Red, White, & Royal Blue: A Beautiful, Hot, Delusional Fantasy

Captured on Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios; Berlanti-Schechter Films

I am a purveyor of trashy media. It may surprise people to know, but I love bad films. I am obsessed not only with indie titles but also with reality television, anime, and, of course, romantic comedies (Rom-coms). I grew up on a diet of Sleepless in Seattle and Moonstruck as a kid, and I have not stopped watching such titles now (shout out To All the Boys I've Loved Before).

Red, White, & Royal Blue is the quintessentially RomCom. Based on the book by Casey McQuiston of the same name, it is about the steamy love affair between a member of the British royal family (the second in line to the throne, or the "spare"), Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), and the son of the American president Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez). It follows the typical enemies-to-lovers trope as these two gays who thoroughly dislike each other learn to like and finally love one another.

It's refreshing that we are finally at the stage in the pop culture landscape where a gay rom-com can come onto the scene and not create a vicious media cycle, but the movie, although a fantasy, had some frustrating politics that I believe are worth diving into. And so let's don our royal apparel and cut to the chase, shall we?

Leaning into the fantasy

Politics in RomComs are often the backdrop for the romance, and that's fine, expected even, but that doesn't mean that the texts themselves do not have political messages in them, and Red, White, & Royal Blue wears its messaging on its sleeve. One of the film's central ideas is that the political office of the presidency and American politics, more generally, can be an institution for good. As Alex Claremont-Diaz tells Henry of politics during a bit of pillow talk: "To devote your life to helping others? To know that what you do has a meaningful impact on people's lives? I know it's my life's work."

Alex believes that working in politics is a net good. This perspective may seem naive to some, and his mother, the president (Uma Thurman), tells Alex off for it, but it is never disproven by the text. Alex's idealism ends up being validated in the narrative. He idealistically pushes for a new strategy to win Texas for his mother and succeeds. The thrill of the movie is leaning into the fantasy that this institution can be a force for good (if we fight for it) and that idealism can be enough to push us through.

That is an interesting perspective, but is the presidency indeed a force for good, especially when, in the current era, the biggest argument for voting is not usually the institution's benevolence but "harm reduction" and voting for "the lesser of two evils? Just this year alone, President Biden's administration has actively supported over half a dozen military conflicts — not all of them possible to frame as "good."

It's not that people cannot be helped at the margins with a presidential win. You are reading the words of a trans person. I am painfully aware that my access to medication and other fundamental rights depends on the outcomes of elections, but I would never say that I see the office of the presidency as a whole as good. Regardless of who gets elected, many bad things will continue to happen on our border, with our environment, and in our markets, and that's just the reality.

I think texts like Red, White, & Royal Blue try to ignore that complicated reality so we can lean into the fantasy of young idealism being able to "change the system" from within, and I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing. Alex may be fighting for something, but because he is so confident of the goodness of his actions, he never really has time to assess if he is devoting his time to someone who deserves it. His mom is just so nice, after all. She's getting him pizza after he comes out and monologues passionately about how much she cares for the American public. Why would you not want to give Uma Thurman Texas? It's not like we see her in the War Room ordering air strikes on Middle Eastern civilians (something that the president does in our reality) — this president is all cuddles and no bite.

And this whitewashing applies not just to the presidency but to the British monarchy, which I view in even less charitable terms than the presidency. There is a large thread throughout the film about whether Prince Henry can ever come out because of his duties to the crown. He is implied to be tightly controlled by his Grandfather, King James III, a man described throughout the film as cold and alienating. However, when he comes on screen for a single scene, he is played by the warm Stephen Fry. He may be stern, but he's also affectionate, worried about Henry's relationship more out of practicality's sake than outright bigotry (though he is still very much a bigot). "Oh, Henry, no one is suggesting that you don't deserve to be happy," he cuts in, "…The nation simply will not accept a prince who is homosexual."

This turns out to be wrong, as the public in the film does come out to support Henry's relationship, but it also places the burden entirely on the public. While the monarchy is a hanger-on from a previous era, rightfully worried that one long-term dip in public opinion will end their existence, it's not true that they are a passive institution. They have chosen a more conservative stance because that is the institution's overall disposition. As anyone who followed Meghan Markle's marriage to Prince Harry can tell you, it was often the monarchy itself pushing against that union. Markle allegedly received a lot of racist remarks from her new royal family, and the couple soon bowed out from royal life altogether.

Watching this film feels like looking at our world through a funhouse mirror, where bad institutions are recast as stifling but redeemable, given the proper representation, that is.

Representation politics

Red, White, & Royal Blue does not view the monarchy favorably, as all the characters believe it to be an extravagant waste. Still, the power of celebrity it wields is seen as important. In fact, even more than the positive nature of liberal politics, an overarching theme is that representation politics is a net positive by itself.

If we return to that bedside cuddle, Alex went on about how representation was critical, saying: "My father was 12 when my abuela brought him and his sister over from Mexico. You may not understand this, but in America, if you're an immigrant with a Z in your last name, there's not a lot of people in positions of power that look like you or sound like you. I've been given a chance to be someone in the world that my father didn't see when he was growing up." We don't know anything about Alex's political positions, but his existence in politics is itself seen as a positive change.

We could also look at the child of the Vice President, Nora Holleran (Rachel Hilson), who runs a nonprofit akin to Emily's List with the goal of getting women and femme-presenting people elected. We don't know anything beyond that, although it's assumed they have some vaguely liberal-aligned goals, but uplifting this identity is what is seen as good.

And finally, when Prince Henry comes out, people around the country rally on his behalf. He becomes an instant symbol for queer people everywhere. "Apparently, there are crowds gathering in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Liverpool," Princess Beatrice tells Henry excitedly.

Like the nature of the presidency, the existence of queer, brown, and femme people in levers of power alone is seen as a net good, and I really want to push back against this idea. Minority leaders are elected all the time who are detrimental to those same groups they come from. Eric Adams is a Black mayor, and his tough-on-crime approach has hardly been a boon for New York City. The same goes for Muriel Bowser and a host of other diverse (i.e., nonwhite, cis, and male) politicians.

We don't need to go far from the direct parallels in this film to further this point. Emily's List is a PAC devoted to electing Democratic pro-choice women into office (similar to character Nora Holleran's nonprofit). Its name comes from the phrase "Early Money Is Like Yeast," in reference to getting money to pro-choice women candidates early in their races so they can build momentum. However, Emily's List has become a de facto benchmark for high-spending donors, arguably defeating its entire purpose of getting money to many candidates early as by the time they "prove" themselves to be worthy of the endorsement, it is already well past the time it would act "like yeast." This leads to a political ecosystem where the women who secure Emily's List's endorsement tend to be better at raising money already and consequently more conservative (at least in the context of democratic politics).

Emily's List has also been criticized in recent years for its electoral strategy of valuing one issue over other intersecting ones that also affect women. For example, the organization only stopped supporting Kristen Sinema in 2022 for her refusal to overturn the filibuster, despite her rightward turn being obvious well before then. They supported her (and a lot of other more conservative Democrats) because she was outwardly pro-choice. Other groups, such as the Matriarch nonprofit, have emerged in response to such criticisms with the explicit goal of electing working-class women. There has been a general push to take a more holistic approach to who should be elected into office.

I bring this up because it’s the same perspective I see with Red, White, & Royal Blue. It’s a movie that has not challenged the structure of anything it’s talking about, either politically or narratively. It argues that you instead need to coopt the structures around you to change them. When director Matthew López sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss this film, he pointed out this fact directly, saying:

“If we see romantic comedies that have people who are like Alex in it — and are like Henry — if we can really mess with the DNA of what Hollywood bread and butter looks like in terms of storytelling and take those things and turn them into something that looks exactly like it used to but also not at all what it used to? This film’s structure is such a classic structure. We haven’t done anything to the superstructure of the romantic comedy at all. It’s still built the same way, is still the same architectural design. But you’re making an entirely new building that looks different and that is used differently by different people….We have the opportunity, we have the right, and we have the ability to make people feel by taking those old architectural plans and making our own buildings from them.”

López is essentially making "the seat out the table argument." You get social minorities and other stigmatized groups into the halls of power, and positive change is bound to happen.

However, as we have already discussed, that is only half the battle. It's all well and good to be inspired by someone's identity (I know I am all the time), but politically, the ideologies and preferences these candidates hold still matter. I don't care if a person with my identity is representing an awful institution on behalf of an awful party. In a candidate, we should want more than a shared social identity; we also should want them to fight for our rights; otherwise, there is no point to them.

A Royal Conclusion

Red, White, & Royal Blue is undeniably a cute and heartwarming movie that captures the essence of a romantic comedy. The film features a cast of lovable characters, from the witty and passionate Alex Claremont-Diaz to the precocious yet sweet Prince Henry. Their on-screen chemistry, as well as the evolution of their relationship, was a delight to watch.

However, the film presents a romantic and idealized vision of politics that may be appealing but overlooks the complexities of real-world institutions in favor of a more saccharine ideal of representation. While the film celebrates the idea that politics can be a force for good and that representation matters, it fails to critically examine the inherent flaws within these perspectives when you don't also factor in power dynamics such as classicism.

While fantasies may be a treat, there is only so much sugar you can put on a cake with a bitter base.

As a Trans Person, I Don't Think Conservatives See Me As Human

Photo by Mercedes Mehling on Unsplash

I have spent a lot of time online defending my existence as a queer person. I have examined the history, biology, philosophy, and more of what it means to be a queer person: all in the hope that others realize that I and the other members of my community are humans deserving of empathy and respect.

While some people have come away with greater understanding, I have noticed a disturbing trend where none of the arguments I present sink in because many conservative critics don't see me as human. Where rights such as equality and freedom might appeal, in the context of another person, I find they don't work with many conservatives when it comes to me because there is a lack of an essential empathetic connection.

Moving the goalpost

I want to back up and explain what I mean here. It should be noted that my definition of conservatism is largely US-centric, where it has morphed into a proto-fascist (and increasingly an actual fascist) movement based on a desire not only to conserve the status quo but to return to a time that never existed. Conservatism has always been susceptible to authoritarianism and fascism, but things have exacerbated to the point where I don't think one can seriously claim that American conservatism is not actively fascist. As Thomas Palley writes for the Political Economy Research Institute Journal in their piece Proto-Fascism Unleashed: How the Republican Party Sold its Soul and Now Threatens Democracy:

“The driving force behind the U.S. drift to fascism has been a Faustian bargain made by the old guard Republican elite which is now being dismembered by Trump. That dismemberment is the payback which the old guard thought it would never have to make. The bargain had Republicans pandering to prejudice by pushing “red meat” politics that advocated nationalism, xenophobia, racism, abolition of abortion, and white conservative cultural values. In return, they got votes that enabled them to push their agenda of tax cuts plus a deregulated economy favorable to business and profits.

For almost forty years, beginning with the folksy charm of Ronald Reagan, the old guard persistently fed its political base that diet. And for forty years the formula worked, with Republicans setting the U.S. political agenda as evidenced in bi-partisan support for both the neoliberal economic policy regime and the neocon foreign policy regime.

As with Faust, the bargain eventually came due...The old guard only broke more substantively with Trump after the January 6, 2021 insurrection. However, by then it was too late as the old guard no longer controlled the Republican Party, whose base had been transformed by the forty year “red meat” diet. Instead, the base now swore allegiance to Trump, in whom they see an alter-ego with which they can wholly identify: a rich vulgar billionaire, a transgressor (e.g. p*ssy grabber and conman) who gets away with it, and a demagogic amoralist who is willing to deliver the punitive intolerant social and cultural agenda they want.”

The conservative movement-at-large wants to return to that mythical time of cultural perfection, back when America was supposedly great, and it's obvious my queer, trans, neurodivergent, depressed, left-leaning ass does not fit in that picture. The rise in anti-trans legislation across the country makes that point abundantly clear, even though I am sure there are some conservatives adrift from their party who are not anti-trans.

Yet, I think the rhetoric a lot of bigots use to dehumanize trans people is not always so straightforward. I will increasingly get into online conversations with people, and I rarely see a direct call to have me eradicated (although they do still occasionally happen). When I bring up that my rights are at risk from this rising trend of conservative fascism, these commentators will, at best, ignore the point. Take this one example where one user claimed that the trans issue in the current era is not worth being that stressed about, saying: "The civil rights situation for gay and trans people greatly improved in the 1990s. There are still some serious problems, but few of them are worth being all that militant about."

As anti-trans legislation builds, it is an opinion increasingly detached from present reality, and even when I take time to document that yes, there are serious problems worth being "militant about" (an exhaustive effort on my part), I don't get from conservatives an acknowledgment of that harm.

Instead, the natural counter I hear is a Motte and Bailey type of argument, where people say that they, of course, see me as a human being (i.e., as dehumanizing me would be the Bailey, the more difficult argument to make), they just disagree with my perspective (i.e., the Motte, the more defensible position). People are allowed to disagree, after all. Why am I being "fascist" about this? As one user commented on my article about JK Rowling: "Just because someone doesn't share your deeply-held beliefs doesn't make them phobic of you or of those you feel closely aligned to. It most certainly doesn't mean that they hate you."

However, when that "disagreement," which is a little more severe than people being mean online, is about something so fundamental to who I am (i.e., my rights), this comes off as a deflection. If this person respected my queer comrades as people, they wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the alarming problems we are pointing out. It makes it appear that these commentators do not care enough about our concerns, instead classifying them as "not serious" because they are not serious to them. We are just, at best, silly people with silly problems, and at worst, well, I am sure your brain can fill in the dots.

When trans people talk about our precarious position in society and that humanity instead gets likened to a differing perspective, "an ideology" that can be discarded, it is a type of dehumanization. The trans person isn't a person in this context but a worldview that can be challenged, and you don't have to look too far to see this argument stretched out to its natural conclusion. As Ryan T. Anderson argues hatefully in The Daily Signal of the alleged ideology of trans activists:

“At the core of the ideology is the radical claim that feelings determine reality. ….The movement has to keep patching and shoring up its beliefs, policing the faithful, coercing the heretics, and punishing apostates, because as soon as its furious efforts flag for a moment or someone successfully stands up to it, the whole charade is exposed. That’s what happens when your dogmas are so contrary to obvious, basic, everyday truths

A transgender future is not the “right side of history,” yet activists have convinced the most powerful sectors of our society to acquiesce to their demands. While the claims they make are manifestly false, it will take real work to prevent the spread of these harmful ideas.”

From the perspective of this far-right reactionary, an increasingly common opinion in the conservative movement, trans activists like me can control the levers of society to instill a tyrannical trans agenda but can also be easily defeated. This perspective is coincidentally one of the hallmark signs of fascism (see Umberto Eco's bullet point "the enemy is both strong and weak").

Men like Ryan move the goalpost with this rhetoric from trans identity being a mere "disagreement" to a sign of conservative victimization. Their work is reframed not as bigotry but as pushing back against "liberal coercion." This rhetorical strategy is like a funnel, where an attempt by trans people to document systemic discrimination (and call it out as such) moves from being labeled as a disagreement to then being classified as oppression caused by trans people — it is an argument that requires a basic removal of empathy to work, and it's not just here that it's used.

But the children

The classic counter-example to all of this is "but the children." Conservatives are always claiming to be protecting children in the trans debate (see the "groomer" discourse). Many conservatives have made the case that a child doesn't know the harm such an "ideology" poses. And so, they must remove trans people from the public sphere to prevent social contagion (a theory that has been thoroughly debunked).

This argument does not need much digging to realize how genocidal it is. The rhetoric of social contagion has been used by everyone from the Third Reich to the scientific racism movement of 1900 America. As commented by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention:

“The ideological constructions of transgender women promoted by gender critical ideologues are particularly genocidal. They share many features in common with other, better known, genocidal ideologies. Transgender women are represented as stealth border crossers who seek to defile the purity of cisgender women, much as Tutsi women were viewed in Hutu Power ideology and Jewish men in Nazi antisemitism. Trans people in general are framed as figures that threaten the wholeness of the patriarchal nuclear family as well as the strength and vitality of national communities, much in the way that ethnic and national targets of genocide are viewed as cosmic enemies of the perpetrator group.”

In making this case, conservatives are asking us to remove our empathy for the scapegoat they are directing their ire toward (i.e., trans people) in the name of protecting children. It is an ideology that is genocidal as it requires force to implement because that is the only way to remove a group of people.

Most conservatives don't care when you point this out because we are being told that "children's" safety always matters more. Yet overwhelmingly, it's not actual children being defended but the concept of innocence that children represent. In the words of the then-Texas attorney general about his decision to prosecute gender-affirming care as child abuse: "In Texas, we cherish all of our children, and we must do everything in our power to keep them safe — free from the influence of a radical liberal sexual agenda they are too young to understand fully."

This politician's view here is that children are young, innocent, and pure — too immature to understand their needs and desires. An almost religious argument is being made. We must protect things that are pure from corruption as long as possible, the argument goes, a concept that sounds more like the theological notion of "original sin" than anything else.

Despite claiming to protect children, empathy has been removed from them even here. Conservatives are not claiming to care for what individual children want and feel, as that would require ceding agency and empathy to some children who are transgender and want to transition. It would mean trying to understand their desires and taking them seriously.

Instead, many parents are being encouraged not to see their children as people with independent wants and desires but to view their wants as coming from malicious outside influences. In the words of Matt Sharp from the Alliance Defending Freedom:

“State lawmakers can protect children and parents from being pressured into agreeing to these harmful, experimental “gender transition” procedures by enacting laws that prohibit the administration of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries on minors who experience discomfort with their biological sex.”

We can see how, in the conservative case of transgender ideology vs. children, empathy has been removed from the equation entirely in this debate — at least, for all the people being openly discussed. What we get is a paternalistic argument using the idea of children as a cudgel to hurt a social minority, and the only people being treated as humans in that situation are the ones with the weapons in their hands.

Conclusion

Genocidal aspirations start with refusing to acknowledge someone's humanity and then using that denial to transform them into the villain. That has been the playbook for as long as there has been fascism, and I see it now with how the conservative movement is treating transgender people in the US.

Some people got wrapped up in this movement out of the admirable desire to protect their kids. It's natural to want to protect the ones that you love, but we should not pretend that that impulse has not been manipulated across history to bolster support for fascist and authoritarian regimes. One's need for safety should not allow them to push for the systemic discrimination (and, let's be honest, elimination) of an entire social group.

Even if we can avert the fascism solidifying now around the Republican party, we still have to recognize when fascist rhetoric is being employed — in fact, to prevent the former, it's vital that we do so.

Eugenics in The Guardians of The Galaxy Vl 3

Image; Captured Disney+

The Guardian of the Galaxy series is about a ragtag group of scoundrels ranging from a super-intelligent, trigger-happy raccoon named Rocket (Bradley Cooper) to the smart-talking, rock-loving human Peter Quill (Chris Pratt). These beings face up against foes that threaten the stability of the galaxy — all while making nifty quips and doing everything to the beat of a great music playlist.

The series has always been one of the more fun parts of the MCU for me. Set apart from the shenanigans happening on Earth (mostly that is), it has given the series more breathing room to do its own thing while still being within the MCU. It's not strange to see Thanos, Howard the Duck, and other fantastic elements here because we are in space, and the realism of Earth can be set aside.

In the first movie, the Guardians faced off against an emissary of the tyrant Thanos called Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace), who wanted to destroy the space-faring civilization, Xander. In the second one, they defeated Quill's dad, Ego (Kurt Russell), a narcissistic space blob who wanted to remake all of creation into himself. The third movie, Volume 3, had a villain equally as destructive but with motivations far more “sensible,” albeit sickeningly so. Like Thanos's ecological Malthusian in the Infinity Saga, our antagonist's actions are rooted in a drive that is sadly all too real: the desire to make all organisms in the universe biologically "perfect."

In other words, our villain is a eugenist — i.e., he believes in the purposeful breeding of "desirable" traits — and that seems like a dastardly motivation worth sinking our teeth into.

MCU eugenics

We first meet The High Evolutionary (played by the exceptional and scene-stealing Chukwudi Iwuji), the movie's primary antagonist, when he is talking down to the High Priestess Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki) of a subordinate race he created called The Sovereign. He condescends to his creations, claiming he created them merely as an "aesthetic experiment" and sees no problems in culling their entire civilization.

The High Evolutionary's plan from the beginning to the end of this film is to create a perfect race of beings and place them in a new world called Counter-Earth. He believes he can biogenetically engineer perfection through the scientific method and has created countless "experiments," including one of our protagonists, Rocket, in the process. As he says later in the film to Rocket:

“It’s our sacred mission to take the cacophony of sounds around us and turn it into a song. To take an imperfect clump of biological matter such as you and transform it into something perfect.”

His perspective is not subtle, and — I need to stress this because this view about evolution has been repeated so often that some actually believe it — it's also utter nonsense. There is no such thing as evolutionary perfection. Natural selection — the vehicle that guides what we think of as evolution — is the process of an organism passing genes on to the next generation to adapt to its specific environment. If its genes are "good enough" to do that, they will be passed on — it has nothing to do with what traits are "objectively" better. The belief that certain traits are naturally and absolutely superior is not an objective assessment but a value judgment based on one's own morals.

It's also worth noting that this pursuit of "evolutionary perfection" has been historically used in the real world to justify horrible atrocities in the name of "progress." The Nazis are one such example, as they conceptualized their social problems as being the result of "hereditary factors," justifying the implementation of the holocaust, but we can also point to America's homegrown eugenics movement in the 1900s. White supremacists used the theory to advocate for a belief in scientific racism, likewise claiming that eugenics would "eliminate mental illness, physical disabilities, moral delinquency, crime, and even physical illnesses." It helped lead to the passage of things like miscegenation laws (i.e., banned marriages between white people and Black and Brown people) that had devastating consequences on social minorities in America. To this day, there are still people claiming that eugenics is practical, especially with the emergence of the ability to live-edit human DNA (see eugenics fears around Crispr).

However, it's important to remember that eugenics is only ever viewed as a positive by the individuals with some or all of the allegedly desirable traits — i.e., those at the top of the hierarchy. If something is "desirable," then conversely, something else must be classified as "undesirable." And for those who don't meet the criterion for such desirability, people who are often sick, disabled, or belong to a social minority, then eugenics has been quickly used as an excuse to discard them (as the histories we have already mentioned painfully tell us).

We see this callousness embodied in how the High Evolutionary views Rocket. He was one of the High Evolutionary's many experiments, and when Rocket was no longer deemed useful, he and his friends were discarded. "Look at you," the High Evolutionary mocks to Rocket shortly before giving the order to kill all of the talking raccoon's friends. "As if you were cobbled together by fat-fingered children. How could you be part of a perfect species? You're simply a medley of mistakes we could learn from and apply to creatures that truly mattered." It's a chilling line that you can imagine coming out of the lips of a Nazi eugenist as much as a mad space tyrant.

Yet Rocket, despite coming from the near-bottom of the High Evolutionary's pseudo-scientific hierarchy, has an exceptional brain. He is brilliant, even able to solve a crucial scientific problem that has stumped the High Evolutionary. This brilliance from someone whom our antagonist perceives as inferior further drives the High Evolutionary mad with resentment. He becomes determined to dissect Rocket's brain, convinced that it will allow his experiments (which, again, are sentient creatures) to be genuinely innovative, while, simultaneously being unable to realize that Rocket's existence invalidates his entire ideology of evolutionary perfection.

Despite what the High Evolutionary may claim, the narrative constantly shows us how value can come from anywhere and everywhere. Another example is the Guardian Drax, whom most people on his team undervalue for having "lower-than-normal" intelligence. However, he still has knowledge and skills to bring to the table, such as knowing the Orbose language, a language that the rest of the Guardians are ignorant of and need to know once they reach Counter-Earth. However, no one on his team initially realizes Drax has this skill because they don't bother asking him for his perspective. When you automatically discard people based on preconceived notions, you lose all the skills and insights they might possess.

The Sovereign creation Warlock also falls into this camp. He was meant to be the "apogee" of his people but came out of his cocoon early, a little stunted. The High Evolutionary and even the High Priestess (his mother figure) believe Warlock to be only valid as a blunt instrument, but he is the one to save Quill from certain death at the end of the film.

Simply because someone fails to meet a person's conception of usefulness doesn't mean they can't have value in other ways.

A heroic conclusion

The film ends with a solid refutation of the genetic superiority the High Evolutionary clings to. He is not able to create a perfect utopia with his experiments. There is still crime and poverty on Counter-Earth because his arbitrary traits for perfection are not enough to fix these social problems that are more the purview of politics than genetics. The High Evolutionary appears stuck in an endless cycle where the "perfect" worlds he creates always fail to meet his impossibly high standards. So he razes them to the ground, ignoring that he, as the architect of these "imperfect" places, might be wrong.

As the Guardians blow up his flagship, Rocket decides to rescue not only the sentient lifeforms aboard but also the "pre-evolved" animals. He does this because he was once one of them, a pre-evolved raccoon, and this realization causes him to expand his empathy for all the experiments aboard. Unlike the High Evolutionary's fascistic myth of racial perfection, Rocket decides not to draw lines in the sand over what sentient life is valuable, and what is more heroic than that?

Mega Garbage Rafts, AKA Yachts

Photo by Viktor Ritsvall on Unsplash

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour." This is the tour for the lovers of all things morbid. Those who want to see some things that are a little f@cked up (an expletive that is indeed universal). We note the problematic locations, tools, and, in this case, transportation vehicles that contributed to species 947 or humanity's end on an insignificant rock called Earth in the year 90,423 XE (what humans may know as 2XXX AD).

On this tour, we are looking at Mega Garbage Rafts, known to the primitives of Earth as "commercial yachts" [kuh·mur·shl yaats]. These were large buoyant structures used by members of 947 to traverse large liquid bodies of oxygen and hydrogen, sodium, and chloride that made up most of their planet's surface (see also the sugar oceans of Rhyzome for a more famous comparison).

With the exception of the glorious man-eating willows of Abba-B, sentient organisms within this dimension have typically used some device, whether mechanical, emotional, or biological, to get around. A vessel used to cross a liquid body only makes sense on such worlds where liquid surfaces are dominant. These have independently developed countless times across the histories of many species in our universe.

However, unlike more utilitarian vehicles used to transport items and people great distances for trade and travel, Mega Garbage Rafts were unique in the galaxy for primarily being used as a commodity for one single entity or procreative unit (note, for the gestalt consciousnesses on the tour today, human procreative units were often ten organisms or less). These commercial yachts could be pretty large — a minimum somewhere in the range of 30 to 50 feet — and the larger "super," "mega," or "giga" yachts could be anywhere from 120 to over 300 feet (note, one human foot is equivalent to 18 and a half quibbles).

These latter giga yachts could have dozens of crew members, not to mention all the fuel used to power them, and with that massive expense came waste. It should surprise none of our audience members, omnipotent or not, that these vehicles emitted many units of carbon dioxide, what we would classify as death chemicals, into species 947's atmosphere. As written by one insignificant human information outlet known as The Conversation:

“…a superyacht with a permanent crew, helicopter pad, submarines and pools emits about 7,020 tons of CO2 a year, according to our calculations, making it by the far worst asset to own from an environmental standpoint.”

It might seem strange that such a tremendous waste, both ecologically and materially, would be permitted for one individual's pleasure in a time of extraordinary ecological degradation, but you see, the extravagant waste of resources was the point. These vehicles were a status symbol for those in the upper caste of human society; individuals called the "rich," a type of entity very similar to the bone marrow leeches of Underburrow X because they, too, consumed the flesh of their hosts until nothing was left.

Rich people, whose social and political positions within 947's society allowed them to distort Earth's laws for personal benefit, had long stopped caring about their impact on the planet, believing they would be able to buy more oxygen when the environment was no longer habitable. Mega Garbage Rafts were the ultimate expression of this extreme selfishness. While yachts were often categorized as a waste of resources and many fragile humans from the lower castes increasingly came to resent the rich for these purchases (mainly because such opinions were grounded in material reality), most humans were loathed to destroy such vehicles.

For one, within polities such as the imperial United States of America [yoo·nai·tuhd stayts uhv uh·meh·ruh·kuh], many members of the lower caste suffered under the delusion that they, too, might be rich one day. Some even worshipped rich people, listening to their words like they were coming from the lips of a prophet. For example, economic parasite Jeff Bezos, who in the human-year 2023 owned the largest Garbage Raft in the world, had millions of humans follow him on species 947's worldwide communication system called the "Internet" [in·tr·net]. You don't destroy the garbage rafts of the beings you worship unless we are talking about the masochistic energy beings the next galaxy over (see the Xer).

Another reason people didn't destroy the Mega Garbage Rafts was because of 947's dominant economic system, capitalism [ka·puh·tuh·li·zm], which divvied up the land, as well as the materials made by the collective, into the hands of a few individuals. These individuals, the rich people we talked about earlier, often maintained their claim over such property through force, manipulating the legal system so those who violated their property claims were swiftly punished. The rich believed they had the right to use "their" property in whichever way they wanted — the social and environmental consequences of their actions be damned — and would make sure all members of the lower caste knew it.

And so most non-rich humans were often left with few options other than to guffaw at the absurdity. As fragile humans continued to experience the worsening effects of climate change, their harbors were clogged with more and more yachts of all kinds, which to this day are still rather pretty to look at in this dead world's toxic, green oceans.

A watery conclusion

For our trans-temporal visitors, when you go back to the 21st century, be sure to treat yourself to observing one of these pollutive beauties in the wild. We have provided some suggestions for Mega Garbage Raft manufacturers in the US so you can observe them at your leisure.

• Westport Yachts: 637 Marine Dr, Port Angeles, WA 98363

• Viking Yachts: 2713 Green Bank Rd, Egg Harbor City, NJ 08215

• Burger Boat Company: 1811 Spring St, Manitowoc, WI 54220

Remember that property laws were very contentious during this period, and many humans had primitive death canons on them to protect such property from harm (see A Brief Look at Death Cannons). It's advised that you navigate these situations with caution and set your defense systems to their highest possible levels.

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.

Loki Season 2 & The Dismantling of Fascism

Captured on Disney+

Loki is a show about time and space, specifically, the cost that comes with trying to keep something as entropic as the fabric of the universe in place. A variant of the supervillain Loki finds himself serving the Time Variance Authority (TVA) — the entity meant to keep the status quo that is existence chugging along.

The story of an entity that, by its very essence, is conservative naturally pushes the show to deconstruct authoritarianism and fascism. The TVA, as it was presented in the first season, is a very regressive institution. While that was not challenged much in the first season (much to my chagrin), as the second season ended, I found myself pleasantly surprised by its handling on this topic.

Loki not only gives us a look into the inner workings of a fascist institution but also shows us the day after fascism dies (and the stumbles it takes to get there).

When fascism resists the truth

The definition of fascism has been debated for decades. From newspeak to hero worship, Umberto Eco famously lists fourteen points in his piece Ur-Fascism. Robert O. Paxton gave us nine in Anatomy of Fascism. Roger Griffin defines fascism in a single phrase: "palingenetic ultranationalism," or a uber authoritarian rebirth of a time that did not truly exist. These theorists' components may vary, but most talk about a group concentrating power in an authoritarian, anti-democratic fashion, using myth-making and scapegoating to justify the movement's existence.

The TVA in the first season of Loki follows this template. The organization has created a hierarchical culture governed by a mythical trio known as the Time Keepers. Every action members of the TVA make is allegedly in the name of preserving the "Sacred Timeline," which is the base timeline the Time Keepers claim will be destroyed if the other branches are allowed to grow.

The organization preserves "order" through the murdering of deviations in the timeline, which, left unchecked, the TVA believes will destroy all of existence. This makes the enemies of the TVA not only ever-present but somehow can be killed with little effort, fitting the fascist concept that your enemy is both strong and weak simultaneously.

There is a lot of simplistic terminology meant to dull the senses — what Orwell might call Doublespeak. When a person or branch is destroyed, this is euphemistically referred to as "pruning." People slated for execution are not people but "variants." And, of course, everyone is judged in a sham trial with only one conclusion: execution.

When we learn the truth in Season 1 that all the people working for the TVA are the very variants they were charged with pruning from the timeline — men and women pulled from the timeline and given false memories — I found myself frustrated that many of the TVAs adherent suddenly abandoned the ideology they had been indoctrinated in all their (false) lives. As I write in The TV Show 'Loki' Gets Fascism All Wrong:

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

Yet the second season takes pains to make clear that indoctrination doesn't simply go away because "the truth" gets out. Braced with the possibility of a fraying timeline, a rogue general named Dax (Kate Dickie) takes soldiers to all the branches and "prunes" them, killing an incalculable number of people. General Dax does this because she is still operating under the logic of the TVA before the revelation, believing that the atrocities she commits are "protecting" the Sacred Timeline.

It was quite clever to show how organizations fracture when confronted with challenging information. Even when fascist people are exposed to the truth, it doesn't always do away with their brainwashing. The TVA is in the process of shedding its identity. However, that is a process more complex than simply flipping a switch.

The day after fascism dies

If the first season was a deconstruction of fascism, the second season is about how we move beyond it. The TVA is in the middle of an identity crisis as it debates how it should move forward in the absence of the mythology and leaders that once guided it.

We have three main perspectives on how to proceed. On the one hand, there is Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), who believes the TVA must be dismantled. She is a victim of the TVA, forced into a lifetime of hiding, and she wants it gone. "The TVA is the problem. It's broken. It's rotten," she tells Loki.

We also have those who want to preserve the status quo. This perspective comes from the genocidal General Dax as well as regime holdouts such as Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Miss Minutes (Tara Strong). They want the TVA to return to what it was before (at least initially).

Finally, we have the perspective of Loki himself, who spends most of this season trying to prevent the TVA from falling apart. He holds the reformist perspective. He wants the institution to change, not be abolished. As Loki tells Sylvie: "Sure. Burn it down. Easy. Annihilating is easy. Razing things to the ground is easy. Trying to fix what is broken is hard. Hope is hard."

I was worried that when Season 2 resumed, the narrative would come down hard on Sylvie, and we would get a frustrating plotline where her decision to kill He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) is depicted as "going too far." Season 2's plot point of various branches of the Sacred Timeline blinking out of existence in the wake of He Who Remains’ death made me extremely nervous that Loki would have to kill Sylvie and reset everything back to the status quo. Indeed, the show does make a false pivot in that direction. Loki even has a conversation with He Who Remains, discussing this very idea, but that turns out to be a red herring.

The fight to preserve the TVA's dominance is eventually tossed aside as we learn that the device that allowed the TVA to create the Sacred Timeline — i.e., the loom — is causing this problem. When the loom loses the capacity to sort all the various branches, it deletes them. Loki spends an excessive amount of time in the second season trying to keep the loom operational because he's worried the multiverse will lead to a new war and, consequently, the destruction of everything.

Ultimately, he has to come to terms with the fact that he cannot keep this remnant of control in place, and the loom is destroyed. I found this to be an excellent metaphor for how you cannot keep the mechanisms of fascism in place if you wish to move past them. The phrase "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" has been used extensively in Internet circles, but I believe it rings true in moments like this. When you build a big gun meant to destroy worlds, realities even — and that is what the loom effectively was — keeping it around guarantees its use. The best thing to do is to let it die.

And yet, while the loom is destroyed, the TVA is not. It is reformed. They push for an incrementalist direction for what to do with the dying remnants of fascism, and that is an interesting conclusion worthy of reflection.

A mischievous conclusion

As the second season ends, the TVA still exists, but it has been transformed. The other branches are not only “allowed” to exist, but the organization has taken an active stance of non-interference. The TVA is now an observer who has committed to being a final line of defense if and when things spiral out of control: peacekeepers on a temporal level. The reform perspective has won out, and it's hard not to believe this is the perspective the show believes is morally correct, given that all significant tensions have been resolved.

Now you can have a whole other debate on whether you can "reform" fascist institutions or, like Sylvie says, you need to burn them down. Loki claims this is the easier approach. However, you can argue the opposite, as doing the dual work of dismantling an institution and building a new one is much more complicated than simply working with “what you have,” especially since “what you have” makes it easier for you to default to older, more fascistic patterns.

Again, we can go around in circles here, and that's a sign of this being a good narrative: one that makes you think even if you do not always agree. Loki season 2 tackled something much more challenging than depicting the black-and-white rigidity of fascism: it talked about its end.

Wonka & the Myth of Meritocracy

Wiki Commons: Marcus Quigmire from Florida, USA

The prequel to the famous Roald Dahl story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is about the titular Wonka (played by Timothée Chalamet) as he pursues his dream of being the world's best chocolatier, specifically by owning a store at the prestigious Galeries Gourme. Starting at the bottom, Wonka teams up with a ragtag group of outcasts to defeat the bigwigs who control the current chocolate industry.

From its special effects to its silly characters, this movie was fun to watch. The feats Wonka manages to achieve are downright impossible and yet feel emotionally real. Wonka is a fantasy where our aspiring chocolatier uses mythical ingredients such as bottled weather to make his candy. The movie is not meant to be practical, so it's perfectly fine for it to be impossible: that's the whole point.

Yet all narratives are trying to say something, even if they don't have the best execution or make unintended messages in the process, and part of our job as viewers is to imbue and debate meaning from the works we see. It's worth asking ourselves what this fun movie was trying to say. Not everything was sunshine and everlasting gobstoppers. When we examine the emotional core of this movie, we come across some interesting messaging that seems to uplift the very businessmen it initially lampoons.

The making of an entrepreneur

From a marketing standpoint, it would have been challenging in an age of rampant wealth inequality to tell a story that glorifies a wealthy entrepreneur without ruffling a few feathers. A lot of people are tired of seeing billionaires justifying their fortunes. If this had been a story about an upper-class or even a middle-class person building his financial empire, I am not sure that the child-like awe and whimsy of Wonka would still be there.

So Wonka smartly reworks the source material to add a tragic backstory, where none had existed in the books, to tell a classic "rags-to-riches" tale before Wonka was rich and powerful (the only stories about wealthy people Americans tend to like). Wonka now grew up poor, with only a single mother (Sally Hawkins) to raise him. He had to work hard in his young adulthood as a cook on a freighter ship to both learn how to make chocolate and gather all of his mystical ingredients. He is a hustler of sorts who has put in his time and is now branching out on his own.

On the one hand, the film parodies the hustle culture that Wonka ascribes to. The opening song literally refers to bootstrapping ("Gotta drag myself up by my one good bootlace"), a reference to the impossible feat of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. A phrase that has since been adopted in earnest by aspiring entrepreneurs. Wonka learns almost right away that this viewpoint of going at it alone is naive. He is quickly taken advantage of, losing all of his savings by the end of this initial song.

Throughout the movie, his efforts are disrupted by corrupt cops, politicians, and unscrupulous businesspeople. There is even a running bit where one of the main antagonists, Felix Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton), gags whenever he hears the word "poor." The villains of this movie are out-of-touch rich people and their aspirants, whom we are supposed to despise (and rightfully so, as they are awful).

Wonka, conversely, cares for the "poor." He charges a fair rate so that even lower-class people can afford his candy, and he ends up redistributing stolen chocolate to the community. He is a nice person, a good capitalist who is trying to help who he can.

However, it bears stressing that Wonka never stops being a hustler — in fact, his core demeanor and motivations never change. Even during his lowest point, he is still able to pour chocolate out of his hat and create an automatic laundry machine using dog-powered labor. It's not that he doesn't have barriers — he has plenty — but he's no longer hustling alone. He partners with a team of outcasts, primarily the orphan girl Noodle (Calah Lane), and there is nothing that he and his compatriots can't achieve with a little hard work. The hustle archetype has not been challenged so much as expanded. You can't conquer the marketplace alone, the movie seems to suggest, you need a team.

With Wonka, we see someone who builds his life around laws and contracts. He isn't willing to steal, even when at his lowest, and puts all his efforts into honoring his agreements, not just with his business partners but with everyone. He is honorable to a fault. Wonka is ultimately manipulated into leaving town due to a deal he establishes with the movie's villains in exchange for his business partners being able to get out of a bad contract. It's a deal Wonka would have honored if not for the villains breaking it first.

It's honoring a contract that ultimately saves Wonka's life. He and Noodle find themselves drowning in chocolate via a James Bondesque death trap devised by the devilish Arthur Slugworth (Paterson Joseph). Before meeting his fate, Wonka requests that these villains bring a container of chocolate to an oompa-loompa named Lofty (Hugh Grant), with whom Wonka has been feuding. This action would fulfill a debt Wonka owes. It's his only request — a feat that compels the oompa-loompa Lofty to rescue the trapped Wonka and Noodle.

One of the things that makes Wonka such a good guy is that he honors his contracts while the baddies break them. These corrupt businessmen have not only watered down their chocolate, lying to all of their customers in the process, but have used that excess chocolate to bribe the local chief of police so that they can shut down any and all competition.

They are nasty, unscrupulous, cutthroat individuals, and it's this perspective that leads to their downfall. The oompa-loompa overhears their decision not to deliver Wonka's chocolates to him (these villains eat them instead), and Lofty decides to rescue Wonka, saving our protagonist's life and sealing our villain's fates. Wonka promptly exposes the trios' corruption, as well as the crooked chief of police (Keegan-Michael Key), and we see the system immediately work for the young entrepreneur. The police act on the information and arrest the film's villains promptly.

With the barriers of corruption removed, the exceptional Wonka is able to rise to the top of the chocolate-making world — a nostalgic "Pure Imagination" sung as the viewer sees a montage of his factory rising to the surface: the origin story complete without any complications that would place our capitalist in a negative light.

A bittersweet conclusion

Wonka was, again, a delightful movie. It had a lot of good humor in it, and the special effects really do make you feel like you have been transported to a world where "magic is real" (also, side note, Hugh Grant's oompa-loompa character was the highlight of the entire movie for me).

Yet, despite making a few jabs at detached rich people and bootstrapping, it does not appear to be a text criticizing hustle culture as much as it criticizes people who do not honor the rules of the marketplace. What unfolds is a morality play where the hero is someone who respects the law (at least toward non-rulebreakers) and always honors his debts, while the villains are lecherous cheats who are not playing by "the rules." People who eventually are removed — a small hiccup on the way to a fairer, more equitable marketplace.

It's a nice fantasy, and that is all Wonka ever promised to be anyway. However, as we navigate a society where the Arthur Slugworths of the world are not just a barrier to the marketplace but its architects, we must reflect on how far from reality this fantasy is.

A Tumultuous Year: What Lies Ahead in 2024

Photo by Ross Stone on Unsplash

The 2020s have already brought with them so much uncertainty and heartbreak: the surge of a terrifying pandemic, the thawing of geopolitical conflicts thought to be frozen in amber, active genocide, and ethnic cleansing. It's hard not to look at the situations unfolding before us and not believe they will worsen.

While we cannot know precisely what the future will hold, we can make a few educated guesses. The predictions I have made below are not a definitive list (and I am sure a few of them will end up being wrong), but taken as a collective pattern; they paint a picture of the dark year ahead of us in 2024.

The Ukrainian-Russian war will rage on

This war has been waged for over two years. Both sides are significantly depleted. Russia has lost hundreds of thousands of troops and is loosening conscription laws. Ukraine has not faired better, losing hundreds of thousands more (in overall casualties, not troops) and about 20% of its territory.

If such material indicators were why wars ended, then this war would be over. Unfortunately, both countries appear to be bleeding out while waiting for the other's defeat. Ukraine is part of the United States gambit to deplete Russian military forces, and Russia has staked so much on this quagmire that Putin might be worried for his political survival (and actual survival) if he were to end the war without achieving his objective of holding onto captured territory.

Since the GOP blocked December 2023 funding over the border, some claim that a Republican Congress will kill funding in 2024 as well. Yet I see this as a larger play for border funding (and they'll get it). Biden does not want to lose Ukraine right before the election, so he will sacrifice a lot to prevent that from happening.

In the meantime, Putin will most likely wait out 2024 for his Hail Mary: the election of Donald Trump. The Republican Party and Trump, more specifically, do not appear to be as supportive of the War in Ukraine as the Biden administration. And so, Putin hopes to wait out the clock on Biden's presidency. If and when this happens, and the Republican government cuts Ukraine's funding and military aid, the Russian government will then pressure Ukraine to accept a new, smaller Ukrainian map.

The border will be further militarized

As alluded to in the previous section, our country's conservative attitude toward border control will become more entrenched. The US has been militarizing its border for a while now. The establishment of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in 2003, as well as a steady increase in funding for border agencies (and the businesses who supply them), have been pointing us in the direction of a someday locked-down US-Mexico border (at least for migrants coming from outside the US).

Yet I suspect things will get worse in 2024, in no small part due to the presidential election, which will incentivize more funding to border agencies and more troops to be stationed there. In the words of Mark Akkerman in the Migration Policy Institute on this funding increase:

“The United States has in recent years spent more money on immigration enforcement than at any other point in history. For fiscal year (FY) 2024, the Biden administration has asked Congress for nearly $25 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an increase of almost $800 million over the previous year and nearly equal to the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of Iceland. U.S. immigration enforcement budgets have been steadily increasing for many years, irrespective of the political orientation of the country’s federal government.”

As we can see, neither party has the incentive to roll back the decisions of the other. The GOP wants to militarize the border, and the Democratic Party seems largely indifferent to this. This status quo creates an incentive to increase militarization to score easy points and deflect criticism.

I don’t think the border will close in 2024, but I do suspect this year we will see the continued contraction of civil liberties for people along the border (both for Americans and refugees), which will have ripple effects for years to come.

It will be the hottest year on record

If there is one thing on this list that is a near certainty, it's that 2024 will be the hottest year in recorded history. Not only because climate change has made the last decade already quite hot but because El Nino (a meteorological process that brings warmer-than-average sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific) will increase that heat. As mentioned in YaleEnvironment360:

“Next year is likely to surpass 2023 as the hottest ever, according to the U.K. Met Office, which projects that 2024 will likely measure 1.46 degrees C warmer than preindustrial times, but could conclude up to 1.58 degrees C warmer.”

This process will lead to a year with stronger hurricanes, rising ocean levels, famines, and, as we shall soon discuss, lots and lots of refugees.

The heat in the American Southwest will lead to internal mass migration

Climate change and political instability will lead to a lot of people fleeing their homes, but I want to focus on the American Southwest (i.e., Arizona and New Mexico, along with parts of California, Colorado, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah) because I don't believe people have come to terms with how dire the situation will be there this year.

The American Southwest has been projected to be severely impacted by Climate Change. In 2021, the IPCC had an entire section devoted to the region. With poor water security, severe wealth inequality, increasingly poorer air quality, and worsening wildfires, the rising heat levels in 2024 will lead to a situation where many people lose (or are forced to leave) their homes.

While some states in the region, such as New Mexico, have low, almost flatlining growth rates, states like Arizona have experienced steady population growth. I understand why this has happened, as the cost of living there is lower than on the coasts, but as water and electricity become internalized into these residents' costs, this incentive will shift.

Indeed, we are already starting to see this internalization happen. The metropolitan area of Phoenix, Arizona, voted to increase water rates significantly this year (the same in Tucson, Arizona). Water rates have also increased in the last few years in Denver, Colorado, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. Other Municipalities, such as Albuquerque, New Mexico, are delaying increases despite the need.

I believe that 2024 is going to be the year the "shit hits the fan" for a lot of people in the region. And since America already has a very poor social safety net, many Americans in the Southwest, particularly in New Mexico, will be forced to move with little resources. Next year round, I expect to see very different growth figures from the American Southwest overall.

Artificial Intelligence will cause the further degradation of Google Search Results

2023 was a cultural flashpoint for AI, mainly because of programs like ChatGPT, where people could suddenly churn out low-effort content with less than 30 minutes of effort. It wasn't great content (mostly), but there was an abundance of it very quickly.

Google search results, at one point the backbone of the Internet, have been flagging for a while now. Unless you are very good at keyword searches, for years, the top couple of pages of Google have been SEO soup for most search results. This is because the economic incentive is to produce clickbait and misinformation. AI will make this problem much worse. As Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer write:

“In 2024, AI-produced dreck will find its way into nearly every corner of the internet. While most of it will be inoffensive and generally correct, it will get enough wrong — and cause enough frustration among those it misleads — that trust in search will decline.”

Yet the way that AI is trained might also lead to new problems. Companies like OpenAI set their AI on the Internet to learn how to do tasks like writing and image generation. However, now that the Internet is quickly becoming filled with AI content, it leads to a situation where AI starts training on more and more AI material, possibly leading to model collapse. As a recent paper writes (first coming my way via reporting from VentureBeat):

“…learning from data produced by other models causes model collapse — a degenerative process whereby, over time, models forget the true underlying data distribution … this process is inevitable, even for cases with almost ideal conditions for long-term learning.”

All in all, expect the Internet to be just a little worse in 2024.

We will still be arguing about a recession

Most conversations about economic health are usually framed on whether or not we are in a recession — i.e., a decline in economic activity that lasts for at least a few months.

However, that framing comes with some significant limitations. The National Bureau of Economic Research, the main trusted body in the states for determining such a thing, uses quantitative indicators such as "real personal consumption expenditures" and "industrial production," among others, to make such an assessment. The nature of tabulating and comparing such figures to past trends means these assessments are made after the fact. And so, political leaders have to act to stabilize the economy before a recession is determined.

Yet, as many Americans know, another problem is that indicators like "personal consumption" or "how much businesses produce" are not the best for judging their standard of living. Real wages in the US have been very slow to grow and, in some sectors, have yet to meet inflation or increased productivity. Other essential costs such as housing and healthcare have likewise increased, reducing many people's wealth generation. If you have to deal with these problems, it doesn't matter what the US's GDP is; you won't experience that alleged prosperity.

This creates a disconnect where the forces in power will bring up figures such as increasing GDP, low unemployment, and more as signs of economic prosperity, but that wealth is not felt by most Americans. These two sides are essentially talking past each other (often callously so for those focusing on recessions), and I don't expect this debate to go away in 2024. If anything, it will intensify as two different ideas of who the economy should serve come head-to-head during this election year.

Covid will be here to stay, and we won't care

COVID-19 defined 2020, and much like 9/11, I expect our geopolitics to be discussed in terms of a pre-COVID and post-COVID world. And yet, much of the country has gone "back to normal." Masking mandates have been lifted, and much of the initial measures have been rolled back with no signs of returning.

Yet the virus is still with us, and although vaccines have made it less deadly for those countries that have access to them, there is still much we do not know about long-COVID (i.e., the long-term negative effects from the initial respiratory infection). The virus may have already disabled over a million, possibly even millions of Americans (but again, we still don't know with certainty).

I suspect this status quo will remain in 2024. COVID will remain a persistent problem in the backdrop, but we will not pursue systemic remedies such as extensive air filtration systems and masking up while using congested public transit. Instead, our society will learn to live with long-COVID.

Elections all over the world will be very unstable

There will be 2 billion voters across 50 countries in 2024, and they will have dramatic consequences on the world, particularly the elections of the United States and India. These elections have authoritarian people running in them who have no problem encouraging their followers to use violence to achieve victory. We all remember the January 6th riot in reaction to the 2020 election, but that potential instability will not just be in the US.

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP party has long manipulated ethnic and religious tensions for political gain. While the BJP has launched an effort to increase its share of Muslim voters in the 2024 election, nationalistic rhetoric has still been part of the party's bread and butter. And with recent clashes in Manipur (a state the BJP controls), there is reason to be concerned that such tensions will enflame further this election season.

In Indonesia, according to reporting from the Carnie Endowment for International Peace, for years, power has shifted mainly in the hands of elites who first built their fortunes during the authoritarianism that existed in the country before 1999. Upstart Joko Widodo tried to challenge the status quo in 2014 but quickly became coopted by the establishment. He is now trying to use this election to make himself Indonesia's new kingmaker, and that comes with the possibility of high tensions.

From Mexico to the European Union, many pieces are on the board this year. And yes, the US election (a Trump-Biden matchup) will be one of them, and it is expected to be very messy. The election denialism of 2020 has not gone away (if anything, it's hardened with Trump's base). It feels terrible to say, but expect at least one attempt of a US-based terrorist attack motivated by the 2024 US election.

Military conflicts will escalate in 2024

There is no other way to say it: 2024 will worsen military conflicts. 2023 was already pretty bad, with many (though not all) parts of the African continent engulfed in conflict (see Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, etc.). Elsewhere, there was also the Ukrainian-Russian War, the hostilities in Palestine, and many more.

I suspect some of these conflicts will expand, even as new ones burst onto the scene. The more prominent tension is in Palestine. The Israeli government is currently committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and that has eaten away at much of its international goodwill, jeopardizing support for the first time in decades. Israel is also currently engaged in border skirmishes with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which have the genuine potential to spill out into a regional war, forcing the country to deploy troops on multiple fronts.

Another contentious region is Haiti. Groups have been sounding the alarm here for a while. The economically impoverished country has been struggling with famine and criminal activity (two interrelated issues), and now that entire swaths of the capital, Port-au-Prince, have been captured by gangs, this violence risks increasing into an informal Civil War.

We could spend here all day listing and recapping geopolitical situations potentially spiraling into war, civil war, or genocide. You might also want to check out Guatemala, the cartel skirmishes in Mexico, and possibly even Taiwan.

TL; DR

The year ahead will be a rough one. From the deteriorating Internet to terrible heat waves, every aspect of life is expected to get a little bit harder in 2024.

It might seem like things are hopeless, but I genuinely don't think so. Yes, the current political regime has failed us, and these problems unfolding are the fruits of that failure. However, there is still time to change course. We do not need to live in a world of constant war, famine, and political instability. These are political choices.

But to change things, first, we must accept the world around us as it is.

ExxonMobil's "Let's Deliver" Commercials Are Malicious Propaganda

Captured; ExxonMobil YouTube

Recently, ExxonMobil has been putting out these ads that tout its efforts to "reduce" emmissions. The one I always see is of a woman of color standing in front of a backdrop of gas refineries and saying, "Heavy industry with low emissions. Let's deliver." Sometimes, the ad will be longer and tout solutions such as carbon capture and clean energy from "hydrogen" (e.g., usually by using methane).

These ads imply that this company is trying to do something to combat the worsening of climate change. Yet, given this company’s historical (and current efforts) to deny the full extent of climate change, we must view them with heavy skepticism. ExxonMobil is not trying to "save the planet" but perpetuating a form of greenwashing propaganda, and today, I wanted to explain the reasons why this is the case.

A brief breakdown of what this jargon means

Since this company's propaganda relies on using complex terms that people may or may not understand, we must explain what ExxonMobil means by words like "clean" hydrogen and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) (note: if you already know all this stuff, skip to the next section).

CCS means pulling carbon at the point of emission and then storing it somewhere, usually underground. It is not to be confused with Direct Air Capture (DAC), a technology that theoretically pulls Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere. ExxonMobil is not touting Direct Carbon Capture because the technology has yet to be deemed feasible on a widespread scale (who knows if it ever will be). However, the company most likely benefits from people's confusion between these two terms.

When ExxonMobil is talking about "clean" hydrogen, it is advocating for using fossil fuels such as natural gas (i.e., methane) to produce hydrogen, the latter of which the Department of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (a subdivision of the US Department of Energy) claims "…is a clean fuel that, when consumed in a fuel cell, produces only water." Water is, after all, a much better byproduct than CO2.

However, while this consumption is better, emissions are still involved if you use fossil fuels to create that hydrogen. This is where Carbon Capture and Storage is supposed to come in. Since CCS is used to allegedly store the majority of the Carbon Dioxide underground when the fossil fuels are used to create hydrogen fuel cells, less CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere (again, allegedly) — hence the tagline "heavy industry with low (not no) emissions." ExxonMobil is trying to make the case that with these few tweaks, they will be able to curb the majority of their carbon emmissions (by 2050).

Now, you can create hydrogen with renewables through separate processes, but that's different from what ExxonMobil is advocating for. They are trying to claim that the fossil fuel industry can be retooled to be "green," and their claim very much depends on whether Carbon Capture and Storage, as well as Clean Hydrogen, will work as advertised.

F@cking with methane is a bad idea

It needs stressing that the substances ExxonMobil is asking us to rely on to create "clean" hydrogen are "natural" gases like methane, which, according to the EPA, has "a global warming potential more than 25 times that of carbon dioxide." We still need to extract it from the Earth, too, usually via hydraulic fracking (i.e., injecting water, sand, and other chemicals deep into the ground to crack rock and allow more oil and natural gas to come to the surface) so that it can be used in a separate facility to create hydrogen fuel cells.

Fracking, on a fundamental level, requires altering the geology of where it happens — you are cracking the rocks beneath the Earth. It is a process that has come under intense scrutiny for creating high amounts of pollution. Plenty of studies have indicated that the chemical substances used to extract methane can leak into the water table. Hydraulic fracking has also been noted to increase geological activity (i.e., earthquakes) in the areas where drilling occurs.

Again, methane is 25 times worse than carbon as an emission, and even if everything goes right with extraction (which we have already established is not happening), there are then problems with transportation. Methane must be liquified, usually via high-energy refrigeration (see “Liquified Natural Gas”), stored in a pressurized environment to be transported long distances, and then regasified at the point of origin. There are a lot of ways that process can and does break down. Indeed, the most common way methane escapes into the atmosphere is during transit. Millions of tonnes of methane are estimated to leak from pipes every year. As stated in one Environmental Defense Fund report:

“Natural gas is primarily composed of methane, meaning that all leakage from natural gas pipelines contributes to harmful climate pollution. EDF analysis, using the latest research, finds that U.S. natural gas pipelines are leaking between 1.2 million and 2.6 million tons of methane per year.”

Before we even get to the technology that companies like ExxonMobil are touting as the solution for climate change (i.e., so methane and other fossil fuels can be used to create hydrogen fuel cells), we have to contend with the fact that the entire supply chain to get to that point will be detrimental to our environment. It's quite frankly not worth the risk, and unfortunately, this is just one small problem with CCS — the bigger one is that the technology may just be keeping oil and gas extraction alive for years to come.

It might extend oil & gas projects

It's important to remember the history of CCS. It's not a new development but a rebrand of an old technology called "Enhanced Oil Recovery." Rather than capture gas byproducts inside a permanent storage system, one way these companies extended the lifespan of an oil or gas formation has been to reinject collected gases into said formation to build up pressure so more oil, methane, and other fossil fuels would come to the surface.

As the truth of climate change has become undeniable, this technology has been rebranded as the solution to the climate crisis, but it wasn't designed to do that. Indeed, most current Carbon Capture and Storage projects are Enhanced Oil Recovery projects devoted to extending oil and gas formations, not permanently capturing carbon. We have to assume that this trend will continue. As Bruce Robertson wrote in 2022 for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis:

“The [IEEFA] has estimated that most of the total captured carbon throughout history found its use in enhanced oil recovery — approximately 80–90 percent. Only a small proportion of carbon capture projects (approximately 10–20 percent) have stored carbon in dedicated geological structures without using it for oil and gas production.”

As things currently stand, rather than wrapping down overall production, Enhanced Oil Recovery has the potential to extend the life of oil and gas formations. The expansion of CO2 “storage” pipelines only makes that possibility more likely, not less.

We will still have to worry about leaks with CO2

Then there is the issue of what happens once most carbon is "captured" (keep in mind that even under the most theoretical of circumstances, some CO2 is still escaping into the atmosphere). In theory, the CO2 is transported to a storage site or an adjoining factory for reuse (this may have started sounding familiar). But if you are very clever, you might be asking yourself, "What happens when this carbon leaks out at any stage of the process?"

Again, one of the more significant concerns is that this technology works as advertised, but leaks are widespread in the current natural gas space. Are we expected to believe the problems already rampant in the oil and natural gas industry will not continue with the transportation and storage of carbon?

Pipelines meant to transport and store carbon can and have leaked. In one infamous example in Satartia, Mississippi, the pipeline ruptured. According to a report by NPR, hundreds had to be evacuated, and 45 people were hospitalized. Years later, respiratory and brain issues are still common. According to Anna Mattson in Scientific American on CO2 leaks from such pipelines:

“A study released in May found that carbon capture pipelines are more likely to experience small punctures than large ruptures such as the one in Satartia. Smaller holes release the gas at a slower rate, which makes them harder to locate. And a delayed response to smaller punctures could cause them to be deadly.

When CO2 vaporizes and escapes, it causes the temperature in the pipeline to drop immediately — a process [described] as “violent.” The escaped gas doesn’t ignite or dissipate. It moves quickly along the ground and can collect in low-lying areas, including small valleys and basements near the pipeline route. If a person in one of these pockets breathes air with a 10 percent concentration of CO2, they can fall unconscious within one minute.”

Oil companies often try to stress that the risk of leaks is small. Yet, when even small leaks can have such devastating consequences, it's worth wondering if this technology should be ditched in favor of other technologies that do not have the same drawbacks (see renewables and natural carbon sinks).

While leaks are allegedly believed to be low once they are successfully stored underground, there is the issue of the CO2 that escapes at the source. According to a paper by Yuanrong Zhou, leakage at both active and idle wells (especially the latter) is very common. As Zhou writes: "Based on historical information, researchers estimated an average of 7.5% of wells may experience continuous leakage, at about 150 metric tons of CO2 per year for active wells and 300 metric tons of CO2 per year for abandoned wells."

We can increase regulation in these areas to mitigate that leakage — something Zhou and most academics in this area stress passing — but the truth is that we will only know the leakage rate for these projects well after the fact. Implementing this technology at the scale needed to theoretically curb emissions will have all sorts of unintended direct and indirect effects we cannot anticipate. Again, it isn't worth the risk.

Little CO2 captured, bad storage

And all of this is before we get into the efficiency and cost of the current technology. While many CCS facilities are in construction, only a few have been completed for the explicit purpose of long-term storage, and the ones studied by third parties have often revealed less than stellar results. As the Center For Internal Environmental Law claimed of one example in Texas:

“The Petra Nova carbon capture facility installed at a coal-fired power station near Houston, Texas, in 2017 illustrates the failure of CCS to deliver meaningful emissions reductions and the folly of deploying CCS in service of fossil fuel extraction and use. During its operation, the CCS system only captured 7 percent of the power plant’s total CO2 emissions, well below the company’s promises to reduce CO2 emissions by 90 percent.”

The IEEFA conducted a study of 13 flagship CCS facilities and found that "Failed/underperforming projects considerably outnumbered successful experiences." That report also noted that CCS does not account for the majority of Scope 3 emissions —i.e., the emmissions created when the product is burned by consumers outside of initial production. As the report goes on to claim:

“It is obvious that [Carbon Capture & Storage] in the [oil and gas] sector is not about reducing Scope 3 emissions from the final combustion/use of gas. Rather, it is about minimizing production-related Scope 1 emissions from gas with excessive CO2 content.”

In essence, little thought and care is being placed into what happens to these emissions further down the supply chain.

The technology is also expensive because the markets for carbon outside of the oil and gas industry are small (i.e., outside Enhanced Oil Recovery). CCS is only being made economically viable via massive subsidies from the federal government, paying these polluters directly to store CO2 underground. These are subsidies that could be plugged into more viable renewable sources such as solar. "A dollar spent in renewable technologies will avert a lot more emissions than CCS will," MIT Professor Charles Harvey told CBS News.

We have to contend with the fact that right now, this technology does not work as advertised. We are being asked by the fossil fuel industry to roll CCS out en masse as the solution to the very problem the oil and gas industry helped cause, and doing so ignores the lessons of the last fifty years.

A gassy conclusion

Again, we are being told to preserve the oil and gas industry through the magic of Carbon Capture and Storage so we can use fossil fuels such as methane to create "cleaner" technologies. Yet the technology behind this modern-day alchemy (i.e., carbon capture and storage) does not appear to work, comes with high economic costs, and might even extend oil and natural gas production much longer than necessary.

While we need to switch our energy production to something greener, the natural question becomes, "If hydrogen fuel cells are so amazing, why not just use something like solar to create them?" If we must ramp up production for these things (a big if), why use methane as a middleman when it has so many drawbacks?

And, of course, ExxonMobil doesn't have an answer to this other than its existence. It has built its identity around fossil fuels and wants to keep the gravy chain going. But that is not a good enough reason to justify the continued mining of a highly volatile substance such as methane. A substance whose effects will be felt much more immediately than CO2 and will impact us not 50 years from now but in the present.

Don't let a self-assured commercial convince you otherwise. ExxonMobil gave us our precarious present. It should not be involved in building a better future.

The Strange Trend of Pretending to Have a Marginalized Identity in Movies

Image: compiled from movie posters hosted on IMDB

Stop me if you have heard this plot before. A character, usually a man, and usually a white man, is down on their luck. Their career is dead in the water for whatever reason, so they take on a new persona. They decide to impersonate a woman, and it revitalizes their career. They go from nobodies to stars almost overnight.

Or here's another one: a boy is in love with a woman who will not give him the time of day. He wants to get close to her but doesn't know how, so he lies about his sexuality to get in as her gay best friend, and, at least initially, all is well. He connects with her as an individual, and by the end (after a comedic reveal), they're dating.

There are a lot of films where a privileged character pretends to be a social minority for laughs. The character, either for prestige or romance, has adopted the persona of a less privileged person so that they can achieve their goals. Although the truth is almost always revealed to some (or all), they usually achieve one or all of their objectives, reinforcing problematic tropes in the process.

'They have it easier'

One trend we see a lot in these films is the misconception that stigmatized populations have things easier than more privileged people, at least in some ways. A common throughline in many of these films is that the role the main character adopts has immediate financial or social benefits.

In the film, Tootsie (1982), the character Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) is such a difficult actor that no one will hire him, but these attributes as a woman allow him to gain success (albeit because a powerful woman is at the helm of the soap opera he was cast in). It's not that he doesn't experience harassment as a woman (he does), but he is depicted as a "better" woman because his upbringing allows him to act with assertion. He loses that career after his "big reveal," but not after wooing the heart of the woman he admires.

In Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), a film about a cis-gendered man named Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams) dressing up as an older nanny to secretly take care of his children, the sexual harassment he receives dressing up as a woman is mainly played for laughs. And while Daniel may not be able to rekindle the relationship he had with his ex-wife, his cross-dressing revitalizes his career. He ends up hosting a new children's show under his Mrs. Doubtfire persona.

In Soul Man (1986), Mark Watson (C. Thomas Howell), a posh white kid, pretends to be Black after his parents cut him off so that he can secure a scholarship. He obtains this with some Blackface and little effort. Although the film does try to underscore the difficulties of the Black experience in America, albeit in a problematic way, Mark is still able to go to college for free for most of its runtime. He ends the film not by going to jail for fraud but by earning the affections of a girl with the "cool" pickup line: "How do you feel about interracial relationships?"

For most of their runtime, these films allow these characters to extract benefits for donning the role of a stigmatized population, and they end with either financial or romantic success. This outlook is false. Stigmatized populations do not have an easier time overall (a reality that is backed up in the data). If it was easier to be gay or a woman (or both), especially to be a gay Black or Latina woman in something like the film or entertainment industry, our lived reality would be much different.

Yet this falsehood is a real feeling that many people hold. For example, before conservatives were successfully able to end race-conscious admissions for universities via the Supreme Court case Students For Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, a common argument was that such a process gave Black and Latino populations "unfair" advantages.

Given the pervasiveness of this belief, even a passive reinforcement of this idea in films can be pretty damaging.

'It's funny & educational'

Another component is that these movies allow the actors and the audience to promote stereotypes against the stigmatized population in question. And since the people acting out these roles (and writing and directing them) are usually not from the stigmatized population in question, there is a certain voyeurism with how they revel in these tropes.

In a scene from Soul Man where Mark is invited to a dinner party, we see how the white family views him in their minds, and it's all stereotypes. For example, one of the characters views him as a "pimp" eating a watermelon slice. These are portrayed as damaging stereotypes but also simultaneously given extended air time in a way that feels gratuitous.

We could also look at Big Mamma's House (2000), a police comedy that tells the story of Malcolm Turner (Martin Lawrence), who dresses up as a Black woman to stake out the wife of a dangerous criminal. The comedy mainly involves Malcolm in a fat suit doing over-the-top physical humor, and it has been well-criticized for perpetuating damaging tropes, particularly the mammy trope (i.e., a Black-faced minstrelsy character of a fat, loud, cantankerous Black woman). As Ukiya C. Henson writes in THE MAMMY RELOADED: African American Men Portraying The Updated Caricature In Contemporary Films:

“The mammy is further emphasized in the trailer to [Big Mamma’s House]. It begins by positioning the film as an action movie involving two agents going undercover. However, it soon becomes apparent that the film is actually a comedy centering on agent Turner’s undercover stint as the plus-sized, sassy, and nurturing matriarch, Big Momma. The trailer also features the tagline, “It aint over ’til the fat lady sings.” This expression places even more emphasis on Big Momma’s figure and weight. Thus, the underlying meaning is that House’s humor derives from an African American male dressing as a plus-size African American mammy.”

Similarly, the movie I Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (2007) is about Chuck (Adam Sandler) and Larry (Kevin James), who marry each other to extract financial benefits. Hilarity ensues as they must pretend they are not committing fraud, and in the process, we have two straight men trying to pantomime gayness to prove their relationship. And while I don't care if two straight men decide to get married, there is something strange watching Adam Sandler suddenly having a flair for fashion the moment he has a chance to go out for a "girl's night." There is also a cringe-worthy "drop the soap" scene that, although it is meant to highlight the homophobia of Chuck & Larry's straight coworkers, goes on for way too long.

By taking on the aesthetic of a stigmatized population, these characters can act out the worst stereotypes imaginable while still having the psychic distance of "educating the viewer" on how awful these stigmatized minorities have it. How could the film be racist, sexist, transphobic, etc., when this privileged person is merely acting out that characterization to talk about how bad it is?

These narratives are trying to play "both sides" with how they depict discrimination and highlight injustice, all while giving space for the viewer to laugh at the stereotypes in question.

'They're heroes in the end'

Another aspect is that the film allows the pretender to learn about how awful being a social minority is, usually after simultaneously extracting all the perceived benefits, so they can swoop in and save the groups they are impersonating.

Tootsie has an entire subplot where Michael Dorsey, as Dorothy Michaels, pushes up against the misogyny on the set of her soap. She stops a man who uses his position to make out with women on set by publicly shaming him. She then causes a secondary character to gain self-confidence by being such a great example of female independence. In fact, in the movie, Dorothy Michaels becomes a role model for many women for being able to speak directly about misogyny.

In the film I Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, Chuck punches a homophobe and becomes a mini-gay celebrity. In one scene, Fred G. Duncan (Ving Rhames), comes out to Chuck after being inspired by his "out and proud" relationship with Larry. Their relationship gave Fred the chance to come to terms with his sexuality and "be true" to himself. These two characters are portrayed as heroes. Larry ends the film with being able to keep his benefits. Chuck "scores" a new woman, and neither of them experiences consequences for their fraud.

In Soul Man, Mark Watson not only returns the money from the scholarship to the person he stole it from (with interest) but establishes a new scholarship and pledges to devote his life to serving "underprivileged" people. He also literally beats up a white duo that has been making fun of Black people the whole movie and is "rewarded" with the Black woman he has been courting (and lying to) the entire film, deciding to start a relationship with him.

There is a level of entitlement that comes from these types of plots. Whether we are talking about false rape accusations against Black men or grooming allegations against LGBTQ+ people (or both), accusations of sexual impropriety are some of the first things to be weaponized against social minorities. As a trans person, I have been called a groomer by people since I transitioned just because I exist. And if a trans person were to do the things depicted in these movies (i.e., to secretly court a woman by dressing in drag), they would be arrested and then held up as an example of immorality.

Yet here we have characters actively lying in one of the worst ways possible — in ways that are arguably predatory — and there are not only few consequences, but often these characters are depicted as heroes in the text to the communities they have infiltrated.

A hidden conclusion

Since most of these films are comedies, a common response is to say, so what? Who cares if a comedy has a whacky premise?

But I find that excuse to be intellectually lazy. Art is a mirror that influences our perceptions of who we are and who we believe others to be. The better question to ask is what these films are telling us about how dominant society views stigmatized populations, and often, the lessons are not very flattering. We have characters who pretend to be members of a stigmatized population and reinforce harmful stereotypes for the sake of "education" while simultaneously centering characters outside that population.

And, of course, this situation is rarely reversed. Except maybe the comedy White Chicks (2004), where two Black male cops named Marcus (Marlon Wayans) and Kevin Copeland (Shawn Wayans) dress up as posh white women (parodying that subculture to great effect), you don't get a whole lot of examples where socially stigmatized characters get to put on whiteness, maleness, cisgenderness, and the like to “punch up” for laughs. It's almost always a subgenre for “punching down.”

Thankfully, when we look at the dates of these films, most of them started to wrap up in the late 2010s. The most recent one I could find was Adam in 2019, where the main character of the same name pretends to be trans to date a woman. That movie not only takes pains to stress how f@cked up this action is, albeit pulling a few narrative punches, but some viewers were so upset by the premise that the film received calls for boycotts before it even came out.

Hopefully, we can put this trend to rest as we go deeper into the 2020s. We don't need to understand marginalized identities through the lens of someone who is not that identity. A white main character isn't necessary to explain how bad it is to be Black in America. A straight character isn't needed to understand gayness. Let's leave the Sociology 101 course films to people who actually understand these identities, shall we?

The MCUification of Edgar Allan Poe

Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash

The Mike Flanagan TV show The Fall of The House of Usher is, first and foremost, not a modern retelling of the famous Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name — at least not only that. How could it be? The original short story was at most 12 pages.

For those unfamiliar, The Fall of The House of Usher short story is about an unnamed character coming to visit his sickly friend. Most of the story is about the mood — how Poe describes the decaying architecture of the Usher house and the deteriorating mind of its master, a failing Roderick Usher. The story ends with Roderick meeting his untimely end and the house collapsing as the friend flees.

Some of the significant beats remain the same in the Netflix show, such as a "friend" visiting Roderick Usher in the house (although the nature of the relationship has completely changed). Roderick’s sister, Madeline Usher, also tries to kill him. However, these elements are reshuffled to the point of being almost unrecognizable. Many components are also added, a major one being multiple Usher children, with the Usher estate being decentered to focus on this latter development.

Instead of a recreation of The Fall of The House of Usher story, the title is used more as a vehicle so Mike Flanagan can guide the viewer through some of Poe's greatest literary hits, all within one self-contained universe. If that sounds familiar, it's because it's the narrative template for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) — the property that has dominated the US box office for over a decade — and it leads to some complications.

A brief aside on the MCU & Storytelling

The MCU hardly needs an introduction: a retelling of the Marvel comic characters on TV and film where every story exists within the same cinematic universe. So, theoretically, the events of one story can have wide-reaching consequences within the next.

Some have argued that this is taking the season-wide arcs of television with seasons (or "phases," in MCU lingo) and bringing them to the Silver Screen, but it's actually more complex than that. Sans anthologies, television shows, although having wider arcs and characters, will still be loosely connected from one season to the next. If you have watched some of House or BoJack Horsemen, or whatever, you will still understand the gist of any episode, even if there is an adjustment period as you come up to speed.

Conversely, the MCU relies on a much larger meta, both within the text and outside of it, where subsequent seasons and sequels are entirely incomprehensible unless you have been following the entire cinematic thread. For example, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness cannot be understood easily if you watch the first Doctor Strange alone, but only if you consume the Avengers Infinity Saga, the TV show WandaVision, and the TV show Loki for good measure.

This leads to very structured and arguably stilted storytelling where creators not only have to factor in the beats of their current story but the larger beats of the MCU, as well as the narrative history of Marvel characters overall. You cannot merely do anything with Dr. Strange. The director and creator have to balance their work with the wishes of the MCU's showrunners and producers, as well as "honor" the source material.

It leads to a type of filmmaking where the text is constantly alluding to and referencing people and concepts either within that larger cinematic universe, will be within it, or could be. You see a character referenced in one movie, and although it has nothing to do with the story, it alludes to what is possibly coming down the horizon. It's storytelling that is first and foremost referential to not its own story but its metatextual brand.

Back to Poe

I bring all of this up because a very similar set of constraints was visible in Mike Flanagan's The Fall of The House of Usher. Most episodes are a recreation of a famous story told within the meta-narrative of Flanagan's Poe Universe (although episodes A Midnight Dreary and The Raven are both references to the same poem). In The Masque of the Red Death, the show is loosely recreating the deadly party of Lord Prospero (though in this retelling it's an orgy). In the Tell-Tale Heart, the character Victorine Lafourcade experiences the same general beats of guilt and paranoia for killing someone as the nameless protagonist in the original story. And so forth (although the episode Goldbug has nothing to do with the original story except for the name).

We don't get an anthology but a world where all these stories live together, so the Poe fan, like the MCU fan, can point to the references they remember reading. In some cases, this is done even when the narrative hasn't built up to the same catharsis as in the story, but it's done anyway because that's what the original IP did. We are honoring the larger meta at the expense of the current story.

For example, in the original The Fall of The House of Usher, Roderick keeps hearing noises because he accidentally entombed his sister Madeline alive. The noises he hears are real, and so when she tries to kill him, it makes perfect sense. But his sister isn't entombed alive by mistake at the show's end. Roderick mutilated her eyesight on purpose because he wanted her to be "like a queen." There is no doubt he did this, unlike in the story, so instead, the noises and sights he witnesses are now visions of his dead children. He feels guilt for the Faustian deal he made with a supernatural figure (more on this later).

But then, why replicate this dynamic with his sister at all? Well, because it happened in the original story.

The same critique is valid with the house collapsing at the end. The entire short story was as much about the house as it was about the eponymous Usher family. The Usher line is associated with the house in the short story, so much so that Roderick has not left it in years. Its decline is linked to him, Roderick's friend recalling:

“He believed that plants could feel and think, and not only plants, but rocks and water as well. He believed that the gray stones of his house, and the small plants growing on the stones, and the decaying trees, had a power over him that made him what he was.”

In the Netflix show, the house doesn't have this emotional weight. The Usher family is more concerned with the survivability of their company, Fortunato Pharmaceuticals than some abandoned property that only Roderick and Madeline know about. There is no storied history with the house. Roderick grew up poor and had to build himself up (and make a deal with a supernatural entity) to gain success.

And yet, the house still collapses in the show because it did in the story, and it just comes off as contrived. We didn't need the house to literally fall in the show because it does not have the same emotional weight, and unlike in the story, we have an entire family and company to play with. Their destruction is narratively enough, but again, we have to get the reference: the nostalgia for the property we have already consumed, the fall of the house of Usher.

Then there is the force tying these recreations together in the same world: the Raven from Poe's arguably most famous poem. We learn that the brother and sister, who in this retelling are recast as stereotypical "greed is good" business tycoons, made a deal with some supernatural entity (i.e., the Raven, a loose stand-in for death) to get a head in the world. The agreement is that Roderick and Madeline will bear no accountability in life in exchange for the lives of all their children.

This Raven entity, who has come to collect on the Usher's debts, is the narrative vehicle allowing us to recreate old Poe stories. She kills Roderick's children in fantastical ways because she is a fantastical figure. The first story (The Masque of the Red Death) reads almost as a morality play as the "depraved" bisexual trope Prospero leads to his own undoing by unwittingly dumping toxins on his partygoers, but many of the other characters die just because they need to: driven crazy because the plot is forcing all these characters to recreate the beats of Poe's stories. Because the Raven is making them.

And this would be fine if we were experiencing a modern anthology, but as an extended universe, it all feels a little pointless. By the death of the second Usher child, we know what is going to happen, and so we are just left with this push forward as we watch these stories recreated, regardless of whether they fit in the context of the world. The story was built to move in one direction, and that's where we are going.

A dreary conclusion

I can see the pitch for The Fall of the House of Usher: Edgar Allan Poe meets American Horror Story (another extended universe so similar I had to stop the screen and make sure Ryan Murphy was not an executive producer). We are given a story assembled from the loose threads of Poe, cramming as many references as we possibly can, including a partial recreation of the poem The Raven.

It's a type of storytelling I find enjoyable sometimes (I have watched most of the MCU), but must everything be this? Are we just going to place all existing stories within a cinematic universe where we must connect every reference together for the sake of brand completionism?

Call me old-fashioned, but I am okay with a bit of separation in my stories: only this and nothing more.

Downsizing: A Bad Movie About Capitalist Degrowth

Image: Paramount Pictures

Downsizing is a high-concept movie driven by a technology that allows people to shrink themselves down irreversibly to about five inches and some change. We follow white "everyman" Paul as he weighs the merits of the procedure and ultimately moves to a retirement-esque community called Leisureland.

Downsizing is not a good movie. It's tonally inconsistent as the film moves from a vicious satire to a deconstruction of those who slip through the cracks of capitalism to an existential treatise on the end of the world. The jokes start out quite funny, only to sputter into an ending that feels like it belongs in an entirely different movie.

Much has been written about the casting and acting of this movie (see Hong Chau's accent and, separately, Matt Damon's sexual assault and harassment allegations), but something I want to talk about today is how this movie discusses the philosophy of Degrowth and its incompatibility with our economic system.

Degrowth, what now?

Degrowth is an economic philosophy that claims to prioritize social and ecological well-being over the vices of our economic system, such as corporate profits, over-production, and excess consumption. Proponents of this school of economics argue that current free market ideologies fail to factor in environmental laws such as the laws of conservation and entropy. As written in the piece, The Economics of Degrowth:

“…economic growth of the productive economy depends on energy and materials, and on the availability of sinks for waste such as carbon dioxide. We see the building industry or car manufacturing as part of the “productive” economy but they depend on exhaustible resources. “The entropy law and the economic process” by Georgescu-Roegen (1971) insisted in the fact that energy cannot be recycled, and that materials are recycled only to some extent. Fresh supplies are needed, and this is problematic when we rely on exhaustible fossil fuels and on materials which are ever more difficult to obtain at the commodity frontiers….”

Most advocates of Degrowth are coming from the left because current market economies demand continuous growth, which is hard to do if you believe overall consumption and pollution must be capped and reduced. Downsizing provides an interesting counter to this tradition because its conceit — i.e., a magical technology that allows us to cut our emissions without changing our behavior— allows its characters to theoretically cut emissions while still operating within the confines of our capitalist system.

In the movie, the inventor of Downsizing, Dr. Jørgen Asbjørnsen (as well as the Institute he represents), investigated this technology to reduce emissions, believing that "overpopulation" was the main driver of climate change. As one of his comrades says during a Ted Talk-esque presentation:

“…overpopulation [is] mankind's single greatest long-term threat. The cause of all catastrophes we are seeing today: extreme climate and weather events and the devastating impact on food and water security…And [so] today, we are proud to unveil what we fervently believe to be the only practical, humane, and inclusive remedy to humanity's gravest problem.”

Several years after the introduction of the Downsizing technology, companies have emerged to provide downwardly living Americans the ability to downsize in exchange for a higher standard of living. It's advertised as a chance to save the world, but really, it allows companies to capture a significant amount of life savings from such individuals as these new littles live off the big-to-small exchange rate. Little people don't have as many expenses, so a little, the argument goes, goes a long way.

Yet, there are problems with this transition. As many current DeGrowth activists have indicated, the neoliberal economy actually can't survive an economic contraction. People who downsize are effectively taking themselves out of the economy or, at the very least, reducing their consumption significantly. This removal from the economy unsurprisingly leads to a social backlash. As an anti-small bigot tells Paul and his wife Audrey at a bar:

“…do you think in your that small you should still have all the same rights as the rest of us normal-sized people? I mean, like the right to vote?… You're not buying as many products; you're not paying as much sales tax. Some of you aren't even paying any income tax. You're not really participating in our economy…..In fact, you're costing us money and jobs….I think you should have a quarter of the vote at most. I think that’s pretty generous.”

This man's rhetoric is abhorrent (someone's citizenship should not be linked to their productivity), but he does underscore the reality that the current economic system can barely support a status quo in consumption, let alone a widespread economic contraction. Men such as Dr. Jørgen Asbjørnse may believe overpopulation to be the problem, but in reality, our economic system is what cannot be separated from the unlimited growth destroying our environment — Downsizing is only a bandaid to this problem.

Another criticism of the films is that even when this technology is introduced, it doesn't mean everyone will adopt it. Indeed, only 3% of the global population undergoes Downsizing by the film's end. Contrary to popular opinion, markets are not the best tool to get people to adopt a necessary technology in a very short period. If that were the case, solar and other such renewables would have already been widely adopted (behavioral changes require different incentives, and our system seems very good at sabotaging those).

As we can see, most people avoid Downsizing, and there are excellent reasons not to in the logic of this world. Apart from the cost ($7,500 a person for a downsizing procedure), the most obvious is the power dynamic between big and small people, with the latter being physically weaker and less dominant than their bigger counterparts. It's made quite clear that governments use Downsizing as a punishment against dissidents. We even see an example of the government of Vietnam secretly shipping dozens of dissidents in a television box, killing most of them in the process.

It's not easy being small and on the margins. As one character says of this reality:

“That’s the wonderful thing about becoming small. Because you're immediately rich. Unless you’re very poor. Then you're just small.”

A shrinking conclusion

Downsizing is a poorly executed movie, but that doesn't mean we cannot mull over its ideas. The lesson that capitalism won't save us — even if we invent a magical technology to combat climate change, it won't solve our fundamental problems — is an important one to consider.

To this day, there are oil executives and think tanks pushing the idea that we are days or months away from a magical technology that will scrub carbon from the atmosphere so we don't have to change our underlying behaviors of consumption and pollution. These cases are often overstated, but even if they are invented (a big if), texts like Downsizing call into question whether our current economic system will allow them even to be implemented properly.

There is no magical technology coming to save us, and we will properly have to engage in degrowth (willingly or unwillingly) as an act of survival. We ultimately don't need to shrink down to comprehend this fact — just a little perspective.

‘No Hard Feelings’ & The Cinematic, Double Standard for Female Predators

Image: Captured on Netflix

The coming-of-age comedy No Hard Feelings is a strange film. Its premise borders on the problematic, as a much older Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman named Maddie secretly hired by the helicopter parents of the character Percy (a recently graduated high school senior, I must emphasize) to have sex with him. The reasons for this charade are contrived (and that's okay), but throughout the film, I was very uncomfortable about this much older woman trying to "seduce" a nineteen-year-old (don't worry, he's technically legal, I guess).

The plot of this film thankfully moves us away from this angle, as Maddie and Percy fail to have sex and eventually just become friends, and the parent's behavior is depicted as wrong. Yet I was left wondering that if the gender of Jennifer Lawrence was swapped for a man, would we still find this movie funny? I don't think a lot of people would.

No Hard Feelings seems to tie into a double standard with how we treat female predation, and although I think the film's heart was in the right place, we still walk away with a comedy that trivializes male victimhood.

A Brief History of Pop Culture Downplaying Male Sexual Assault

There seems to be a double standard in film (and society at large) where sexual harassment and assault toward men are depicted as a joke. For a long time, whenever the concept of perpetrators grooming or raping men was brought up, a lot of people would make fun of it. "I roofied you on [two dates]," the alien character Roger from American Dad says to the high school boy Steve Smith, in a longstanding bit about how the character rapes any and everything, but mostly men.

One of the most pervasive myths is that men simply can't be raped because they all want to have sex. In an old episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, he referred to male victims of sexual assaults as experiencing "Lucky Bastard Syndrome." The movie Wedding Crashers had an entire bit where Vince Vaughn's character Jeremy Grey was tied to the bed against his will as another character tried to rape him — it was played for laughs (see also Get Him To the Greek, Get Hard, etc.).

And this dismissiveness is not only in media: legal systems all over the world have denied the existence of male rape, especially in the case of female perpetrators or perpetrators perceived as queer. Much hay was made in 2018, for example, about how England and Wales still had a legal definition of rape that was gendered, only recognizing victims of rape as those who are penetrated by a penis, either vaginally, anally, or orally. (see also Switzerland, Finland, etc.).

This willful ignorance of male sexual assault sadly even applies to young boys and teenagers from authority figures such as teachers and the like. There is an entire South Park episode aired in 2006 that parodies this grim reality (see Miss Teacher Bangs A Boy). A young boy is engaged in a sexual relationship with a female teacher, and when someone comes forward about it, the police are pretty dismissive, saying it's "nice."

There is also the contradictory belief that those who rape men are "sexual deviants," particularly queer people, who are often erroneously portrayed as the primary (and sometimes sole) initiators of sexual assault. In the words of Dr. Aliraza Javaid from the paper Male Rape, Masculinities, and Sexualities: Understanding, Policing, and Overcoming Male Sexual Victimisation:

“…the male rape myth that ‘male rape is a homosexual issue’ is highlighted in more recent research. Demirkan-Martin (2009) perpetuates male rape as solely a homosexual issue and believes that male rape is either incited by sexual deviance, sexualised aggression, or sexual lust/desire, instead of male rape being totally desexualised. This suggests that male rape does not affect heterosexual men and is essentially a sexual act, whereby the offender is unable to control his aggressive and sexual impulses.”

This myth is again untrue (queer people are more likely to be sexually assaulted and often not well studied when it comes to sexual predation), but it is pervasive nonetheless. We started this section with the alien character Roger, a "depraved" bisexual trope whose gender and romantic fluidity are intertwined with his predatory nature. This type of paring is common in media, especially in comedies, where a depraved bisexual is pushing the limits of his more timid and "stereotypical" heterosexual cast mates, many times nonconsensually. Other media characters that might fit this mold are Dr. Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror, Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Logan Delos in Westworld, and many more.

We can likewise see this outlook of deviancy leading to assault with male prison rape jokes, which are ubiquitous in pop culture. Whenever the threat of prison comes up, it's common in media for a character to jokingly bring up the threat of rape as an unavoidable aspect of this “deviant” environment. As Tony Stark implied to the character Ivan in Iron Man 2: "Where will you be watching the world consume me from? That's right. A prison cell. I'll send you a bar of soap," he laughs, referring to the widespread myth of men in prison bending over to get a bar of soap only to be raped as a result. "I am going to slather you up in Gunavian jelly and go to town," a prisoner says to Peter Quill, in a line we are meant to find funny in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie (see the "Don't drop the soap" meme more broadly).

These jokes are almost always directed at men, and the whole punch line revolves around trivializing male rape. As stated in the video Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs: "Men's vulnerability is an endless source of mockery in mainstream comedy and vulnerability that results from sexual violence is no exception…The idea behind the joke here is as obvious as it is toxic: that men who aren't tough or manly enough to avoid being victimized are pathetic and therefore deserving of ridicule or worse."

We can see how, historically, sexual violence toward men has often been downplayed. While some media and academics are starting to challenge these misconceptions, for the most part, it's not uncommon for our society to reinforce the idea that sexual violence toward men is funny, nonexistent, or, paradoxically, both — and that is where the film No Hard Feelings comes into play.

How 'No Hard Feelings' fits this trend

The movie No Hard Feelings takes a very similar stance, trivializing male sexual assault for laughs. Maddie initially abducts Percy. She goes to his place of work and pressures him into her vehicle. Percy nervously glances at the back of the van he's in and sees a machete and other equipment that could kill him. He starts messaging 911, and Maddie takes his phone. In any other context, this would be horrifying.

However, the way this scene is framed shows us that while Percy thinks he's getting abducted (which he is), the film doesn't want us to think about it too much. We hear not horror music but The Stroke playing in the background. When they get out of the car, Percy maces Maddie, and it's played as a comedy of errors. He tells her that she tried to abduct him, and she denies it, saying, "I can't kidnap you. You’re 19. Grow up." This statement, along with several other assurances, is enough to convince Percy, and he rushes to get Maddie a hose, which he, of course, fails to administer. Maddie's actions aren't depicted as creepy as much as funny and ineffectual.

I want you to imagine now that a man in his early to late thirties shows up unannounced at a 19-year-old woman's place of work. He tries to sleep with her in her office, and when that fails, he pressures her into his van so aggressively that the teen fears for her life. He offers to drive her home, a lie, instead bringing her back to his place, and then when the 19-year-old finally has the courage to mace her would-be assaulter, he responds: "I can't abduct you. You're 19."

Is that funny? More to the point, would that be believable (note this is your public service announcement that adults too can be abducted)? I am not the only one who has asked this question. As Claire Cohen writes in Vogue:

“It’s just all a bit tone deaf, isn’t it? And while I do think a predatory older man and a young girl has different connotations when it comes to the power dynamic and threat of physical violence, frankly I’m not sure a film about a young person of any gender being pressured into having sex after their parents decide that they’re “ready” is a feel-good “coming-of-age sex comedy,” as No Hard Feelings is billed.

And indeed, this movie does not feel very lighthearted. Maddie is very unstable. She has her reasons (i.e., being abandoned by her father and almost losing her house), but that doesn't change the fact that she actively puts people in danger. There is one "funny" scene where she doesn't let Percy into her car after the two have lost their clothes, and he jumps on her car's hood, begging to be let in, and she starts driving with him on it. It's, again, framed as a laugh-riot, and while Percy eventually gets to do the same to Maddie, the power dynamics of this initial interaction make me very uncomfortable.

It also bears mentioning that while Percy may be legal to bang (gross), he's emotionally stunted. The whole reason his parents hired Maddie is because they somehow thought that having sex would allow him to mature (parents of the year, right here). And so, emotionally, he's like fourteen. He doesn't navigate the world very well, and so his parents hiring this very mature woman to pressure him into having sex is just abusive — there's no other way to say it, really.

While their helicopter parenting is depicted as wrong in the end (although childishly so), that's not the primary issue here. I am not angry that they are tracking his phone and other such over-functioning — like I am a little peeved by it — but mostly, they arranged for their son to get sexually assaulted. That's what I dislike about them.

The film eventually pulls away from this premise, and Maddie and Percy become friends (in the last ten minutes), but again, most of the film is just Jennifer Lawrence's character very aggressively going after an immature 19-year-old.

A hard conclusion

The most disappointing aspect of this whole thing is that the film was trying to say something meaningful. A significant tension is that Maddie, a townie, is resentful (rightfully so, in my opinion) of the wealthy vacationers gentrifying her town. Her only significant friend is another working-class white woman who can no longer afford to live in that community and is considering moving to Florida.

There is even an intelligent lampshade where Maddie is complaining about this gentrification to a Native American, only to realize that yes, maybe other people do understand how she is feeling — a nod to the fact that although gentrification is hurting poor white people, as an attractive white person in a settler-colonial state built for white people, she still has many privileges. There is a better comedy movie trapped in here that talks more succinctly about the intersections of class, gender, and whiteness that I would have loved to see.

Yet, instead, we go ham on this very outdated gag about a cougar hitting on a late teen and there being no power dynamic because men love to f@ck. This film felt very anachronistic. We are in the 2020s, not the 80s. Can we accept that men, too, can also be victims of sexual assault and stop with this patriarchal nonsense about men being so "horny" that any harassment directed toward them doesn't matter?

As Claire Cohen continues in that Vogue article: "The truth is that it's this tired old storyline that has come of age — and should rapidly be put out to pasture."

Baldur's Gate 3 Is Very Anxious About Automation

Larian Studios

The videogame Baldur's Gate 3 earned accolades the moment it launched, dominating nominations for the 2023 Game Awards and being well-received by gamers and critics alike. The game takes place in the world of Faerûn (a common Dungeons & Dragons setting). The plot involves an invasion of Mindflayer parasites secretly influencing the minds of more and more hosts in a bid to take over the continent and perhaps all of existence.

Yet something is not typical with this resurgence of mindflayers. Not only is your character infected and not being turned into a tentacled monster, but the hivemind that usually controls such hosts is silent. In its place is the Absolute, a mysterious force your player must uncover the motivations of as you race to find a cure for your infection.

Although bugs were frequent, I found this game to be a treat to play, especially its narrative. There are many nuggets that one could deconstruct from this work: its unapologetic queerness as every other NPC casually slips in references to a same-sex partner or lover; the way it breaks down how innocent people can get indoctrinated into cults; the way player creation allows for transness in a way I haven't seen in a while.

Perhaps the most interesting is this fantasy work's take on security and Artificial Intelligence. Autonomous defense units, parallels of which are being deployed in the real world as we speak, are not depicted in the game as vehicles of safety but harbingers of fascism — an intriguing criticism as our world gears up to connect everyone and everything in the name of productivity and safety.

Fascist, fantasy robots

Automation may seem an unlikely topic in a fantasy game, where much of the population still lives in Medieval-going-on-Enlightenment-style housing. And yet, the techno-magic of Dungeons & Dragons allows for a wide assortment of flying machines, steampunk underwater bases, and, for our purposes, security robots called Steel Watchers.

Players (most likely) first hear about the Steel Watch, an autonomous defense formation meant to uphold the city's laws, from Counsellor Florrick. The politician sings the praises of Enver Gortash, the man credited with creating the Steel Watch. Depending on your companion selections, we know that Gortash is a bad guy because one of our companions, Karlach, was sold into servitude due to his backstabbing. But at this point in the game, we have yet to determine the extent of his plans and how it relates to the Steel Watch.

It takes us two-thirds of the game to reach Baldur's Gate. We have been fighting the Cult of the Absolute, trying and failing to stop their armies from making it to the outskirts of the city. When we finally get there, we are greeted by a metropolis that has been heavily militarized in response to these attacks. Massive Steel Watcher automatons patrol most of the city, checkpoints are frequent, the newspaper is being actively censored, and refugees and other displaced persons from the war have become heavily stigmatized. "We got to kick 'em out," young child Rhett says of refugees, mimicking her father's words.

The city-state of Baldur's Gate is succumbing to fascism, a loose term meant to describe authority centralizing on one figure or entity, often by relying on myth-making and violence, with heavy buy-in from a select portion of the public. Many of its habitants have willfully chosen a "tough on crime" mentality to pursue a sense of safety from both the army outside and the "threats" within. "Fear not friend, the days of proper Baulderians fearing walking the streets are over," remarks noble Saer Manzarde, glad that stigmatized people will be dealt with, out of sight by the Watch.

Fascism requires not only a fear of human difference and an exploitation of social frustrations but often the worship of a central figure for it to operate, what Umberto Eco called a "selective populism." Leaders become interpreters of the people's will, calling all of them to serve the majority, which, of course, only they alone can divine.

In this story, we have Gortash, a man who has created a cult of personality around himself as the savior of Baldur's Gate. NPCs everywhere in the city chat about how he will save their city, both physically from the Absolute and spiritually from the city's underclass. We first have a chance to speak with Gortash at his coronation, where he has a very paternalistic version of the public he "speaks" for. "…people are cattle," he lectures, "obedient until panicked."

The Steel Watch represents the security state that Gortash has built to tighten his hold on the city, one that he's candid about when you two meet. As he tells you moments before he's coronated: "…people crave strong leaders. Leaders that bring law, order, and protection. Leaders like me, Bane's unyielding hand, author of justice."

Gortash may publicly claim to have built this security apparatus in response to an emerging threat, but in much the same way fascists have historically relied on scapegoats such as Jewish people or communists to drum up fear, the Absolute threat was very much engineered. In a surprising twist, we learn that the Cult of the Absolute was a lie constructed by Gortash and other allies to create fear within Baldur's Gate so that enough of the populace would willfully accept his solution of the Steel Watch and the authoritarianism he wished to usher in.

You may think our population would never do such a thing, but the real world is rife with such examples. Following 9/11, our government adopted all sorts of security measures to provide the illusion of safety, including a massive surveillance network that is currently spying on hundreds of thousands of people via Section 702 (a provision set to expire this year, if not renewed). And because programs such as PRISM and Upstream have never disclosed a tally of American citizens being spied on, the actual number is most likely much higher. Several US cities are likewise now literally introducing robotic police dogs for the stated purpose of enhancing security. Minus the magic, the impulse to trade freedom for safety is genuine. It's easy to imagine such a tradeoff being made because, in many ways, it already has.

Furthermore, something is chilling about how Baldur's Gate 3 depicts the construction of these automatons, which relates directly to how automation works in the real world. Unlike the many fantasy golems that are animated via techno-magic alone — meaning we, as the player or viewer, don't have to think about how they move about — the Steel Watch is intimately tied to exploited sentient labor. It was, in fact, built by enslaved people, the Gondians, as well as your companion Karlach, who was enslaved for the purpose of prototyping the infernal engine foundational to a Steel Watchers design. More to the point, a Steel Watcher has biomechanical components with mindflayer brains used to pilot each and every one.

The Steel Watch, in essence, is not separate from biological sentient labor but very much intertwined with it, and this remains true of the AI of our world as well. Training deep learning models, which we know as AI, still requires human labor. For example, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, outsourced to Kenyan laborers (earning less than $2 per hour) to train some toxic behaviors out of its model. This labor is critical to how such models work. And yet, these companies often try to obscure this frequently exploitative, underpaid labor that is increasingly vital to our automated world, pretending that automation just happens.

Returning to the game, there is a social and moral cost that came with the Steel Watches construction. Gondians, out of sight from the eyes of the Baldurian public, were brutally enslaved in the Steel Watch Fondry to make these automatons. NPCs may glowingly speak in awe about the efficiency of a Steel Watcher and how it keeps them "safe," but we, as the player, come to learn that these imposing machines are not only intimately tied to exploitative sentient labor but actively help prop up a fascist government.

An automated conclusion

Like many open-ended games, we, as the player, decide what to do with the Steel Watch and the foundry used to build it. We can either destroy it or side with Gortash and let his Steel Watch protect us (at least initially).

But like with many karma-based systems, this agency doesn't make the Steel Watch benevolent. The Steel Watch is the creation of Gortash, an antagonist of the game and the Champion of the God of Tyranny, Hate, and Strife. These were devices built by enslaved people and piloted by the organs of brainwashed and murdered abductees. Everything about them, from their dark origins to imposing frames, is unsettling. There is nothing good about the Steel Watch — a message that the game hammers home at every opportunity.

Art often reflects what is happening in the real world, and as anxiety about automation increases, we will see more and more pieces like this one. Baldur's Gate 3 is very anxious about automation and how it can be used to prop up fascism. And as authoritarianism emerges all over the globe — it's not the worst moral for a game to focus on.

Biden Might Lose 2024 If He Doesn’t Back A Ceasefire

Photo by Ömer Yıldız on Unsplash

I want to preface this by saying that I have a long history of encouraging people to vote. One of my most popular articles is Pop Culture Has Never Understood Politics And Voting, where I break down what, at the time, I argued was a simplistic binary between total optimism in the system and blind pessimism. Shortly after I published that piece, I made the argument that elites historically have tried to prevent many people from voting (see Elites Don't Want You To Vote).

In 2021, I published an article directed toward my fellow leftists, arguing that electoral politics was not a failed project and that we should still engage in the Democratic process (see Why You Should Still Vote, Even If You Hate The Democratic Party). I provided three justifications for engaging in electoralism: harm reduction, the potential for radicalization, and successful elections making on-the-ground activism easier. As I wrote in that piece:

“You might not be able to get a single-payer law passed or to create a lasting autonomous zone successfully, but you can convert people to your cause and fight for small changes on the local level. Those tangible victories can galvanize people to support your cause and funnel them toward the types of activism you consider more effective.”

I still believe in democracy, and I am not encouraging people not to vote. That being said, many of the arguments I advanced in that piece simply do not apply to the situation in Gaza. The argument of harm reduction has truly gone out the window now that Biden has rejected the policy of a ceasefire and said some genuinely abhorrent language in defense of a regime many consider to be genocidal. The same can be said for elections "making on-the-ground activism easier," as many of the candidate's leftists have backed recently, including Senator Bernie Sanders, are not engaging with calls for a ceasefire, instead kicking out activists who once supported them from their offices.

As things currently stand, many Democrats will not support Biden going into the 2024 election, and perhaps any candidate who refuses to back a ceasefire against genocide as well. If the Democratic Party cannot meet these criticisms, it will most likely lose significant ground in the year ahead.

The reason why people are upset

Some say that progressives and leftists should “suck it up,” as any dissent will lead to the election of a Republican candidate such as Donald Trump. As micro influencer Karen Piper commented: "A vote against Biden is a vote for Trump. Period. I'm discouraged by leftist voices thinking otherwise because of a problem in Gaza. It will pass, and then we'll have a stupid dictator in charge."

Yet you have to understand that many are coming from this perspective from a moral angle, believing that they should not be linking our rejection of genocide to an election. In the words of another micro-influencer: “…if you can’t vote for either party, then don’t! Vote for the people who are actively pushing for a ceasefire, who best represent the average American experience, and aren’t maintaining the status quo.”

And make no mistake, what is happening in Gaza is genocide. The Israeli government is bombing hospitals, schools, and refugee camps. Over ten thousand are confirmed dead (a number estimated to be much higher), including over four thousand children. Entire bloodlines have been culled. As legal and political scholars from prestigious schools all over the world asserted in a letter on October 15th:

“Israel’s current military offensive on the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023, however, is unprecedented in scale and severity, and consequently in its ramifications for the population of Gaza….huge swathes of neighbourhoods and entire families across Gaza have been obliterated. Israel’s Defence Minister ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip prohibiting the supply of fuel, electricity, water and other essential necessities. This terminology itself indicates an intensification of an already illegal, potentially genocidal siege to an outright destructive assault.”

Israel has long maintained a settler-colonial project against the Palestinian people. Hundreds of thousands were expelled from their homes following the partition of Palestine by the UN (and the ensuing war in the late 1940s) and then crammed into the world's largest open-air prison. In the words of the United Nation's website describing this history:

“The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem under a UN administration. The Arab world rejected the plan, arguing that it was unfair and violated the UN Charter. Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee. The situation escalated into a full-blown war in 1948, with the end of the British Mandate and the departure of British forces, the declaration of independence of the State of Israel and the entry of neighbouring Arab armies. The newly established Israeli forces launched a major offensive. The result of the war was the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population.

As early as December 1948, the UN General Assembly called for refugee return, property restitution and compensation (resolution 194 (II)). However, 75 years later, despite countless UN resolutions, the rights of the Palestinians continue to be denied.”

These actions have been (and are currently being) funded directly by the United States. From 1951 to as recently as this year, hundreds of billions of dollars have been funneled to the Israeli government, many of which have been used to fund the military and its apartheid regime against Palestine.

That is the framing many leftists and progressives now hold. They do not believe we should play the “accept genocide for political convenience” game and are withholding their vote because they consider it morally correct. As one person remarked: “…why Biden lost my vote…I am making this statement not because it will change anything in this country. I am making it so the country won’t change me. I am making this statement so they don’t [rob] me of my humanity. I won’t support this race to the bottom. I cannot support genocide or rationalize it.”

If Biden is not willing to be on the right side of history here, the argument goes, then he is a bad leader unworthy of the presidency.

The political implications

The fact that so many people are now staking their vote to Palestinian Liberation is a bad sign for Biden going into 2024. Biden won partly because of young voters — a demographic that increased their turnout by 11 points from 2016 to 2020. One NBC exit poll suggested, "…that 65% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 voted for Biden."

Younger people are also more likely to support Palestinian liberation and a ceasefire. What Biden’s supporters are accomplishing by shaming those angry with this administration's anti-Palestine stance is creating a rift between them and this crucial bloc of voters. It signals to all those paying attention that such naysayers have no intention of listening to this vital demographic, and this willful blindness makes it more likely that young voters will check out in 2024. As the political director for the Sunrise Movement, Michele Weindling told The Rolling Stone:

“Biden has the opportunity to listen to the majority of people in this country that are calling for him to call for a ceasefire, and an end to unconditional support to the Israeli military. And we are seeing an immense risk around whether or not young people will feel alienated ahead of the 2024 election and risk staying home.”

The same can be said of many groups in America, such as American Muslims, whose support for Biden has plummeted. The same might also be true for Black Americans, whose support has likewise dipped. In general, Biden's approval now sits at just under 40%, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, and he has lost significant ground in a hypothetical pairing with Republican contender Donald Trump.

Supporting a ceasefire would ensure that that hemorrhaging does not continue. If Biden were smart, he would budge here on demanding a ceasefire and then change nothing else (i.e., still provide funding to Israel). It's a move that would piss off leftists who believe we must stop funding the Israeli war machine but would appease those on the more liberal end of the spectrum and prevent mass disengagement.

Instead, he's denying the existence of a genocide, and the world is watching him do it. Forget morals for a second; this is bad politics — the thing Biden is supposed to be good at. Democrats need massive support to win the 2024 election, in some cases in margins in only the tens of thousands, and he's willing to gamble that margin away to support a genocide.

If you want to guarantee that he loses swing states, then by all means, shame these constituencies into disengagement. Watch as Biden loses states such as Michigan, which is home to over 200,000 Muslim voters, and Georgia (and really much of the South), where young voters were a deciding factor in the 2020 election.

Because the message coming out of the Palestine Liberation Movement is quite clear: no ceasefire, no votes. As Nihad Awad, the national director at the Council on American–Islamic Relations, said in a speech during the pro-Palestine march on Washington, DC: "The language that President Biden and his party understands is the language of votes in the 2023 elections, and our message is: no ceasefire, no votes….No votes in Michigan, no votes in Arizona, no votes in Georgia, no votes in Nevada, no votes in Wisconsin, no votes in Pennsylvania."

The Biden administration ignores this ultimatum at their peril.

Biden’s flawed gambit

There is a certain cynicism that is related to the genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip. With the election about a year away, the Biden Administration is gambling that the voting public will stop caring about this issue by the time they go to the polls.

And yet, moments like this are formative ones for the electorate. In the same way, the George Floyd Uprising shifted how many (though not all) talk about race in America, countless on the Left are educated about Palestine liberation in a way they simply weren’t four months ago. We might not be talking about this issue in six months in the same way (that depends on the extent of the campaign in Gaza and the West Bank), but that doesn’t mean voters won’t remember.

It only takes tens of thousands of votes to swing an election in a state one way or the other. Biden is already an unpopular candidate (so too is Trump, for that matter), and Genocide Joe is a much worse nickname than Sleepy Joe. This baggage will stick with him if he doesn’t get ahead of it because, unlike four months ago, the world is more aware of the situation in Gaza, and many don’t like what they see.

“They Cloned Tyrone” Eviscerates the Black Professional Managerial Class

Sourced: Captured, Netflix

The satire They Cloned Tyrone is an absolute delight. It's essentially about a group of Blaxploitation archetypes (i.e., a portmanteau of Black and exploitation describing films that perpetuate offensive stereotypes about the Black community) as they are brought together in the wake of an unusual murder. Along the way, they uncover a conspiratorial plot in their community of Glen that cuts to the core of white supremacy in America.

There are many lenses from which to deconstruct this film. The most obvious is perhaps how it humanizes stereotypical archetypes — "the pimp," "the thug," "the ho" — that have been the butt of our white supremacist society’s jokes for years. These characters use skills they have learned in their lives to correct injustices, expanding the viewer’s empathy and providing a bit of excellent catharsis along the way. (As a personal note, I loved how Yo-Yo used her passion for Nancy Drew books to help solve this mystery).

One thing I want to narrow in on is how this movie treats the Black Professional Managerial Class (i.e., a term used to describe people who control production processes not through the owning of capital but via their high places in management). The film sees them not as a vanguard for liberation but rather as barriers at best and, at worst, tools of the Black working class's obliteration.

White Supremacist capitalism

To cut to the chase of what the plot of this movie is, a white supremacist organization with ties to "those in power" is experimenting on the community of Glen and communities all over the world to learn how to control people of color.

This movie could have personalized this conspiracy through individual actors, as has been standard in many Hollywood films where racism is the product of one particular individual's bigotry (see Hilly in The Help), but instead, it's more amorphous. We don't even get to meet the big bad at the very top of this conspiracy. As one minor antagonist says when asked if he's in charge: "No, everyone's got a boss. Mine's a real hardass." There is no simple villain we can point to to blame everything on.

Rather, the film places its ire on a system, and not just any system, but that of white supremacist capitalism. Black people are not being controlled overtly but subtly through consumption. The conspiracy, in particular, is doing so through items of consumption closely associated with Black culture — fried chicken, grape juice, club music, etc. These products literally have components meant to distract, subdue, and pacify those in the community of Glen.

We see this in the real world, too. Fast food, for example, may not be direct mind control, but it has long been studied that these foods take advantage of quirks in human biology to make them as addicting as possible. Fast food companies then place their stores (which, again, have psychologically addicting products) in Blacker and Browner neighborhoods, taking advantage of these groups and furthering a sense of dependence on their products.

On average, this is compounded by the fact that Black people in America earn less than their white counterparts, have less wealth, and own less property. We may have moved past direct bondage (at least partially — see the prison system). However, groups at the bottom of our racialized caste system are still systemically denied the means to access high-end resources. This reality means that many must rely on subpar food, housing, and the like, which, on average, reduces Black people’s overall standard of living: a fact the film satirizes at every turn.

Tyrone & The Black Professional Managerial Class

Knowing this, one might think that when this film reaches its climax, we would have to hear a monologue from some white CEO or political figure running the facility below Glen about how white people are "superior," but They Cloned Tyrone is far more nuanced than offering a simple binary condemnation. It instead places its contempt, symbolically at least, at the Black Professional Managerial Class and how they often collaborate with that system to stifle actual change.

A central conceit of this film is cloning, and one of the main characters, Fontaine, has been cloned many times. A minor antagonist Fontaine has to "face off" against is a wordless clone of himself called Chester. Dressed in a suit ("professional attire"), Chester is forced to obey the orders of his superiors, a very telling and somewhat sad portrayal of what the Black Professional Managerial Class must become to obtain power. While Fontaine uses that lack of agency to ultimately free himself from capture, Chester is not redeemed following Fontaine’s triumph. Instead, he is left motionless, no longer having any orders to follow.

Furthermore, when we meet the manager of the facility beneath Glen, it's Fontaine, well, at least the original Fontaine, a brilliant scientist who perfected the cloning program. Original Fontaine is working for this white supremacist organization partly because he wants to resurrect his dead brother (a nod to how many Black professionals serve large companies and organizations that actively harm their communities for personal gain) but also because of his philosophical outlook. As he monologues to cloned Fontaine:

“… It's not enough to think the same. We have to be the same. My work in the cloning initiative helped me track 378 unique genes that separate you, and your ghettos, from your counterparts in the suburbs…Once I sequenced them all, I approached my superiors with an addendum, and I'm sure you’re aware of our first test subjects… [the managers], not complete successes, but they pass…

… We have since perfected the process….this won’t happen overnight Fontaine. It’ll happen over generations. And now we are at the precipice of our true national rollout. Assimilation is better than annihilation.”

Original Fontaine essentially wants Black people to be white, to cling to whiteness so hard their Blackness, impossibly, disappears. There has been a long historical tradition of Black intellectuals arguing over how best to tackle White Supremacy, and not all of them have been revolutionary, but like original Fontaine, assimilationists, albeit not as heightened as in the movie. Booker T. Washington— a man around during the mid-1800s to the early 1900s — notoriously argued for this viewpoint, saying in a speech in 1895:

“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.”

Washington here is essentially advocating for Black Americans to ignore discrimination and instead focus on material prosperity. Others have pointed out that this viewpoint concedes political power for vague promises of future acceptance. In the words of W.E.B DuBois in a widely cited essay in 1903: "Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission…Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things, — First, political power, Second, insistence on civil rights, Third, higher education of Negro youth…"

Indeed, there is much to believe the film would be more in line with DuBois than Washington. When you take a step back, Original Fontaine's plan is actual annihilation. He intends to use breeding to slowly replace the Black population over the course of generations until everyone is the same. He may think he's serving the community, however, everything he is doing hurts the community of Glen. Not only does he hold internally racist viewpoints, such as believing the differences between races (a social construct) are genetic, but he is willing to condemn his people to a slow withering away in the name of "progress."

They Cloned Tyrone is decidedly not in the pro-assimilationist camp. It's telling that Cloned Fontaine has to kill off this professional version of himself. There is no redemption for the Black Assimilationist, it seems.

A Fringe Conclusion

Ultimately, freedom for Glen doesn't come from the top — and it certainly doesn't come from the middle — but below. The people that society thinks are worthless — those who "keep the rents" down so that the conspiracy can conduct its experiment — are who ultimately raid the facility and bring its abhorrent behavior to light.

Throughout the movie, we are shown over and over again that "forgotten" people have more insight and power than our society gives them credit for. Whether it is the man in front of the liquor store who knows precisely "what's going on" or the gang members willing to go to bat, violently if necessary, for their community — it's the people below, the movie suggests, who have the power to bring our white supremacist society to its knees.

And in an age of rampant inequalities, that is a lesson worth considering.

A Brief Look at Death Cannons

Photo by Taylor R on Unsplash

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour." This is the tour for all those thrill seekers out there who want to see some things that are downright insane. We note the problematic locations, tools, and, in this case, weapons that contributed to species 947's (947 were also known as humanity [hyoo·ma·nuh·tee]) entirely predictable end on a tiny, weeny planet called Earth in the year 90,423 XE (what humans may know as 2XXX AD).

Today, we are looking at death cannons, known to the natives there as "guns" [guhnz]. These were metal tubes that could propel even smaller pieces of metal or plastic for the purpose of penetrating the flesh sacs of humans. In the words of xeno-anthropologist Qe're'witz Sod: "The simplicity of the tool implies that humans were aggressive creatures. And also stupid."

Every known sentient species at one point or another has developed tools of murder — the mutant flies of Omegar, the supremely terrifying radioactive ice cream of Bastian VI. Humans from the Empire known as the United States of America were unique in believing that carrying such weapons was a divine right. Their country's constitution had enshrined "the right to bear arms," which constituencies such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) had convinced this empire's corrupt government that people should be able to carry and worship unrestricted from the forces of the law. As then-executive vice president of the NRA Wayne LaPierre once noted, presumably before kissing his death cannon, "Our Second Amendment is freedom's most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea."

Unsurprisingly, this led to a situation where these death cannons were used quite frequently. Disgruntled individuals, mainly on the fascistic end of the human political spectrum, would employ such weapons to execute people who frustrated them, especially social minorities they erroneously believed were inferior. In the human year 2022, the country had nearly 650 "mass shootings" [mas shoo·tuhngz], defined as a situation where at least four or more humans were injured or killed.

Sadly, this trend applied even to younglings called "children" [chil·druhn], with 51 of those mass shootings in the year 2022 occurring in places of learning known as schools [skoolz]. The specter of school shootings became an unavoidable aspect of these fragile human lives. Schools often had to practice drills to prepare younglings for the statistically significant likelihood someone with a death cannon would assault them. The only parallel I can draw is to the ritual sacrifices of younglings on Sticklit Prime, but seeing as that species is immortal, such sacrifices are primarily for show. Again returning to the words of xeno-anthropologist Qe're'witz Sod describing school shootings: "That shits f@cked up."

This situation not only indicated deep social dysfunction at the heart of the US Empire's political structure but also had a direct environmental cost on society. Death cannons emitted many death chemicals (what humans may have referred to as greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide). The firing of Death cannons (as well as the improper disposal of their ammunition) could release toxic metals such as copper, antimony, mercury, and lead as particulate matter, or most terrifyingly, potentially sink into the soil and sometimes leach into groundwater and surface water. This could have detrimental effects on the fragile human body.

This pollution was something that scaled depending on the ammunition and death cannons used, the ventilation at the time of firing, and, perhaps most importantly, the scale of the conflict. For example, a prolonged military conflict in the early 2020s known as "the War in Ukraine" between the fascist oligarchy known as "Russia" and an economic vassal of the United States called Ukraine led to the usage of many death cannons, including more mobile varieties known as "tanks" [tangks]. While capturing an accurate figure is complex, some estimates placed it at 33 million tons of greenhouse gases by November 2022. That number grew to over an estimated 120 million tons in the first twelve months of the war as the country's death chemical industries were damaged in the ensuing months.

Albeit much less than the cost of war (a high bar), there were also the death chemicals that came with the direct production of these items, especially from the production of their corresponding ammo — emmissions that had a long history of ending up in human waterways. As Jeffrey F. Hall-Gale wrote in one of humanity's pathetic academic journals: "…gun and ammunition manufacturers have been identified as some of the worst polluters in the country. The United States Department of Defense's (DOD) Radford Army Ammunition Plant (RAAP) in Virginia, for example, was the second largest polluter among all facilities discharging chemicals in 2010 due to its release of 12,006,602 pounds of toxic chemicals."

Even as these firms allegedly attempted to reduce the death chemicals emitted in their production by creating energy-efficient products such as lasers, there was also all the excessive heat that such goods produced. Like all human goods, the production of death cannons required, according to Glorb's Universal Law of Entropy, that "the total quality of energy not be conserved." This meant that while humans used low-entropy energy to do the work of "making stuff," it inevitably led to high-entropy wastes that were unavailable for further use or degraded, which, when released into their environment, exacerbated the destruction of 947's atmosphere. Even if partially recaptured, it was impossible for death cannon production (and again, all goods) not to emit some heat waste, a fact their modern economy often tried to ignore through an ancient practice known as "lying" [lai·uhng].

As humans continued to experience the worsening effects of climate change, their thinking became more and more detached from the fundamental laws of entropy and thermodynamics, hoping some magical technology would come along to break the laws of the universe and somehow reduce all waste in the process.

In the meantime, there were always death cannons for sale.

A deadly conclusion

Death cannons are a great item to review when analyzing humanity's destruction because they were items that were both socially and environmentally destructive. People used them to kill others, instilling a paralyzing culture of fear and paranoia, while their production and usage released waste that furthered the destruction of humanity's environment.

Many humans did not like the status quo of gun production in America, often calling on leaders to pass legislation that would limit the production or ownership of such weapons. However, there were not many attempts to sabotage production, as humans were very self-conscious of property ownership, believing that those who claimed possession of the land had, within the reason of the law, the right to make whatever they wanted — the social and environmental consequences of that production be damned.

Increasingly, however, death cannon manufacturers were deemed significantly responsible for the costs they had on US society. As fragile human theorist Thomas Metcalf argued in their paper Gun Violence as Industrial Pollution in Public Affairs Quarterly:

“…the prevalence and possibility of gun violence increase the demand for guns, since some buyers want to use the guns violently, and others want to use them for self-defense…

…gun manufacturers are in a position to know the general statistics about the prevalence of gun violence, since these data are presumably helpful to their marketing, public relations, and legal strategies…[the manufacturer] at least foresees that some innocent victims will be victimized by people using those guns….

…Presumably, if anyone is morally responsible for anything, then [the gun manufacturer] is morally responsible for manufacturing and distributing [them]…”

Sadly, not enough humans adopted this mentality, as their species produced death cannons to the end.

For our temporal visitors, see how many of these death cannons you can find in the wild. We have provided a list of the largest Death cannon factories in the US so you can observe them at your leisure.

• 2100 Roosevelt Ave, Springfield, MA 01104 (Smith & Wesson)

• 1852 Proffitt Springs Rd, Maryville, TN 37801 (Smith & Wesson)

• 271 Cardwell Rd, Mayodan, NC 27027 (Ruger)

• 1 Lacey Pl, Southport, CT 06890 (Ruger)

• 18 Industrial Dr, Exeter, NH 03833 (Sig Sauer)

• 129 Broadway, Dover, NH 03820 (Sig Sauer)

• 7 Amarosa Dr, Rochester, NH 03868 (Sig Sauer)

• 100 Springdale Rd, Westfield, MA 01085 (Savage Arms)

• 1 Lawton St, Yonkers, NY 10705 (Kimber Manufacturing Inc.)

• 200 Industrial Blvd, Troy, AL 36081 (Kimber Manufacturing Inc.)

• 30 Lower Valley Rd, Kalispell, MT 59901 (Kimber Manufacturing Inc,)

Remember that death cannons were quite lethal, as they were intended to murder other humans. Gun wielders were also very uppity about the different names of death cannons and would chastise anyone criticizing gun ownership for not knowing them. It's advised that you approach all such people with caution. Set your energy shields to their highest safety levels.

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.

See more entries here:

The Pirate Show 'One Piece' & the Cyclical Nature of Oppression

Netflix, ep 6 "The Chef And The Chore Boy"

The live-action One Piece, based on the manga and anime of the same name, is about a pirate named Monkey D. Luffy and his crew as they search for the infamous treasure, The One Piece, hidden somewhere on the Grand Line. This world is one made of island chains (and one large, inaccessible continent), making shipbuilding and piracy a fact of life. Throw in some zany characters and an even campier aesthetic, and the viewer is undoubtedly guaranteed a treat.

There is always difficulty that comes when adapting between mediums. With its long-drawn-out fight scenes, Shounen anime is not well suited for the budget constraints of live-action TV. The Netflix adaptation had to be heavily slimmed down episodes-wise because of this. For example, the arc where Luffy defeats the pirate Buggy the Clown (see the Orange Town Arc) takes about five episodes to resolve in the anime and only two in the live-action show.

Therefore, for such adaptations, there is always a concern that some magic would get lost in this trimming. And while the show rearranged some things — character motivations are revealed way sooner, and some are axed entirely— mostly, I believe that the series captures the essence of the anime and manga quite well (see Trent Cannon's essay to see the significant differences between the show and the manga).

However, there is one key difference that deserves more analysis, and it's that of Arlong, the sharky Fish-man who wants to dominate humanity as an act of vengeance for his people's previous enslavement. Yet rather than tie into an old, problematic trope of the oppressed becoming just as bad as the oppressor, his violence is rooted in how those in power preserve the status quo — a refreshing take not seen as much in pop culture.

Fictional revolutionaries

The show, perhaps to tie into the zeitgeist, has retooled the motivations of Arlong. In the manga, he is merely dismissive of humans because he believes they are physically weaker — physiology that is more or less the same in the anime, the manga, and the live-action show. However, Arlong hates humanity in the latter because humans enslaved and later segregated fish-people. As he says to a marine: "…the leaders of the organization you so proudly represent saw fit to disparage and enslave my people…[and] your prejudice remains."

Let's not beat around the bush here. Metaphorically, we are meant to draw a line between the treatment of fish-people by humans in this land and Black people in the real world, who were also enslaved and discriminated against. This subtextual reading is made more explicit by casting a Black man (the talented McKinley Belcher III) in the role of Arlong, which wonderfully rebukes a tendency in media to have “metaphorical racism” narratives where white people play the oppressed group (see Star-Crossed, Zootopia, and many more).

And what does Arlong want to do in response to that mistreatment?

He wants to enslave and conquer humanity. "Fish-men are the rightful rulers of the seas," he monologues to his crew. "And the humans know it, too. They fear our power, so they bound us with chains. They loath our presence, so they banned us from their cities…But we broke those chains and built our own cities. Now the time has come to restore the natural order of this world…we will teach each and every human their rightful place."

Arlong was oppressed, and so he wants to replicate this dynamic with his oppressors. We see this tendency on a smaller micro scale when he enslaves the main character, Nami, as a child, chaining her up in a small room to take advantage of her cartography skills. He is contributing to a cycle of abuse.

As the saying goes, "hurt people hurt people." It's a trend we can see in the real world with abuse. While most survivors of abuse do not become abusive, it can correlate in some instances. One study found that "…adults who had records of abuse or neglect as children were twice as likely to have been reported to [Child Protective Services] because of child maltreatment" (note — there were limitations to these findings, and it's important not to walk away with the erroneous conclusion that an abused person will automatically go on to perpetuate abuse).

We can see this on the state level as well. At the risk of being controversial, the state of Israel was founded on the collective trauma of the European Genocide against the Jewish people, and that new state, in turn, used that hurt to ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands (see the Nakba). Israel has since arguably constructed an apartheid regime in the Gaza Strip. Trauma was weaponized to justify harm on a massive scale — and we have no reason to believe that the world Arlong wants to build will be any different.

There is a tendency to believe that this cycle of abuse is inescapable. This belief is especially prominent in pop culture where, except for maybe in Star Wars, oppressed groups who try to free themselves often become just as oppressive as the group they broke free from. Erik Killmonger from Black Panther; Marco Inaros from The Expanse; Daisy Fitzroy from Bioshock: Infinite; Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones; the hosts from Westworld— we could spend the rest of this article just listing examples of this happening in media.

And yet, just because it can (and does) happen doesn't mean that that regime is inevitable. When I look at Haiti, for example, the revolts that led to independence may have been violent for those enslaved people's oppressors (arguably rightfully so), but the country didn't create a regime that was just as oppressive as what came before, where white people were now in chains. Haiti forswore imperialism and reimagined race (on paper). Although many problems existed afterward — some perpetuated by imperialist powers, others by the newly emerging governments toward their own peasantry — there wasn't a role reversal where white Haitians were suddenly enslaved.

Our history is ripe with counter-examples of oppressed groups freeing themselves from oppressive regimes and then not becoming just as bad as what came before. Still, somehow, our media is bereft of these examples. I believe it is partly a defense mechanism from our institutions, which do not want to recognize the initial harm done by colonizers for fear that it will lead to even worse reprisals. As I argue in Westworld and the Limits of White Imagination:

“…the trope we have discussed above hints that, white society, by which I mean white supremacist, capitalist colonialist patriarchy, has never moved on from this fear that oppressed people will call for their pound of flesh when the time comes. It’s not a coincidence that most stories we see today of oppressed people violently rebelling against their oppressors devolve so quickly into an even worse status quo.”

For its part, One Piece has a more nuanced conversation about why this happens. Arlong was not lifted to power because his violence was inevitable but rather because his type of instability is what the World Government (that's what the centralized authority is called in the show) prefers. They brokered an agreement with dangerous pirates called the Warlords of the Sea to let the status quo remain, and Arlong has an ongoing "agreement" (bribe) with Marine Captain Nezumi for his operations in the East Blue to be ignored.

Tellingly, the World Government supports violent extremists rather than transformative revolutionaries like our main character, Luffy, because the prior is perceived as less of a threat to the status quo. As Vice Admiral Garp lectures to a subordinate: "…the world is no simple place. The same set of laws do not apply to everyone… but you have to decide if you can live with that…[because] the marines are all that are standing between order and anarchy." Garp doesn't care about changing the system, merely preserving his sense of order. He wants to keep everything the same, fearing that change will devolve into chaos. And if that means funneling revolutionary frustrations toward tyrants like Arlong and the even more powerful Warlords of the Sea, well, that's an acceptable risk to him.

That take is refreshing compared to such authoritarianism constantly being depicted in media as “inevitable” whenever oppressed people dare use violence against their oppressors. And in fact, this aligns more closely with our lived reality anyway. In the real world, many extremist groups are funded by imperialist superpowers. The US funded, sometimes indirectly, other times quite directly, the predecessors to Al-Qaeda, the Contras in Nicaragua, ISIS, Al-Qaeda again, and many more. Israel has backed the group Hamas. These countries often fund rogue insurgent groups to combat an immediate enemy, only for it to tragically blow up in their faces years or decades later.

Whether we are talking about the World Government of One Piece or the governments of the here and now, such violence is very much engineered (partly) by those in power.

A drowning conclusion

The richness of this commentary owes much to the source material. Eiichiro Oda's manga has constantly been called anti-imperialist, and you can see those influences bleed into the live-action show. The World Government was arguably more corrupt in the manga and anime, but I am glad that corruption is still a central component in the Netflix adaptation.

However, this doesn't mean that the manga was perfect. Eiichiro Oda's handling of race left much to be desired. The character Usopp's chief trait was that he always lied, and for a long time, he was the one Black lead on the show. In a years-old interview, while Oda could list where every other character's fictional counterpart would be from in the real world (Luffy would be from Brazil, Zoro from Japan, Nami from Sweden, etc.), Usopp was the only one he claimed, based on appearance, was from "Africa," contributing to the tired trope of flattening the continent to only one place. Usopp also had exaggerated facial features in the manga and anime that some fans considered problematic.

A lot has changed in the years since, and the live-action show (while keeping many things in place) has updated the material's sensibilities on race. Usopp's features were not exaggerated for the show, and many more Black and Brown characters were included to make a more well-rounded story.

We can also see this transformation in how Arlong was handled. He may be authoritarian, but because of the anti-imperialist themes of the story, we get a departure from the usual moral that radical revolutionaries are no different from the oppressors they fight against. Arlong is not a symbolic extension of what happens when the oppressed use violence in the name of freedom, but a rogue militia tacitly supported by the very government he is allegedly fighting.

Because while oppression may not be inevitable, it certainly can be enforced and funded by the status quo.

What Israel Is Doing In the Gaza Strip Is Not "Defense"

Photo by mohammed al bardawil on Unsplash

The word “defend” originates from a combination of the Latin word de, meaning “from or away,” and fendere, meaning “to strike, hit, or push.” It is a word about resisting attack from others, literally pushing a force away. At some point, the need for defense ends. The attacker is repelled, and if successful, you, as the defender, have the upper hand.

A question naturally arises of when the defense ends, one that is saliently linked to the current issue in Israel and the Gaza Strip. Over the past few days, a narrative has emerged that in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, which tragically killed over 1,300 civilians, Israel has every right to “defend itself.” As President Biden remarked shortly after the attack: “ISo, in this moment, we must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel….And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack.”

The Israeli government has military superiority and appears to be leveling Gaza City as we speak, but curiously, this language of defense has been front and center. Attack and defense are moral positions as much as they are definitional ones. A defender is largely considered to be in the right, while an attacker is deemed the opposite. If an attacker is killed during their attack, the defender is morally considered not to be in “the wrong” for such an action: they were merely “defending” themselves.

Therefore, parties are incentivized to label their actions as defensive. Whether we are talking about an individual or, as in the case of Israel, an entire country, those who are defending themselves generally “win” in the court of public opinion, and that’s what we are seeing with this current media campaign.

And yet, when we focus on the actual word “defend”, we find this framing is inaccurate and manipulative. Political figures are ultimately perpetuating propaganda to justify harm on a massive scale and duplicitously branding it as harm prevention, twisting the very nature of language in the process.

War is not defense

This problem is not new. There has been a type of Orwellian “doublespeak” (e.g., deliberately obscuring or distorting the meaning of words) over the last few decades where Departments and Agencies of War have been rebranded as Departments of Defense.

For example, the most prominent defensive force within the United States is the National Guard: individual militias overseen by each state and territorial governorship, though the Office of the President can also direct them. It is part of the National Guard Bureau, a venture that can feed into the Army and the Air Force Reserves, but is not technically a Branch or Department of the Department of Defense (DoD). It is one of the few security institutions, besides the Coast Guard, one could safely say is devoted to defending US citizens, though even here, these assets are also used abroad.

The Department of Defense, on the other hand, is a little different. While it does position troops in the US — there are military reserves stationed in practically every state — mostly, it is not preparing defensive efforts but is in charge of what it describes as “deterring war.” The DoD does this by engaging in acts of violence abroad. DoD assets have constantly used drones or planes to bomb other countries. We are also providing other regimes with hardware to fight for our interests more directly, including Israel.

While the DoD may frame these actions as “defensive” or related to “peacekeeping,” much of its time is spent meddling in other nations’ affairs. “Proactively defending yourself” is the same as saying you will attack someone. It is a polite way to dress up violence as peace. In other words, the Department of Defense is really a Department of War.

It’s the same language game with the Gaza Strip situation. When Hamas attacked Israel in the infamously dubbed Al-Aqsa Flood — an operation that tragically took the lives of at least 1,300 Israeli civilians — it initially defended itself against Hamas, taking back all the land they lost in the engagement. This was not surprising as Israel has one of the best militaries in the world (funded by the US, owner of an even stronger one), and except for a hundred or so hostages, its military curtailed the potential for violence at a massive scale against its citizens within that initial engagement.

None of Israel’s succeeding actions have been “defense” but rather “attack.” When you cut off the water and electricity of a territory and brace for a ground invasion, that is not “defending yourself”; it is conducting (and augmenting) a siege. Israel has already repelled or pushed away Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. It is now attacking another polity and rationalizing the harm done to its nation as a pretext to perpetuate even worse harm. Israel is the historical aggressor here, and since they have long been found subjugating civilians of the Gaza Strip, conducting an apartheid regime according to many human rights groups, and in some cases even violating International Law (see white phosphorus attack), the idea that this attack is somehow defensive is quite preposterous.

Furthermore, there was a disturbing development on October 13th when the Israeli government demanded that over one million people relocate from Northern Gaza, its most heavily populated area, to the South within 24 hours. It is onerous to relocate people, depending on your age or disability status, impossible even, and such an action condemned many to their deaths as they ran out of time and the bombing campaign intensified. Over one thousand children have died as the Israeli government bombed hospitals, schools, and other essential infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

But even if everyone could magically relocate within that period, the forced relocation of a population might be classified as a war crime or even an act of genocide. As genocide scholar Raz Segal wrote in Jewish Currents of Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant’s orders to impose a siege: “Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.”

A sobering conclusion

It’s tragic that so many Israeli civilians died in the initial operation. I want to stress that the violence committed against those Israeli civilians during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was horrific, and I am heartbroken over it. I do not think we should blame a country’s citizens for the harm their country commits, harms they may disagree with and have even resisted. I do not take glee in the fact that many people were mowed down during a music festival.

Yet we cannot let that heartbreak close our souls to the innocent people on the other side of this conflict, people who also had no say in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood because the Gaza Strip has not had an election since 2006, and about half of whom are inside it are 18 years old or younger. We are being told it’s OK that this predominantly young population, trapped inside an open-air prison for their entire lives, is being bombed into oblivion because Israel has “a right to defend itself.”

I find this justification abhorrent. Words mean something, and to call what Israel is doing now “defense” warps that word so far away from its original meaning that it genuinely becomes Orwellian. You might as well call the bombs dropping on Gaza “love droplets” and the lives lost to them “voluntary transfers.” If we are making up things for the sake of our comfort, why acknowledge the conflict at all? Just say no one lives there and never did.

At this moment, the government of Israel is not a shield defending its people from harm but a hammer crashing down on others for the sake of its own comfort, and it is calling itself a savior for doing so — if anything is farthest from the word defense, it is this.

Being Trans Isn't Just One Thing

Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash

One of the most frustrating things about the public discourse around trans issues is how low the floor is regarding what people know. The way some describe "transgender ideology" is so disconnected from reality that from this rhetoric, you could easily confuse a transgender person for some demonic harpy from the Pits of Tartus. According to these hate influencers, we are all groomers who take pleasure in not only "cutting up" our own bodies but "convincing" children to do the same.

All of this is, of course, nonsense, and while we could spend this time debunking these claims (which I have already done repeatedly), fundamentally, it just seems like these people don't understand what being transgender even is. Many Americans, especially older ones, believe that the pace "of change around issues of gender identity" is going too quickly, with a plurality believing that gender is determined by someone's sex assigned at birth. Many people don't seem to understand sex and gender at all, parroting gender essentialist tropes that often equate transness to some absurd parody.

And so, at the risk of sounding redundant, I want to stress that there is no single type of trans people and that many's definitions of gender and transitioning are painfully inaccurate.

Gender, sex, and all the many shades of trans

Part of the confusion is generational. According to texts such as the DSM–III, which was put out by American Psychiatric Association in 1980, "transgenderism" or "transsexualism" used to be considered a mental disorder. Transsexualism was defined as "…a persistent discomfort and sense of inappropriateness about one's assigned sex in a person who has reached puberty."

Definitionally, the stated "goal" of transexuals was to use a combination of "gender presentation" (i.e., clothing, speech, mannerisms, etc.), "gender identity" (how someone identifies via pronouns, naming conventions, and other gender markers), and "medical interventions" (i.e., hormones, surgeries, etc.) to "pass" as another binary gender. Or, as the DSM-III put it, "…getting rid of one's primary and secondary sex characteristics and acquiring the sex characteristics of the other sex."

This was and still is a perfectly fine goal in isolation, but as a totalizing definition, it excluded everyone who wanted a different path and was quite transphobic in its framing. The DSM-III insisted that people could always clock a transgender person, or in its own words, "the alert observer can recognize [a transexual]," which is just demeaning and untrue. There are plenty of trans people no one can identify until they self-id — it's sadly part of the reason some react violently to such revelations, claiming that a trans person has "trapped" them.

This archaic definition continues to have ripple effects to this day. The way even some transgender people talk is that if you aren't trying to fit into one end of the gender spectrum, you are not valid as a trans person. The prominent trans man Buck Angel is notorious for insisting that he continues to be a biological woman and often reshares prominent transphobic figures such as JK Rowling, Blaire White, and more, tweeting this year: "I said I am a female who made my appearance look male so I can walk the world without Dysphoria."

This framing was never great as there were always people in the margins who didn't fit inside of the gender binary or didn't want to. Many trans people don't have dysphoria and don't feel it's necessary, and nowadays, the medical community is largely transitioning (pun very much intended) away from this mindset. The DSM-V explicitly states now that the presence of gender variance is not itself a pathology but rather any accompanying dysphoria a trans person might have. The World Health Organization's ICD-11 no longer classifies gender identity as a mental health disorder, and what we might classify as dysphoria has been relabeled "gender incongruence" and has likewise been reframed as a non-mental health issue — the organization claiming that framing it as the latter had added to social stigma.

As things have progressed, people have started to use the word transgender to describe anyone who doesn't fit inside the classic gender binary of man and woman. As recapped by WebMd, of all places: "Not everyone's sex at birth lines up with their gender identity. That identity is how you see yourself and what you call yourself — he, she, they, or neither."

In essence, trans is an umbrella term meaning anything that is not "cisgender" (i.e., Latin for "on this side," it just means a person who has a gender identity that matches the sex registered for them at birth). Trans is not a definition that describes specific things within it, and more describes a person who, for whatever reason, does not want to align with the gender binary. Trans is a word defined in reaction to something: a word essentially describing what you are not, as much as what you are.

And so — and this is the part that throws a lot of people for a loop when we only focus on puberty blockers and surgeries — the people who decide to undergo medical intervention are only one slice of the trans community. Many trans people are only interested in experimenting with gender presentation and gender identity and will never engage in medical interventions. Not because of stigma— although that is a factor too for some people — but because they don't want to. They want to wear what they want to wear and identify how they want to identify, and that's the end of it. Again, transgender people are just those who have rejected the gender binary. There are no requirements one has to check off to do this — it simply is what someone identifies as.

In fact, there are some trans people who only engage in medical interventions such as hormones and do not vary their presentation at all. I sometimes meet this threshold. I am currently doing several medical interventions, and while I will occasionally experiment with my dress and appearance, I mostly do not. I am nonbinary, not seeking to fit either side of the gender binary, and so depending on how I present, I come across as an effeminate man with tits. Many nonbinary people can say the same. As one Redditor responded to a question on whether a Trans(MtF) person was allowed to wear typically masculine clothing: "Gender has nothing to do with clothing or makeup. Tomboys are for sure a thing. But honestly, clothes are clothes 💙."

Even when it comes to the subject of medical interventions, there are infinite combinations. There are puberty blockers (i.e., medication that lowers testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone) and hormones that increase things in the opposite direction. Electrolysis to remove hair on the body. Breast augmentation. Surgeries to change bone structure and to sculpt or remove genitals. Are all people who have opted for one or some of these surgeries the same kind of trans person? Where do you draw the line between puberty blockers, the effects of which are easily reversible, and things like genital reconstructive or "bottom" surgery, which can take months to recover from?

You can't, really, and that's my point — being trans isn't one thing.

Furthermore, many transgender people engage in neither nonnormative gender presentation nor medical interventions; they simply identify as transgender. There are buff, bearded people going by she/they pronouns, and they are still trans. There are femme, lipstick-wearing people who identify as men, and they are also still trans. Presentation is a component that can be added or discarded at will, and it doesn’t change someone’s gender.

To understand this complexity, one has to realize that there is a difference between sex (i.e., a label based on the genitals you're born with and the chromosomes you have) and gender (the presentation and identity we show to the world). Societally speaking, we do not use genitals in our day-to-day to determine if someone is a man or woman, but again, gender identity and gender presentation. We look at how they present, hear how they identify, and go from there. It's the reason why many trans people change their pronouns and names because identity is one of the primary ways we recognize someone's gender, and pronouns and other such gender markers are how that happens.

Now, if you are still following me here, this mutability with gender presentation does not mean that someone is automatically transgender for experimenting with it. You are not necessarily trans because you crossdress for a Halloween costume or even if you engage in a subversive activity such as drag. Identity is an essential component of being transgender — it is perhaps the only one — and there are plenty of cisgender people experimenting with nonnormative gender presentation and are still cisgender, including, perhaps most famously, half the cast of RuPaul's Drag Race.

Adding to this thought, there are plenty of effeminate men out there who are very much still cisgender. Gay men are classically stereotyped as effeminate, and that doesn't make them trans. There are even heterosexual effeminate men (gasps), including the fabulous TikToker James Carrington, who went viral not too long ago for being in a relationship with a masc-presenting straight woman.

To claim that gender is merely about biology not only ignores how gender has been redefined throughout human history (see Debating the Morality of Heterosexuality) but also ignores the reality of the modern trans experience. Transgender people are pretty aware of their biology — it's the reason some of us engage in medical interventions in the first place. If willpower alone could give you tits (or remove them), a trans person would have done it already.

We are aware that there is a difference between sex and gender. It's the reason why there are so many different flavors to the trans community in the first place, as deciding whether or not to engage in medical interventions (the many that exist) is one of the many choices a trans person can make.

Conclusively trans

All of this is to say that the totalizing framing of trans people as those trying to undergo one set of circumstances is limiting and untrue. Transness is so many things that cannot be narrowly placed inside a box or rubric.

Furthermore, you cannot stop trans people for this very reason because you cannot stop people experimenting with gender presentation and identity. There is no way to stop a person assigned male at birth from wearing a dress, changing their name informally, or using different pronouns. These are social constructs that are inherently fluid, and people have been experimenting with them for as long as there has been the concept of gender.

Hell, you probably can't even stop people from buying hormones and receiving illegal surgeries. Trans people injected with smuggled hormones and got under-the-table bottoms surgeries during periods with far less acceptance. I am sure they can manage it again in the Internet age — though, like with the case of abortions, their quality will be much worse.

The only option is to criminalize public acceptance of those things and, consequently, increase stigma against them so that a combination of shame and outward brutality stifle human expression. You make that expression more dangerous, as trans people face violence for being themselves and, in the case of medical interventions, experience harm from unregulated drugs and procedures.

The beauty of humanity is its diversity, and that applies to gender. Transness is a part of gender diversity, and its boundaries are murky. It's like a river, forever shifting, and its edges will never stay still for long, even by those petulantly splashing on its surface.

Why Aren't There More Lawyers in Space?

Source: Paramount Plus

In 2023, the second season of the Star Trek show Strange New Worlds, the prequel spin-off to the original series, had a legal episode where the civil rights attorney Neera defended the genetic modifications of Lt Cmdr Una Chin-Riley. The Federation, despite being a socialist polity, still has biases, and one of them has been its despicable treatment of genetically modified species like the Illyrians, who have faced systemic discrimination.

The episode was not only a great conclusion to Una's arc on her secret Illyrian identity but also an excellent metaphor for the difficulties of the immigration process and the nature of citizenship, something that many viewers might be able to relate to. Illyrians may not exist, but people's ethnicities are discriminated against all the time, and it was, in this viewer's humble opinion, an excellent way to tackle these sorts of questions.

Many people hailed the episode on social media, and it got me thinking: why are there not more lawyers in science fiction shows? Law procedurals are one of the most common types of television shows after law and medical ones. This year alone, we have on the air True Detective, Shetland, Fargo, and many more.

The sci-fi lawyer seems like a natural extension of our obsession with the legal system, and today, we are going to examine the state of this genre.

A brief history of space lawyers on TV

The sci-fi legal episode has been a quintessential aspect of TV science fiction for decades, especially in Star Trek. A famous example is The Next Generation episode The Measure Of A Man, where the character Data, an Android, has his Captain, Picard, argue for the recognition of his own humanity. You could also point to The Original Series episode Court Martial, where Captain Kirk has to defend himself against a computer that never lies, and The Menagerie, where a trial is the framing device for the entire episode.

It's not merely Star Trek, however. Babylon 5, the space opera about a diplomatic space station, was filled with episodes where delegates for various species had to defend their positions. Characters had to give impassioned monologues, including in perhaps the emotional height (or low) of the series where a desperate Narn ambassador, G'Kar, pleads in vain for the galactic community to step in as the Centaurians try to reenslave his species.

We could look at the interplay of the delegates in Battlestar Galactica, where the character Baltar is put on trial in Crossroads, Part I, for his leadership of New Caprica during the Cylon occupation. It's a cathartic moment, albeit a short-lived one as he is ultimately deemed not guilty, because this is the man who unknowingly betrayed the human race by leaking information to the robotic Cylons. This act would ultimately trigger a vicious genocide of humanity in the process.

There are also many successful book series centered on sci-fi lawyers. For example, Robert J. Sawyer's novel Illegal Alien is all about aliens landing on Earth for emergency repairs, only for one of them to be suspected of murder. A trial ensues as the world watches what happens when another species is put on trial.

Clearly, there is an audience for these types of stories. With TV specifically, the debating of the law is something that science fiction shows have naturally gravitated toward, given enough time. So why has a popular sci-fi procedural yet to come out that centers on the law entirely?

There have been plenty of other aspects of the science fiction legal system. Syfy cops are practically their own genre. We have the robot cops of Robocop and Almost Human. The time-traveling cops of Continuum, TimeCop, and Minority Report. The fringe science of the X-Files and, well, Fringe. The hammer of the law is very well represented on TV, even in space and time.

And yet, when I search for sci-fi legal procedures, I can find only one example: a failed, one-season series called Century City that dropped in 2004 and only aired four episodes before being canceled due to low ratings. The writing for the show wasn't bad, and it had an excellent cast with the likes of Viola Davis and Héctor Elizondo, but it was during the same time slot as American Idol, a ratings darling at the time, and I suspect it could not compete.

It seems strange that this nearly two-decade-old property is the only contender in this subgenre. I have no evidence for this, but I suspect that the failure of this TV show, which is mostly coincidental, has become a reason why this subgenre has not been tried more. Studio executives like a "sure thing," and they are not going to greenlight another sci-fi lawyer entry if the last one was a failure.

Unfortunately for us, that means the closest we will get to the sci-fi lawyer is one-off episodes of Star Trek.

In conclusion, your honor

Unlike police shows, which currently have countless police sci-fi shows on the air — the Beforeigners, Mrs. Davis, The Ark, and even Andor, if you consider that The Imperial Security Bureau is an intelligence agency — there are no other law science fiction procedurals in the wings. The closest is an Apple TV+ movie called Dolly that is not out yet, about a robotic "companion doll" charged with killing its owner only to claim it is not guilty, and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, an MCU property on Disney+ that is more about satirizing the superhero genre than using technology to discuss modern-day problems.

And that's unfortunate because unlike cop shows, which are all about preserving the status quo, legal shows are, at least on the surface, about challenging it, providing us a window on how things could be. As one character monologues in Century City: "…[the law is about] the way things run. What society looks like. Whether this little boy lives or dies."

Law shows are at their best when they are making direct commentaries on society, serving as mini debates on the pressing issues of our time. Science fiction can heighten that premise by using technology to exaggerate the problems that come with current beliefs. These two genres fit so well together. The pilot of Century City, for example, was all about using cloning technology to skewer the pro-life argument, and it didn't feel strange or out of place.

Technology has advanced so much since 2004: this area is ripe for so many new stories coming to you, one case at a time.