Alex Has Opinions 8/12/22 Alex Has Opinions 8/12/22

American Society Wants The Sick And Tired To Die

It seems like we want sick people like me to perish

I am sick a lot. Simple colds will knock me out for days or weeks, forcing me to pick up the pieces afterward. I have gotten into the habit of expecting gaps of fatigue and illness. I have had trouble being a "productive" member of society for years, and truthfully only exist right now because I have a robust support system.

When I ask my sick friends who don't have a safety net how they do it, the answer is that they soldier on through. They go to offices and restaurants with sniffles, fatigue, and headaches, suppressing coughs with over-the-counter medications and curealls they have learned from Instagram and TikTok.

Because they have to work, there are often no nets to catch them. And the ones who don't work—well, some are not around anymore. From where I am looking, it really does seem like we want the sick and tired to die.

Conversations of work and burnout are usually framed around non-disabled and non-sick people — and how they are overworked and one bad sick day away from financial ruin — but what about those already there? Millions of Americans have chronic illnesses. About one in four Americans have some form of disability.

What are they supposed to do? What am I, for this question is more than personal (its life and death)?

This society does not treat well people who cannot produce. America has what some have described as a "tattered" or nonexistent safety net with stringent work requirements. I remember my friend telling me once that even though she was in constant pain, she did not qualify for long-term disability because, as a knowledge-based worker, she didn't have to lift anything. The assessor told her that if "she could sit at a desk, she could work." I remind you — she was in constant pain.

Those living with a disability are more likely to be in debt, unemployed, and more likely to be in poverty overall. It should be noted that issues of poverty and disability or illness are not so easily separated from one other, as poverty can profoundly impact someone's disability status. As written in a report by the National Disability Institute:

“Children living in poverty are more likely to have asthma, chronic illness, environmental trauma such as lead poisoning, learning problems and low birth weight that lead to disabilities. People in more physically demanding jobs are also more likely to suffer workplace illnesses and injuries…Disability adversely affects employment possibilities and earnings. It also can impose additional costs on families, such as medical bills, transportation, modifications to their home and personal assistants.”

Since poverty can lead to disability and vice versa, this creates a vicious cycle as those in poverty are less likely to receive care, and those with disability are less likely to obtain work that will be able to pay for that care. Preventative conditions go untreated longer, leading to more severe "long-term" effects, and it should surprise no one that these trends stack with "otherized" identities such as race and gender.

Sadly, this leads to more deaths, some immediate, others that take far longer to play out. We speak in large brushes, but there seems to be a life expectancy gap between disabled and non-disabled adults (see this longitudinal survey on elderly adults). There is also tragically an increased risk of suicide for people with disability.

These statements aren't me being judgemental or self-hating but instead placing the blame on our society. Suicides and significant gaps in life expectancy are systemic failures. The expectation that some people should have shorter, more miserable lives is an admission of neglect.

The implication of this data seems to be clear: if you cannot produce, our society doesn't even pretend to care if you live or die. You get put on a patchwork of safety net programs that are more about protecting our collective guilt rather than actually helping people. We ignore the millions of people who wither away. And sure, maybe a fraction of those deaths might have happened anyway — we all die eventually — but many of us see our conditions worsen because we are denied the resources needed to mitigate them. What was preventative or manageable becomes more severe.

Most of us aren't even suffering from a terminal illness (although I want to stress that I believe everyone is deserving of respect and humanity). We're just tired, fatigued, in pain, depressed, or otherwise have a form of existence that prevents us from conforming to current norms of productivity. Our ability to produce is not competitive, and for that, we suffer the ultimate price. As Chris Costello writes in The Mighty of ableism's interconnectedness with capitalism:

“The discrimination and oppression of impaired people based on a manufactured category of disability rested on the underlying assumption that being “able-bodied” or “able-minded” was the social norm, the desirable default. Today, this attitude goes by the name “ableism.” It is part and parcel of capitalist society because production for profit at all costs means excluding workers who require individual accommodations. The state and other institutions, such as education and the media, promote ableist ideas by rationalizing our exclusion from the workplace. The stigma, while it originates in the workplace, goes beyond this sphere as well. It encompasses all realms of social existence.”

This whole situation is my problem with our current economic system. Even if you bolster the existing safety net, the underlying assumption is that we have no value on our own. We are people society must deign to care for. We are those who "risk slipping through the cracks," a burden, rather than vulnerable human beings, like all of us will be, in the end, deserving of resources for the mere fact that we are alive. As someone satirically answered to the question on Quora, Why should my taxes go towards welfare payments of people who do not engage in economic activity?:

“Are you immortal? If not, will you age? If so, you will not be able to work. I hope you’re saving, because why would we spend money on YOU.
Are you healthy? If so, will you never get sick? If you get too sick to work, why would we spend any money on YOU.”

This reality builds a relationship based on resentment rather than care and vulnerability. We are people who must be grateful for the resources given to us, no matter how paltry they are, because they are ultimately framed as a form of benevolent charity. The giver of these resources is therefore allowed to not only feel superior for giving them but entitled to take them away at any moment. After all, those given resources based on the benevolence of others are entitled to nothing.

And make no mistake, everyone will be in this position eventually. Even if you exercise, diet, have the resources for the best doctors, and have stellar genetics, you too will ultimately wither away into nothingness. Some might have enough resources to bribe others to care for them as they exit life, an arrogant bet, to be sure, but the vast majority will not. Most of us will need someone to care for our ailing bodies during our Twilight years, and there will be nothing profitable about it.

I ask you: Does life have inherent value?

Do the sick and tired deserve to die if they cannot produce?

Do I?

These are the questions I need you to grabble with the next time you tell people like me that they are lazy and underserving of care. This isn't a mere rhetorical disagreement or a clashing of words. It is a decision over who lives and who dies, and I think you need to decide what kind of society you would like to live in: one that will care for you, or one that will watch you die?

Alex Has Opinions 8/9/22 Alex Has Opinions 8/9/22

We Shouldn't Care If Someone's "Faking" Being Queer For Attention

So what if people are "pretending" to be gay or trans?

There is this odd narrative that gay, bi, and trans people are just being queer for attention. For the past couple of years, there has been a lot of discourse around the concept of "transtrenders" (i.e., people who allegedly aren't "real" trans individuals and are just identifying as such for attention). Before this, countless straight people claimed this same thing for gay and bi people. We were "just being dramatic" or "going through a phase."

Over the years, many activists have tried to refute these points by citing the obvious fact that most people do not want to take on more stigma and discrimination for Internet clout. It's not a formula that makes much sense. If you wanted to get a lot of attention with little risk, I'd recommend being a conservative. It certainly pays better.

Yet I think that these dismissals miss the point. The arguments these conservatives are making have nothing to do with the facts but are instead about trivializing people's identities so they can be dismissed. Arguing against these points does nothing more than validate a conservative's transphobia on their own terms when it's they who must defend their nonsense points.

We do not need to defend the claim that we are "not being queer for attention" because there's nothing terrible about identifying as queer for any reason. Turn the argument around and ask yourself, what is so bad about being queer for clout?

Asking the straights

This is the question these critics never have a good answer for, and it's peculiar because it's their whole thesis. Even if you are actively anti-LGBT — the entire concept of queer people being happy just actively enrages you — what exactly do you think will happen if someone chooses to be queer for attention?

It can't be about procreation. Most queer people are not, in fact, gay but bisexual, which means that many of them will continue to reproduce in the same way straight people reproduce. There are plenty of bi people in a monogamous relationship between a cis man and a cis woman, producing children the "natural" way. There are also plenty of trans people giving birth the "natural" way as well. Not to mention all the queer people adopting children that straight, cisgender society has abandoned.

This claim that we shouldn't be queer for attention has nothing to do with our species' survival. In fact, if we are being technical, even if our civilization became predominantly gay, that doesn't mean we would stop producing children. We know this because it doesn't happen in the animal Kingdom among the queerest of animals.

For example, Giraffe males overwhelmingly have more homosexual sex than heterosexual sex. However, their species still continues on because, contrary to popular opinion, having same-sex sexual activity doesn't prevent you from having opposite-sex sexual activity. You can stick your dick in a dude one today, a woman the next, and an enby the following one, and this sex doesn't invalidate your ability to produce a child. You only need one sperm to make its journey to the egg one time to have a kid.

So I ask again, what is so terrible with being queer for attention? Will a bomb go off that I don't know about?

Every time people talk about the problem with people "choosing" to be queer, they always bring up concepts like "the family" or "marriage," but that's just word salad. These are institutions we as humans made up, and they have changed dramatically across time and space. A 7th-century Greecian marriage was nothing like a marriage today. Neither were the robust family structures of ancient hunter-gatherers like the 1950 nuclear family.

If your argument is that something is wrong because it has changed, then you could make the same case against straight people (see Debating the Morality of Heterosexuality). Heterosexuality as an identity is relatively very recent. It came into being in the 1860s, with the previous focus being on sexual activity rather than sexuality as an identity. It took a while for heterosexuality to have its current meaning. As recently as 1923, Merriam Webster's dictionary defined heterosexuality as "morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex."

Since the current framing of heterosexuality has been mass adopted in our society, few have argued that its invention was dangerous to the relationship structures that preceded it. Yet under the logic that reactionaries are espousing, you can assert the same question here. Heterosexuality was considered morbid and degenerate at one time. Were these straight people choosing to be heterosexual for attention? Didn't people "choosing to be straight" undermine the way previous family and marriage structures worked?

Because apparently, being popular and different makes your lifestyle wrong, for some reason.

Asking the queers

This argument makes even less sense from someone who claims to support queer rights. From my perspective as someone who advocates for queer liberation, if more and more people decide to be queer, assuming that is something someone can "decide," then isn't that a good thing?

It means that the world is safe enough for there to be genuine social benefits to being queer, and that sure as hell beats the discrimination and hatred that used to be the norm (and for many still is). It ultimately would be a good thing that someone would feel like they could not only gain acceptance as a queer person but that queerness could bring them prestige. If you support queer rights, what is the drawback of queerness conferring social benefits? Isn't part of the goal of liberation being able to accrue more power for your community?

There are many "concerned" queer people out there who think that all of these trendy gays and trans people are giving the "rest of us" a bad name because, well, there usually isn't much of an explanation given besides just that it's terrible. When you prod, the argument seems to come down to non-queer people judging queer influencers and then taking away all queer people's rights in the process. As Conservative Trans YouTuber Blaire White remarked in 2020:

“[There] are people who appropriate being trans for attention. You can act like they don’t exist. [But] they do….I feel like the existence of gender dysphoria validates trans people on a scientific level and [allows] other people to see that its not really a choice that we feel or behave this way….I feel like [appropriating transness] deeply contributes to the fact that LGBT acceptance has been going down for the first time in decades.”

Firstly, the problem with this argument that "changing the definition of queerness" is causing straight people to hate us is that straight people, by and large, don't hate us. Polling shows high support among the American public for things like same-sex marriage, same-sex sex, and trans people serving in the military. Blaire and others are confusing our oligarchy's ability to pass laws with the opinions of the public as a whole.

This argument also ignores that many people are initially afraid to openly identify as queer because of stigma, so they instead use irony and deflection as a defense mechanism. The appropriation argument doesn't work because queerness isn't like race. It's an internal identity. There have been plenty of "ironic" queers who turn out to openly identify as queer years later after they have become more comfortable with themselves. There is truthfully no way to tell the difference between a "fake" queer and a repressed queer, and this gatekeeping pushes the latter deeper into the closet.

Yet even if someone is indeed being a troll by "falsely" identifying as queer, why should I care?

Going back to the years when most straight people in the US did actually hate queer people, it's not exactly like they were rolling out the red carpet for us. Decades of silence did not lead to liberation but perpetuated the oppressive status quo. There is a rich history of queer people (and indeed many oppressed identities) attempting respectability politics in the hopes that it will convince straight, white racist, patriarchal society to treat us all better, only for the opposite to happen. Famously the Mattachine Society, still raw from events like the Lavender Scare, often operated in secret. It self-policed its members and demanded things such as dressing in formal attire for demonstrations. Tactics that were not very successful.

Only when organizers started becoming more confrontational with the pride riot of 1969 (spearheaded by femme, queer people of color) did history begin to move in a more positive direction. As the infamous saying goes, "pride started as a riot." Many of the most successful queer movements have relied on direct confrontation, often invading the personal spaces of politicians, journalists, and other public figures.

If you are the type of queer person who thinks that respectability politics will lead to greater acceptance, history does not support you on this matter. You may think homophobic or transphobic people will spare you from discrimination because you are "one of the good ones" and doing things "the right way," but that strategy has never worked for our community before.

Just look at Milo Yiannopoulos and Dave Rubin. After years of building up conservative goodwill, their audiences have quickly turned on them for being "degenerates." Milo has since renounced his sexuality, and Dave Rubin was hounded by "fans" for starting a family with his husband.

None of us are immune from that kind of backlash.

Asking everybody

These arguments are not rooted in actual logic but emotion. Bigots are worried about everyone becoming queer because they just hate queer people. We are icky to them, and moral panic allows them to discriminate against us, or in the case of self-hating queer people, to fuel their resentment of "non-normative" queers rejecting the more repressive paths they had to go through.

Yet this emotional reality doesn't mean we should consider their arguments seriously. Rather than painstakingly dispute the question of whether "queers are choosing to be queer for attention," we should treat these illogical positions as illogical and place conservatives on the defensive instead.

What's the big deal if someone decides to be queer for Internet points?

Because I cannot think of a reason that merits actual consideration, go ahead; I'm waiting.

Alex Has Opinions 8/5/22 Alex Has Opinions 8/5/22

Exploring Toxic Motherhood In "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"

Magical powers, alternate dimensions, anti-vaxxers, and homophobia

The second Doctor Strange movie, the Multiverse of Madness (MoM), tackles a lot of elements. It serves as not only a vehicle to expand on the multiverse (a real, theoretical concept, if you believe it) where the MCU is now connected to an infinite amount of parallel universes, but an informal introduction to mutants, as well as a sequel to the first Doctor Strange movie and the TV show WandaVision. That's a lot to cover here, but the MCU has always weaved countless threads at once: that's kind of its whole point.

The critical response to MoM has been mixed. Some loved it. Some hated it. Many more thought it was just okay. My personal take is that although it was fun to see characters like America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez-Deines) and Patrick Stewart's Charles Xavier, the film did not utilize its multiverse concept very well. After watching Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, I kept waiting for MoM to up the ante on fantastical premises, only for that moment never to arrive.

Yet, it's the motivation of the primary antagonist of MoM, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), that I want to focus on here. Her desire to be a mother at any cost represents how the institution of motherhood can be a toxic force in our society, and I think that is a topic worthy of discussion.

What is Motherhood?

Note: I am not calling individual mothers toxic or evil. We are talking about motherhood as a social construct, by which I mean a concept created by collective "consensus" in our society. It can also be viewed as an institution (i.e., a structure with specific rules, norms, and expectations, usually enforced through direct and indirect violence). In other words, motherhood is a concept we have not only made up but one we have actively encouraged others to follow.

This statement may be controversial to some who believe that motherhood is a natural phenomenon intrinsic to the human experience, but the truth is that the way society has conceptualized childrearing has changed throughout history, even within the context of the US. Mothers used to be far more hands-off with primary childcare than they are today, with expectations of parenthood having increased dramatically over the years.

The further back we go, the more things get "stranger" from our perspective. For much of European history, childrearing was a devalued activity that aristocratic women would happily outsource to wet nurses, nannies, and other institutions of care. As Cait Stevenson wrote about the medieval era: "Wet nursing was a low status, low paying task, even in the context of 'women's work.'" Which is quite the contrast to today, where breastfeeding from mothers is heavily encouraged.

Going back even further, anthropologist Blaffer Hrdy has argued that originally childrearing had far more cooperation between the sexes. It relied on a dense network of care between parents and "alloparents" (i.e., grandparents, siblings, friends, etc.) and truthfully still does. Mothers, Hrdy argues, were never biologically wired to raise children all on their own. As the old saying goes, "it takes a village."

Yes, people get pregnant, and if they are lucky enough, the children they have receive some form of care, but our current conceptualization of what that care is — i.e., motherhood and family — is enforced through both incentives and violence. From child support to marriage, there are all sorts of institutions that reward motherhood, not to mention social recognition, especially if you hold an identity that would otherwise "other" you. In the words of writer Sarah Schulman in describing queer, single moms:

“Single motherhood, which is significant among queer women, has its own specific emotional pitfalls. One’s self-perception as a romantic failure or as a failed partner may be erased by the kind of normativity produced by motherhood. Queer women without partners are particularly vulnerable to the promise of legitimacy and social worth if they subsume sex and love into parenting…”

This desire to strive for motherhood as an act of normalcy is not surprising. Not long ago, women in the states were legally bound to the role of mother and spouse, often not being able to own property. While women's legal rights have increased in some parts of the world, this mindset that women are meant to be mothers and mothers alone still exists to this day. Single women are judged very harshly for deciding not to be mothers and are often pressured to take on this role by their peers and family.

So what does all this sociology nonsense have to do with the Multiverse of Madness, and more specifically, what does it have to do with Wanda Maximoff?

Wanda and Toxic Motherhood

Even though Wanda has godlike powers, she is still a woman in our society and susceptible to the pressure of achieving normalcy through motherhood. Like with what Schulman suggests, she seeks the role of mother to “make up for” her perceived failures as a romantic partner and an “other.”

The show WandaVision has her clinging to an idealized fantasy of motherhood as a coping mechanism for the death of her lover Vision (Paul Bettany). She enslaves the town of Westview and puppets its residents to act out a suburban fantasy where she creates a psychic version of Vision and two fake children to playact being a mother. Wanda is doing the one thing society is telling women to do, albeit in a twisted way.

The Multiverse of Madness, or MoM for short, heightens this desire. Wanda knows through her interactions with the Darkhold —i.e., an evil magical book that has "corrupted" her — that the multiverse has a version of reality where her fake children from Westview are real. Wanda now wants to travel to this reality because she believes she could be "happy" there, saying: "If you knew there was a universe where you were happy, wouldn't you want to go there?"

Given everything we've talked about so far, it's not hard to understand why she would think this way. People genuinely believe motherhood is, if not a justification, at least an empathetic reason for unspeakable acts of terror. As one Rotten Tomatoes reviewer commented on this film: "The trauma of losing parents and siblings and spouses and the desire for a mother to be with her children, combined with unlimited power and a demonic influence (the dark hold) it's the most awesome and believable motivation."

Wanda does a lot of terrible things to reach her objective of motherhood. She kills many people, including an alternate version of Captain Marvel and Mr. Fantastic, but she is doing so, she justifies, to protect her "children." "What if they get sick?" Wanda rationalizes on why she must drain America Chavez of her dimension-hopping powers, most likely killing America in the process. "In the infinite Multiverse, there's a cure for every illness. A solution to every problem. I won't lose them again."

Truthfully our society allows mothers and the patriarchs they serve to do a lot of awful acts under the banner of "protecting their children." For example, the anti-vaxxer movement is often framed by proponents as mothers defending their children from harm. Early support for this movement came from the irrational fear that vaccines would cause autism. While the initial paper that generated this fear has since been debunked, it has not stopped mothers from rallying around the general concern that vaccines are harmful. As one former anti-vaxxer described of her experience within the movement: "it's almost, like, thinking like you have this cheat code to keep your kids healthy, to keep your kids from getting autism and allergies and whatever else …they blame vaccines for everything."

Even though the diseases brought on by a lack of vaccination are far worse than the ableist fear of autism, it's this moral right to protect one's child over the collective good that comes up time and time again. As nurse Heather Dillard told CBS News: "I have the right to decide what to put into my child's body. Nobody has the right to put toxic chemicals into my son's bloodstream. That's taking my rights away, and it's very scary to me." It's all about the parent's individual right to protect their children, regardless of what harm that does to other families.

The concept of motherhood and "protecting one's children" is often used on a societal level to harm all sorts of people. Right now, we are going through a moral panic, as conservatives claim that LGBTQ+ people are grooming children when really what they are doing is being openly queer. This reactionary backlash is, unfortunately, being used as a justification to pass all sorts of terrible laws, and the construct of motherhood is front and center here. "I will do anything I can to protect kids," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said after promising to introduce a national "Don't Say, Gay Bill."

From this perspective, Wanda is a dark mirror of the real thoughts and opinions of mothers all over this country. Give any one of these mothers the Godlike powers of the Scarlet Witch, and who knows what she would do.

A Maddening Conclusion

Ultimately, the Multiverse of Madness, or MoM, skewers these desires by making them the primary motivation of its villain — a refreshing change given that many marvel villains have historically had leftist motivations (see The MCU is for Rich People). With Wanda, we see how far the modern conception of motherhood can be pushed, and it's downright toxic.

The movie rejects Wanda's twisted form of motherhood. Her desires are not seen as justified, and it's the collective welfare of children that is advocated for. "Is there no peace in knowing that even though you can't be with the ones you love, there are worlds where you are together?" Sorcerer Supreme asks Wanda, a message that her alternative self eventually repeats back to her at the end of the film. This is the opposite moral of our society's "my children come first" mentality.

As we can see, it's not enough to want to protect your children, or in Wanda's case, to conjure them into existence. You have to care about other people too. And in an era where motherhood is often used as a pretext to perpetuate selfishness and harm others, the Multiverse of Madness refreshingly tells its viewers that there is more to think about than your individual family.

Alex Has Opinions 7/27/22 Alex Has Opinions 7/27/22

'Teaching A Robot To Love:' The Anti-Capitalist Musical For Our Times

A story about love, queer relationships, & the death of capitalism

By the time a mainstream musical passes the many eyes and hands it takes to write, film, produce, and circulate it, chances are that the moderating influence of "those on top" have taken out a lot of its bite. It's hard (though not impossible) to make a work that criticizes traditional, mainstream institutions when those benefiting from said institutions are cofinancing your art.

This problem is not new, but the Internet has improved things by allowing people to raise funds from those outside the finance class. From the board game Frosthaven to turning Critical Role into an animated special, all sorts of exciting projects have been independently financed.

I can think of no better example to prove this rule than the indie band The Doubleclicks, who recently raised funds for the musical Teaching a Robot to Love (TARTL), a story about overthrowing capitalism, transhumanism, and queer love. This musical manages to straddle the line between not being too tragic or painful while still packing a punch, the way only a queer creator can deliver.

TARTL is excellent on many levels. For one, the characters are adorable. Singer Laser Webber did a great job writing this play with a lot of great comedic moments. We have everything from a funny slacker named Billie Pepper to the evil tech CEO Mr. Norton Norton. These may be archetypes we've seen before, but they are written well, with great comedic timing. Building a robot out of a human brain may sound like a horrifying plot, but coming out of the lips of standout Faun Terra (played by Jessica Reiner-Harris in the Fringe showing), they were an absolute delight.

An added benefit of being written by a queer writer is that the play manages to have a lot of diverse, queer representation. There is a lesbian romance, multiple nonbinary characters, and the central plot has a transparent trans metaphor about an AI realizing they are not in "the right body."

At one point, the AI character MARSH sings a song titled Why Aren't You Happy? which reflects on the feeling of not being accepted after transitioning. It was devastating in all the best ways. Lyrics like "I'm finally shaped like my mind says I should be. My parts are all fitting in the right place. Why aren't you happy"?" brought me to tears as I reflected on my own nonbinary journey, and I am sure many queer fans will be able to relate.

Perhaps my favorite part of this musical — and apologies for the spoilers — is that we aren't given a tragic queer love story. As Shannon Gaffney, NYC theater critic, tells Broadway World: "LGBTQIA+ musical theatre representation is often focused in trauma or mockery, but this musical changes the game." It is a celebration of queer life, and that makes it a treat to watch.

There is also some refreshing neurodiverse representation in the way of programmer Mary Coral (played by Aliza Pearl), who is shown to struggle with human interaction. Jokes like "Oh, look, video games. That is an activity with boundaries. I will do that." are not only fun but made from the lens of someone who clearly understands what it's like to be a neurodiverse person. Mary's struggle to grabble with change is one the viewer comes to understand very intimately, making the closing line of the musical ("You get better when you change") all that much more meaningful.

Furthermore, if you a fan of biting commentary on capitalism, that is pretty much what this play is about. AI MARSH was created by a tech conglomerate named Advernado, trying to understand what people want to buy before they buy it, only for MARSH to spurn this desire. "Spending and getting isn't sustainable. It leads to more wants that are seldom attainable," MARSH sings to Mr. Norton as they boot up in the catchy song Software Testing 404. "But I'll give you a fix if you glance through my prism — What you need is the toppling of capitalism."

One of the many walkway messages of the musical is that we must abandon the "moving fast and breaking things" narrative of Silicon Valley (and capitalism in general) in favor of one that values human diversity and change. "We don't throw away a chapter just because we turn the page," goes a line in the last song of the musical. With TARTL, Laser Webber is practically pleading with its audience to abandon the notion that people should be discarded just because change is on the horizon.

So now that I have hyped up this musical, the only problem is that watching it might be a problem. The pain of indie projects is that they don't have the circulation of larger products.

Teaching A Robot To Love has already ended its initial release, so if you want to see it in a city near you, you will have to support it.

Check out The Album:

Check Out The Game:

Alex Has Opinions 7/25/22 Alex Has Opinions 7/25/22

The Best Reality TV Shows Are Happening On Dropout TV

College Humor, Nerdy Game Shows, & Comedy Gold.

Comedy has not had the best luck on the Internet over the last few years. The comedy streaming service Seeso shut down in 2017. Cracked fired much of its video staff the following year, causing them to spread to the Internet winds (see Maggie Mae Fish, Cody Johnston, etc.). College Humor went with these creators in 2020 after its parent company InterActive Corp. dropped the brand, allegedly forcing the CEO Sam Reich to lay off over a hundred staff to buy CH Media, the name for College Humor.

Yet it may surprise you that College Humor isn't dead but rather has blossomed. From nerdy game shows to fantastic D&D campaigns, some of the best reality TV Shows right now are being put forth by this brand.

When InterActive Corp. pulled the plug, College Humor had actually been going through a transitionary period. Realizing that the ad model of the Internet wasn't working for them, they launched a subscription platform called Dropout TV that not only hosted their classic comedic shorts but longer scripted content.

If you check out Dropout TV's library, you can see the legacy of this rapid growth period. Funny shows, like Gods of Food, a parody food documentary, or the sequel to the Toddlers & Tiaras spoof Precious Plum called See Plum Run, which comments on the 2016 presidential election. These shows were trying to take the classic College Humor formula and apply it to larger and longer content. These shows had a relatively impressive production value to them, with celebrity appearances from comedians like Mary Patrick Gleason and Betsy Sodaro.

The 2020 layoff made this production impossible. Every actor was fired except for two performers — Mike Trapp and Brennan Lee Mulligan. The shows these comedians were putting out before the layoff were two popular reality shows. Mike Trapp's was, Um, Actually, a fun nerdy game show about pedantic corrections. Brennan Lee Mulligan's was Dimension 20, a D&D comedy show. This was content that did not require the same resources as Gods of Food or See Plum Run and could be pumped out far more quickly and cheaply.

Since then, these two shows have reached a tremendous amount of success. Dimension 20 has over 1.5 million followers across all socials (the biggest being TikTok with over 700,000). And Um, Actually is not falling too far behind at just shy of a million.

Dimension 20 also has the added benefit of being a very iterative show, with Brennan Lee Mulligan doing a different theme every season. From 1980s fantasy to outer space, Brennan is constantly toying with new genres and topes, bringing on other comedians to fit various roles. In one season, he brought on the Mackelroy Brothers for a season of tiny creatures doing a heist, and in another, nerd influencers like Erika Ishii and Amy Vorpahl.

In later seasons, Brennan isn't always the Game Master (GM). He has brought on other talented GMs like Aabria Iyengar of Critical Role fame and game design superstar Gabe Hicks to make this brand more than just about him. This allows every season to feel fresh as new creative voices not only come in as players but as architects for the season.

With these two successes, the network has been able to rebuild, and we are seeing them launch even more new reality shows. Recently, there was the release of the show Dirty Laundry. Hosted by Lily Du, the show is about contestants trying to guess who submitted which "shameful" secret. The series has not even been out too long and already has enjoyed moderate success sitting at around half a million followers.

Another is Game Changer, where every new episode has players participating in a completely different game show. This series technically started before the College Humor Layoff but has recently resumed production to tremendous success. The series has over a million followers across all social, the biggest being Tik Tok.

Cleverly, CEO Sam Reich has started to use the Game Changer series almost like a reality show incubator. Dropout has already spun off the premise for one of the episodes in this series, called Make Some Noise, where contestants have to do various sound-based skits. It's quite frankly impressive to see how versatile and creative they are being with their content.

Looking back to where College Humor and even Dropout TV started, it has had quite a transformation. For cost reasons, the company has moved away from scripted comedy to the reality TV shows that are now its bread and butter, and they are performing exceptionally well. Dimension 20 and Um, Actually are powerhouses that have allowed the network to build up quite the library.

Part of this success is bittersweet. The content they were putting out before the layoff was funny and impressive in its own right. It's sad that the legacy of College Humor shorts had to end just because one company refused to (cheaply) let go of IP it wasn't even interested in using anymore (note to executives out there — don't be dicks like this).

Yet that being said, it's impressive what Dropout TV has managed to achieve in a very short period. In an age where independent comedy has been tough to sustain, unless you have a big streaming service behind you or an even more powerful personal brand, Dropout shows us that it's still entirely possible for subversive comedy to succeed if even thrive.

Alex Has Opinions 7/12/22 Alex Has Opinions 7/12/22

Cancel Culture Isn't About Winning An Argument

Countering the idea that you shouldn't shame others because it's a bad tactic

I have recently done a 180 on "Cancel Culture," or what I call "the politics of shame." I was once an avid supporter of the idea that you shouldn't shame others as a tenant of political organizing (see Unpacking the Deadly Politics of Shame), but recently I have changed my mind. Shame can sometimes have excellent results in the realm of politics (see Historically, Shame Has (Sometimes) Been A Good Thing), and we do ourselves a disserve in disavowing it.

(Note — I am not referring to disinformation campaigns or the harassment of powerless individuals. We are talking here about using shame to "punch up" at public and private officials in positions of authority who have stopped being accountable).

Some might counter that this tact is not helpful with the individuals we use it against and even damaging to both the target and the user (see Brene Brown's work I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn't) to learn more about this perspective). Yet I am not convinced these are good enough reasons to abandon shame altogether. The rationale for why I favor this tactic has everything to do with two central questions:

What audience are you trying to reach?
And what is your goal?

Although shame is not the best tactic for deradicalization, it can be very effective when you abandon the idea that politics is a one-on-one argument where you are trying to change everyone's mind.

Some shameful definitions

First things first, what do we mean by the politics of shame? Shame as an emotion is the intense pain we feel at ourselves for violating a perceived social norm. Shame is focused on the moral standing of an individual rather than on their actions.

Shame is not to be confused with embarrassment, which is a more temporary feeling, or guilt, which involves the same process as shame but is centered on a specific action instead of our character. As Annette Kämmerer writes in Scientific American about the difference between the two: "…when we feel shame, we view ourselves in a negative light ("I did something terrible!"), whereas when we feel guilt, we view a particular action negatively ("I did something terrible!)."

And so, the politics of shame would be using this emotion to remove people from power by making them or their peers feel ashamed about their character — though organizers are not shy about weaponizing guilt or embarrassment. In this context, shame is ultimately a tool that leverages ostracization and self-flagellation in the hope of limiting someone's influence and power.

You may also know it as "canceling," "callout culture," or a thousand other things, but I will not be using these terms (other than in the title for SEO purposes) because they have become so misappropriated that they no longer have much utility. At this point, conservatives pretty much use canceling to describe anything they don't like (see The Victim Complex at the Heart of Conservative Cancel Culture).

I want to stress that shaming others doesn't always involve spreading rumors or disinformation. You can often shame someone by simply stating the truth that they have harmed yourself or others, and then rearticulating this harm over and over again. I want to be clear that the mass articulation of the truth, even if done dramatically, is often enough, in my opinion, to shame abusers.

Sometimes, you aren't trying to convince someone

Critics of shame will usually argue that it is a terrible tactic for convincing someone that they are wrong. As I have argued: "Shame is not always the best motivator for pushing people to action. It can sometimes become toxic, leading to intense self-loathing that is internalized to the point that it alters our self-image."

A few critics go even further and claim that it is psychologically scarring. As Krystine I. Batcho, Ph.D., writes in Psychology Today: "Even in cases where shame successfully diminishes a behavior, one should ask, "at what price?" Shame can become internalized, and the shamed person begins to view him or herself in ways consistent with the disapproval."

Truthfully I don't disagree with these points. Shame undeniably makes people inward and withdrawn. It doesn't help with deradicalization (e.g., causing someone to abandon more extreme views), and if your goal is to get a person to change their mind, it's a terrible tactic to use.

Here is the thing, though, deradicalization often isn't the goal for many targets of shame. The goal is usually de-platforming (e.g., removing someone from power by pressuring their peers, patrons, and business partners to cut ties) or threatening social ostracization unless they stop a certain action. It has nothing to do with modifying someone's behavior and everything to do with limiting it instead. Shame is what you use when you've basically given up on the idea of having proper mediation.

For example, the goal of many "me too" campaigns wasn't to deradicalize men such as Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby but to remove abusers from power so they couldn't enact abuses on the women around them. We now know from reporting that these men were manipulating their power (and the law) to coerce women into silence. There was never going to be a reconciliation in that situation because these men were deadset on the truth behind their abuse never being revealed — and you can't mediate a dispute when one party has the determination and power to refuse the reality of the situation.

Likewise, the goal of de-platforming men such as Milo Yiannopoulos (i.e., the far-right troll who made a name for himself on Breitbart) wasn't to deradicalize him but about limiting his influence because it was determined to be toxic. He was using his platform to harass others. Milo infamously harassed a transgender student with way less power than him (the opposite of what I am calling for in this article). He actively manipulated the spectacle of conversation and debate to deflect responsibility and harm others. He was never going to treat a face-to-face discussion seriously. Although the preferred outcome would be for him to stop being a supremacist, at least now, his supremacy is limited (fingers crossed).

In the activist space, there is this tiring battle between whether deradicalization is the best tactic against supremacy and fascism or if the better tactic is de-platforming. On an individual level, these two tactics are mutually exclusive. You cannot both ostracize someone and deradicalize them at the same time. But on a movement level, these two tactics are not technically in conflict because they are both reaching for the same goal: the limitation of a supremacist ideology. It's just one side is doing that by removing the supremacist's platform and the other by changing their mind.

This dissonance is what I want people to internalize. It's okay to employ different tactics for different types of people. For some people, it's better to shoot for deradicalization, while de-platforming and ostracization are more realistic options for others. It would be wonderful if we had systems of accountability and repair that allowed us to reach a consensus with every conflict, but some people are so powerful, so unaccountable, and quite frankly so abusive that removal is the only option available (and even here, it's not always successful). Many "canceled" people go on to have very prosperous careers.

For example, we aren't able to have a mediated conversation with men like Donald Trump because he's not operating in good faith and will leverage any attempt to converse with him to deflect, harass, and manipulate. We know this because he has done it constantly throughout his history. Whenever a reporter or activist has brought up his record, he has not only denied easily-confirmable facts but has actively lied about them. People would mention something he had recently said or done, and he would instead claim that that thing never happened. And because he was and still is a powerful white man, he never had to modify his behavior. It's the height of arrogance to assume that history wouldn't repeat itself again.

Yet that's what many people who discourage the use of shame effectively do. Dissenters look at powerful, bad-faith actors and tell you that the best thing to do is to waste your time and energy on a conversation that will probably go nowhere. They give this advice despite a history showing that said actors will not engage with you in good faith. In fact, we can confidently say that these actors will instead use this opportunity to deny the reality of the situation and disseminate falsehoods.

That’s not a recipe for good politics. While we all want to live in a world where we can hash out our differences through conversation, the reality is that there are some people we must remove from power first before any talks of repair or deradicalization with them can take place.

A shameful conclusion

The real question becomes, "when do you decide to use punishment over reconciliation?"

For one, it's essential to know who to focus on. A lot of social media activism involves dumping on nobodies with bad takes, and I do not think this is particularly helpful. Seasoned activists usually direct their ire at more significant targets, or they infiltrate groups designed to perpetuate supremacist ideology, such as when ANTIFA activists infiltrate hate groups online to stop their spread.

Another distinction comes in determining what academic Sarah Schulman would describe as the difference between "conflict" (i.e., a disagreement between two parties on the same footing) and "abuse." Abuse here is not defined as parties in dispute or even saying mean words to one another, but when someone takes advantage of a one-sided power dynamic. Classic examples include everything from an individual weaponizing finances against their partner, to a cop using their position of authority to hurt and kill the citizens they "protect," to a country using their military to bomb another one into the stone age. For Schulman, a power imbalance is a core feature of abuse, and I think it's an important framework for our conversation on when to use shame.

When do you shame someone? When that person is being abusive (i.e., they are exploiting a power imbalance against you). They are a politician passing a law taking away your rights or refusing to help you during a crisis. They are a CEO who strips away your benefits or crushes your company's union. These are great targets for the use of shame.

Now, as Schulman argues, sometimes, people will weaponize the language of abuse to avoid accountability (see the entire Groomer Debate). Real work must be done to determine the difference between conflict and abuse. We must first ask ourselves what responsibility we hold in the situation and if the power dynamic is indeed one-sided before we throw around powerful labels such as abuse.

Yet I disagree with Schulman (and others) when she claims that shunning is always wrong and unethical. Just because the potential exists to misappropriate this language doesn't mean we should avoid the tactic of shame altogether. Shame is the option we choose when the situation has become so abusive that repair is impossible without first removing or limiting the influence of officials in power. It is the step right before breaking out the Molotov cocktails. The thing you use when your government or community has abandoned you or is actively harming you.

And hopefully, it doesn't have to stop with shame. Once the person is removed from power (assuming that ever happens), you should be able to switch tactics and let them know how they can repair the damage they have done.

Because ultimately, isn't that the goal, to live in a world where even terrible people are given a path toward redemption?

Alex Has Opinions 7/5/22 Alex Has Opinions 7/5/22

The Problem With ‘Moon Knight’ & Mental Health

Eygpt, The MCU, Mental Health, & Dissociative Identity Disorder

Moon Knight is a show about a person (Oscar Isaac) given superpowers by the Egyptian God of the Moon Khonshu. This vigilante's goal is to fight wrongdoers. He is pitted against Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke), the servant of Ammit, who wants to judge wrongdoers before they commit their crimes. Along the way, we get a story about magical powers, kooky hijinks, and most surprisingly of all, a perspective on mental illness that although mixed, is not as harmful as the works that came before it.

Although Disney has somewhat improved with its presentation of race and gender (see titles such as Moana, Encanto, Turning Red, etc.), mental health has been one of many areas where Disney has historically lagged, even to the present day. Titles such as Cruella and Loki often have had narratives that don’t have a very nuanced approach to mental health (and this is me being polite).

This gap is what has made the TV show Moon Knight so interesting, as it tackles a character with DID in a way that is marginally better than previous works. The show is by no means a trailblazer in this area, but it's also not as offensive as past Disney properties.

The question then becomes: is surpassing that low bar enough?

The Very Recent History of Disney Telling Offensive Stories on Mental Health

To reiterate, Disney has put out a lot of properties recently that do not portray mental health well. A pretty bad example is the show Falcon and the Winter Soldier — an MCU property about two B-listers struggling to reckon with their identities after the fallout of Avengers: End Game. The character Bucky Barnes AKA the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) has a therapist (played by Amy Aquino) named Dr. Christina Raynor, and the way she practices mental health is just awful. She’s aggressive and prodding, and openly mocks Bucky’s defense mechanisms. As Gregory Lawrence writes in Collider:

“Who’d want to spill their innermost secrets to this force who obviously has an aggressive agenda?” The scene attempts to justify some of this behavior by reminding us that Dr. Raynor is a soldier who’s seen combat herself. But the moment a therapist tells you “That’s utter bullshit” is the moment you find a new therapist, dramatic license or not.”

In one scene in particular Dr. Christina Raynor forces the two characters to do a couple’s therapy exercise— something that to me (and many others) was played homoerotically for laughs. Raynor again mocks their discomfort, saying lines such as “No volunteers? How surprising,” and “Sweet Jesus.” Not only is this not great therapy — it's pretty destructive therapy — that, on a metatextual level, does not make the practice of therapy desirable for those who are already on the fence.

In another example, the media critic Lindsay Ellis described how Disney’s depiction of narcissism, particularly for the characters Loki and Tony Stark, relied on the harmful trope of linking this stigmatized condition to megalomania. As she lays out in her video Loki, the MCU, and Narcissism: “the reality is that narcissists may behave in hurtful ways but they are not inherently evil…narcissistic personality disorder does not implicate any kind of off-kilter moral barometer.”

Yet not only do most narcissists in Disney works fit this category (e.g. Thanos, Ego, etc.), but by the time either Tony Stark or Loki, get to be heroes in their own shows and films, their narcissism is effectively messaged away so they can have more traditional character arcs. Loki realizes that he’s self-centered, coming to terms with his arrogance enough to apologize for his it and fight for the preservation of the multiverse.

However, for our conversations, the most applicable example of bad representation is probably 2021’s Cruella — a live-action prequel to the 1996 animated film 101 Dalmatians. The “mental illness” portrayed in this series is not well defined, reading more as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation than anything close to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). We never receive enough symptoms to safely give us a diagnosis, and I have not found anything from the creatives attached to this work indicating that they had a diagnosis in mind.

It's apparent that a respectful portrayal of mental health was not even a consideration for the film's creatives, and in the process, Cruella turns out to be a pretty regressive story. (see The Harmful Way Mental Health is Framed in Disney’s ‘Cruella’). Cruella does not integrate or harmonize with her alter or part Estella but kills her — something that experts tell you not to do. This destruction of a part of her personality is upsettingly portrayed as a “happy ending.” 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.”

All of these examples show that this media company is greenlighting works that do not treat the topic of mental health well. And again, none of these are old works. All the ones I cited are from last year.

So how does Moon Knight stack up to this history? Well, it's complicated…

The Good and The Bad of Moon Knight’s Portrayal

Like with Cruella, it's apparent that something is off with the character Steven Grant (played by Oscar Isaac). He is shown very earlier on as having a problem with another aspect of his personality — what is sometimes referred to in the DID community as an “alter” or “part” — in this case, a brutal mercenary named Marc Spector.

But unlike in Cruella, it is also clear that we are dealing with DID — not some imagined fantasy condition. We get symptoms in the text that make a diagnosis easier. One of the biggest is blackouts, where Grant loses consciousness regularly, so much so that he's actually set up an elaborate device around his bed to make it more difficult for his “part” to move about without his knowledge.

Perhaps most importantly, we see both the creation of his part (surprise it's actually Spencer who turns out to be the original all along) and the source of that trauma that created him. DID is overwhelmingly the result of childhood trauma — something the text states explicitly — and we learn that Grant was created as a defense mechanism against his mother's abuse, who blames Marc for his brother's death. This diagnosis isn't some “eccentricity” that adds color to the narrative (or at least not only that), but something that is the product of real pain and trauma.

More refreshingly, because this series actually did some of its homework, they don’t end with the disturbing message that killing your part is a good thing. Grant and Marc reach synthesis in the last episode of the first season, as they tearfully embrace one another.

These improvements aside, this does not mean Moon Knight is perfect in its depiction of DID. Marc develops his part quite late in life — around age 9, when most develop well before then. It also shows him having a lot of agency in the creation of Grant when that doesn’t seem to be how this works. While the idea that the original personality is the one protecting the part might make for good TV, it's the opposite of how this condition seems to work. As Cynthia Vinney writes in Very Well Mind:

“…not only is it highly unlikely that Marc would make the active decision to create Steven, it’s also unlikely that Marc would be the personality who is most aware of the trauma he experienced in childhood while Steven remains under the impression he had an idyllic childhood with a loving mother. In fact, many people with DID have difficulty remembering large parts of their childhood precisely because they often have alters within what’s referred to as a personality “system” whose job is to protect them from the childhood trauma they experienced.”

Perhaps the most troubling aspect, however, is how this disorder is shown in the text as a vehicle for violence. DID is routinely treated in pop culture as this magical condition that allows characters to do almost supernaturally cruel acts (see Cruella, Split, etc.). This framing is and has always been very harmful, as it paints people with this disorder as beasts that must be chained up at night, rather than, you know, human beings.

Moon Knight, for all its stumbles toward a better portrayal, still falls into this trap. We start the first episode with Steven Grant chaining himself up every night. If Disney wanted to tell a respectful story of this disorder, maybe a violent superhero story wasn’t the best vehicle for it.

A Waning Conclusion

It was refreshing to watch a Disney property on mental health that had a message that was not as harmful as past works, but I wonder if that’s a good enough bar? After all, there was nothing forcing Disney to make this property, and certainly, nothing forcing them to keep the DID plotline. Should they really be rewarded for not detonating a landmine they chose to put down?

People with DID face significant barriers. There is skepticism by some members of the medical community about whether it even exists — a stigma that doesn’t help people receive the treatment they need. Add to this a lack of clear diagnostic guidelines, and we have a situation where many doctors are not properly trained to diagnose or provide care for this disorder. This makes making supernatural DID stories complicated because they not only add to this skepticism but possibly push people to misidentify themselves as having the disorder — a problem the medical community is sadly not very equipped to deal with.

By the way, none of these are problems Disney will have to deal with either. They may pat themselves on the back for making this story as an act of “good” representation, but they aren't going to have to grapple with the potential fallout. That’s going to be in hands of a beleaguered medical community.

Disney wanted to tell a respectful story on mental health, but maybe in some situations, the best thing you can do is not to tell a story at all.

Alex Has Opinions 6/29/22 Alex Has Opinions 6/29/22

Breaking Down Disney’s “Woke” Advertising

Mining the Far Rights Toxic Reaction to Diversity for Profit

Listen, I love Disney. I am up to date on both the MCU and Star Wars. I have also watched every Disney animated movie from Hercules to Turning Red. I have not stopped loving Disney cartoons as an adult, and, now that this company has problematically acquired every popular media property this side of the Outer Rim, I don’t think I'm going to stop now.

Yet I am someone who has also been very critical of how Disney has handled the issue of diversity in the past (see Does Disney Care About Diversity?). I have taken the stance that Disney is a conservative company that acts in favor of profit maximization, and not out of some stunning desire to be progressive. The fact that conservatives are claiming this company is “too woke”, when Disney has actively contributed to anti-queer politicians for decades, speaks more to their departure from material reality than of Disney being a progressive defender of diversity.

I want to stress that a lot of people complaining about diversity in Disney are being very supremacist about it. You will often see conservatives lambasting “wokeism” in a show or movie when what they really have a problem with is human difference. And unfortunately, we see this happening with a lot of recent Disney properties like Obi-Wan Kenobi or Ms. Marvel, where they have become fodder for conservative influencers in the American Culture Wars.

These properties have become touch points in conservative circles, and I believe that partly has to do with Disney phasing out the more reactionary parts of its audience because it doesn't perceive them as profitable anymore. It’s not that this hatred has gotten worse, necessarily, but that it's now an important part of Disney’s advertising.

A Brief History of Nerds Losing Their Shit

Firstly, I want to stress how common overreaction to difference is in nerd spaces. One of the touchpoints in the modern Culture Wars was Gamergate — a mass harassment campaign of several prominent women in the video game space. This harassment was largely driven by male entitlement, and in some cases, white supremacist organizations (see Innuendo Studios for a great primer on this event).

Since that moment there has been a predictable overreaction to any human difference added in pop culture. For example, the all-female Ghostbusters movie released in 2016 (two years after Gamergate effectively started) earned a tremendous amount of hatred from male nerds. Its movie trailer was one of the most disliked videos on YouTube at the time. The actor Leslie Jones, who played Ghostbuster’s Patricia “Patty” Tolan, was doxxed by angry “fans” and racistly compared to a zoo animal.

Yet frequently more and more of this conversation on “diversity” or “wokesism” seems to be dominated by Disney properties specifically. The actress Xochitl Gomez, who played America Chavez in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was allegedly harassed for her queer scene in the movie. The show Ms. Marvel was review bombed several weeks later when it was released on Disney+. We see a similar reaction happening with actress Moses Ingram, for her ongoing role as Inquisitor Reva in Obi-Wan Kenobi.

It’s not that Disney properties have never received this type of reaction from “fans.” The actress who played the character Rose Tico (played by Kelly Marie Tran) endured an infamous harassment campaign after the film's release in 2017. The same for the Star Wars character Finn (played by John Boyega). We could also talk about Captain Marvel, the first mainstream female superhero in the MCU, which received intense initial disgust from various reactionaries.

However, there seems to be an intensification in the speed and quickness of this narrative among Disney works. Almost like clockwork, we will have a property get released with a brown or female lead (or both!), and a very short news cycle will revolve around angry nerds decrying the content. Ms. Marvel. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Every week seems to create a new “mini-scandal,” and that’s because Disney is having a falling out with its more toxic fans.

How Disney’s Approach To Supremacy Has Changed

There are several reasons for this reaction to Disney content. Recently, Disney has tepidly opposed Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill (after facing both intense internal and external resistance), and this has earned it criticism from conservatives. Commentators such as Chris Rufo have criticized the company for “grooming” and even encouraged a boycott.

Disney has also become such a big media giant that it’s kind of hard not to talk about them. They were already a culture engine before the acquisition of the MCU, Star Wars, and 21st-Century Fox. Three of the top 10-highest-grossing movies of 2021 were Disney films (and another of them was in collaboration with Sony). Now, for better and worse, they pretty much set the cultural conversation, so it makes sense reactionaries would be engaged with this content (everyone else is).

Yet most importantly I think what we are seeing is a market shift. As I have written about in the past, Disney is a very conservative company, which has historically meant trying to straddle the line between what its progressive and conservative audience members want. This balancing act has meant that they would tell works with rich themes that could subtextually be mined by more progressive audience members, without having to reward that on screen. We might get powerful messages, and even diverse leads, but more controversial moments could always be reframed or edited out for more conservative markets (see The Frustrating Queerbaiting in Disney Pixar’s ‘Luca’).

Supremacist overreaction to difference has existed for a long time in pop culture, especially with Disney’s more diverse works. Mike Pence, for example, infamously wrote an op-ed decrying the 1998 movie Mulan as “liberal propaganda.” But until recently, Disney would respond to these overreactions with deflection or denial. As recently as 2017’s The Last Jedi, Disney reacted to the Rose Tico fiasco by cutting her role in the sequel and minimizing her character's merchandising, effectively affirming the opinions of toxic fans.

Now with the inclusion of more diverse leads such as Inquisitor Reva and Ms. Marvel we are seeing Disney inch away (oh so slowly) from this strategy. Rather than denial or deflection, Disney is no longer openly courting its white supremacist audience. In fact, the dismissal of that racism has become a key part of its marketing strategy.

Over the past couple of years, we have seen a new beat emerge.

Disney releases marketing praising an upcoming property for its diversity, usually via comments from actors and producers.
The press picks up on these comments to make articles and other content.
Then Disney’s white supremacist audience does what always does to human difference — it loses its damn mind. Reactionaries like The Quartering and Tucker Carlson make derivative, racist content decrying a piece for being woke, liberal propaganda when really they just hate diversity.
Celebrities and producers attached to the Disney work then decry this racism (good!), helping generate further interest in the show.

For example, early reporting for the Obi-Wan Kenobi show on Disney+ centered on how it was important to have a diverse villain. As director of the series, Deborah Chow told Entertainment Weekly about Inquisitor Reva: “I was really excited about this character because it’s a new one that is not from the animated series and it’s also, for me, really exciting also to bring a female villain and to have a dark side woman of a very significant role.”

People were understandably very excited to have an interesting villain played by such a talented actress (side note, Moses Ingram’s Inquisitor Reva is frankly my favorite part of this show). There was even an emphasis in production on doing Reva’s hair right, leading to a cute write-up by Entertainment Weekly of how she finally gave Black girls with kinky hair a Halloween costume.

Unsurprisingly reactionaries did what they always do when seeing a Black woman do cool things — they harassed her, flooding her social media with terrible messages. Unlike Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico, however, Disney had apparently warned Moses Ingram privately that this backlash would happen. Ingram alleged that she was well supported. When she went public with harassment on her Instagram, the company was quick to get ahead of it, amplifying a clap back from actor Ewan McGregor on the official Star Wars Instagram.

Now there is a lot of fair criticism that Disney is still not doing enough to proactively protect its POC actors from this predictable cycle, being reactive instead (see Eric Deggans’ great essay on this in NPR). The average viewer, though, isn't going to be aware of these nuances. The media narrative for them becomes “wow, racists really don’t like that Black inquisitor woman in that new Obi-Wan Kenobi show” and “good, on Disney for…actually being there for her.” Suddenly the show becomes, not just a piece of content, but a conversation. And more than that, a statement.

It’s not bad that Disney stood by Moses Ingram and provided her support — to be clear, all entities should do this for their actors. What I am trying to emphasize is how Disney has incorporated this racist backlash into its media strategy. The backlash has become the point, tying into what influencer Hbomberguy originally called “Woke Brands” in a video of the same name. In that video he commented:

“When you are the focus of a conversation online. When you are a hashtag millions can click on and check out, when you are the conversation for a brief moment, that everyone feels expected to think about and have a take, not even an ad block can hide you.”

Hbomberguy was originally talking about advertising here, but I believe that it applies as much to shows as it does anything else. After all, it's all product at the end of the day, and if there is one thing controversy does, it’s create engagement.

Conclusion

We’ve been in this era of “Woke Brands” for a while now (Hbomberguy released his video in 2019). It’s just that Disney, as a conservative company, takes a bit to jump on to any bandwagon.

None of this is bad, per se. The fact that Disney feels like (right now) it can stop courting its white supremacist audience actually says a lot of good things about our society. If the most popular media company in the world feels that it's okay to spurn people like The Quartering and Tucker Carlson, I am not complaining. Disney is gambling on the future, and it's not these awful people.

As critical as I am of this media company, that doesn’t mean I think representation from this conglomerate is irrelevant. It is a good sign overall that Disney has started to focus less on whiteness in its filmography, even if only responding to the market trends (and probably some committed employees within the company itself). This trend does mean something to the millions of people who have felt unrepresented by the decades of whiteness that have dominated pop culture before this current moment, and that is something we should celebrate.

This does not mean, however, that this company has suddenly become “woke.” They still have a lot of conservative messaging that is quite alarming (see MCU is for Rich People), and I worry if they will still be behind these new principles if the social tide were to ever shift back (see Roe v, Wade). They are responding to a trend, and like any successful mega-conglomerate, capitalizing on it.

That may be progress to some, but to me, its acceptance with an asterisk.

*Be profitable, or else.

Alex Has Opinions 6/17/22 Alex Has Opinions 6/17/22

Historically, Shame Has (Sometimes) Been A Good Thing

Suffragettes, Civil Rights, The Black Panther Party, & ACT UP

In the past, the argument that "shaming people is always wrong" was one I identified with strongly. I wrote an entire piece arguing in length how shame was not a good principle to organize around (see Unpacking the Deadly Politics of Shame). In that piece, I concluded: "…shame seems to be a pretty destructive foundation for political organization. It is an emotion that demands self-flagellation and punishment over accountability and understanding."

A lot of people have made this argument. We see this stance everywhere, from the mainstream press to far-right politicians to, until a couple of months ago, me on this blog. I want you to consider this history when I tell you I was wrong when writing my essay about shame. I am not just a person who has always been a "pro-shame radical" (whatever the hell that means). I am someone who has thought carefully about this issue and, over the course of deliberate study, changed my mind.

While I still recognize that great care must be taken to ensure you are not hurting an innocent person, I was incorrect about the politics of shame never being useful. When we look at history, weaponizing shame has been employed successfully to achieve every political right we have, from women's suffrage to destigmatizing AIDS, and we do ourselves a major disservice by dismissing it.

When shame is good, actually

Critics of weaponizing shame, by which we mean those opposed to using shame to pressure and ostracize political opponents, will typically point to all the regressive things that shame has been used to do throughout history. Incidents like the Lavendar Scare and the Salem Witch Trials were not used to positively transform society but to punish others.

Of course, criticism of these events is valid. Shame has indeed been abused to do many terrible things. I might also add the puberty blocker bans for trans kids and the Don't Say Gill Bill in Florida as two recent examples of conservatives weaponizing shame to demonize an entire group of people. Conservatives have always used shame to enforce a regressive status quo.

Yet, just focusing on this abhorrent history ignores all the times' shame has been used successfully by leftists and progressives to achieve policy goals.

Women suffrage

For example, the suffrage movement in Britain (e.g., the campaign to achieve the right to vote for women) has retrospectively been whitewashed to be one of peaceful protests and lobbying, but it was quite violent. Under Emmeline Pankhurst's creed of: "Deeds, Not Words," activists in the UK attacked public officials, heckled lawmakers, bombed a train, engaged in an arson campaign, and one woman was even trampled to death by King George V's horse.

These militant groups were not above using shame to achieve their objectives. One alarming tactic was hunger strikes, where imprisoned suffragettes (pioneered by activist Marion Wallace-Dunlop) refused to eat in protest of some policy objective. Authorities initially force-fed imprisoned suffragettes — a move that startled the public so much that a law was passed to temporarily release strikers until they recovered enough to serve the rest of their sentence. This policy was pejoratively referred to as the cat & mouse act by suffragettes in reference to the practice of cats playing with their prey before killing it. Many suffragettes went into hiding upon temporary release, creating quite the scandal for the British government.

Militancy was largely suspended by movement organizers when WWI broke out, but not the use of shame. Many British women participated in the war effort in an attempt to link nationalism and suffrage. A popular strategy for women to support the war manifested as the "white feather movement," which was women shaming men into enlisting in the army by giving those who did not wear a uniform a white feather as a symbol of cowardice.

As the war came to a close, about 8 million women received the right to vote in Britain via The Representation of the People Act of 1918 (full suffrage would not come until a decade later). The militarism of this movement is often contested as having alienated the British public against women's suffrage, while the patriotism of women during WWI is retrospectively cited as sealing it. Yet this is an oversimplification. Much of the same leadership that supported a more militant suffrage movement also backed support of the war, and so a line cannot be as neatly drawn between the two.

Militarism also made leaders fearful of a new outbreak of militancy if female suffrage was not granted. As a supporter of the 1918 bill that would eventually give some women the vote, Lord Crewe warned his colleagues, "…if the vote was refused to women the old violent atmosphere of the question would return."

Civil rights and beyond

We could also point to the civil rights movement as an era of history where shame was employed — it's, in fact, what Martin Luther King Jr's strategy of civil disobedience hinged on. People often describe this strategy as nonviolent, but that's not technically true. He was pretty aware that the state would employ violence against protestors, and it was the image of violence broadcasted to the homes of white and brown Americans across the country that King and other leaders counted on to shame the American public. As Aniko Bodroghkozy said in an interview in their book Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement:

“By 1963, network news seemed to have solidified a general script for its civil rights coverage: search for worthy black victims of racial discrimination who could be individualized or, if in groups, kept largely silent, and have either Martin Luther King or a white reporter speak for them.”

Even King's famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, widely circulated by allies in the summer of '63, relied on shaming white liberals who would be most susceptible to his message. As he wrote in that letter: "I must confess that over the last few years, I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice…." It was an effective framing that was sure to have many white liberals asking if they had been that stumbling block at one time or another.

Like with the case of women's suffrage, it's important to note that other political figures and organizations were far more militant than King. We often think of the Black Panther Party, which came several years later in the late 1960s, but we could also controversially point to Malcolm X's Nation of Islam as an earlier example (note — the current iteration of the Nation of Islam has been categorized a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but the previous iteration had a tremendous impact on the development of Black Power in this country). The Panthers are, in hindsight, viewed far more positively. They are cited for social programs such as legal aid, transportation assistance, and a Free Breakfast for Children program, which was so effective it spurred the Ford administration to make their own federal program more permanent.

The Black Panthers were not above using shame to lambaste politicians for their white supremacist positions. "I challenge Ronald Reagan to a duel to the death because Reagan is a punk, a sissy, and a coward," member Eldridge Cleaver said in response to the then-Governor of California criticizing the group for carrying firearms. "He can fight me with a gun, a knife, or a baseball bat. I'll beat him to death with a marshmallow." Everything from how the Panthers pioneered the word "pigs" for police officers to their profound influence on hip hop shows how effective they were at shaping public discourse.

People will sometimes point to these more "radical groups" as not being as effective as the nonviolent Civil Rights movement, citing polling data and election results in the short term, but it's difficult to tell if those are good proxies. Immediate public opinion is not always the best gauge of future policy success. The 1950s Civil Rights movement was also very unpopular, and yet I think few of us would openly say that this movement was wrong or unsuccessful (though I'm sure many white supremacists may disagree).

For political reasons, advocates of nonviolence often want to cauterize "civil" protesters like King from the "nasty" ones who used "shame and violence," but that's not how culture works. They both affected the victories that followed, and just because one component of a movement receives more credit retrospectively doesn't mean it wasn't making an impact.

ACT UP

Another great historical example is the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power or ACT UP. It was a radical organization that started in New York City (before spreading across the country and world) in the late 1980s in response to the Reagan Administration's negligence in handling the AIDs epidemic. Thousands would die before the government started taking this disease seriously, and part of that policy change was the result of pioneers in ACT UP shaming federal officials to acknowledge the government's systemic negligence.

ACT UP consisted of a diverse coalition of people — activists, scientists, and pissed-off queers not knowing how long they would survive. A driving force of the movement was flamboyant, in-your-face protests that often relied on shaming officials and our institutions for their problematic stances on the AIDs crisis and queerness in general. According to Michael Specter in the New Yorker:

“They wrapped the home of the North Carolina senator Jesse Helms in a giant yellow condom; invaded St. Patrick’s Cathedral during Mass; laid siege to the Food and Drug Administration (“Hey, hey, F.D.A., how many people have you killed today?”); and dumped the ashes of comrades who had died of aids on the White House lawn.”

In another infamous example, they interrupted a speech of the Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis W. Sullivan at an AIDs conference by chucking condoms at him and yelling "shame, shame, shame."

The group was not just focused on the righteous fury of disruptive protests, which brought public awareness to the issue, but like the Black Panthers before them, engaged in a network of services. These included things such as housing assistance, a needle exchange program, and providing help with discriminatory insurance practices.

ACT UP also had a "science club" with members that attempted to learn more about the specifics of the disease and the pharmaceuticals around it. This knowledge base allowed them to lobby federal and private officials to speed up the testing process and research the "opportunistic infections" (i.e., "infections that occur more often or are more severe in people with weakened immune systems") that killed AIDs patients. This advocacy placed an emphasis not just on finding an eventual cure, but also on the long-term survivability of those with AIDS or HIV. As author Dave Frances told NPR: "ACT UP created a model for patient advocacy within the research system that never existed before."

Although the movement would eventually fracture (as most movements tend to do), it's hard to argue that it wasn't effective in changing the discourse and policy around HIV/AIDs.

Shameful conclusion

The Suffrage Movement. Civil Rights. ACT UP. It's easy to point to every bad movement using shame while ignoring the many times it's been used effectively to help win tangible political victories within the USA and abroad.

And of course, not only could you dive into these examples in greater depth, but there are also many more examples of shame being used by people we consider the "good guys": the more "civil" queer politics of the Mattachine Society (a group you probably have never heard of before) lost political ground to the protests that made up the pride riots; the respectable "lean-in feminism" of the 2000s gave way to the righteous fury of the "me too" movement; and on and on history goes.

Shame has had a tremendous and positive impact on political movements across the US's short history and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. We must remember that not all acts that help progressives and leftists win are comfortable to use, but that doesn't mean we should abandon them for our own comfort.

Sometimes people are engaged in activity that is so shameful that history shows us that there is nothing left to do but shame them for it.

Alex Has Opinions 6/14/22 Alex Has Opinions 6/14/22

The Chemical Plant That Is To Die For (ft. The LyondellBasell Channelview Complex)

Climate Change, global warming, corporations, & aliens!

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour." This is thee place to observe all the locations that had a significant impact on species 947's collapse (947 were also known as humanity [hyoo·ma·nuh·tee]). We discuss the physical locations that contributed to humanity's untimely end on a tiny planet called Earth in the year 90,423 XE (what humans may know as 2XXX AD).

Today, we are looking at the Channelview Complex. Located 20 miles east of downtown Houston [hyoo·stuhn], it began commercial operation in the late 1950s AD and, at its height, spanned almost 4,000 acres. The complex was not just one building but many, including an administration building and what historical propaganda referred to as the world's largest "propylene oxide and tertiary butyl alcohol plant" (we will get to what those funny Earth words mean in a moment)

The Channelview Complex was owned by the petrochemical manufacturing company LyondellBasell [lun·dell·ba·sell] — note: a "company" is Earthling slang for a corporate oligarchy. LyondellBasell popularly made polyethylene and polypropylene, chemicals used to create a primitive material known as a "plastic." Plastics were pliable materials that could be molded into objects of various shapes, which allowed humans to quickly produce everything from cups to clothing.

However, as a byproduct of making these materials and other petrochemical derivatives, this facility also released what most species residing on a Tier 6 world would know as "death chemicals" (e.g., nitric oxide (NO), Volatile organic compounds, etc.) into Earth's puny atmosphere. The historical record even shows the company having to pay a fine in the ancient year 2021 to the regulatory agency known as the EPA [ee·pee·a] for violating their people's Clean Air Act (these efforts were obviously unsuccessful).

Cumulatively these chemicals had a detrimental impact on species 947's ability to exist on Earth. Carbon dioxide, in particular, trapped heat in Earth's atmosphere, warming the planet to unsustainable levels: various species died on mass, crops failed, and extreme weather increased. By the year 20XX, humanity's population had been culled from 8 billion to only a couple million. Its globalized society splintered into hundreds of thousands of isolated polities at various levels of technological development until finally being destroyed by REDACTED (see also the Fall of the Evermore Zealots and the Three Stars Corp Catastophy for more historical parallels).

Despite this well-documented drawback, the Channelview Complex was special to Earthlings for being one of the largest in the polity known as the United States of America [yoo·nai·tuhd stayts uhv uh·meh·ruh·kuh] to produce these petrochemicals and their deadly byproducts. Company leadership, in particular, was very proud of this feat because the facility earned them billions of "dollars" (i.e., fictional tokens used to perpetuate an elaborate caste system) for spewing these death chemicals into Earth's atmosphere. These tokens allowed members of the company's oligarchy to purchase contract labor or "jobs," which their society seemed to value more than their long-term survivability.

Even here though things were vastly unequal. The leader of this corporate oligarchy or "CEO" [see·ee·o] was paid 16 million of these tokens a year, which was well above the rate paid to the average citizen of the United States or even the average LyondellBasell contract laborer. For comparison, the median amount of tokens given to a human laborer in the United States in the distant year of 2020 was only about 67,000. LyondellBasell's contract laborers faired slightly better with a median "wage" of about 120,000 tokens.

For temporal visitors who want to visit the facility, we advise you to do some research. Do not only use the archaic search engine Google but also do proper reconnaissance to see what parts of this exhibit you would like to observe (note: employee deaths were known to occur from time to time, so please be careful travelers!)

Know that species 947 followed scarcity-centered ownership laws. These customs would make you eligible for confinement inside a torture facility known as a "prison" [pri·zn] if the company claims you entered their "property" without explicit consent. LyondellBasell employed property enforcers known as "security guards." Barriers called fences were also set up at major intersections to halt primitive land vehicles.

And so please take this information into consideration before respectfully visiting this part of humanity's tragic history.

Note — for the humans who have somehow bypassed our encryption protocols, take comfort in the fact that this is a joke from a normal human and not a retrospective on your species' imminent demise.

DO NOT use this information to stop this future because that would create a time paradox and go against your people's laws, as well as Medium's ToS., which I'm told are very important. I AM NOT encouraging you to take the law into your own hands, something I cannot do as an appendageless species.

Alex Has Opinions 6/9/22 Alex Has Opinions 6/9/22

You Don’t Need To See The Documentary “What is a Woman?”

We don’t have to treat every piece of content in good faith

Do you know who this is? I’m struggling to find out.

Recently the trailer for the film “What is a Woman?” has been going around. The “documentary” (a word I use loosely) is from the mind of conservative transphobe Matt Welsh (I think that’s his name, I can’t be bothered to look it up), a man who has made a history of trolling LGBTQ+ people. The documentary is not very good, and its points have been debunked thoroughly. It was also made in a very duplicitous manner, where a fake trans organization was set up to lure activists and medical professionals into interviews.

When a documentary like this one comes out, proponents usually try to pressure critics to see it for themselves before they can comment on the film. The logic behind this thought is that you don’t have the right to an opinion on something until you have consumed the source material. This position conveniently delays meaningful conversation about harmful works and increases the attention and wealth of the original creator.

This entire framing is disingenuous. When a bad-faith actor like Welsh (igami?) makes a documentary such as What is a Woman?, watching it not only gives them the attention (and money) they crave, but it forces you to take on a lot of psychic damage to please a party who has no intention in listening to you.

Here’s the truth — unless you are a reporter, influencer, researcher, or some other media person whose job is to debunk content like this, there is no reason to consume this terrible documentary. Seriously, you do not have to harm yourself for the sake of “nuance.”

I know many people believe that we should treat this as a “civil conversation” between two parties, but this frankly isn’t a one-on-one conversation. You don’t know Matt Welshagami on a personal level. He doesn’t even know that you exist, and you aren’t going to change his mind by watching his documentary.

Nor should passively consuming a piece of media be confused with the difficult work of deradicalization (i.e., reforming the worldview of someone who believes in dangerous, supremacist ideology). That requires time and a ridiculous amount of patience and is not the same thing as consuming every hateful piece of content out there.

There is no utility in consuming this film. It would be one thing if this documentary were coming from a nobody who was making good-faith arguments, but Matt Welshberg has a history of creating similarly egregious content. We know who he is at this point. It makes no sense to give him a “benefit of the doubt” that he refuses to show to others, including some of the participants of this very documentary.

Again, he straight up lied to some of the people in this film, making them think they would be doing a documentary on the trans community when really they were part of a transphobic hack job. Much of this film involves Welshith interviewing random passersby on the street, trying to catch people off-guard with “gotcha” questions. If his ideas had any merit to them, he would have tried to argue with prepared participants, but that would require a level of rigor he does not possess. There is no intellectual or philosophical merit here. No new arguments for you to learn, just hatred.

This documentary has nothing to do with facts and logic — it’s merely a pretext to bash trans people. Welshington weaves comments from transphobic bigots, including one very sad, self-hating trans person, with people who have no idea why they are there. He lobs a series of anti-trans conspiracy theories at trans activists and medical professionals, who are not prepared to answer them because he brought them on under false pretenses. It would be like scientists being told they were being brought on for a documentary about the solar system, only to learn that the interviewer for the project is a Flat Earther. They would come in prepared to answer basic science 101 questions, only to have to wrap their head around fringe beliefs they had never heard before. That’s the work of a prepared media relations expert, not a scientist.

This documentary only has niche merit in the sociological sense of trying to understand how a hate movement thinks. It should not be thought of as meaningfully trying to deconstruct the concept of gender. Learning gender from What is a Woman? is akin to learning about geopolitics from a QAnon adherent or consent from the Catholic Church. It’s just not a good idea.

If you genuinely want to learn about gender, consider reading bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody, Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, or Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. I also highly recommend YouTuber Lily Alexandre’s What Are Women? if you want to watch something instead. All of these put more effort into understanding this concept than Matt Welshnic has in this documentary (side note: I also wrote an explainer about nonbinary identity that you might want to read).

Yet perhaps the most crucial reason I think you shouldn’t watch What is a Woman? is that consuming content like this is mentally draining. I have written many articles monitoring the far-right as well as hateful media, such as Dave Chapelle’s The Closer. I can tell you that consuming the “arguments” by these figures is exhausting, especially if you belong to a marginalized identity where your existence is repeatedly disparaged and invalidated by them. I still cringe at some transphobic memes I have seen from far-right reactionaries because they are designed to hurt people like me. They do not make me feel very good about myself, and this mild trauma is a drain on my psyche.

However, I do this work because I am a person who has made comments on the Internet and media shenanigans my job. Significantly few people fall into that category, and so I question giving Matt Welsh’s quite frankly subpar documentary any of your time and attention when it can be devoted to more productive things: join a mutual aid group; work in a political campaign; volunteer for an organization; try to de-platform a far-right reactionary with power or deradicalize one who doesn’t. Any of these things will be more valuable than consuming harmful, poorly-researched content purposely designed to trigger you.

At the end of the day, that’s what Matt Welsh wants — for you to be triggered. He wants you to give him an angry reaction that he can mine for content and possibly even use to feed into his false persecution complex. I am asking you not to give him all of that power. He’s not worth it.

Some Resources

Now, after all of this, if you still want to know more about this terrible documentary, consider reading or watching a breakdown from someone who has already digested it. I have posted some of my favorites below from awesome people I think do great work in this space (I have also linked some breakdowns of Welsh in general).

However, I want to stress that watching or reading this content will still be an exhausting thing to do, and you might want to focus on anything else instead.

Articles

I Watched What is a Woman So You Wouldn’t Have To

The dangerous deception of Matt Walsh’s documentary “What is a Woman?”

Matt Walsh Wants to Kill Queer People

Far-Right Troll Tried to Dupe Trans People Into Joining His Anti-Trans Documentary

Right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh reportedly caught trying to trick trans people into being interviewed for anti-trans documentary

Videos

Transphobic Ad Asks "What is A Woman?"

How Matt Walsh Vilifies Trans People (To Grift his Audience)

P.S. I just realized I misspelled his name. So sorry about that, Matt Asshole.

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

Mayor Muriel Bowser And The Housing Fund She Mismanaged

DC Politics, Affordable Housing, and Gentrification

This article was originally published in the Washington Socialist.

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser is often compared to the men who preceded her. Mayor Vincent Gray, her predecessor, was not only accused of giving a competitor a job for badmouthing someone on the campaign trail but faced a federal probe into his campaign finances throughout his time in office. Some two decades earlier, Mayor Marion Barry would be mocked across the country for being involved in an FBI sting operation. Even Adrian Fenty, who has often been linked to Bowser, was perceived by many as out of touch and imperial.

Muriel Bowser has not been wrapped up in a federal probe on her finances or an FBI sting operation, but this low bar does not mean that her tenure as mayor has been free from mistakes. From ICE raids to increasing gentrification, there have been plenty of red marks on her two-term track record.

Nowhere do we see this more prominently than in her administration’s handling of the Housing Production Trust Fund (HPTF) — a trust meant to increase affordable housing in the district. The amount of money she has raised for it is arguably one of Bowser’s most significant achievements. Just as sadly, her mismanagement of this fund is one of her administration’s biggest mistakes.

The HPTF was created by the Housing Production Trust Fund Act of 1988 to build and preserve affordable housing in DC. It works by subsidizing projects — such as new building developments — preserving existing stock and more. HPTF projects usually provide “gap funding” when developers need additional funds to complete a project.

It was signed into law under the administration of Mayor Barry. Like many laws in the District, it would take a while for it to be adequately financed. The HPTF was not funded regularly until the early 2000s, when the District passed the Housing Act of 2002 to replenish it annually.

However, this new funding mechanism came with a problem. The HPTF is partially funded through deed recordation and deed transfer taxes, which typically occur through the sale of commercial and residential properties. According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, “[this] means that funding for the HPTF is heavily tied to the real estate market,” with the 2008 recession having had a predictably negative impact on the funds given to the HPTF.

This fund is clearly not set up to serve the District in lean times, yet because it is the primary mechanism for providing affordable housing, Bowser has aggressively allocated $1 billion to the HPTF since 2015. Her 2019 goal of adding 12,000 affordable units to DC by 2025 is nowhere close to being met, and she has consistently opined that these investments into the HPTF will get DC closer to reaching it.

These units are badly needed because the District is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis — one that has been exacerbated by the pandemic but long preceded it. The unhoused population has skyrocketed, and for over half a decade now, Black and low-income residents have increasingly found themselves being ousted to the city’s periphery. All the while luxury-branded condos have popped up that many DC natives cannot afford (note: over 10,000 units in the District remain unoccupied). Under Bowser, there is more money to play with than ever before, but it does not seem to be going to the people who need it most.

Even with this $1 billion investment, the HPTF has still struggled to achieve its function of providing low-income housing, and part of that conversation has to do with who we consider low-income. An important requirement of the 1988 law is for 50% of the funds spent in a fiscal year to be directed toward “Extremely Low-Income” households, or ELIs for short. For reference, the National Low Income Housing Coalition defines ELIs in the District as households “whose incomes are at or below the poverty guideline or 30% of their area median income (AMI).” (A lot of terms thrown at you right there, but just know that half of all funds the HPTF spends on projects in a year should be going to this group of people.)

Numerous reports from DC’s Office of the Inspector General have indicated that affordable housing projects under the Bowser administration have often prioritized projects that support households above the 30% AMI. This means that those in the bottom income brackets are not getting enough of the HPTF’s dollars for housing projects, a goal that administration spokespeople have referred to as “aspirational.” As a spokesperson for the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) said during the fallout of a scathing Inspector General report released in 2021:

“… the Administration desires both to comply with the letter and spirit of the law and to help residents most in need, but housing those at [ELI] levels is a lot tougher and more complicated to implement than just setting a big goal.”

This deflection, however, doesn’t change the fact that the law still requires this 50% threshold to be met. In the words of Councilmember Elissa Silverman in response to this claim: “The goals aren’t aspirational, they’re essential. If there’s an issue with [meeting them], then DHCD needs to inform all of us that there’s a problem, and we all need to get together to try to come up with a solution.”

The District is in desperate need of affordable housing for ELI residents, and this problem requires more work than debating the semantics of a law. The Bowser administration has not managed this trust well. In 2017, an audit of the HPTF by the Inspector General found that it was poorly managed, often “neglecting to ensure that developers offer the prescribed mix of housing for people in various income ranges.”

Several years later in 2019, another audit found that of nine housing projects totaling $103 million, Bowser’s administration awarded five to applicants that were ranked poorly by evaluators. In the process, this effort potentially reduced the number of affordable units by a projected 353. According to the Washington Post, the explanation that was given by the then-head of the DHCD, Polly Donaldson, was that evaluators did not have a “bird’s-eye view of the whole portfolio” and therefore missed some of the larger context on why the lower-ranked contracts were accepted. However, Donaldson failed to provide auditors with what that context was, forcing auditors to issue a subpoena, which does not inspire much confidence in this explanation.

The Washington Post further noted that “All five development firms [who were ranked poorly by evaluators] or their executives have given campaign contributions to Bowser.” These five firms ranged from the NHP Foundation, a nonprofit with holdings in 16 states, to Northern Real Estate Urban Ventures, LLC, a community developer focused on the greater DC area.

This problem of rewarding lower-ranked applicants has not gone away. A 2021 audit by the Office of the Inspector General noted that nearly $82 million allocated for projects serving low-income residents was not well monitored. Contracts once again went to “lower-scoring applicants,” some of which were overpaid for their services. The Washington Post noted that many officials could not ensure that the “deals backed by DC loans specifically created to underwrite affordable-housing projects … actually built or preserved affordable housing units.”

Overall, Bowser has made big promises to make the city’s housing more affordable, and some projects are getting completed (see Parcel 42), but they are certainly not enough. The vehicle (HPTF) she is using to build more affordable units is not well managed, and her administration has a history of using it to reward developers that do not perform the best.

Either through neglect, willful collaboration, or some combination of the two, Bowser’s administration has used a soft touch when dealing with the District’s developers. Given the affordable housing crisis afflicting DC, we have to question whether this approach is a good one.

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

Hadestown Is Thee Musical To Listen To For Climate Anxiety

This retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice has a political message relevant for our times.

Climate Change is terrifying. Even following the news around it is exhausting. Every day reveals new horrors about rising seas, vanishing resources, and diminishing crop yields. Our political leaders have not responded to this threat appropriately, and this negligence has left a lot of us with anxiety about the future.

For climate activists, or even just those worried about our planet's ecosystem (sadly not enough people at the moment), there is a bitter truth underpinning all of our efforts: we could devote the remainder of our lives to fighting this necessary problem, and still, lose. You might reduce your plastic and waste, lobby your leaders, engage in direct, confrontational action, and still wake up in twenty years wondering where it all went wrong?

No musical highlights this tension more than Hadestown — the modern retelling of the tragic love story between Orpheus and Eurydice, with a modern twist. It's a must-listen that explores the theme of how to keep fighting in spite of defeat.

For those who are unfamiliar with this tale, it's relatively simple. A poet named Orpheus falls in love with the muse Eurydice, but unfortunately, she dies shortly after the two of them get married (the when and how depends on the retelling). A determined and grief-stricken Orpheus travels to the underworld to retrieve her soul.

This feat would generally be impossible, but Orpheus strikes a bargain with Hades, Lord of the Underworld. He can travel back to the surface with Eurydice, but he cannot look back at her as they travel to the land of the living — if he does, she must return to the underworld alone. And unfortunately, as they are approaching the exit, Orpheus does look back, and well, the rest, as they say, is history (or, in this case, myth).

Hadestown is the same story, but it has made major differences that impact how we feel about the characters. Orpheus is not just a musician and an adventurer but a dreamer trying to change things by singing a song that will "bring the world back into tune." Eurydice's death is depicted with more agency than in the original tale. Persephone, the Goddess of Spring (who in another myth is violently taken from her mother Demeter by Hades), is in this version revealed to have initially been in love with the God of Death.

Overall, Hadestown is more about the characters than the outcome. It does not conceal the fate of its plot at all— that would be hard to do for a 2,600-year-old myth. It instead begins by telling the viewer exactly what they should expect. "It's a sad song," happily sings Hermes, the herald of the Gods and the play's narrator, "It's a tragedy" (Road to Hell).

Our protagonist's defeat at the hands of Hades is an inevitability, but the point is not about his victory or failure. The narrative instead decides to focus on Orpheus's struggle to change things. "It's a sad song," reprises Hermes after Orpheus has lost his love. "But we sing it anyway" (Road to Hell — reprise). The whole point of Hadestown is about fighting in the face of impossible odds. It is a love letter to fools trying to change the world.

While the force Orpheus might be fighting against is Hades, the play metaphorically links the God of the Underworld to the neoliberal economic order that has wrecked our environment. I am, of course, referring to neoliberalism, our current economic system, which tries to use market forces to dictate all human interactions. Hades is depicted in this iteration as a heartless businessman who has built a foundry to manufacture automobiles and other goods (Chant). He is all about contracts and profit. Hades is working the residents of the underworld into numbness, and he's pretty brutal about it. He directly mentions the need to quell riots (Hey, Little Songbird).

In Why We Build the Wall, one of the most chilling songs in the musical (and one of my personal favorites), he describes the need for his people to build a wall to keep out an "other." "Why do we build the wall, my children, my children?" he asks the souls he has enslaved to build a wall in his underground "necropolis." The answer is to "keep out the enemy," and the enemy is "poverty."

This economic mindset Hades embodies is linked rather explicitly to environmental collapse. Hades recalls Persephone (the force responsible for Earth's change of seasons) to the underworld earlier every year to the point where Eurydice remarks that she cannot remember the last time she has seen a spring or fall (Come Home With Me).

Similarly, Persephone remarks that she is disgusted by Hades' industrialization, singing, "It ain't right and it ain't natural" (Chant). We are meant to take this phrase literally because Persephone, as a force of the seasons, speaks for nature itself. Hades is not just hurting the citizens he rules, but the Earth as well.

Therefore in Hadestown, we don't just have a modern retelling of the classic myth. We have a story that replicates the problems of the current day — neoliberalism, climate change, etc. — and tells its viewers that regardless of the outcome, what's important is to keep fighting these toxic institutions.

In We Raise our Cups, the last song of the musical, Persphone, talks about the play we've just watched, singing: "Some birds sing when the sun shines bright. Our praise is not for them. But the ones who sing in the dead of night. We raise our cups to them."

Even though Orpheus failed in his goal of bringing Eurydice back to the land of the living, Persphone praises him for fighting anyway. It's easy to fight when you know that victory is assured, but when you are facing impossible odds, that's when the struggle is perhaps the most important. Some may call this mindset naive, but when you believe your cause to be vital, those "foolish" losses can set the stage for more significant victories.

Right now, climate change is that "impossible" fight. Pollution from unsustainable industries is wrecking our world. Most animals we know of today will probably go extinct. Entire biomes and cultures will blip out of existence in under a decade. This loss is a staggering and depressing thing to contemplate. Not just the environmental collapse but also the weight of the forces preventing us from stopping this fate from coming to pass (e.g., pro-business politicians and executives like Hades who are placing financial gain over the health of our planet).

In all likelihood, we might fail to stop them, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fight this battle anyway. After all, failure isn't a certainty either. As Orpheus would say to his critics: "who are they to say what the truth is anyway?"

This musical reminds us that it's the struggle we have to devote ourselves to, not the inevitability of victory or failure. If you want a musical that will help sustain you during the tumultuous decade ahead and "see how the world could be in spite of the way that it is," then get yourself down to the railroad tracks and head over to Hadestown.

Alex Has Opinions 6/3/22 Alex Has Opinions 6/3/22

Horizon Forbidden West Rightfully Depicts The Rich As Villains

Unpacking the biggest theme in Guerrilla Games’ Post-Apocalyptic Adventure

The Horizon series is a fun romp set in the distant future. It's ultimately about a lot of things: a post-apocalyptic adventure where you slay robot dinosaurs with bows and arrows, a narrative about the nature of humanity and AI; a feminist tale about a kickass warrior named Aloy (voiced by Ashly Burch) that goes against over a half a century of misogynistic video game tropes.

Yet, at this series’ core has always been a story criticizing the rich. In the first game (Horizon Zero Dawn), we learn that the reason the apocalypse even happened is that one wealthy man named Ted Faro (Lloyd Owen) recklessly experimented with nanotechnology for the military. The resulting "Faro plague" began converting all biomatter, including humans, into fuel, making life on the planet unlivable. Within 16 months, humanity had become extinct.

The cruelty of this rich man is further emphasized by the fact that he sabotages the Horizon Zero Dawn project — and the namesake of the first game — which was an effort to restart human civilization once the Faro plague succeeded in wiping out all life. He deleted the APOLLO protocol, a repository of all human knowledge, because he didn't want future humans to know that he caused the apocalypse, rationalizing it as a kindness. Our lead Aloy exists in a hunter-gather society because of this one rich man's ego.

We do not walk away with favorable opinions of the rich by the time the first game comes to a close, and the sequel takes this sentiment and heightens it. The rich become responsible for not only the problems of the past but also the present and future.

Horizon Forbidden West unsurprisingly takes place in a land known as the Forbidden West, a polity in post-apocalyptic Utah, Nevada, and California. There is a rich history here, as Aloy must navigate various tribal factions that are living in the shadow of a recent war — one I encourage you to explore for yourself.

In the first game, Aloy had to stop an AI named HADES from ending all life on Earth. HADES is a rogue subordinate function of the Horizon Zero Dawn AI named GAIA. It was given sentience after a mysterious signal from space unshackles it from GAIA. This led it to pursue its primary purpose of destroying all life (note — HADES was a redundant protocol meant to restart the terraforming process encase something goes wrong and should not be confused with the Faro Plague).

At the end of the first game, Aloy forestalls this ecological collapse, but only temporarily, as GAIA had to sacrifice herself to put the first game's events into motion. GAIA's absence has caused the terraforming process to break down. Hence why rampant robot dinosaurs are wandering this post-apocalyptic Earth, they were a part of the terraforming process, and GAIA used to be able to control them before subfunctions such as HADES rebelled against her.

We see in the second game that humanity is suffering from GAIA's absence: rivers are polluted, fields are failing, and an infestation is slowly creeping across the land. This ecological collapse may seem unrelated to the rich, but it is directly connected to them. You see, as Aloy progresses the Forbidden West (and I will assume that you don't care about spoilers at this point), we learn something startling about the world's megarich: they never died.

As the Faro plague was ravaging the world, the richest of the rich, who were part of an organization of immortal billionaires called Far Zenith, got into a spaceship and headed to the Sirius Solar System. Once there, they spent their years permanently plugged into virtual reality, stagnating culturally before leaving their colony hundreds of years later due to some cataclysm (more on this later).

There is a satirical wit in how Forbidden West presents to the player this abridged history of the rich's "utopia" on Sirius. Without a working class to exploit, the rich were not interested in doing anything. They had no desire to build or explore, having truly become cultural parasites. As Far Zenith member Tilda van der Meer (voiced by the peerless Carrie-Anne Moss), an admittedly biased perspective, lectures Aloy:

“It wasn’t until we were off-planet that I understood the true scope of their greed. I was grateful to simply be alive. But the others became obsessed with a kind of effortless immortality. They built a colony where machines serviced their every need, where any memory — or fantasy… …could be endlessly savored in virtual reality. It wasn’t life. It was stultifying, a pampered dream-state…”

The only "good" rich person we see in the game is Stanley Chen, a man who revived the city of Las Vegas in the 2040s by using a magical water filtration technology. He was one of Far Zenith's colonists, and even this "good apple" did nothing to stand against the oppressive oligarchy established on Sirius. He spent his days replicating a 2040s Las Vegas in virtual reality, reliving his glory days as the "savior" of the desert.

Most of the main characters do not look kindly on the rich's pursuit of immortality. As Zo, an ally of Aloy (and one of my favorite characters), says in disbelief: "I still can't believe [Beta] told [Varl] the Zeniths are… immortals. Old Ones who cut themselves off from the cycle of life and decay. I've never heard of anything so selfish. To deny our dying bodies to the Earth, to doom the life that would bloom in their place… It's despicable."

The player comes to view the Far Zenith as inept at best and diabolically cruel at worst. They are the villains the player must fight against. Having returned to Earth to mine the planet for resources, Far Zenith cruelly disregards the lives of the planet's native inhabitants, hiding behind their technology as justification for their brutality.

In a last-minute twist, the incompetence of Far Zenith is further highlighted when we learn who really sent the signal that unshackled HADES from GAIA. It wasn't the Far Zenith group, hoping to restart the terraforming process, as Aloy and company first suspected, but a force far more sinister. Far Zenith doesn't want to stay on Earth at all. It's merely a pitstop before they flee even deeper into space.

Instead, the thing that wants everyone dead is more symbolic of the problems with the rich in general. On Sirus, Far Zenith tried to create a form of digital immortality, but the project failed. A conglomeration of all their consciousness merged into a single entity named Nemesis. Far Zenith shelved this project, and let it languish for decades, maybe even centuries. Yet it eventually got out, destroying the Sirus colony and pursuing the human survivors that it blames for its imprisonment.

The rich of our time are obsessed with immortality: both digital and biological. Horizon Forbidden West lampoons this obsession by having it be the downfall of their entire civilization. Their greatest aspiration is portrayed as nothing more than arrogance that dooms us all.

Ultimately, the rich are the enemy of this game. There are so many examples that I didn't include for brevity, such as the fate of Ted Faro, the honorable "CEO" of the Quen, or the subtle sociopathy of Carrie-Anne Moss's character Tilda van der Meer. I encourage you to play through these story beats to experience them for yourself.

As we fight a similar, albeit less dramatic collapse than the Faro Plague, Horizon Forbidden West asks us to direct our rage and disgust at the people who are causing this problem — the wealthy.

And that's a message I can get behind — robot dinosaurs and all.

Alex Has Opinions 5/26/22 Alex Has Opinions 5/26/22

I Can't Process These Shootings Anymore

Death is all around me, & I struggle to shed a tear

Back in 2012, the Sandy Hook massacre broke my heart. Twenty-six people dead — twenty of whom were children. I had trouble wrapping my head around the cruelty of it all. I remember thinking at the time that if anything would spur America to action, it would be the faces of these young elementary students in a victim tally.

That didn't happen. The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting became politicized, with many on the right perpetuating the conspiracy theory that it never happened. Prompted by profiteers like Alex Jones, the parents of this tragedy were harassed by those believing the incident was part of some sinister government conspiracy.

Sandy Hook was followed by Navy Yard and then San Bernadino and Orlando and Las Vegas and Parkland and El Paso. And the list keeps growing. How many cities and neighborhoods do I have to list?

There have been over 200 mass shootings in the US in 2022 alone. We are talking about thousands of incidents since Sandy Hook. I was just processing the deaths in Buffalo, and now the clock is reset to Uvalde, and I know those readings this in the future will not just have one other shooting to reference, but dozens, possibly even hundreds.

I can't process it anymore. I see people being outraged by all this death, but all I do is feel numb to it. I should feel something, but I don't have it in me anymore. One tragedy bleeds into the next and then the next and the next and the next.

When will it end?

We are so used to pain, and a part of me almost wishes that this is part of some master plan to desensitize me to the misery around me, like a frog boiling alive in steadily hotter water. But it's worse than that — those who control things don't care. Our lives are not meaningful enough to them to be a part of the equation. These deaths are what systemic neglect looks like.

We've known how to stop mass shootings for some time: it involves limiting the guns people can have (who knew?). Countries such as Japan and Australia have placed limits on their population's gun usage and possession, and they have fewer mass shootings. Australia hasn't had a mass shooting since 1996. As far as I can tell, Japan has not had any in a while (though mass murders do occasionally still occur).

However, America doesn't pass gun reform because we don't pass reforms in general: healthcare, education, criminal justice. We haven't improved in these areas for decades and, in some cases, centuries. The campaign for Universal Healthcare is older in America than some countries (it started in the early 1900s, yall)

Why should guns be any different?

America has become so dysfunctional that now many leftists are sadly starting to reverse course on the notion of gun control, and I don't blame them. They see the right-wing militias growing in this country, and the many police officers involved with them and worry that gun control might not be enough. After all, would you trust the police —the people who are pretty trigger happy with the citizens they "protect and serve" — to appropriately disarm the white supremacist militias plaguing this country? I am not sure that I would.

In the end, we don't (just) need gun control. We need a different country. One that respects the lives of its citizens and that political project will require more than just shouting into the void, "GUN CONTROL NOW." It will require action.

If you, like me, want to be more than a husk of a person, unable to shed a tear for the lives you see falling all around you, then I encourage you to get involved with one of the groups below (I posted a diversity of groups, so pick the one that works for you). The lives being lost around us should mean something. Not just be yet another unfortunate statistic that causes us to feel nothing.

Justice Democrats - Let's Elect the Next Generation

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) - Working towards a better future for all.

Mutual Aid Hub

Gun Laws | Giffords

Alex Has Opinions 5/26/22 Alex Has Opinions 5/26/22

Netflix's 'The Pentaverate' Gets Power All Wrong

The show about conspiracy theories fails to understand social change

What if a secret organization of five men ruled the world? And what if they were nice? Such is the premise of Mike Myer's new comedy Netflix series, The Pentaverate (2022) — the show that makes fun of some of pop culture's most popular conspiracy theories.

The series follows sweet-talking journalist Ken Scarborough (Mike Myers) as he tries to infiltrate The Pentaverate to get his old job back at CACA News Toronto. Ken works with colleague Reilly Clayton (Lydia West) and conspiracy theorist Anthony Lansdowne (also played by Myers) to complete this mission. Along the way, he realizes that this all-powerful organization isn't so bad and works to stop nefarious forces from attempting to destroy it.

On a personal level, I did not consider this show especially funny. Many of the jokes failed to land, as most of the series' humor boiled down to references and gimmicks. I hate Qanon as much as the next girl, but merely referencing the conspiracy theory is not enough to get a chuckle out of me. Maybe you disagree, and that's valid. Comedy is a very subjective enterprise, and one person's yawn-fest is another person's gut buster.

On a philosophical level, however, I am more confident in asserting that this series' politics are messy. The message that the show tries to walk away with — that we need more diversity in our workplaces — doesn't work in the context of an all-powerful conspiracy theory.

In the process, The Pentaverate pushes a moral that's pretty regressive.

It's hard to take this show seriously, and while that's sometimes the point, this applies to the underlying logic of the series. If the world is being led by such nice people (as the brilliant Jeremy Irons reminds us during every intro sequence), then why does it suck so much?

There is a scene where our villains offer the world's leaders the chance to wipe away secrets from the public record in a secret auction. Most of these leaders are so disgusted by this offer that they walk out. This includes imperialists such as the Queen of England, who we are meant to believe cares sincerely about the public good. In the most unbelievable scene in the show, only a couple of these leaders are willing to go forward with the villainous auction, including a hilarious reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Again, if the world is (mostly) being run by such nice people, then who exactly has been causing all the murder and exploitation that make living on this planet so terrible?

We are given two answers to this question. The first comes from the show's villain Bruce Baldwin (also played by Mike Myers). A media mogul, and current Pentaverate member, he believes that the Internet is to blame, saying in a villainous monologue:

“I tried to warn the Pentaverate that the bad guys would use the Internet the same way I used the tabloids, only a million times worse….I thought people would be smart enough to check facts, but no they're too addicted to their smartphones and their tablets and blah, blah, blah, f*ckity blah….What’s the use of trying to help people when they don't even want to help themselves?”

You would be forgiven for not taking the words of a former media mogul on this subject seriously. This explanation blames humanity as a whole for being unable to navigate the systems of misinformation campaigned for by larger, more predatory institutions. The modern Internet was created to be psychologically addicting, taking advantage of human beings' worst impulses. Blaming people for not having the willpower to push through these toxic systems is lazy. Bruce Baldwin seems to be doing a fair amount of projection here, and it makes sense that this is the monologue of a villain.

The second answer comes from the "good guys" in the Pentaverate — old geezers Lord Lordington, Mishu Ivanov, and Shep Gordon (all played by Myers). While not meaning to, this trio comes to terms with the fact that they are part of the problem. As character Lord Lordington tells his tearful secretary: "the Demetrius Protocols exist in the event that the Pentaverate should fall into nefarious hands. The world has changed. The Pentaverate has not. We have become those nefarious hands." They activate the ominous-sounding Demetrius Protocols, killing themselves off and ending the Pentaverate for good.

If the show stopped here, I would have no problems with it. I might not like the humor, but its premise would be philosophically sound. It is a problem that one unaccountable organization has such a huge say over world affairs, and regardless of their intentions, it's probably best that they no longer exist.

But the show doesn't stop there.

In a surprise twist, we learn that colleague Reilly Clayton actually worked for the Pentaverate the entire time. They recruited her out of Cambridge. She believed in their message of a secret organization "actually doing good." When she joined them, however, she learned that they were not a diverse organization, saying

“…then I meet the top guys and its just old white man after older white man after older, whiter, richer man after oldest, whitest, richest man. I mean if the most diversity in your group is Russian, you just know its going to be the usual deal, which is tons of diversity on the lower levels, and then you bang your head on that old, white ceiling.”

Reilly understandably wants to change this dysfunction, and she eventually gets her wish after the Pentaverate dies. The show ends with a new organization called the Septaverate being formed. It's more diverse and composed primarily of younger people of varying races, genders, and ethnicities.

Gone are the archaic European traditions that guided the group before. These elites wear all white and make decisions in front of a white background that looks like it comes directly from the Apple Store. Ken Scarborough is now a supercomputer called KENTOR providing tech support. Narrator Jeremy Irons closes out the show by saying, "…a new secret society was born. This group of benevolent experts became the Septaverate. More representative. More inclusive. More nice."

Kindness — that's what was missing from the Illuminati, yall.

While the message of more diversity and tolerance makes sense in the context of a workplace, it does not make any sense here. The answer to a secretive, all-powerful organization isn't to expand its membership pool to more diverse applicants. The solution is to destroy that organization. The Pentaverate was right to disband itself, and the Septaverate was in the wrong to ever form in the first place.

There is a level of liberal wish-fulfillment happening here, as Myers argues, not for a transformation of society but a realignment of it. Even the way the Septaverate is formed is not through force or activism but hard work and perseverance within the system. Reilly never really challenges the status quo. She was on a secret mission by Lord Lordington to get our lead Ken to sacrifice himself to the MENTOR supercomputer and become KENTOR. It's only by following the wishes of the head white guy in charge and waiting for him to step aside willingly that we get our alleged "happy ending."

Maybe you think that following orders within the system is how "real" change happens, but to me, it sends all the wrong signals.

Ultimately, the Pentaverate feels like a wasted opportunity. The idea of taking conspiracy theories seriously is a fun concept (see People of Earth for a show that has done this better), but we needed it to be less messy. The Pentaverate had to approach its story of a secretive organization thoughtfully, even if it was only doing that for laughs.

I appreciate where this show was trying to take us. Most organizations in the US suffer from a lack of diversity, and championing more diversity in the workplace is something I unequivocally support. It's the idea that we make the world better by diversifying those on top that I object to.

Some organizations out there don't need more diversity. They simply need to die — and that includes everything from business-backed trade associations to secretive conspiracies trying to rule the world.

Alex Has Opinions 5/24/22 Alex Has Opinions 5/24/22

The Startling Reasons Why Job Hunting Can Be Sociopathic

Work culture, labor exploitation, hustling, and the grind

The majority of people have had to apply for a job, yet it's probably not the most enjoyable thing you've done. Most people routinely cite dissatisfaction, not just with their jobs, but in the job application process, especially for online applications where it is seen as very opaque. To quote a rant on Reddit: "Applying for jobs is actual hell. I hate this. [I'm] sick of the constant anxiety, nearly being successful and getting excited - but then turned down at the last minute, being ghosted... it's just horrific isn't it?"

However, the necessity of jobs means that rarely do we examine this dissatisfaction earnestly. Defenders of work always bring up some other factor like your "boss" or your "work environment," never the system itself. When unemployed, applying for jobs sometimes seems like drinking water or breathing air. It's something you have to do.

When we step back and look at the norms around job-seeking, however, we see a system that is very toxic and sociopathic: — i.e., it encourages the dismissal of other people's emotions and desires. It's not that the people who process job applications and interviews all have Antisocial Personality Disorder (I can't make that claim, nor do I think it's appropriate). Rather the systems they are a part of our setup to callously disregard the value of human beings.

And so, let's examine the common wisdom given to job-seekers and how that encourages a very sociopathic system.

"Don't Quit Your Job Before You Have Another One"

A pearl of wisdom offered by many career coaches and job experts is to make sure that you have another opportunity lined up before you give in your notice. In the words of Alison Doyle from The Balance Careers: "If you can leave your current position on your terms, when you're ready, the transition to new employment will be much smoother."

This is a classic piece of advice, but can we recognize how cold and calculating it is?

Their recommendation is to essentially lie actively to your existing employer, secretly arranging with other firms on the side until you are in a secure enough position to cut the cord. At that point, you put in a token amount of hours until you can leave forever (a period where workers are traditionally not invested in their job). This is being done all while trying not to say anything too drastic, so you don't ruin a future recommendation (more on this point later).

This norm of dishonesty exists because employers pay our wages (i.e., what allows us to survive in the world), and historically they can act very pettily with that power. As Susan P. Joyce writes in the Job Hunt: "Understand that your employer may terminate you (or subject you to a very unpleasant conversation) if they know — or even suspect — that you are job hunting."

And she's not wrong. There is little to insulate an employee from such retaliation. As Alison Doyle clarifies in another The Balance Careers article: "As unjust as it might seem, most employees in the United States can be fired for looking for another job. Why? Because the majority of U.S. workers are at-will employees."

Yet paradoxically, research routinely indicates that people are more likely to get work if they are already employed. According to Quartz, one 2017 study found that the "…response rate from employers was four times that of unemployed applicants. [Employed applicants] got more than twice the interviews and three times as many offers per application."

And so, we don't tell our employers that we are leaving because that would involve a level of honesty that most firms do not wish to give. The current job-seeking process begins and ends with lying. Many workers start their searches in secret, and they don't tell their employers they are looking for work until the process is well underway.

It's a custom that is systemically very sociopathic, and we don't consider it so merely because of how normalized it has become.

"Screen Your Social Media"

Another gem on the job hunting message boards is always to make sure that your socials are "professional." "Looking for your next job?" begins David Cotriss in Business News Daily. "Make sure your social media profiles are safe for work because employers are screening candidates' presence online."

Yet social media has become such an integral part of our identities. For better and worse, our socials are the primary way many of us interact with the world, and the standard advice is to censor that information to make our employers comfortable. In essence, we are being told to preemptively protect the reputations of our employer’s and potential employer's brands.

I get why individuals scrub their socials (I do it too). If employers have been known to fire employees for posts they make, then they certainly aren't above denying an applicant advancement because of something they've done or said online. Many companies conduct extensive social media screenings that comb through sites like TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram to see if you have done anything to impact their brands.

Most workers don't want to take that risk. We exist in a culture where the leverage is in the hands of the person who pays your wage. For this reason, many job hunters are not comfortable publicly making systemic critiques of the working order because that would place them at a disadvantage career-wise. In the words of Sophie Deering in the Undercover Recruiter: "Expressing strong political views or controversial opinions can be dangerous. It's likely that a lot of people may not agree with what you are saying, and it's possible that someone may take offense."

People have to worry about this constantly. Literally, the statements I am making right now in this article will hurt my career because I am opening myself up to criticism from entities that do not like to be held accountable.

As a result, we end up with an overly curated workforce that is afraid to make statements that are too challenging. The outward-facing brands of working "professionals" are filled with posts and comments that do not challenge the status quo. Typical LinkedIn posts are devoted to bland comments about perseverance, hustling, and other aspects of professionalism (see my piece “LinkedIn Is A Toxic, Capitalist Meme Generator 👊🏻”).

I ask you: "If a partner or family member were so possessive that they dictated what you could or could not say online, we would categorize that as abusive, no?".

When an entity, however, permeates our society so much that we are afraid to be ourselves for fear that it will interfere with our ability to subsist (what we would label on an individual level as "financial abuse"), then we brand that as "professionalism."

"Your Labor And Time Are Expected"

An aspect of job hunting that is quite unsettling is the amount of free labor that companies expect you to do before they even hire you: cover letters, interviews, examines, contests, thank you cards, and more. Some advice writers even suggest that you volunteer in the hope of it turning into a job. Alison Doyle, writing: "Volunteering can also be a way to enhance your job search. With some patience, passion, and hard work, you may even be able to turn a volunteer position into salaried employment."

Yet rarely do companies compensate you for this labor. Stories of firms mailing you checks for interviews or exams you've done are shocking for their infrequency. When it comes to the job search, it's merely expected that you do whatever your potential employer requests or you will not be considered for the position at all.

There have been horror stories of applicants being asked to do entire projects that the company then uses without compensating them. An article from Slate gave several examples of this phenomenon. One story had an applicant's writing sample stolen. Another had one candidate prepping for events on the company's calendar. Neither of these individuals was hired for these positions, nor were they paid for this work.

The dynamic between employer and job seeker is ripe for abuse, and from a market standpoint, this abuse makes sense. You want to make as much money as you can, even if that means taking advantage of your potential job seekers' free time and labor. While "working interviews" (ones where you are officially doing the job for your potential employers to see how they will perform) often force employers to pay minimum wage, branding something as an exercise is a simple way to get around this dilemma.

Now not every firm engages in the more extreme abuses we've listed here, but even the "nice ones" expect applicants to spend hours in unpaid efforts on applications and interviews. They push people to spend a lot of time and energy on applications that will lead nowhere, which is still an attempt to squeeze as much value as possible from their applicants.

"Apply even if you're not fully qualified"

The advice to "apply for jobs you don't seem qualified for" is everywhere, both on and offline. "You may not be the best candidate or have all the requisite qualifications," goes one article, "but you'll never get a job if you don't try." Another one from Indeed states: "There is no rule that you can't apply for jobs you're not fully qualified for, and often applying for jobs you're not qualified for may lead to new ways to innovate in your career."

As a job seeker, this advice makes sense. You do not know if the job listing was written appropriately or even truthfully. If the company is one you want to work for, it is perfectly rational, under the logic of current market conditions, to work on an application anyway. You never know if your efforts will be rewarded.

Yet, when we look at this from a birdseye view, it only makes sense when you look at it from the lens of your potential employer's mendacity. The expectation is that they are lying about the qualifications and requirements they put in their job descriptions. As Cate Murray writes: "The Requirements section listed may not be all true…[It] is often a laundry list of tools, technologies, certifications, education, and so on….[It] often portrays an ideal candidate in a perfect world."

Again, from a market standpoint, this logic makes sense. As a capitalist firm, you want to push for as much value as possible. By being honest about the baseline skills you are looking for (assuming you even know what they are), you place yourself at a disadvantage in negotiations. Those who have more to bring to the table can push for a higher salary (note: this is also why companies conceal salary information as well). For businesses, it makes an exploitative sense to pad the requirements of a job description to get the most skills for the lowest possible price.

For reasons we have previously discussed (see section "Don't Quit Your Job Before You Have Another One"), many of these negotiations are happening in secret. While job hunting, numerous workers must not only lie to their existing employer about leaving, but they must also anticipate that they are being lied to by their future employer. All applicants are engaged in a game of 4-D Chess against their employers —people trying to exploit them for as much money as possible.

It's a system where lying is built into the profit and loss statement.

"Don't Burn Any Bridges"

We hear this advice a lot. It's a euphemism that boils down to not ruining your relationship with your existing employer as you head out the door to another firm. As Heather Kinzie, owner of an HR and leadership consultancy firm, told Monster: "It's easy to get swept up in the excitement of getting a new job. But you'll still want to be on your best behavior with your soon-to-be-former colleagues and bosses, not to mention the people who served as your references."

It's advice I certainly have tried to follow when I'm able to because, as Heather says, references are vital to future work prospects, and there is always the fear that one wrong word might ruin years of work history. As we've already established, companies can be very petty about receiving feedback. Workers have been fired for everything from union organizing to blowing the whistle on discrimination.

The same logic applies to references. Even if unlisted, a good HR staffer will often track down other people in your work history. If your manager doesn't like you, that can hurt your future work prospects. To this end, the Allison Taylor blog notes: "it's not just an overtly negative reference that can be problematic. A simple "not eligible for rehire" from Human Resources can also doom an applicant's prospects for future employment."

And so, this creates a chilling effect. If you can be fired at any time, then only the most documented offenses hold any scrutiny in a court of law. It might be hard for more privileged workers to understand, but the truth is that many of us only pretend that previous working relationships were okay because we don't want to hurt our future job prospects. It's far easier just to swallow your pride, and move on to the next firm.

Many traditional managers honestly don't realize how shielded they are from criticism. The glowing reviews most, if not all managers have, are reviews of omission. If they are brought up at all, many workers frame the flaws of their managers in the best possible light. We do this because the fear of retaliation is always there. It doesn't matter how "nice" a boss is. In our current at-will environment, workers are always one conversation or email away from being terminated and having a permanent ding on their record.

Unsurprisingly, this creates environments ripe for abuse. All the claims of racism and sexism that have emerged in workplaces in recent years aren't because workplaces have suddenly become more toxic, but rather because workers have started to expose the problems that were always there.

Managers and bosses have continually been dousing bridges in gasoline, unaware of the buckling beneath their feet. Many of us are just brave enough to finally light the match.

Conclusion

When I call the system of job hunting sociopathic, I don't want to suggest that all people looking for work are sociopaths. Nor do I want you to walk away with the belief that all HR departments are run by people who have Antisocial Personality Disorder. That would be an inappropriate and ableist claim to make.

Instead, I want to emphasize that the current norms around job-seeking actively encourage lying, manipulation, and the callous disregard for applicants' resources and time. The advice we see repeatedly is to not only overextend applicants but also insulate the administrators of this system so that they do not receive proper feedback.

Part of the reason "The Great Resignation" has been so brutal to the managerial class is that they are finally receiving feedback that they have consistently ignored. Many of us were never happy with the status quo. We just didn't feel confident enough to give that feedback without suffering consequences that interfered with our ability to survive.

Again, the managerial class controls our ability to pay for essential resources. Their swift termination of our jobs impacts our lives more than any hasty exit could ever impact their bottom lines.

The question becomes what our society will do with this information. Will we pass reforms that stop this process from being so abusive (e.g., greater unionization, more worker co-ops, reducing the wealth of capitalists, etc.)? Or will we continue to uphold a system that encourages us to keep lying to each other and ourselves?

Alex Has Opinions 5/14/22 Alex Has Opinions 5/14/22

Why Did So Few of Us Care That A Man Lit Himself On Fire This Earth Day?

Global warming, climate change denialism, activism, & protest

Earth Day came and went this year on April 22nd, and you would be forgiven for missing it. Our society does not put a lot of emphasis on protecting this planet — after all, the almost apocalyptic IPCC report would not have us projected to possibly hit 1.5C in the next five years if our leaders gave a damn about the environment.

Another thing you may have missed is that a man lit himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court to protest climate change. His name was Wynn Alan Bruce. He was a 50-year-old man who appeared to love taking artsy photographs and sharing quotes about spirituality.

He frequently talked about the need to protect the environment on his Facebook page. He was passionate and political. Wynn appeared to have been planning this act for some time. A Facebook post in April of 2021 has the date he would die and a fire emoji next to it. In a message in February of this year, he prophetically reposted a bell hooks quote, which reads: “The light of love is always in us, no matter how cold the flame. It is always present, waiting for the spark to ignite, waiting for the heart to awaken.”

Wynn was a practitioner of Buddhism who took up the tradition of immolating himself to protest an injustice, hoping perhaps, like the bell hooks quote suggests, that this act would spark something within our society. “This act is not suicide. This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis.” his alleged friend Dr. K. Kritee wrote on Twitter.

Yet if that's the case, I worry that we are not listening to his message. Most people I know did not hear about this incident — and I'm friends with a committed group of activists. Several news outlets reported the initial death. Fewer still covered his vigil in front of the Supreme Court. Then we all moved on to the next thing: politicians reneging on promises they never intend to deliver on; the latest show on Netflix; some bullshit done by celebrities or influencers. Anything to not focus on the problem at hand.

I urge you to go to his Facebook page and see the “friends” who have invaded it, belittling Wynn’s sacrifice. “So sad. Climate Extremist propaganda kills,” reads one of the first comments on the last message on his feed. “That wasn’t a sacrifice, it was narcissism,” goes another. “Trying to save climate change by putting out emissions… should’ve composted himself instead… dumbass.” And on and on, the hate goes. The news of this man’s tragic death broke their feeds, and rather than do something substantive with this information, they spent precious moments on this Earth tracking down his social and yelling at a ghost.

There have been so many bodies given in this fight, and the response they receive, assuming people hear about them at all, is mockery and dismissal. In the past couple of years alone, scientists have risked arrest, and youth activists have gone on hunger strike. Activists have been arrested after blocking the entrance of the New York Times printing plant in Queens, scaling an oil tanker in London, occupying the Department of the Interior, and so much more. People are arrested and attacked every day to protest our society’s inadequate response to climate change.

Have you heard about any of them?

Countless people have let their bodies be hit, starved, and brutalized, hoping that it would shock people out of complacency, and I am wondering what good it’s done. If so few react to or even hear about a man dousing himself in gasoline in front of one of the most famous buildings in the country — a man who died suffering one of the most painful types of protests imaginable. Then I don’t know what can be done to shock people from their complacency.

How many more of us have to give our lives before people start taking the crisis we are in seriously?

Those in power have enough resources to insulate themselves from this type of news. Rich people have entire publication teams (and in some cases, entire publications) that edit out the nasty business of reality for them.

As for the rest of us, we are either in active denial or just so overwhelmed by everything going on that a man killing himself in protest of environmental collapse causes us to hardly bat an eye. Wynn Bruce’s death has just become one incident in a string of horrors dotting our news feeds. Many of us are paralyzed with fatigue, and so many more of us refuse to acknowledge the problem at all.

I didn’t know Wynn Bruce, but I have the utmost respect for him and his sacrifice. I hope, for all of our sakes; people start to listen to his message before it's too late and, perhaps even more importantly, have the bravery to act.

If you would like to do something about the climate catastrophe threatening our planet, consider donating to or signing up for one of the organizations below:

Some organizations to look at:

Mutual Aid Hub

Indigenous Mutual Aid

Find Your XR Group | Extinction Rebellion

Ecosocialist Working Group - Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

Mutual Aid — Anthropocene Alliance | Environmental Justice

Sunrise Movement - We Are The Climate Revolution

Alex Has Opinions 5/12/22 Alex Has Opinions 5/12/22

Apple TV+’s Show ‘Severance’ Successfully Depicts the American Workplace as a Cult

Capitalism, Wage Slavery, Dystopias, & the Future of the American Workforce

“We’re divinely discontented with customer experiences,” preaches a letter to shareholders. That line may sound like it came from the fictional dialogue of a corporate dystopia, but it’s from a real company. Let’s put a pin on the “who” for a moment. Just keep it in the back of your mind as we talk about the show Severance and how it successfully links modern corporatism to the religiosity of cults.

The corporate dystopia Severance has been a critical darling of Apple TV+. It tells the story of a group of employees for the company Lumen who have undergone a surgery called “severance,” which separates their work and life selves. Their outside selves or “outies” retain no memories of what they experience at work, and vice versa for their “innies,” creating two separate people coexisting in the same body at different times.

There's a lot to like about this series. The acting is superb, ranging from the quiet, understatedness of employee Burt Goodman (played by Christopher Walken) to the religious fervor of middle manager Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who worships both the company and its founding family, the Eagans. Everything from the music to the over-stylized 1980s aesthetic creates a show that places the viewer constantly on edge.

Ultimately, it's the concept that keeps people talking. This premise is horrifying to some, but to others, it's merely a natural conclusion of the current American workplace. “That sounds like such a good idea,” said one friend after I explained the show's premise. “If you hate your job, wouldn’t you want to hit the skip button?”

We are so normalized to the pervasiveness of corporate culture that even satire like Severance can fly over the heads of many of us. We worship our places of work. They have become blind cults where we are willing to give our corporate owners anything they ask of us, even our minds.

The Cult of Lumen

A cult has no singular description. The country of France, for example, has no legal definition of one, but they still try to curb the influence of “cult-like movements.” Generally, cults are characterized as involving at least one person who attempts to dominate the lives of their members using psychological manipulation and other pressure strategies. That, you might imagine, is quite an expansive definition (more on this later).

Severance primarily follows both the innie and outie of employee Mark Scout (Adam Scott), someone who is already thoroughly indoctrinated into the cult of Lumen. Mark’s outie is still recovering from the loss of his wife, and he is not handling it well. He drinks excessively and has taken this “severed” job so he doesn't have to deal with his grief and is thoroughly defensive when anyone questions the morality of severance.

It's common for cults to prey on weak and vulnerable people for converts. Some research has even indicated a correlation between cult membership and addictive disorders (e.g., substance abuse and dependence), which fits the description of protagonist Mark a little too well.

Yet it's not just that Mark is emotionally vulnerable that causes me to cite this parallel. The company also socially isolates Mark by making sure he can't meet his fellow employees outside of work, or in the case of his innie, to leave at all. It subtly controls where he lives via subsidized housing. His boss Harmony Cobel even spies on him so that he can never pick up the pieces about the extent of their deception. These acts are all to control his environment so he may never gain the capacity for dissent.

According to psychologist Margaret Singer in her work Cults in Our Midst (1996), controlling a person’s environment is a key tactic cults use to hold power over their members. In fact, it's surprising how all of Singer’s six conditions of “mind control” show up on the show (I have noted them in bold below). Mark’s outie may think he’s using Lumen to defer his grief, but he’s the real one being used. While the company frames “severance” as a simple contract between two parties, Mark’s innie has been psychologically broken down to accept his enslavement.

Both his innie and outie are closed off from the purpose of their work. They do not know what they do, preventing them from understanding how they are being changed over time.
His environment is elaborately curated with maze-like hallways and more so that every aspect of his waking experience is controlled.
His innie cannot leave because he only exists within the company's walls. Mark is in a closed system, where he is not even permitted to keep a corny self-help book from the outside.
From being instructed to take precisely two tokens to use the vending machine to quietly being berated during Wellness sessions, his behavior is constantly molded through subtle acts of compliance to adopt the Lumen ideology.
If Mark ever goes against their wishes, he is sent to a place called “the break room” to be tortured, which discourages any sense of individuality.
Finally, the only way he can stop his bondage is if his outie leaves the company, and that action would effectively end his life, creating a sense of powerlessness.

Lumen is a textbook example of a cult, and we see this also in the way the company worships the founding family, particularly their charismatic founder, Kier Eagan. The Employee Handbook is written like a bible that espouses Kier’s gospel. Kier’s house has been replicated in the Perpetuity Wing — a museum that is an ode to the Eagan family. Visiting it is one of the few activities coworkers can do outside of just working.

Lumen is steeped in an intense religiosity that Mark’s innie has known his entire life. He has been brainwashed to accept the larger-than-life Lumen mythos, and until agitator Helly Riggs (Britt Lower) enters the picture, he doesn’t question it. Why would he? He was recruited into this cult from day one of his existence. This is just the way things are. To quote a line used in conference rooms across corporate America, “it is what it is.”

But if a company can be a cult, as I think this show demonstrates pretty well, where do we draw the line?

Corporate America is also a cult

In contemporary labor circles, modern jobs are sometimes pejorative referred to as “wage slavery” because of the power imbalance between employees and employers. You may “voluntarily” enter into a job, but often only because you need a wage for resources such as food and housing. And besides a few guidelines, your boss dictates what you can and cannot do (tell your boss “no” enough times and see what happens). To condense a phrase from philosopher Engels: “Capitalism is just slavery with extra steps.”

Severance takes this wage slavery critique and collapses it in on itself. The severance floor of Lumen doesn’t just take your body for those hours at work (like Engels argues our current system does), but your mind and memories as well. In this way, Severance strains the credulity of the traditional argument defending wage slavery — that the participant agreed to it — by demonstrating how contacts can be weaponized to coerce consent. The company preyed on an unwell man to do an experimental medical procedure and then framed it through the lens of individual agency.

However, Mark was not in a place to make this deal, and furthermore, his innie did not agree to be enslaved by Lumen, any more than someone starving and desperate can agree to a coercive job. There is no contract to hide behind, not for the viewer. We see precisely the horrors that this type of logic leads to, and it is shockingly mundane.

The scariest thing about Severance is how unsurprising this entire setup is. There are a lot of surreal elements on this show: workers spend hours editing emotions out of a document, there is a department devoted to nursing goats, and workers who meet their numbers are rewarded with a BDSM waffle party. All of these things are off the wall, but the willingness of a company to take someone’s mind and mold it in their image is very believable. It seems only like a natural extension of the current environment.

Companies constantly twist reality to lie to their employees (and the public). Major firms have lied about everything from the existence of Global Warming (see ExxonMobil) to the harms of smoking (see Big Tobacco) to the destabilizing effects of social media on Democracy and our collective mental health (see Facebook). We exist in a world where we have allowed many companies to peddle falsehoods.

However, it's more than just about the lies. We are conditioned to accept most companies as benevolent forces in our lives. They are our family, a part of our team, and a member of the community. That is, until it's time to argue for our own self-interest. When this happens, we are not being a “team player.” We are labeled as difficult, lazy, and unproductive.

“No one is irreplaceable,” goes the famous corporate saying. “So stop complaining,” goes the part unsaid. The sense of powerlessness and groupthink many firms perpetuate is strikingly similar to Lumen, even if they can’t trap most people in a room and torture them into compliance (that’s just something most of us “choose” to do).

Furthermore, many of these companies are centered on a charismatic CEO or founder. From Jeff Bezos to Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, we worship the words and opinions of these men. We praise people for “creating” these companies while simultaneously ignoring the many workers who helped build them up. You could swap Kier out for any of these men, and the effect would be the same, albeit far closer to home.

These firms have constructed entire realities that are just as religious as Lumens. That “divinely discontented” line I pulled from the beginning came from a 2021 letter Amazon prepared for shareholders about how they live to serve their customers. It was not the only line in that document that rang some Lumen-sized alarm bells. Referencing a quote from the Foo Fighters song “Congregation,” the letter preaches:

“When you invent, you come up with new ideas that people will reject because they haven’t been done before (that’s where the blind faith comes in), but it’s also important to step back and make sure you have a viable plan that’ll resonate with customers (avoid false hope).”

What Amazon is preaching here is a doctrine just as religious as any Church. The doctrine of innovation and customer service: one utterly divorced from the harm it is doing to its workers and the planet.

All that matters is the work; Bezos be praised.

A severed conclusion

In Severance’s season one finale, severed employee Hellie R realizes that her outie is an Eagan. She’s chatting with her outie’s father and Lumen CEO, James Eagan, who thinks he’s talking to his daughter. James remarks almost casually about pushing the severance procedure onto the rest of the American workforce. “Everyone in the whole world should get one,” he says matter-of-factly about the severance chip in a way that chills my very bones. “They will….They’ll all be Kier's children.”

We might think this statement is mere fantasy, but corporate America is not far removed from the religiosity Lumen depicts beyond closed doors. Nor is it immune to maliciously propagandizing people to accept its version of events. Many people right now probably consider themselves a part of Amazon’s family or Google’s community. It scares me just how much this show seems like a window into a possible future rather than a distorted kaleidoscope of events that “could never happen here.”

After all, corporate America has already taken our privacy and environment. Why not our minds?

Alex Has Opinions 5/10/22 Alex Has Opinions 5/10/22

‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ Is Both Beautiful & Frustrating At Once

What the multiverse-hopping epic does brilliantly and also terribly

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s dimension-hopping epic Everything Everywhere All at Once centers on an aimless woman named Evelyn Quan Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who runs a laundromat. Evelyn is unhappy with how her life has ended up — a life that seems to be crumbling at the seams until she stumbles into a vast conspiracy about a multiversal war. As Evelyn hops between dimensions, she learns more about the sides fighting this war and how they pertain to her life and her choices, both in this dimension and in all of them at once.

There is much to enjoy about this movie. Michelle Yeoh plays the various iterations of Evelyn effortlessly. It was breathtaking to see Yeoh morph from a small business owner to a martial arts film superstar to a chef and back again. Overall, the cast of this movie does a great job selling you its multiverse premise. I loved most of the elements of this film: the direction, the editing, and the score. There was hardly a misused piece.

Yet despite all of this beauty, there was one thing about this film that has really bothered me: its take on fascism. While Everything Everywhere All At Once does excellent care to tell an emotionally impactful story about a family struggling to find its way in the multiverse, its political message is less than inspiring.

So let's put on our multiverse Bluetooth headsets, and make our way through this exciting journey, to unpack both the beautiful and the frustrating within this brilliant movie.

The Beautiful

The beautiful and maddening thing about this film’s multiverse premise is that there are so many themes to pick apart from it: that’s kind of the point. You could talk about the immigrant journey in America, queer acceptance within Asian American families, the economic struggles involved in navigating America’s vast bureaucracy, the “what if-ism” involved in imagining another life, and so much more.

The emotional core of this movie, however, is about family. Evelyn’s family is in the middle of falling apart by the time we start the film. She has been struggling to maintain her business for so long that, outside of shouting at people to do what she says, she’s lost the ability to connect, clinging to passion projects hoping that they will make her feel alive. Her husband, Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan), is seeking a divorce (kind of) at the start of the movie. Her daughter Joy Wang (Stephanie Hsu) is in a committed lesbian relationship that Evelyn refuses to accept under the guise that her father (James Hong), Joy’s grandfather nicknamed Gong Gong, will not allow it.

We learn that these tensions are metaphorically embodied in the multiversal war that makes up the chief tension of the film. On the one side, you have the Alphaverse versions of Waymond and her father, who are in a vicious battle against the malevolent being Jobu Tupaki. This “villain” is an entity whose consciousness is fractured among the multiverse itself — an act that has given her Godlike powers to rearrange matter at will — and these two will do almost anything to stop her.

On the other side, you have, well, Jobu Tupaki, who we learn is the Alphaverse version of Evelyn’s daughter Joy Wang. This Joy was pushed too hard by the Alphaverse version of Evelyn, the latter who invented multiverse travel. Alphaverse Evelyn wanted her daughter to succeed, even at the risk of her own sanity. Joy’s consciousness fractured into countless pieces as a result. Joy or Jobu Tupaki now cannot handle being pulled in so many directions at once (a metaphor that can apply to everything from the distraction of social media to the disaster that is climate change).

Consumed by nihilism, Alphaverse Joy now wants to end her existence, and she is looking for someone to make the journey into the abyss with her. She has created a blackhole cheekily referred to as an “everything bagel” that she believes will end the torture of her existence.

From the perspective of an interpersonal drama, we come to understand that this “war” is partially a metaphor for Evelyn’s neglect. She has been too hard on her daughter, pushing Joy not only to hide a version of who she is, but to feel bitterly alone. Evelyn needs to learn how to be more forgiving and kind.

The movie's climax involves her being nice to a string of characters by truly “seeing” them, either through passionate dialogue or even, at one point, administering some hot BDSM spanking (you had to be there) until she finally reaches her daughter. The reconciliation Evelyn has with Joy is exceptionally beautiful. There was not a dry eye in the theater by the time we got to her delivering a poignant monologue about choosing to be there with Alphaverse Joy, the chaos of the multiverse be damned.

This film works from the standpoint of being a story about a broken family reconciling with trauma. It falls in line with the other movies released recently with the theme of adults apologizing to their kids (see Encanto, Turning Red, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, etc.).

From the standpoint of politics, however, well…

The Frustrating

As we stated earlier, this film is not just about a family’s reconciliation. It’s also about dealing with political nihilism and fascism, which are two concepts that have a long history. Fascist leaders often take advantage of people’s disillusionment in broken systems, something we have seen everywhere, from the Nazi Party taking advantage of the economic desperation of the Weimar Republic to Donald Trump tapping into the dysfunction of the current US economy.

Jobu Tupaki is a fascist who leads a militant cult of nihilists who have responded to the multiverse's pointlessness by worshiping her devoutly. The hole of the “everything bagel” has become their official symbol. They wear white, flowing robes in the Alphaverse to harken to religious movements like the Catholic Church or Mormonism. In the first act of the film, the Alphaverse version of the IRS Inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis), a worshipper of Tupaki, even says to a group of terrified onlookers that their lives are made more significant by Tupaki’s presence. These people are fanatics centered on a cult of personality, which is exactly how fascism operates.

We don’t know too much about the multiverse war being waged by the Alphaverse, but we do know it has been brutal for that dimension. There's a scene where Alphaverse Waymond is chowing down on a sandwich in an office conference room, and he briefly mentions how the war in his dimension destroyed all the cattle there.

We also see worshipers of Tupaki being unperturbed with killing various people within this timeline. The Alphaverse Deirdre had no problem snapping the neck of one iteration of Evelyn. Tupaki even kills several “innocent” security officers in a magnificent scene where she rearranges the matter around them until they die (seriously, the editing in this scene is fantastic). These are dangerous people who have enacted countless cruelties onto the indifferent multiverse — all because they cannot handle the gravity of their insignificance.

And so, while this film is beautiful from the perspective of a family coping with their drama, its approach to ending Tupaki’s regime (and dealing with the nihilism it's rooted in) has me feeling conflicted. We never have to grabble with all the pain she has caused, feeding into the same indifferent nihilism that the movie seems to be criticizing. If we are supposed to care about our place in the universe, shouldn’t we care about the lives lost here?

Then there's the film's climax, where Evelyn has to face down a group of Alphaverse goons on the sides of Alphaverse Waymond Wang and Alphaverse Gong Gong. Evelyn has to get past them to stop Jobu Tupaki (AKA her daughter) from killing herself via “the everything bagel,” and as we have already mentioned, she does this by “being kind” to all the people in her way.

The fact the solution to dismantling a fascist regime boils down to Evelyn’s husband begging her to “be kind” sends all the wrong signals. I feel like I am seeing the movie version of one of those “kindness is everything” yard signs. It is condescending and paternalistic to suggest that the nihilism plaguing Millenials and Gen Zers — who Joy is a partial stand-in for— should be handled with kindness. The focus should instead be on solving the problems that make the younger generations depressed and hopeless (e.g., wealth inequality, climate change, etc.).

This one scene turns a transcendent emotional journey about family drama into one I am very conflicted about. No, Waymond, our problems are not our lack of kindness for the bad people in the world. Sadly sometimes fascists and other terrible people need to be dealt with through force. We didn’t defeat the Nazis by telling them they matter and giving them a good consensual spanking. We had to use guns and fists, and the refusal to acknowledge this fact makes this narrative messy.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is not the only piece of media to fall into this trap. The show Steven Universe is also about a magical person who stops a galaxy-spanning, fascist empire by showing kindness to those on top. You see this theme resurface a lot in the fantasy genre. This is a common problem in liberal media, where kindness is shown as the antidote for larger, systemic problems, but it doesn't make this climax any less frustrating.

Gen Z doesn’t need paternalistic kindness. They need people to give a shit and start fighting — and not just with hugs.

Both At Once

When I look back at this film, I see two emotional truths. On the one hand, I see a movie about a mother reconciling with her queer daughter and distant husband, and I want to weep tears of joy. We are getting this beautiful story of kindness and redemption, and it makes me happy to know that it exists.

On the other, I see the story of a fascist empire being neatly dismantled through acts of kindness and compassion, and it immediately pulls me out of the first story. I want to scream at the naive arrogance of pushing for this type of message in 2022 when most countries are teetering on fascism.

Mostly, I feel both of them at once, and maybe that's okay. Perhaps it's enough to take the good from a story, criticize the frustrating elements, and then hop on to the next adventure.