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Some peoples lives are worth more than others.
In the context of American society one of the deciding factors of how much your life is worth is determined by the colour of your skin. Here in Canada a similar skin tone gradient applies as being First Nations in Canada gets you the special police attention you don’t deserve. Bonus features of being in First Nations in Canada include (but are not limited to), poverty, limited access to potable water, and an hostile educational system. Make no mistake, we have much to do in Canada to address the needs of our people. We have a Canadian Highway of Tears that sullies our escutcheon and is indicative of the racism that still permeates our society.
The inherent racism present in Canada pales before the horrendous shitshow that is running south of the border. Racial divisions and discrimination represent a clear and present danger to fabric of the civil society of the United States (necessarily so). The scale of protests against the racial violence of the white establishment is increasing – fuelled by social media that circumvents mainstream media and offers a small gory window into the lives of black people who are being murdered by the security apparatus of the state.
I cannot imagine the horror of witnessing your partner being shot to death in your car, having to be polite to the individual that just inflicted moral wounds on our loved one while having your child witness the entire blood spattered episode from the backseat.
…
Violence breeds violence.
The unidirectional nature of the violence was reversed as an individual who proclaimed his hatred for white police, killed five white police officers in Dallas. The shooter was a reservist and had seen a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Lives are being lost because we have tied how much humanity you’re allotted to the colour of your skin.
Madness. It is sheer madness that we have allowed our societies to be shaped by racism and that the status quo is in fact racist. Is this series of murders in the US the tipping point? It certainly seems like people have had enough and are willing to entertain a large spectrum means to achieve their ends. It should be (like the constant stream of black people being murdered by police hasn’t been) a wake up call to the American congress and its legislative position on systemic racism and gun control. Henry Giroux paints a darker picture when he says:
“In the increasingly violent landscape of anti-politics, mediation disappears, dissent is squelched, repression operates with impunity, the ethical imagination withers, and the power of representation is on the side of spectacularized state violence. Violence both at the level of the state and in the hands of everyday citizens has become a substitute for genuine forms of agency, citizenship, and mutually informed dialogue and community interaction.”
The response of the law makers will tell the tale though, because the disconnect between public opinion and public representatives is being brought into stark relief. Congress has been mostly bought and paid for – but they have to at least look like they are serving the needs of the public on occasion, will the murder of five police officers stir the sycophants into action? I really don’t know, because getting reelected seems to override important qualities of being a decent human being. Qualities like empathy, compassion, and morality seem strangely missing when it comes to societal issues that threaten idea of moving toward a just society.
The cynical side of me contemplates this question: Would the US have gun control if members of Congress were similarly subjected to the murder/assassination program the rest of America is being subject to?
It is a good test.
“How We Reached the Point Where We Can’t Hear Each Other” is a article on Counterpunch by Joseph Natoli. I’ve excerpted some of the beginning bits for context, but the best is when he focuses on what is happening in Education and how people are taught to think these days. I’m also a fan of his borrowing of radical feminist methodology that focuses on the the material reality of the situation and the naming of the problem. I heartily recommend you read the full article, as it suggests reasons why we are becoming less social despite ‘social’ media and the corrosive effect that identity politics, one of the crown jewels of post-modern theory, is having on our society.
[…]
“The intent of a past analog world to put us all on the same page so we could all direct ourselves in common to our common, societal problems is something now disseminated into an infinitude of self-designed enclaves. We have connectivity between the like-minded, or opinionated, but not conjunction which Bifo Berardi defines “as a way of becoming other.” (And: Phenomenology of the End, 2015)
If you want to reflect beyond the entrapment of your own personal experiences and the personal opinions derived from such, you are desiring something that has been superseded.
If you want not to be the blind man who feels the tail of an elephant and pronounces the elephant to be shaped like a snake, you are hoping for a door that leads out of the room of your own limited experience.
Unfortunately, there is no longer any need to leave that room because cyberspace has designed the whole world to be your room. You can blog, tweet, text. Video, emoji your reflections online without any intent to augment social knowledge or understanding or to encounter a counter-punch that will cause you to adjust your views.”
[…]
“We exist now within narratives, not impeccable logics and sound proofs, air-tight arguments or binding adjudications. For reasons too elaborate to condense, we have accepted Nietzsche’s view of reason as a pawn of power and have retreated to our own personal reasoning.
This retreat to personal arbitration of all matters is expressed in the politics of identity, a politics concerned with the full emancipation of the individual not as defined within any cultural, religious, historical, or anthropological notion of the individual, but defined by each and every variety of individual. It is as if the individual is a knowledge within itself.”
[…]
Education is also in a special dilemma considering the mission here is get a student to put his or her personal opinions and preferences and different experiences out of sight and attend to a rationally validated collective representation of a subject.
Nathan Heller points out that elite colleges find that the cultivation of the individual is not an easy matter when students will not leave their personal “experiential authority” at the door. (“The Big Easy,” The New Yorker May 30, 2016) One is not reading to extract eternal verities, the Enlightenment dream, or to deconstruct the pretenses of those same verities. In the climate that Heller describes, no content can be permitted to transgress the personally defined identity of the reader or listener.
An Oberlin student who Heller describes as “a trans man …educated in Mexico, walks with crutches, and suffers from A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder …lately on suicide watch” objected to a discussion of Antigone without a trigger warning, i.e., characters in the play committed suicide. Identity-based oppression is responded to with a theory of intersectionality, which contends, “who knows what it means to live at an intersection better than the person there?” Thus, personal experiential authority now contends with a pedagogic tradition of minimizing the effects of personal experiential authority on objective, rational reflection.
Education attempts to respect individual arrangements of the results of critical thinking but not allow those arrangements to taint the process of critical thinking. This long standing agreement is no longer in effect. We have reached the point where we cannot engage in any way what may “trigger” our personal dislike or what may upset a private space we have self-designed. Long standing notions of both education and society are dissolving.
We now listen to our own voices and our clones in “social” media, a pathological condition that undermines much needed social and political communication and interrelationships. The way out, as with all pathologies, is to first recognize the condition, observe the point we have reached and reorient our compass.”
Teaching critical thinking in public education has always been a revolutionary activity, as this article confirms, it looks like it shall continue to be in the revolutionary category for quite some time.
How I experience the internet is vastly different depending on whether I am at work, or at home. At work, wherever I go, I experience pop-ups, obtrusive ads, and auto-play movies/noise. Let me assure you, that while teaching, having all the distracting advertising going on in the background does not help the learning experience. But meanwhile, at home I can browse the web unencumbered by any of the annoyances listed above. Pages load quickly and are appealing to read with little clutter to distract the eye and the mind. This peaceful repose is achieved primarily through the use of two program plugins that are available to the Firefox browser – Ad Block Plus and Ghostery. Ad block screens out most of the ads and Ghostery stops websites from tracking your movements and preferences as you browse on the internet (oh, and duck duck go is a nice start to increase your privacy while browsing as well). The powers that be though, are not amused by individuals taking control of their internet experience.
“Global ad spending is expected to reach $600 billion US by the end of next year, according to eMarketer, and grow at an annual rate of about five per cent until the end of the decade. Much of that growth is being fuelled by digital advertising, particularly on mobile devices.
But there was one session in Cannes where some very dark clouds managed to intrude on the sunny forecast. It was a panel devoted to the current scourge of the digital advertising industry — ad blocking.
According to a report by PageFair and Adobe, more than 200 million people worldwide have downloaded software that can block virtually all online advertising.
The number of people blocking ads increased by more than 40 per cent last year, and it is estimated that blocking cost cash-starved publishers more than $22 billion last year.”
Oh my goodness. People not wanting advertising to be part of every facet of their life, not a choice, but a scourge.
“Almost everyone in the ad industry acknowledges that most of the wounds that have led to the rise in ad blocking are self-inflicted.
Advertisers got greedy by assaulting users with too many low quality, untargeted ads, too many auto play videos, too much click bait.
Last fall, the IAB launched an initiative called L.E.A.N. Ads (light, encrypted, ad choice supported, non-invasive).
The IAB hopes that by following the L.E.A.N. guidelines, advertisers will create ads that consumers will be happy to see.”
Hmm, so we alienate people to the point where ad blocking is necessary to have a good browsing experience and then complain that ad-blocking is ‘killing’ the internet. Other entities have decided that they won’t let the user in, if ad-blocking is enabled.
“Sites like Forbes and GQ won’t allow access to their content unless users turn them off. At Cannes, Mark Thompson, the president and CEO of the New York Times, announced that his newspaper would soon be offering an ad-free edition to subscribers at a premium price.
Other publishers are appealing to their readers’ sense of fairness and justice, asking them to turn off their blockers and reminding them they are a critical part of the ecosystem that has powered the internet for the past 20 years. Without ads, there would be no free content online.”
Well, GQ and Forbes you can go frack yourself sideways as the content you produce will be reproduced elsewhere on the web without your restrictions. :) The counterpoint to this though is the insidious beast known as ‘native advertising’.
“So-called “native advertising” has been growing in popularity over the past several years. Also known as “sponsored content,” it looks and feels like editorial content, but it comes from advertisers rather than journalists.
Native advertisements can often pass through ad blocking filters because the filters don’t recognize it as advertising. Many readers seem to prefer this kind of content over traditional advertising, provided it’s properly labelled, although there’s no consensus on what constitutes proper labelling.”
Watch your daily paper, there is more this native advertising junk in there everyday. If there is a scourge to be named, it should be that of the advertising editorial or advertorial.
“But the real victims of the ad blocking surge may not be advertisers and publishers, but the “free” web itself.
The money to pay for content has to come from somewhere, and if you take advertising revenue out of the equation, readers will have to pick up the slack themselves, something they have historically been reluctant to do. Without ads, the web may be a poorer and less interesting place.”
Breaking news: The sky is indeed falling. Also: A-Booga-Booga-Booga! The heart of the very internet itself will crumble if ad-blocking continues!
The advertising industry may piss-off right the frack off with their hyperbole; starting yesterday. If the amount of stultifying drek available on the interweebs is halved tomorrow, not a soul would notice. So I say bring on the next internet apocalypse.
Something might be slightly askew with the American political process.
The new Ghostbusters Movie looks like a lot of fun. What is not so much fun, the overwhelming negative reaction to the trailer mostly by man-babies who have to get their winge on because an all female cast of a rebooted franchise is ruining their lives. But hey, take a look at the trailer and form your own (slightly framed by me) opinion on the upcoming reboot.
There. Now that wasn’t so bad now was it? To my informed readership there could be issues with the dialogue, what is considered funny, how much can one really glean for a trailer – the usual suspects when it comes to evaluating a possible film to watch.
Then there is this dude. Welcome to Ground Zero of glibly earnest misogyny. Feel free to stop the vid at any time. It doesn’t get any better.
The pattern laid out by the douche-nozzle above can be found replicated in the comment section of the movie. But before we get to that, the we should examine the numbers of the situation.
At the time of this screen capture, 877k of negative votes for this movie. Similar trends for other movies?
Evidently not, especially note the Adam Sandler, a movie crafted with all the care and attention a drunkard has while taking his mid bender shit of the day. For this toadstool of a movie, 13k people have rated it negatively. Yet, how did Ghostbusters earn so many down-votes? Could it be the threat of male-centric media dominance ever so slightly slipping way? The plaintive wails from thousands of fragile male egos, given an anonymous forum, showing how threatened they are?
Quite possibly.
I shan’t talk about the Green Lantern – its better and more humane that way.
A small sampling of the comment section:
Now before I go on my spiel, I managed to find a comment hidden in this thread that is golden as it encapsulates the phenomena at hand.
Well there you have it. Problem named. Male entitlement and the reaction to the threat of not being centre of the media universe, for just one movie. The amount of push-back over the new Ghostbusters movie is quite staggering, as it is in fact, just one summer movie and unlikely to change the dominant mode of production in Hollywood.
If we put on our sociological glasses and get our hypothesizing boots out we can appreciate the fertile ground the discussion of this movie brings about. Can we perhaps extrapolate to other venues in society that have been traditional bastions of male power and the backlash that must have been experienced by women trying to change the status quo?
Consider the amount of misogyny present, even in the small sampling presented here (you can go see much much more in actual thread if you’d like) and what does that say about about our society? I would say that despite all the hurley-burley about social justice warriors and their ilk ruining *everything* that one of the dominant themes in our constructed social existence is the hatred of women.
This hatred of women is a learned generational feature – the commenters on this trailer are of the new ‘enlightened’ generation. This is scary frakking shite we have here, because without direct attention to the processes that form this toxic hate, nothing will change. Deprogramming the patriarchal misogyny that cripples men and destroys women must be moved up the priority list (stat!). We have wasted too many generations on a system that is destroying us.
Tatsuya Ishida creates the internet comic Sinfest. Sometimes his insight hits the proverbial nail on the head.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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