community is systemically framing marginalized people as an other.

The site is not content-neutral because there is very clearly a conservative bias. This preferential treatment has a chilling effect as leftist users do not use it because it's not for them. It is geared towards far-right conservatives who face no accountability unless they are hateful in the most overt ways. I have spent a lot of time searching for leftist users on Rumble, and I have not found anyone outside of Tulsi Gabbard who has a very touch-and-go relationship with the Leftist movement. There is no reason to believe that Rumble will diversify its user base anytime soon.

This doesn't mean other more mainstream sites are free from discrimination. In fact, many of the most prolific people on Rumble, from Ben Shapiro to Steven Crowder, still have a presence on sites like YouTube. This framing problem exists on those platforms too, but at least they have made an effort to diversify their audience. Why would you leave YouTube, a site that at least has some leftist communities, to use a site you are not welcome in? A site with worse UI and an even worse atmosphere.

In trying not to take "any position on any type of content," Rumble has created an environment where the most conservative and often detached voices have a home. When CEO Chris Pavlovski speaks of "fairness," they are using a dog whistle prevalent in conservative circles, harkening all the way back to Fox News' original slogan, "Fair and Balanced." This alleged fairness is not about accepting all voices but allowing the most hateful a safe space not to be criticized.

Chris Pavlovski is not a neutral actor. His site was operating on a shoe-string budget before it received interest from the right. Following the rights’ alleged purge from more mainstream spaces, Rumble has now received funding from conservatives like Peter Thiel and Darren Blanton. Pavlovski has a material interest in not pissing off his site's conservative demographic because that's where the money is, and it shows in how they let quite frankly harmful information proliferate there.

The truth that we have learned in the modern era is that there is no such thing as not taking a position on content moderation. Platforms are so complex that the mere act of weighting selections and curating lists is a reflection of values, even if we are not always consciously aware of what those values are. All platforms inherently select certain voices while choosing not to center others. By seeming to focus on the right, Rumble has created a platform where conspiracy theories abound, and hatred festers.

Rumble is still where the right goes to play, and it's a powder keg waiting to happen.

Alex Has Opinions 10/3/21 Alex Has Opinions 10/3/21

How Do You Critique A Cry For Help? ('Introvert: A Teenage Simulator')

The indie game that leaves you left wondering if the developer is okay

Sometimes I stumble across a topic that I think will be perfect, only to start researching it and realizing that I have hit something far darker than I initially realized. This was the situation I found myself in while reviewing the indie game Introvert: A Teenage Simulator — a visual novel about a depressed, mute teenager navigating life in school within a poor town.

The trailer instantly told me that this was going to be a difficult piece. The central premise is that you are a new kid who meets someone at school named Chris, a socially awkward teenager who wants friends. Chris tells you that he will shoot up the school if he doesn't make friends in 5 days. I assumed that the game would be a perfect jumping-off point to deconstruct toxic masculinity, but instead, I found an earnest developer trying to tackle worthy topics but just not quite having the expertise to pull them off.

However, the developer, who goes by the name Faris, didn't just make a controversial game but attempted to pull the viewer in and listen to their pain. He wanted to connect with his players, not simply emotionally, but in the real world. That decision not only complicated the artist-viewer relationship but forced us to question if his work was harming the very people he set out to help.

Firstly, I want to say that I don't think it's fair to judge this game by professional standards. Faris was allegedly 19 years old when he made it, so I am not going to nitpick its gameplay elements. I have some minor quibbles with how the UI works, and some sections are simply confusing or unplayable, but I do not doubt that Faris will get better over time. The game is currently free on Steam, so these problems didn't cost me anything but my time.

The main issue I have with this game is how it presents mental health and depression. Throughout its very short runtime, you are given a series of choices to try to "help" Chris, but they basically amount to joining in on bullying him or leaving him alone. It's not a game trying to understand depression or figure out how to give someone the tools or resources to mitigate it, but it seems to be more a manifestation of someone reveling in that dark place.

Introvert: A Teenage Simulator is about focusing on how awful everything is for teenagers nowadays. There is a sense of hopelessness that permeates the entire work. The authority figures are all portrayed as cruel and incompetent. The aesthetic is gray and constantly on the verge of glitching out. There is disturbing imagery like dead insects everywhere you turn. Not only does the game culminate in a potential shooting, but there is a side quest where you are forced to shoot some entity, and, as far as I can tell, you cannot leave the space you are in until you do.

For a game this short, it certainly puts you through the wringer in terms of the number of disturbing sights and situations that you will have to witness. A more skilled developer may have been able to synthesize these elements into something more cohesive. Again, Faris is a developing artist, and there is nothing wrong with that, but given the raw pain and sadness in this work, I am left concerned for his emotional stability. Faris worked through a lot of pain when he made this game, and it shows. As they write in the game's description:

“I made this game cause I was sad so it took a while to be finished, cause you know… It’s hard to work on something when you’re sad.”

Introvert: A Teenage Simulator already seemed like a cry for help to me. It was a way for the artist to project their disappointment into the world and see if anyone would listen. There were a lot of concerning elements already in my first playthrough, and then the developer went the extra mile and pleaded for the player to contact them in real life. If you take your character to the furthest left point in the game, outside of HappyVille, Faris will start talking to you directly:

“Hey you, yes you. Shh, it's going to be okay. Wipe your tears. Take a deep breath. You've been strong for too long. It's time to let everything go. I'm here for you. I'm Faris, the game developer. I'm 19. If you need to talk about anything, just DM me on Twitter and we’ll talk:) here's the link. Ill reply.”

To be frank, it's very common for emotionally vulnerable people to position themselves as authority figures so that they can have an excuse to work on their own issues. For example, psychology research is often jokingly referred to as "me-search" because there is a perception that many enter the field to understand their own mental health concerns. This statement is an exaggeration, but with 81% of psychologists in one study having a diagnosable psychiatric disorder (most of them mild), the stereotype does come from a grain of truth.

Faris seems to be doing the very same thing here, though, unlike therapists who are receiving the training to genuinely help people, he doesn't have the capacity to do this. I have been to Faris' Twitter. He is an overworked young person struggling to handle game design and school at the same time. He doesn't have the resources to therapize depressed, random strangers on the Internet, and he doesn't have the tools for it either. It's a very nice thought, and I applaud him for his intentions, but bad therapy can do a lot of damage, and his decision to do this warrants criticism.

If you want to help people (a worthy goal), you need to ask yourself if the "help" you are providing is actually doing good. Performativity helps no one. Many organizations dealing with mental health issues need money and volunteers. They will give people training and support to handle these issues (see Mental Health Affiliates, Crisis Counselors, Suicide Prevention, etc.). There are also mental health professionals that would be more than willing to collaborate with game developers to create a game to help destigmatize mental disorders and illnesses.

However, if you are hurting, don't confuse your need to get help with a desire to assist others. It doesn't benefit anyone and can do a lot of damage. Intentions are all well and good, but when someone puts out a "cry for help" under the guise of supporting others, we have to be careful in how we handle it. We should be empathetic — as I have attempted to do in this review — but, intentions aside, we shouldn't pretend like the work being put forth is helpful for others suffering from serious mental health problems.

It might be cathartic to wallow in the darkness, but it's not the best for addressing the themes presented in this work. As one Steam reviewer put it: "I'm not sure I can "truly" recommend this game to anyone. It's bleak, depressing, and is a great allegory all in one. This is a great representation of what it is like to be a depressed teen in a small podunk-ass town who isn't popular. I've yet to play it all the way through.…right now, I'm just trying to keep my own positive vibe going…."

This has been a difficult review to write. Faris unquestionably is trying to do some good, and they also, at least from my perspective, seem to be hurting. I hesitated to publish this review at all, thinking it might be better if they churned out more work until they reached a better emotional equilibrium.

Yet that hesitation is valuing Faris' good intentions over the harm they are doing to others by putting this game out in the first place. Introvert: A Teenage Simulator is not an insignificant title. It has received hundreds of reviews on the Steam store (and they have been overwhelmingly positive), so I figured there needed to be some counterbalancing force to give a fair critique, especially since this game has somewhat of an appeal towards depressed people.

While Faris shows great promise as a game developer, I don't think the message in this story is particularly helpful for anyone. It's a dark, messy piece that aimlessly wanders in the wilderness and threatens to pull other people down with it. We shouldn’t be afraid to say so, good intentions or not.

Alex Has Opinions 9/24/21 Alex Has Opinions 9/24/21

'Voting With Your Dollars' Isn't Democratic

Deconstructing the myth that you can push for change in the marketplace

If you spend enough time in any debate about the actions of corporations, a certain reply will almost always resurface: that you need to vote with your dollars. That we, as consumers, need to reflect our disappointment in the products and services that we buy by choosing something else. In the words of the business-friendly environmental group Grow Ensemble: "Is the provider of this thing I am buying creating, producing, and delivering it in a way that is good for the planet and the people on it? If not, is there another provider who does? Opt for them."

From a certain viewpoint, this advice makes a kind of intuitive sense. If you believe that the marketplace is a free exchange of goods and services, then it would naturally follow that only the products that consumers believe in dominate. Why would a customer purposefully invest in something they know to be fraught, both financially and ethically? "When you vote daily in the supermarket," Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in 1980, "you get precisely what you voted for, and so does everyone else.

This perspective, however, fundamentally misconstrues how capitalism works. The free market has nothing to do with democracy — some have even argued that these two forces are incompatible. Our current economy creates an environment where choice is not only limited, but that limitation is actively encouraged, making the "vote with your dollars" argument ultimately anti-democratic.

A Lack Of Choices

The marketplace does not operate like a ballot box where consumers have a free range of goods and services to choose from. The current economic paradigm is one of extreme consolidation. For example, a report from The Guardian found that in the US, "four firms or fewer controlled more than 40% of the market share" for the foods we buy, and that number gets higher depending on what goods we are talking about. If you wanted to buy a carbonated drink, three companies (Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Keurig Dr. Pepper) own 92% of the market. Want to buy a dip? Pepsico controls 87.5% alone.

If you truly wished to boycott one of the companies above, it could be very difficult depending on how much of the market they control, not only with that one good or service but with all the ones they own. Pepsico, for example, doesn't just own Pepsi, but Aquafina, Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Quaker Oats, and hundreds more. Since these companies have so many brands underneath them, you might not have the time to research all the goods or services they have, and even then, there might not be a true alternative with your local grocery store or delivery service.

Our current market is designed to make true choice very difficult. You might cut the cord with, say, Amazon by canceling your Prime Membership, but you could still be purchasing from them indirectly via services like Ring, Twitch, IMDB, Goodreads, Audible, Zappos, and many others. Some businesses are just so large that finding a real alternative in your area can be quite challenging.

Of course, this all presumes you have the privilege to cut from that initial service at all. Take, for example, insulin, a medication used to manage the conditions of diabetes. It costs somewhere between $63 to nearly $400 per vial or pen to pay out of pocket, more than any other country in the developed world. Diabetic Americans spend on average thousands of dollars on Insulin annually, and it's not because of "consumer" choice but aggressive patent law and market consolidation.

While insulin medication only costs around $2 to $4 to produce per vial and was initially developed around a hundred years ago, companies in the US have aggressively fought to keep prices high. Three companies — Novo Nordisk, Sanofi-Aventis, and Eli Lilly — control most of the market share. There is no national regulatory framework to cap prices, which means they are incentivized to price it at the highest level that will not spur regulation.

And in the meantime, customers will pay whatever they have to because delayed treatments can lead to deadly complications such as diabetic ketoacidosis. This complication is when your body begins to break down fat (instead of sugar) as fuel, leading to diabetic coma (i.e., passing out for a long time) or even death. Desperation locks in these customers because the alternative could be death.

This reality can be seen with any product or service where need prevents people from opting out. Whether we are talking about the sky-high costs of HIV/AIDS medication or the ridiculous price point of chemotherapy, a person cannot "vote with their dollars" for a service that they require for the sake of their health. Some services are so vital that you will pay for them no matter the cost or die trying.

This logic also applies to major infrastructure services like housing, water, medical care, and even the Internet, where someone needs to use them, either urgently or in their day-to-day life, to exist in society, or even to exist at all. Over 40% of Americans live 5 miles or more from their nearest hospital. Around 64% of Americans have two potential Internet providers or less, with several million not having any option at all. Even fewer options typically exist for energy and water. You have a limited amount of options, and that's it. You aren't going to move your home overnight, or take your failing body five miles over, to shop around for prices.

The idea that you have the option to purchase any product that aligns with your values is naive, especially a vital service where your negotiating power as an individual is next to nothing. Our system likes to expound upon how much choice we as individual consumers have, but as we have just covered, that choice is often an illusion. The large market share of our biggest companies, in combination with aggressive IP law, prevents citizens from truly choosing ethical alternatives in the marketplace.

And believe it or not, this lack of choice is the smallest issue with the "voting with your dollars" argument. When it comes to this line of reasoning, it's not simply the options that hinder people, but the alleged "voting" as well.

Inequality Impairs Democracy

In a democracy, one person's vote isn't supposed to be vastly different from any others. Your vote for one candidate should equal the same as anyone else's.

This ideal has not always been realized in the US. The way the Senate and the Electoral College work means that citizens in certain states have a disproportionate say in elections like the presidency, compared to citizens in more populous states. Many people living here have also been denied their rights as citizens or the right to be considered a citizen at all.

In theory, however, these inequities are simply quirks of our system, ones that are highly controversial and debated, and are not "supposed" to be the norm. Few argue openly that a minority of citizens should be able to vote more or have their votes weighted higher than other eligible citizens. They frame it much differently than that because saying that some votes should matter more would go against the core principles of our democracy. And that would not be a good look.

Again in a democracy, every citizen's vote is supposed to be counted more or less the same. This is why the saying "one person, one vote" has become the rallying call in the fight against anti-democratic measures like voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and removing suffrage for prisoners. These movements are trying to align the ideal of American democracy with its inequitable and often harsh reality.

The Supreme Court Ruling Citizens United v. v. FEC (i.e., the ruling that allowed corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections) was so controversial because it upset the idea that everyone's vote should be counted equally. Money doesn't operate on a principle of equality, but rather inequality. The more money you have, the more you can buy, and in the case of political donations, the more influence you can obtain. As William Horncastle wrote in one of The London School of Economics blogs:

“The impact of Citizens United has had a significant impact on democracy, eroding the foundations of the political finance and disclosure system in US politics. While the future is unknown, it is likely to involve increased spending, reduced transparency, and increased cleavages of political power.”

This problem is even more pronounced in the marketplace, where there are indeed fewer constraints imposed on how much influence you can buy as an individual. The whole purpose of capitalism is that, barring any regulations, people can buy as many goods and services as they want and can afford. It's a system tied to the individual liberties of a few rather than the collective decision-making of the many.

A thousand people could decide they want something, but it makes no difference if they lack the capital to invest in it. It doesn't matter if we are talking about the cure to cancer or magical pills that increase crop yields. No matter how good an idea it is, it simply will not see the light of day. Something contributing to the common good doesn't mean it will succeed in our current marketplace. If anything, we have just seen how capitalists benefit from constraining innovation and overcharging people for essential services.

Conversely, if one wealthy person wants a product or service to exist in the world, no matter how harmful or wasteful that product or service may be, they will most likely succeed. Think of the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch. They made their initial fortunes on oil refining and chemicals and didn't like the threat that acknowledging climate change would have to their bottom line. And so, they spent millions funding (and founding) think-tanks as well as donating to climate-denying politicians to cast doubt onto this reality. They weren't the sole contributors to this skepticism (see ExxonMobil), but they were a major one. We are now facing a ticking clock because a couple of individuals choose this fate for everyone else.

And this is just one example. We could talk about how Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are spending billions of dollars to restart civilization on Mars, a dead world, all while contributing mightily to carbon emissions in the process that make it difficult for this planet to survive. We could also talk about how Bill Gates used his Foundation to keep the COVID vaccine in private hands, contributing to its slow rollout for countries around the world over. And the list goes on.

When you create a society where people are allowed to "vote with their dollars," you are essentially creating a tyranny of the dollar. It's a situation where someone can vote many more times than their peers because of the disparity in wealth between them.

Conclusion

From this lens, capitalism isn't democratic. It's about maximizing the disparities between people. Our economic system naturally conflicts with our current system of governance. Democracy is where every citizen, regardless of their wealth, is ideally (though often not in reality) supposed to be permitted an equal say in how we run things. Capitalism is where some people matter more.

When people use the "vote with your dollars" argument, they are appropriating the language of democracy to give an undemocratic institution a veneer of democratic credibility. They are asking people to avoid the realm of politics (e.g., fighting for greater regulation, breaking up companies, unionization, etc.) and, instead, telling them to stick to capitalism, where people overall have less say in how things are organized. This argument simply does not hold up. It's bad logic that, at best, is a defense mechanism that someone uses to not think too deeply about how power works, and at worst, is gaslighting used to discourage political organizing that is genuinely effective.

We do not need people to "vote with their dollars" in the marketplace. We need them to vote — not just in the ballot box, but in the streets, for their union, at their local grassroots meeting. And yes, we need them to vote with their checkbook too, but not for a product they have very little control over, but for people and organizations fighting in the realm of actual politics: groups advocating for political reform; mutual aid funds giving resources to people who need them; and the few politicians fighting to change things.

That's voting worth rooting for.

Alex Has Opinions 9/23/21 Alex Has Opinions 9/23/21

Disney Has A Problem With Depicting Power

How one animated short explains Disney’s problem with talking about power, change, and political revolution.

The sci-fi short Smash and Grab (2019) is not one of Disney’s most well-known works. It came out in 2019 alongside other shorts such as Kitbull and Out, collectively called Sparkshorts, a program within Pixar that allegedly allows its members to take creative risks with techniques and narratives that would have a hard sell as a feature film.

This particular short is about a duo of robot laborers revolting from their assigned positions — one could argue from their class — to make a break for freedom. Smash and Grab has a rather radical message considering that the company hosting it is an entity as conservative as Disney. Consequently, it immediately caught my attention when I streamed it on Disney Plus. Robot laborers revolting would normally be the plot of a horror tale, not a feel-good buddy story.

However, how these two robots go about achieving this brief revolt says something pretty fundamental about how Disney perceives social change — mainly that it’s something that an individual or a group of individuals can enact on their own. All it takes to revolt against the establishment is for one or two people to decide to do so.

This theory of politics is naive, and it's prevalent throughout Disney’s entire filmography. We see this message come up time and time again, not simply in older works, but more recent ones as well. It’s an implicit value that deserves scrutiny not just in this work but in all others that reflect it.

Smash and Grab is only eight minutes long, but it manages to pack a lot into such a short amount of time. We have two robots, which I will be calling Smash and Grab, respectively. They are chained inside a train compartment, forced to mine a glowing, cyan ore. The two robots are not allowed to touch one another. The cord that powers them is positioned in a way that makes physical interaction impossible. They are stuck inside a repetitive loop as Smash breaks apart the ore and gives it to Grab to place it inside some sort of smelter.

Smash eventually realizes that the ore they are mining gets refined into a dark blue power source for a group of robotic beings living in floating mega structures above the clouds. It’s a pretty on-the-nose narrative for what could be seen as a class struggle. Robots like Smash and Grab, under the threat of violence, mine the resources those in the literal upper class enjoy. They put in all the work, and as far as we can tell, the upper class enjoys the products of that labor.

Smash pretty quickly deduces that this is the same power source used to power them via a cord. Smash breaks free of this constraint to track down one of these mobile power sources and returns with two so that Grab can run away with them. This breakout results in a brief chase scene as flying drones with machine guns fire at the two fleeing robots. Smash and Grab are forced to use a technique they learned while goofing off on the job to disable the drones. They succeed but not without both getting badly injured. The short ends with the two chained together as they walk into the sunset towards one of the planets towering megastructures.

There is a lot here, and it's surprising how much of a class-based commentary can be read in a Disney property, period.

Yet while the text definitely could support this reading, it’s not the only one you can take from it. Smash and Grab director Brian Larsen allegedly wrote this work while in a creative rut, saying: “It was during a time when I felt tethered to things that I couldn’t fully crack at that moment in time in my life, things I couldn’t quite accomplish. Doing SparkShorts allowed me to break free, and it fulfilled me.”

And so you could also view the workers in Smash and Grab from the lens of someone eager to escape the monotony of routine. The repetitive nature of the two robots conveys an emotional reality more than it is grounded in a material analysis of class struggle. They are cogs in a machine wanting to work on more fulfilling endeavors, something we see in how the two turn their job of processing ore into a game.

This lens makes more practical sense because the “freedom” Smash and Grab have won for themselves by the end of the short film isn’t very practical. They are injured and alone in a desert wasteland, attached to a dwindling power source, and walking towards a building housed by the people responsible for their enslavement. That walk into the sunset isn’t forever. They are either on the road to becoming outlaws or headed towards their deaths. This Catch-22 is because Smash and Grab have not freed themselves permanently from the system that enslaved them. It’s, at best, a reprieve.

To be permanently freed, these robots would need an ongoing supply of energy — one they would have to most likely, wrangle from the people controlling the machinegun drones — which would involve systemic reform. The two would have to form a resistance, maybe even a violent one, with the other workers of this world against the people and institutions currently oppressing them.

However, the creative forces behind this short don’t want to get into that murky territory. And that’s fine. No one is required to tell the story of how revolutions happen. This project happened on a tight deadline, and director Larsen probably didn’t have the time to expand on the story any more than they did here.

Still, as we shall soon see, this issue I have cited pops up in more places than this one short. It’s a trend. Disney creators consistently bring up complex power dynamics in their works and then refuse to look at the systemic issues surrounding them.

One example very close to Smash and Grab is the movie WALL-E (2008) — a sci-fi epic about a trash-collecting robot of the same name trying to save his love interest EVE from a tyrannical AI named AUTO. The pilot AI doesn’t want the pair to inform humanity that plant life can grow on Earth again due to an old order from the company Buy-N-Large’s last president. They resort to jettisoning the proof (e.g., a plant) into the void of space as well as declaring EVE and WALL-E outlaws. AUTO is the big bad of the film, and much of the climax is spent by our pair trying to get the last vestiges of humanity to resist him.

Humanity in this movie is depicted as “lazy” and fat. They are so immobile that they live their entire lives in floating hover chairs, drinking most of their food from plastic cups. Anti-fatness is used to signal to the viewer that humanity has become docile. We are meant to view their enslavement to Buy-N-Large as a series of personal choices made by consumers. The moment people start to get more active (e.g., splashing in pools, unplugging from their virtual identities, taking an interest in Earth, etc.), the entire system comes crashing down. The human passenger's revolt against AUTO and decide to head back to Earth to begin rebuilding anew. The last few minutes show human passengers taking their first steps on the now fertile soil.

In reality, things would be a bit more complicated on the Axiom spaceship. Most of the passengers had been indoctrinated from childhood to place trust in this corporation from birth. “B is for Buy-N-large. Your very best friend,” we see a robot teacher lecture to a group of toddlers. The idea that a system can just be reformed through a series of quick individual actions, when most people are thoroughly invested in said system, disregards the effort and time political organizing takes. It also ignores all the disproportionate blame that lies with the institutions responsible for causing this mess — in this case, the Walmart-like corporation Buy-N-Large.

“Just get rid of the big bad, and we then have ourselves a revolution,” the movie seems to argue.

WALL-E is not the only film to rely on the trope of the big bad being responsible for all of society's ills. The movie Maleficent 2: Mistress of Evil (2019) is all about how the evil Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer) uses her position to turn her people against the dark fairy Maleficent. As the narrator says at the beginning of the film: “…it was Maleficent's love which broke that very same curse. But that detail was somehow mysteriously forgotten. For as the tale was told over and again throughout the kingdom, Maleficent became the villain once more.”

The evil queen then wages a secret war against the fey folk, employing her son's marriage to Maleficient’s daughter Aurora (Elle Fanning) as a trap to attempt to massacre the fey. Despite Ingrith needing many accomplices to put forth this campaign, we are expected to believe that she is solely responsible for this plan and the speciesism underpinning it. The King and Prince Phillip are utterly clueless to her machinations, and once Ingrith is dealt with, relationships with Fey and humans resume almost immediately. “Ulstead will never attack the Moors again,” Phillip proclaims after the climactic battle in the film.

All that it takes to end years, possibly centuries of speciesism, is removing one bad person, and even this person does not despise the fey out of some widespread cultural bias. Ingrith hates the fey folk because she blames them for not assisting her people during one particularly harsh winter. Her hatred is contextual rather than cultural — that initial trauma shaping her thinking so much that she rejects any ideas of equality between humans and fey as foolhardy. We are told that tensions between humans and fey exist (the dark fey claim they have been hunted for centuries), but once Ingrith is removed, those alleged barriers don’t seem to matter a whole lot.

We also see this trope of oversimplifying racism (in this case, metaphorical racism) in the Pixar-Disney film Luca (2021), where the main characters manage to integrate sea monsters and humans in a single evening. This happens in a town that has glorified the hunting of sea monsters for centuries. The town square is littered with statues and mosaics of humans killing sea monsters, and a single sighting prompts the town's fishermen to form raiding parties to hunt them.

Yet the main characters Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), who are sea monsters, bypass centuries of ingrained hatred by winning the local Triathlon and publically rebuffing the film’s antagonist. There are some lingering animosities, but these resentments are mollified from a stern look of one buff fisherman whom the pair befriended earlier in the movie. The integration of humans and sea monsters didn’t require laws and political organization to overcome, but warm, endearing conversations and the removal of the villain. “It’s over, the reign of terror. It’s over,” one character says of the antagonist being humiliated, which happens around the same time the town begrudgingly accepts our main characters.

The status quo is seldom challenged in Disney films, except in the most superficial ways, and worse, it is sometimes actively reinforced. For example, take the 2019 live-action remake of the animated movie Aladdin. The character Jasmine (Naomi Scott) is portrayed as a fiercely independent woman campaigning for social justice. Early on, there is a scene where she gives several children pieces of bread from a merchant’s stall. Enraged, the merchant asks her to pay for the items she stole. She refuses, telling him that their need is greater. “Those children were hungry,” she responds indignantly.

Jasmine, however, doesn’t spend her vast financial and political power as a princess fighting for redistributed policies. Her political power is spent campaigning to be named the first female Sultan — a position most likely built upon depriving those very children of the resources they need to eat. She could give some of her food or riches to feed those children, but instead, she takes it from a merchant. She expresses no qualms with the monarchy she wants to rule (and maybe placing that power into more decentralized hands). The film positions her ascendency to leadership as a chance for change when we see no indication that it will be different for the people beneath her.

Instead, the movie sidesteps this dilemma to focus on the villain, the Grand Vizier Jafar (Marwan Kenzari), who briefly becomes the Sultan after wishing for it from a genie. We are meant to think his leadership is wrong because he is duplicitous and wants to invade a neighboring kingdom, but he is merely using the power of his office. Sultans have absolute power in this world. They can change the kingdom's laws on a whim, and as the Sultan, Jafar can pretty much do whatever he wants. Just as Jasmine can do whatever she wants as Sultan by the time the film ends. We are given no material reason for why his leadership would be worse for the citizens of Agrabah, many of which were living in poverty before his short rule even started.

After Jafar’s defeat, Jasmine’s ascendancy to the throne is portrayed as a good thing. Yet, other than the gender change, the power dynamic between the royalty and the peasantry remains unaltered. Jasmine's one adjustment to the laws involves allowing Aladdin to marry her. It’s all about her and has nothing to do with her citizens' poverty or property rights.

Throughout these examples, characters make overtures to changing systems without actually changing them. The blame is not laid at the company Buy-N-large in WALL-E, the monarchy in Aladdin or Maleficent II, or the nameless citizens in the floating cities of Smash and Grab, but instead remains in the realm of individual actors and choices.

Disney films seem to be deeply confused about how power works. They often have characters fighting to individually free themselves from systems of oppression without recognizing that it takes collective action to dismantle them. They also introduce serious issues like racism and sexism without diving into the complexities that make those problems worth discussing.

Again, I don’t think Disney is required to tell stories of political change. They could remain in the realm of compelling emotional arcs and hero’s journeys. It’s a niche they are very good at (see Frozen, Moana, etc.), and they are by no means required to tell stories that focus on overcoming discrimination or fighting against oppression.

Yet, if they want to enter the realm of politics (as they increasingly seem wont to do), then I think their theory of political change should make sense. Because right now, they are creating films and shows with the aesthetic of political change and revolution, without putting in the effort to have anything coherent to say beyond looks.

We need stories that focus on what happens after characters decide to resist. I want to know what happens after the robots walk into the sunset at the end of Smash and Grab. Do they die in the desert? Do they have to continually raid the train system, braving death each time from far superior forces until one day they break down? Or most optimistically of all, do they organize with the other workers on the train system to create freedom for more than just themselves?

Disney is so dead set on creating the aesthetic of political change that they never examine what that means for their characters or worlds. Political change always comes swiftly and suddenly in a film’s closing moments. Even more so than the sci-fi ships and magic carpets, that’s probably the most unbelievable elements in their stories thus far.

Alex Has Opinions 9/16/21 Alex Has Opinions 9/16/21

The Harmful Way Mental Health is Framed in Disney’s ‘Cruella’

Unpacking the presentation of Dissociative Identity Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the hit Disney flick.

Many elements in Disney’s Cruella (2021) shouldn’t work. It had to not only establish an empathetic backstory for the classic Disney villain and turn her into a likable anti-hero but create an entertaining enough plot for viewers to watch. It also had to center this villain while not offending the Mickey Mouse Corporations' conservative sensibilities. And on top of all of these constraints, the movie had to create the space for a potential sequel.

It’s a surprise, frankly, that we got a movie as fun and workable as we did. Some of Cruella’s elements really are fun and exciting: the costumes and set pieces are simply to die for, darling; Emma Stone, though using a somewhat questionable accent, is having the time of her life playing Cruella, and we are here for it; there are also many memeable moments that I am sure will fill text threads and messaging groups for years to come.

Unfortunately, what doesn't quite work is how mental health is framed in this film. The film tries to humanize the dog-skinning protagonist by defining her as someone just a bit different. She is an eccentric who can’t help but stir trouble, leaving us with a portrayal that is far more harmful than edifying when it comes to mental health. It uses her “craziness” as a prop to cause drama rather than to reflect on what having mental health issues means to someone existing in a time period as regressive as the 1970s.

For those unaware, Cruella is a reimagining of the 101 Dalmatians’ villain. It’s about a young petty criminal named Estella Miller (Emma Stone) trying to break into the fashion industry in 1970s London. Her initial job as a designer and personal assistant for Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson) blossoms into a secret rivalry, as Estella dons the persona Cruella to go head-to-head with the Baroness.

The film is of two minds when it comes to discussing mental health. On the one hand, it wants the viewer to think that there is something off-kilter with Estella. We see her referring to herself as “as a little bit mad,” and we know that there is a long history of her acting this way. There is a scene midway through the film where Cruella is trying to recruit an old friend, Anita Darling (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), into reporting on her antics. The way she presents herself to Anita causes the friend to recognize old patterns. “You know that glint in your eye,” Anita says cooly, “…I'm starting to remember that you have a bit of an extreme side.”

Cruella clearly has some unaddressed condition; however, the text doesn’t bother to dive into the specifics of what that illness or disorder is. There is no direct reference to a particular set of symptoms. The closest we come to is several mentions of her having two split selves (i.e., the nice, people-pleasing Estella and the dominant, vindictive Cruella), going all the way back to early childhood when her mother asked her to suppress all aspects of Cruella. This could be a reference to Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder), which requires that someone have multiple distinct personalities, but there is no way for us to know for sure because there are gaps in the characterization that make a diagnosis impossible.

Some might argue that this gap in knowledge can partially be explained by the time period. The 1970s existed well before our current understanding of mental health. Multiple Personality Disorder only became a widespread term in 1980 with the publication of the DSM III, years after Cruella was set. Although there were diagnoses for similar disorders going back centuries (see possessions, hysteria, Hystero-Epilepsy, etc.), it’s not surprising that Estella/Cruella and her companions might lack the vocabulary to describe her mental health issues.

Yet this mainly reads as an excuse. The point of frustration here is not the lack of knowledge the characters have but how those characterizations are presented to the viewer. The film didn’t need modern-day labels to depict symptoms of DID accurately. It could have simply depicted them in a way that was accurate, regardless of whether or not the characters understood them. For example, the film could have shown clear signs of ongoing amnesia, as is common for DID. If the film intended Estella/Cruella to have some other disorder such as Borderline Personality Disorder, it could have shown us chronic feelings of emptiness, dissociation, or one of the other symptoms (see the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend for an example that does this right).

Despite clearly referencing some mental health problems in Cruella’s past, the film is not interested in diving into this issue in a way that’s fleshed out. It’s played out more as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation, as Cruella slowly takes over the once-dominant Estella personality. It’s a dramatized conception of two imagined selves (symbolized by her natural hair color of black and white split down the middle) battling it out for control, rather than anything resembling our current conceptions of mental disorders.

This feels all very ableist. These references I have made to DID are subtextual. Unless you are trained to see them, it's doubtful that the typical viewer will walk away thinking the character Estella/Cruella is anything more than “a little bit mad” — a harmful generalization when mental disorders are already understood so poorly by the typical viewer.

Say what you want about Todd Phillips’ Joker (a film Cruella has been compared to extensively), but that at least put a lot of effort into making it clear that the Joker had some disorder (although it is also poorly explained). The film conveyed to the viewer how hard life was for the main character in a society (i.e., 1970s New York City) that didn’t give a flying f@ck about people with mental health issues. He faced stigma that made it difficult for him to interact with people and hold down a job.

Estella/Cruella does have problems, but these appear to be largely situational. She is on the run because she was framed for her adopted mother Catherine's murder, not because her disorder made it difficult to make friends or hold down a job. Her raw talent leads to an unsolicited job offer, and she obtains a found family within days of losing her adopted one.

In fact, the movie often conflates Estella/Cruella’s potential mental health problems with her genius. It frames her challenges to authority not as systemic abuses but rather because these authority figures cannot appreciate her exceptionalism. “And might I say,” remarks Estella’s mother (Emily Beecham) in response to her child getting expelled, “your school seems to turn out horrible children with no creativity or compassion.” “…or genius,” Estella adds mirthfully. “Being a genius is one thing,” Emma Stone narrates several scenes later, “Raising a genius does come with its challenges.”

A more self-aware movie may have made these comments a component of her delusion — a bubble waiting to be popped in the narrative — but the text never challenges these assumptions because Estella/Cruella is by all accounts a genius. She is able to start her own underground fashion label in the span of what seems like five minutes. We have no reason to believe that she’s anything less than exceptional, and it's that alleged genius that brings her more strife than her poorly defined mental disorder.

The writing very clearly wanted to have the aesthetic of someone “mad” without putting in the work to make that characterization well-rounded. This isn't the only area of the movie that relies on appropriating aesthetics without diving into their proper context either. The punk scene of the 70s is referenced to ad nauseum in this film, with Cruella even putting on a punk-inspired runway at one point. And yet, despite a musical soundtrack of over 30 songs, very little punk music is in the actual movie, and there is likewise little connection to punk's political roots. As NPR music contributor Cyrena Touros says in a review segment of the movie:

“…yes, these are songs from the ’70s. But these aren’t punk songs. There was one punk song, which — I don’t know if it’s a spoiler to say — is used in a big high-fashion show moment. And it’s a Stooges song. I think you can guess what it is…And it’s, like, way overproduced. I was like, you took the one punk song in this film, and you did the opposite of what punk is. And you overproduced it.”

The movie also appropriates the facade of queerness with the character Artie (John McCrea), who was lauded as the first openly gay character in a live-action Disney film. However, he is never textually revealed to be queer. He is coded as such in lines like “I like to say that ‘normal’ is the cruelest insult of them all,” his androgynous wardrobe, as well as his David Bowie-inspired eyeliner, but these, are again, merely aesthetics divorced from representation. This queerbaiting is a problem that has shown up in over half a dozen films at this point (see also The Rise of Skywalker, Beauty and the Beast, The Jungle Cruise, etc.), and, unsurprisingly, it has shown up again in Cruella.

Given Disney’s tendency to appropriate other aesthetics, both historically and in this very movie, it would not be fair to give them the benefit of the doubt here with Estella/Cruella’s portrayal of mental health. We have no evidence to suggest that they tried to tell a three-dimensional story about someone who has a mental disorder. Instead, they appear to be using the veneer of “craziness” to tell an “edgy” story about how exceptional women don’t have to be nice.

Worse, when diving a little deeper, we see that the portrayal of mental disorders in this film is actually pretty harmful.

Cruella's inaccurate depiction of mental health not only comes off as ill-informed, but because this is a major film, it means that that misinformation is going to impact how people see mental health, especially for something as misunderstood as Dissociative Identity Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder.

A major component of DID is that people develop two or more distinct personalities (referred to as “dissociated parts” or “alters”), which we see in the movie in the way of Estella and Cruella, respectively. A person may experience passive influence where a part exerts indirect authority (i.e., alien thoughts, emotions, feelings, preferences, etc.) or a full dissociated intrusion, where one part takes control of the body at the expense of another part. There is no cure for DID, and treatments and diagnoses remain controversial to this day. Generally, psychotherapy is used to integrate various parts, so dissociation is unnecessary or, conversely, to achieve a harmony between the various identities where they come to a cooperative arrangement.

Cruella, however, takes the opposite approach. The Cruella part kills the Estella part, and this is portrayed as a positive thing. “[Estella] was with her mother now,” Cruella says after killing off the Estella part. “But Cruella was alive…And I call that a happy ending.” This representation is a somewhat terrifying stance because it goes against the established consensus of how this disorder should be treated. As Therapist Alyssa Cotten says in her own review of the movie:

“What ends up happening at the very end of the movie is very disturbing because, in the DID [community] we do not endorse this at all…we do not encourage, we do not support the death or killing of your parts, your alters, because all of them hold different memories and experiences and its important that we love all the parts that are present.”

The death of Estella at the end of Cruella not only flies in the face of established mental health consensus, but if someone with DID, who did not currently have a stable support network, took the advice in this movie, it could lead to some unsettling outcomes. It’s not a “happy ending” for anyone to kill off a part of themselves, and the fact the Cruella has the viewer walk away with this message is an unsettling take.

Another harmful element in this work is how it weirdly essentializes Cruella’s “craziness” as an inherent component of her nature. “I'm Cruella, born brilliant, born bad, and a little bit mad,” she tells the viewer after learning that her mother is the evil Baroness, a narcissistic woman (more on this later) seen berating and torturing her staff the entire movie. The film recontextualizes Cruella’s badness in this scene, something we have seen her have since early childhood, as a component of that legacy. She’s born bad, it's heavily implied, as a result of her genetic heritage.

Yet, while there may be a genetic component to disorders such as DID, it is not as readily inheritable in the same way the disorders schizophrenia or major depression are. It’s also not clear that someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder can genetically pass on the completely separate Dissociative Identity Disorder. It is not only an ableist assumption that this “crazy” is interchangeable with all others, but it is also weirdly sexist for a movie trying so hard to be a white, feminist power ballad to assume that the “craziness” of the mother could be passed on at all.

These disorders are complex, and our understanding of them is constantly evolving, but what we do know is that environment is a huge factor in how they develop. Childhood trauma, in fact, is overwhelmingly cited as a cause of DID, which means that if you are going to “blame” anyone, Estella’s mother would be the far better candidate because the Baroness never interacted with Estella/Cruella until adulthood. The film briefly addresses this possibility when Cruella monologues to her dead mother about how she always tried to control her, saying: “I guess you were always scared, weren’t you? That I’d be a psycho like my real mum?”

There is an argument to be made here that her adopted mother Catherine did instill real trauma onto Estella to avoid her adopted daughter developing the Baroness’ perceived evilness. She actively tried to suppress Cruella (something we know shouldn't be done with parts), but the movie ultimately doesn’t blame her as the source of that “badness” because this is the same monologue where Cruella tells the viewer that she was “born bad.” The film Cruella erases the complicated reality of how people get dissociative disorders like DID — most likely because telling a story about child abuse would probably be too dark for an edgy Disney movie — and instead tries to essentialize these mental disorders as a part of Cruella and the Baroness's badness.

We see this essentialization, not only with the titular character, but also with the Baroness, who is portrayed as a truly despicable figure in the movie. She takes pleasure in hurting others, has no qualms about killing off her competition, and is literally called evil in the film’s closing monologue. The explanation for why she is like this is because of her alleged disorder, one of her henchmen, saying: “The Baroness, on the other hand, she’s a true narcissist.” Narcissistic Personality Disorder, however, is defined by someone having at least five of nine characteristics listed in the DSM ( e.g., a grandiose sense of self-importance; preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success; belief that they are “special” and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people, etc.) and has nothing to do with people taking pleasure in hurting others or being inherently evil.

This characterization in Cruella is quite ableist as it ties into a long history of people equating narcissists to flat-out monsters. We need to only look at cinemas' classic antagonists to know this to be true. Most Disney villains, from Gaston (Richard White) in Beauty and The Beast to Scar (Jeremy Irons) in The Lion King to Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) in Enchanted, portray narcists as evil. The protagonist in American Psycho, the homicidal Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), is so narcissistic that, at one point, he admires his own reflection while having sex. The serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) in Se7en has an overinflated sense of self. The MCU is likewise littered with narcists from Thanos (Josh Brolin) to Loki (Tom Hiddleston) to Ego (Kurt Russell) in Guardians of the Galaxy.

It’s possible to list pages upon pages of narcissistic villains in pop culture, but the same cannot be said for heroes, especially outside the realm of comedy where narcists are comedic punchlines (see Emperor Kuzco (David Spade) in The Emperor’s New Groove, Lucille Bluth (Jessica Walter) in Arrested Development, etc.). In fact, narcissistic characters given the hero moniker usually have their “badness” massaged to make them likable. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) in Iron Man may have a high ego at the start of the film, but he ends the movie caring so much about humanity that he stops his company from producing weapons. Loki starts the MCU as a “megalomaniac,” but by the time he gets his own series, his ego is deflated so much that he realizes his personal failing on his own. Their narcissism is effectively dropped for them to become protagonists.

We see a similar trend with DID. There are some empathetic, albeit sensationalized portrayals in pop culture (see Tara Gregson (Toni Collette) in The United States of Tara, Charlotte Wells (Sophie Okonedo) in Ratched. etc.), but a lot of people with DID are often depicted as vessels for evil. The character Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) in Split and later in Glass has a literal monster part called The Beast. The character Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) in The Dark Knight is left disfigured from an accident — his psyche split in two, so torn that he often leaves violence up to the flip of a coin. The movie Fight Club ends with the reveal that violent mastermind Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is a part of the narrator character (Edward Norton). A similar plot can be seen in the hacker thriller Mr. Robot.

Just as in Cruella, depictions of DID often fall into the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde trope with a “good” side and a “bad” side fighting for control. The movie Black Swan is about the protagonist Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), splitting back and forth between the orderly white swan and the chaotic black one. The cruel Skeksis and peace-loving urRu in The Dark Crystal are the good and evil parts of the urSkeks race. Split personalities are also frequently a Horror movie trope. The twist of many is that the homicidal part perpetuating the murders is being concealed by a more banal part (see Dr. Elliott in Dressed to Kill, Axel Palmer in My Bloody Valentine, Dr. David Callaway in Hide and Seek, etc.)

However, people who have these disorders are not any more predisposed to “evil” than neurotypical people. One well-regarded study found that when you consider other factors such as substance abuse and poverty, people with mental disorders do not seem to be any more violent than others. As one of the authors remarks: “a great deal of what is responsible for violence among people with mental illness may be the same factors that are responsible for violence among people without mental illness.” In fact, someone with DID is far more likely to commit suicide than they are to engage in Machiavellian plots and serial killer sprees.

This trend of sensationalizing these mental disorders, often quite inaccurately, as this film shows, creates a stigma that prevents people with mental disorders from getting the help they need — for who would willfully admit that they are a “monster.” Millions of Americans go both undiagnosed and untreated, and dangerous framings like this do not help this matter.

Ultimately Cruella doesn’t separate itself from this dangerous throughline in cinema but adds to it. The film creates a story where someone is evil because of their disorder. We don’t walk away thinking mental illness is something that makes life more difficult for Cruella, but at best, it is padding for her eccentricities, and at worst, something that makes that badness predetermined.

Disney’s Cruella relies on some pretty terrible cliches to ground its anti-hero and villain in. It creates this paradigm where mental illness is used to justify why someone behaves immorally, and as we have briefly covered, that ties into a long, problematic history.

There were plenty of ways to make Cruella a lovable protagonist, even one as vindictive as a puppy murder, that would not have played into these problematic tropes. They could have made her motivation about trying to win the estate from the Baroness from the beginning. They could have had the Baroness’ “evil” rooted in a personal philosophy rather than her mental health. Hell, they could have even had narcism and DID play a central role. The goal here is not to preclude villains from ever having a mental disorder or for these disorders always to be a main part of the text, but rather to depict these disorders respectfully. To do that, though, this film would have had to involve far more research and care than shown presently.

Telling a lukewarm conversation about mental health was a landmine they chose to step into. No one asked for them to do this, and, sadly, this has not garnered more attention in the conversation surrounding the film, though there is no doubt it will be perceived less favorably as the years roll on ahead.

All of this being said, I still had fun watching this movie. I loved the costumes and one-liners, and unlike other films I have reviewed, analyzing it was not a chore. There is a tendency for people to criticize critics for ruining their fun or being moralists, but criticizing the things we enjoy doesn’t mean we have to cast them aside. It's just a matter of recognizing the problematic elements in them to make space for future works to do better.

As a society, we have been stuck with these harmful tropes with mental health for a while, and there's nothing fashionable or cool about that.

Alex Has Opinions 9/7/21 Alex Has Opinions 9/7/21

Yes, Evicting Your Tenants Is Bad Actually

I can’t believe I have to stress this during a pandemic

We are in the middle of a god damn pandemic, and some landlords want us not to criticize them for denying their tenants housing. “Not all landlords are rolling in money,” writes Jacqueline A in a Medium article explaining why she is evicting her tenants. “Some are just normal individuals trying to make ends meet. In the same way, we have good and bad tenants; we also have good and bad landlords. In the same way, tenants don’t want to be homeless; landlords don’t want to be in debt due to their tenants.”

Before we proceed, it should be noted that being unhoused is not equal to being in debt. The former is far worse. However, it does speak to the priorities of not only Jacqueline A but many landlords out there. They want to prevent people from demonizing their right to deny an individual in their care housing while simultaneously critiquing anything that prevents them from getting their money.

These criticisms have existed for centuries, but the recently axed eviction moratorium had many landlords up in arms over a temporary loss of profits. (Note that the moratorium excluded many scenarios and did not prevent landlords from getting their money eventually, but a lot were frustrated by a gap in rents anyway). “The eviction moratorium is killing small landlords, not the pandemic.” Dean Hunter, CEO of the Small Multifamily Owners Association, told NBC back in June of 2021. The argument being that landlords would have to sell their property if they did not receive financial aid, or implicitly left unsaid, could return to the previous era of evicting their tenants.

Now that that eviction moratorium has been removed on the national level, we are seeing that cold reality play out in real-time. Hundreds of thousands risk losing their homes by the end of the year. These landlords wanted sympathy from us for “having” to evict tenants from their homes so that they can preserve their economic entitlements (i.e., rents), but they were not nearly as concerned with all the negative repercussions that that decision entails (i.e., financial hardships, homelessness, and even death for their tenants).

They asked us to prioritize their monetary losses over our empathy for their tenants — a group that is overall more disadvantaged economically — and we should question the ethicality of this tactic and what it says of us as a people overall.

When we have this conversation, it's very easy to get bogged down in the specifics of the investment and the philosophical nature of owning property (and we will get to that), but before we even jump into those turbulent waters, we should first talk about what’s at stake. When we discuss housing, we are inherently talking about the right for people to live a good life or even to live at all. The decision to deny someone housing makes their lives materially more difficult, and that action could harm them physically, not simply financially.

Housing is expensive in the United States. There are a lot of factors that are too much to cover in-depth here: the purchasing of a good home outright requires over 100K in all states, a high number for most working Americans who make a median wage of $19.33 an hour; millions of renters also spend over 50% of their income on rent, making saving difficult; there is also a dwindling supply of low-cost rentals and homes to buy. And of course, these problems fall along existing lines of inequity, with browner Americans far more likely to rent than own. All of these factors taken together mean that when someone is denied housing in an inequitable market such as ours, especially a lower-income person, they will struggle to find an alternative.

It’s difficult to find national data on the eviction-to-homelessness pipeline because we don’t have good figures on the total number of unhoused people in the US period, let alone all the contributing factors. However, we know from many studies that a link between eviction and being unhoused is credible. For example, Scholars Robert Collinson and Davin Reed combed through over a decade of housing court cases and other administrative programs in New York City, and they found that evictions increase the “probability of [lower income households] applying to homeless shelter[s] by 14 percentage points.” In the words of one anti-homelessness advocate on their experience with this phenomenon:

“Seven, eight years ago here in this neighborhood, my family and I were evicted. This memory comes back to me, it's like a moment of rejection…we weren't worthy to be in the place that we live at…My mom was a hardworking person and she worked multiple jobs. This was during my Senior year. I didn’t know what we were going to do next and neither did my siblings…We decide to just head into a shelter.”

There is a clear link between evicting someone and homelessness — a statement that should sound obvious when uttered aloud — and that's not the only issue. Losing your home comes with it a bevy of health problems. Unhoused people have a shorter life span — 17.5 years shorter than the general population, according to one estimate. They suffer from treatable problems such as wound and skin infections, malnutrition, and substance abuse, as well as mental health problems — all of which would be easier to deal with with a roof over their heads.

Landlords love to share anecdotes of tenant horror stories where people refuse to cooperate, dragging proceedings in courts for years, as a justification for why they must evict. The web is filled with listicles of these stories, usually taken from only the landlord's perspective. These stories aim for the viewer to gawk at all the problems landlords allegedly have to deal with. “…landlords have a tough job,” writes Jasmin Suknanan in BuzzFeed. “But their jobs become *extra* tough when dealing with people and situations who just make the experience a living hell.” These “problem cases,” however, are a statistical minority. We are in the middle of a pandemic that has wrecked the earning potential of millions of Americans, and the number of Americans who are behind on rent sits somewhere at 12% nationally.

Given the repercussions we just talked about — the poverty and death that follow from an eviction — is preventing one or two people from skipping out on rent truly worth risking the physical and mental health of millions of people? And should someone's personality really dictate whether or not they have a right to housing?

Any empathetic person should answer no.

If you are complaining about a poor return when your actions hurt and possibly even kill people, you might understand for a moment why it's hard for others to take your concerns over a bad investment seriously. Because that’s what housing is for most people who rent out property — an investment, a way to accumulate wealth over time.

According to a 2018 Rental Housing Finance Survey, nearly 45% of all rental units are owned by for-profit businesses, which own a disproportionate amount of properties with 25 or more rental units. It's true that individual investors own the remaining units (55%), but this doesn’t make the majority of these investors poor. Owners make up a small number of Americans, and they tend to have a larger income than the average citizen.

Now, if some of these individuals are over-leveraged (i.e., have taken on too much debt) and make a bad investment, they could stand to lose a great deal, as the standard of living they have mapped out for themselves disappears. When comparing this loss to the loss of tenants, however, who are far more likely to face starvation and death, you can see how people think these complaints come off as heartless.

Despite what people like Jacqueline A may have us believe, debt is not the same thing as being unhoused. One group of people losses the future they thought they were entitled to but still most likely has a roof over their heads, while the other loses everything.

To the commenters already typing away links and articles about landlords losing wealth because of bad tenants, losing your economic future is indeed unfair, but that’s how our capitalist system works. You are not entitled to a return on investment, any more than a restaurant owner would be entitled to a profit if patrons stopped going to their restaurant or an investor is to a certain stock price if the stock plummets. Our system is unfair, and if you are unable to make money, you are only allowed access to a patchwork of safety net programs to survive.

We should want to change this dreadful state of affairs. It seems strange to me, however, that many landlords demand sympathy for them over a loss of profits but will disregard the lives of tenants, who are almost always in a materially worse off situation. It speaks to an utter lack of empathy. They want all of the upsides of capitalism for themselves, with none of the downsides, while expecting others to weather both.

Why should housing be different from any other investment? It seems strange that property owners feel like they deserve special treatment over other investors when sudden economic downturns are part of the risk they take on when entering this sector of the economy. There is always the risk that tenants will default on their rents — that’s part of the reason rents are so high in the first place.

Rather than realize that our housing system is unfair for all (and maybe should be radically changed), many landlords will often complain that the law is interfering with their ability to turn a profit. “Preventing all evictions, for any reason (as some local ordinances effectively do),” opines Tony Francois in The Hill in May of 2020 of the now axed eviction moratorium. “While doing nothing to shield property owners, is a dangerous over-reaction to the scope of the problems posed by the current emergency.” Francois goes on to explain that the moratorium may not even be necessary and that if implemented, it will ruin many small-time property owners. He’s, in essence, complaining that the law is unfair because it will impact the earning potential of landlords.

Yet again, this is a willful misrepresentation of how capitalism works. The law has always affected how wealth is made or lost. In fact, gaps in the law are how most entrepreneurial people make their money in the modern era. Gaps in contracting law allowed companies like Uber to break into the taxi business. They reclassified drivers as independent contractors rather than employees to avoid paying out healthcare and overtime entitlements. Gaps in how cryptocurrencies are classified have allowed speculative investing to skyrocket. Going back even further, Robber Barons such as Rockefeller could amass so much wealth because there was no regulatory framework to challenge them.

Large returns on investment almost always come from the exploitation of inequity, and landlords are no different. Housing is not like other products and services where someone can skip one month if they can’t afford it. It’s an essential service that, as we have already covered, materially impacts someone's physical and psychological health. Someone will pay for this service if they can, which is why many devote such a significant portion of their income to even suboptimal housing.

For many, there is no alternative, but the streets.

People would not rent if they had any opportunity to own property, and it’s this necessity that landlords are profiting off of. Take a moment to consider what renting even is. You get the temporary ability to live somewhere, and in exchange, you pay off a landlord’s mortgage and give them equity. Your wealth stagnates or even decreases in this arrangement, while their wealth increases over time. This is all to pay for a service that you must have if you wish to live at all.

It’s inherently exploitative, and as with any exploitative investment, the risk underpinning these high rewards is that the political order will change at any moment. Many people, for example, currently use Airbnb to rent out (or sublease) their spaces, often circumventing local tax and safety regulations on vacation rentals and apartments. In an attempt to get some of that potential tax revenue, governments all over the country are now cracking down, passing laws that make it less profitable for people to rent out their residences with booking platforms like Airbnb. It was (and to a certain extent still is) that gap that made the platform desirable in the first place.

The law is always shifting people’s access to vital services such as housing, leading to high returns and sudden downsides. One of the reasons there is a gap in affordable housing right now is because the federal government has not prioritized it. There have been consistent cuts over the last three decades, going all the way back to Nixon. Public housing is pretty much only built now to replace existing units. Rental vouchers are the preferred method of choice in the current era. Even these have long waitlists as only about a fourth of people who qualify receive them (landlords also often discriminate against voucher holders).

If our government were to increase its funding toward affordable housing, housing would not be nearly as profitable of an investment for landlords as it is today because they benefit from this discrepancy. As scholars Matthew Desmond and Nathan Wilmers write in a paper published in the American Journal of Sociology:

“In poor neighborhoods…landlords are betting on today. These landlords see much higher monthly profit margins per housing unit. This short-term investment strategy does not rely on future equity, a risky proposition in distressed communities, but on the simple fact that in poor neighborhoods mortgage and property tax payments are significantly lower than in nonpoor neighborhoods but rents are not.”

Our current policy regime prioritizes homeownership while not reducing costs for renters. This creates a climate where those who have the resources to purchase property can do so and then charge renters, especially poorer ones, a premium for that service.

While the money is running high, it may seem to landlords like these entitlements to high rents will go on forever, but that’s not the case. There is nothing inherent about your return on investment, in the same way, that there is nothing inherent about people having to set aside a portion of their wealth in rents. These are temporary arrangements built on policies that could change at any moment. The expectation that landlords should not weather any risk (or losses) goes against how our capitalist system operates.

It is troublesome that many landlords would rather stubbornly hold onto their perceived entitlement to rents rather than work towards building a world where neither party has to worry about housing on an ongoing basis. It seems to be more about the preservation of power than about the economy. We should question why we prioritize someone’s right to exploit others over providing everyone equitable housing.

Again, all of this is unfair. It's unfair that housing is so hard for most people to obtain and keep. It's also unfair that exploiting other people is the easiest way to build a safe future for yourself. It creates a situation where to get ahead; you have to take advantage of others — a win-lose scenario.

We should be working towards a world where housing is not a zero-sum game. How we get there is another article (or book series) in its own right. If you are interested in solutions that work towards that future, check out the Urban Institute, the Coalition for the Homeless, and the Housing Partnership Network as places to start. You might also want to research nonprofits and grassroots campaigns in your area working on this problem on a local level.

When it comes to housing, we can create a win-win solution, but to be frank, it will mean shifting our empathy towards the plight of the exploited rather than the lost wealth of the exploiters. Landlords will have to let go, either willing or through force, the idea that they are entitled to profits built on the backs of others' misfortune.

I am not asking to rewrite the economic order overnight, but when it comes to this debate, we need landlords to stop taking up the conversation with housing. Stop writing op-eds and articles bemoaning your loss of profits, and focus on the structural inequities within this system. Uplift and donate to voices trying to reform housing for the better (not simply your bottom line) and spend political power on their preferred solutions.

Also, if you are a landlord, see what you can do with your tenants to make your relationship with them more equitable. One solution worth looking into is rent-to-own contracts. These vary depending on the specifics of the contract. Generally, though, they create an arrangement where the renter sets aside money every month to purchase the property and has first rights to purchase it when it's sold. This opens up a path for homeownership and provides you, the landlord, with an offer to purchase the property, rather than having to pay fees to a realtor to find one.

In exchange for taking small steps like the ones above, all of us will be working towards a world where we don’t have to worry about exploitation, to have a roof over our heads—a world where housing is a right rather than an asset enjoyed by the few.