Thought Portal

These men become perverse celebrities, partly because they are, of course, still alive — but also because their crimes can be framed as cautionary tales about evil sociopaths, that don’t require a reckoning with, for instance, the real effects of toxic masculinity and the violence it often leads to. This media framework in which the criminality of white masculinity is always individual, and always a shock, is especially relevant at a moment when the ongoing radicalization of white men has shown itself to be a genuine threat, and yet one that even the government has had trouble naming.

Of course stories that require grappling with cultural problems can’t easily fit into the moral imagination of tabloids and cable news, a world of individual monsters and innocent victims, and one that — in these particular tales — offers viewers and readers the promise of avenging a death, and setting their world back as it should be. Who could possibly resist?

Culture vs Copyright and how gifs help us see the difference.

Kate Wagner, aka McMansion Hell talks about this in this wonderful episode of the Hyperallergic podcast. Listen to it to get a more in-depth understanding of architecture as social dominance. 

I am not arguing that the Democratic Party or its members are particularly virtuous. A little more than a century ago, it was the Republican Party that was reliant on a diverse coalition of voters, and the Democratic Party that rode white rage to power. Rather, I am saying that when a party’s viability is dependent on a diverse coalition of voters, that party will necessarily stand for pluralism and equal rights, because its survival depends on it. And when a party is not diverse, it will rely on demonizing those who are different, because no constituency exists within that party to prevent it from doing so, or to show its members that they have nothing to fear.

The underbelly of a lot of this misrepresentation and space-taking lies with a fundamental misunderstanding of the history that much of the story it relies upon, namely that of the Salem Witch Trials. It does so because it is easy for white storytellers to envision a descendant of European witches who fled to the new world to escape religious persecution as the champion of such a story.

In reality, it was not merely witchcraft that sent the town of Salem into a Christian religious panic and doomed many of its citizens to execution by hanging, but specifically the practice of non-European, non-Christian, Black spiritual traditions.

It’s almost as if the film is afraid of making audiences uncomfortable with the reality of queer pain, and as if, from beginning to end, Mercury’s life was most meaningful in terms of what he meant to his family and to the band, rather than what he meant to himself.

To Kill a Mockingbird was not only written in an immature voice, but poured out of a mind immaturely attuned to racialized people as human beings who continue to exist when white people aren’t thinking about them. The story’s cast of white characters – Scout’s family, her neighbours, even the malevolent Ewells – are actualized and living people, each with their own motivations and desires. They, and the social realities of the 1930s South, are the novel’s subject.

Tom Robinson, on the other hand, is a cipher. A formless void into which the white imagination can project itself. We know hardly anything of his family’s grief, or their rage at the unjust society into which they were violently displaced at birth. We read nothing of the nights his mother must have wrapped her hands around her empty womb and cried out to God to save her child. What we do know is his pitiful fate at the hands of a justice system engineered to destroy him.

Tom Robinson, and the black community in the fictional town of Maycomb, are the novel’s object.

That a 58-year-old book, written from a white woman’s perspective, should supersede award-winning stories from authors who live their racial realities once they put down the pen, is an absurd notion. As is the idea that promoting better books and better storytelling amounts to censorship.

this tweet has got me thinking about one of the best critiques of a movie I’ve ever read.

And if you’re a white, relatively affluent, permanently grouchy young man with no real problems at all, it’s extraordinarily relatable. The problem comes when you’re not.

Two creators I really love are interviewed by kinda douchey hosts on two separate podcasts that I listened to in the same week.

133: Karina's Pix (with Karina Longworth) PCWC - False Knees

“ People grow up who not only don’t know how to read, a late-acquired skill among the world’s majority; they don’t know how to talk, to tell stories, to sing, to listen and remember, to argue, to pierce an opponent’s argument, to use metaphor and imagery and inspired exaggeration in speech; people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated bum of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen.”

... Knightley answered the question with unanticipated frankness: “I don’t really do films set in the modern day because the female characters nearly always get raped,” she said. “I always find something distasteful in the way women are portrayed, whereas I’ve always found very inspiring characters offered to me in historical places.” 

... , too, have come to terms with my love for period drama, especially Knightley’s. It is escapism, but of a different variety: to a place where women are the center of the narrative, and where the realities of living as an ambitious woman in a society still very much frightened of them aren’t papered over, but explored with great delight and dismay. I like the elaborate period costumes as much as anyone else, but I’m most drawn to these narratives’ refraction of the realities of our current world — its enduring obsessions with class, and propriety, and women’s performance of both — in a way that feels so much more honest and real than the vast majority of contemporary Hollywood. Yes, Keira Knightley plays variations of the same role over and over again. But that role, that fight against and periodic capitulation to a patriarchal society — it’s one so many women, myself included, recognize as our own.

I read Lolita as a teenaged girl and to me the book was always about Lolita and her pain, she was the protagonist.

It wasn’t until I saw movie adaptations that I was horrified by the destruction of her voice from the story, the view of her thru the male gaze, thru the gaze of the pedophile, thru the gaze of horny men who had turned her into an object.

“To achieve the American dream of boundless wealth, you need to stand on many other people’s backs. That’s capitalism. But how do you entice them to let you stand on their backs so you can make more money than them, and what do you owe them for that privilege?”

This article showed up in this tweet thread. It’s nice when someone can articulate uncomfortable feelings about something you used to like very much but came to realize was actually problematic. I think a lot of American media can fall into this ‘explanations for social phenomena specific to US neoliberal capitalism’ Giving people individual based solutions and explanations for structural problems. Oprah comes to mind big time.

HIGHLIGHTS from the article.

...I can’t help but think about all the authors who could speak to the topic at hand. Scholars of social movements that could describe the changing tactics and demands of women’s rights movements; philosophers that could weigh the responsibility of paying attention to current events with the desire to be happy; and sociologists that could explain why measuring everyday occurrences can change the way you think about them....

...What I get instead are positivists: data analysts, neuroscientists, and behavioral economists....

...what you believed to be true before the show started was not wrong, it just lacked the veneer of factiness....

...NPR’s podcasts depoliticize important issues by recasting them as interesting factoids to be shared over cocktails–stimulating but inherently incomplete...

...try to raise their offspring to be better cogs in the capitalist machine than they were....

...The irony on display in the Vedantam interview–and in the background of nearly every NPR podcast–is that a focus on individuals, rather than society, is exactly the sort of self-centered worldview that the hosts claim is damaging to human flourishing....

...But adding up individuals is not the same as describing structure; cognition is no substitute for sociological analysis, and big data misses what an anthropologist’s thick description might catch: the relationship between meaning and action....

...Progressive and leftist voices are at their most inspiring when they articulate all possible tomorrows; they cannot afford to get mired in positivist ennui while conservatives paint the future in their own moving, affect-driven tones....

...In short, they would misunderstand their own impact on the world the way they misunderstand just about everything else....