tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-306669122024-03-04T23:42:03.664-05:00paxactorTo my grandkids...Once, long ago, Grandpa did more than dribble and tell aimless stories.Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.comBlogger121125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-46909022150709120562023-11-25T13:05:00.003-05:002023-11-25T13:05:21.180-05:00Resignation<p> </p><p><br /></p><figure class="tv tw tx ty tz ua" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; margin: 40px 0px 0px;"><div class="ca dz l fl" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: auto; overflow: hidden; position: relative;"><div class="ub uc l" style="box-sizing: inherit; height: 0px; padding-bottom: 382.197px;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="gc n gm hm bg" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FW2myO-slp7w%3Ffeature%3Doembed&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DW2myO-slp7w&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FW2myO-slp7w%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube" style="box-sizing: inherit; height: 382.197px; left: 0px; position: absolute; top: 0px; width: 680px;" title="Elon Musk on Israel-Hamas war" width="854"></iframe></div></div></figure><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph ud ue ps uf b ug uh ui uj uk ul um un uo up uq ur us ut uu uv uw ux uy uz va jm bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="0720" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">Here, he takes an almost admirable view of the situation while at the same time ignoring the obvious. Namely that the current counteroffensive by Israel has already made that new generation of Hamas. So, the genie can’t really be put back in the bottle with some good PR, or even overt acts of mercy, in the face of IDF killing 2, 5, 10 Palestinians for every one Israeli that was killed.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph ud ue ps uf b ug uh ui uj uk ul um un uo up uq ur us ut uu uv uw ux uy uz va jm bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="d592" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">So why, then? Why does Israel proceed in this way? And the answer seems so painfully obvious, yet no one wants to just say it out loud…</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph ud ue ps uf b ug uh ui uj uk ul um un uo up uq ur us ut uu uv uw ux uy uz va jm bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="3a07" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">Israel has no hope of peace.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph ud ue ps uf b ug uh ui uj uk ul um un uo up uq ur us ut uu uv uw ux uy uz va jm bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="1f40" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">There is no ‘long term’ victory to be had in their minds. There is no undiscovered country waiting for them in the offing. Their actions are a combination of revenge, game theory and resignation. Resignation to the fact that this is how it will always be.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph ud ue ps uf b ug uh ui uj uk ul um un uo up uq ur us ut uu uv uw ux uy uz va jm bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="836a" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">Because that’s the only thing that makes sense. In the context of the occupation. In the context of “For every member of Hamas you killed, how many did you create?” Do we really think that no one in Israel burns at their country being compared to South Africa under Apartheid? That they don’t understand the bad PR of illegal settlements and the occupation? Do we really believe that they want to kill children used as shields? That they don’t bristle at having their military action against civilians drawing comparisons to Nazis?</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph ud ue ps uf b ug uh ui uj uk ul um un uo up uq ur us ut uu uv uw ux uy uz va jm bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="d0d1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">To believe any of that is either willful ignorance or just incoherent demonization borne of pain and anger. It’s not that they don’t know or don’t care. It’s that they obviously don’t think any act of mercy or gesture to the two-state solution will make a difference. They don’t believe that an autonomous, functional Palestinian state where Hamas is the elected government would be LESS of a threat to Israel. They don’t believe Hamas can be defeated by showing mercy (few people do). There is a need to destroy an enemy — Hamas. An enemy that has SWORN to destroy them. Except the only way to eliminate the threat of Hamas would be to kill every single Palestinian man, woman and child or to drive every one of them out of Israel. Neither of these are options so it isn’t a question of whether Hamas will strike again…</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph ud ue ps uf b ug uh ui uj uk ul um un uo up uq ur us ut uu uv uw ux uy uz va jm bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="c13d" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">It is just a question of when.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph ud ue ps uf b ug uh ui uj uk ul um un uo up uq ur us ut uu uv uw ux uy uz va jm bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="c570" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">If it is a question of ‘when’, do you show conspicuous restraint now, dismantle settlements and end the occupation, and the answer to the question of ‘when’ is: 5 years? Or do you proceed from the justification provided by Hamas on Oct 7, and do enough destruction to push that out to 10 years? This is the only consideration remaining. Will it be barbaric and inhumane? Yes. Will there be human rights violations? Yes — that’s what war is. That’s what it always is — regardless of whether Hamas are ‘terrorists’ or ‘freedom fighters’. ‘Right’ rarely becomes more of important than ‘might’ once killing starts.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph ud ue ps uf b ug uh ui uj uk ul um un uo up uq ur us ut uu uv uw ux uy uz va jm bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="992e" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">But this question of resignation — of this being the status quo that no one really believes can change — this is the most important part. So long as that resignation remains, Israel will show Hamas no quarter, their mercilessness will be the fertilizer that sows the soil of the Middle East, they will reap a new crop of Hamas recruits that will sprout properly in the years ahead and the whole thing will just start again. As it has so many times already.</p>Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-22716869396013148612023-07-24T16:46:00.071-04:002023-07-25T11:34:45.773-04:00Oppenheimer - American self-righteousness at its best<p>I am admittedly not fond of Christopher Nolan's aseptic, clinically-diagnosed, game-planned approach to film-making. I have a great deal of respect for people who act with method and care. I marvel at anyone with the confidence and hubris to undertake something like a theatrical motion picture and shepherd it through both writing and directing to a final creation that can be flung forth into posterity. And there is probably no easier way for a modern director to distinguish himself than by eschewing special-effect, post-production heavy filmmaking and rather, relying and elaborating upon classical technologies and methodologies of making film while consistently meeting deadlines and budgets. I'm not under the impression that I could do what Nolan has made a career of doing: creating films that defy conventions in the most mainstream way possible. He's not Hitchcock or Kubrick, but frankly no one is but also no one else is Nolan and that is an undeniable achievement. Being different in any way possible is an achievement.</p><div>Oppenheimer now I'm going to treat very harshly, if for no other reason than the collective consciousness is already lionizing this 3 hour commitment as one of the finest films of the century.</div><div><br /></div><div>But first, let's get right to the meat of the the thing. In a movie about the most momentous, ethically fraught creation mankind has ever brought into this world - the bomb that violates those everyday laws of nature that we take for granted - that unleashed the strong nuclear force and potentiates the most heinous destruction our species has ever wrought - the bomb that was actually a concern for setting ignition to the atmosphere and killing every living thing on the planet - in a three hour movie about that undertaking and the consequence of that undertaking - how much time do you think is appropriate to devote, if not for shock value then simply for the sake of giving a thorough account - how much time in that 3 hour movie should be devoted to the families or survivors of even just one of the 70,000 victims in Hiroshima or the 40,000 victims of Nagasaki - the people most directly and undeniable and practically rather than ethically or morally or hypothetically or geopolitically or biographically affected by the work at Los Alamos? Run time of 180 minutes, what would be a prudent amount of time to show the aftermath of those bombs for the purpose of adding a simple visual context to the implied horrors of the Trinity Test?</div><div><br /></div><div>Because if you said anything greater than a second, then Nolan somehow failed. In a movie, a visual medium, whose central subject is the moral question over these weapons and the back and forth discourse over the course that the world should take with their existence, whose main narrative weaves through how the our protagonist's wrestling with those questions shaped his life and reputation, Nolan somehow doesn't even bother to show even one victim of the bombs that troubled Oppenheimer so dearly that he sat in the Oval Office with the President of the United States and felt compelled to say that he felt blood on his hands for his work. He feels like he has blood on his hands in a movie that really goes out of its way to not show any blood.</div><div><br /></div><div>Clinical. Aseptic. </div><div><br /></div><div>Self-righteous. This is an American movie about an American and the significance of how he felt bad over something that America did. But showing what they did - taking the focus off of Americans achieving the impossible, and then doing the unimaginable, and then destroying each other in the race to lord fire over the rest of the world and then agonizing over what they did - that would take precious time off of the most important parts of the story - namely how Oppenheimer felt bad about being the spearhead of a program that he led enthusiastically right up until the moment of success and then, felt bad about it. He felt bad about it, let's make a movie. And let's not show one single image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let's not show one image of what a nuclear bomb does to a human body. </div><div><br /></div><div>Because that is a little too messy for a Chris Nolan film. It's a little too risky. You might feel something.</div><div><br /></div><div>I felt for this movie exactly what I felt in every Chris Nolan movie with the exception of "The Dark Knight" (and quite frankly, that was 85% because of Heath Ledger). Nothing. Dunkirk, Tenet, Inception. I can appreciate marvelous cinematography. I'm not numb to thrilling sound design. I can clearly see the care and work that went into every single scene in the movie.</div><div><br /></div><div>But did I feel sorry for Robert Oppenheimer when he went to meet Truman and Truman called him a cry-baby? No I didn't. I was confused. Not by whether or not that was a matter of historical record. But by what Nolan was hoping to make me feel there. Was I supposed to feel sorry for the protagonist, that he felt bad for being part of the project? Because I didn't. It seemed remarkable to me that a person could be so casually vulnerable with the U.S. President, confiding in him like he's a long-time friend. It seemed strange to confess guilt to someone who arguably has much more blood on his hands - a person that, if he were a halfway decent person, would probably rather not reflect upon it, reflect upon the millions of lives that he played some part in destroying simply by virtue of being the person in the chair at that point in history.</div><div><br /></div><div>If I were to feel anything in that moment other than confusion, it would be: well, you spent three years enthusiastically doing something that was apparently 'horrible' in building that bomb. If you actually feel as you say, why don't you spend 4 years doing something 'great'. Go to Japan and do missionary work. Mount your bully pulpit and tell the world of what you did and what must come next. Offset the scale. Why am I supposed to feel something about you saying that you feel bad when the screen time spent doing the horrible thing as best as you could vs the screen time of you reflecting on it being bad has a 10 to 1 ratio?</div><div><br /></div><div>Show don't tell. Show me the scene where, in an act of gratuitous self-flagellation, Oppenheimer spends the first hour looking at the after-action report of the blasts. He demurs at first from looking at the human carnage, instead focusing on the technical details of the blast and its effects. Then he picks up a picture. Looks at it. Puts it down. He's on the precipice now, between courage and cowardice - between convincing himself that the image is futile and that the image is the most important thing anyone will ever see. And then he picks it up. Really looks at what his bomb did to another person. His bomb. It's his bomb - regardless of what Truman says - this is what ownership looks like. Then he picks up another. The shame of looking away is too great. He forced himself forward at Los Alamos and he forces himself forward here. He forces himself to look. Then he picks up the film. Puts it on the projector. Hits the switch. You don't see the images on the screen. Just his expression. Just the reaction to the horrors to which his imagination didn't do justice. He did that. He had the power to stop it. And he didn't. He isn't blinking now. On and on the projector goes...On and on.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now it's real.</div><div><br /></div><div>I couldn't possibly feel anything that Nolan might have wanted me to feel because there is not one scene like that in the film. Nolan doesn't care about feeling. He's like the inverse George Lucas. Lucas cares not one whit about the quality of the acting so long as the movie stimulates you. Its almost like Nolan appreciates good acting but doesn't actually care if the movie keeps moves you at all. </div><div><br /></div><div>I'm honestly not sure what Nolan's aim was but Oppenheimer wasn't a sympathetic character in that moment in the Oval Office. He's not really an anything character. They say he's cocky - he doesn't really come off that way. They say he's a genius - Nolan doesn't do a very good job of showing him being the smartest person in the room and Damon's Groves' character makes a point of saying that genius is commonplace in the circles that he travels in - all the physicists at Los Alamos were geniuses. They say he's a man of integrity in a movie that has a subplot of his philandering. And then they make the point that he feels guilty when his ambition or his curiosity (who can be sure which) drove him to be the only consistent voice of the need to make this weapon first - to decide what to do with it first.</div><div><br /></div><div>There will be people who say that this ambiguity is meant to convey the complexity of the man. And I say the ambiguity conveys the ambiguity of whatever message Nolan might have been trying to tell. Is the message that people are complex? Well, that's profound. Is he trying to say that ambition will be the death of the species? That's not clear.</div><div><br /></div><div>Is he trying to leave you confused as to whether right and wrong even exists and that the decision to drop the bombs, like Oppenheimer himself, exists in a rapidly cycling quantum state that is neither one thing or another but rather both at the same time?</div><div><br /></div><div>Let's be honest, that's probably what he was doing. He does, after all have a massive creative mind. He's so creative that in a movie about the birth of the Atomic Age, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were besides the point. They missed the cut. The soap opera like intrigue of Lew Strauss being cock-blocked from the Cabinet by Jack Kennedy - that's what people want to see.</div><div><br /></div><div>And then this obtuse drudgery of the three stories out of sequence. Oppenheimer's reputation was left in tatters after the Gray Board hearings. His life was in ruins; his wife is furious with him for not standing up to the committee and the obvious railroading that is happening. Why won't he fight it, why won't he use his profile and platform to balance the scales? They could be destitute, they could lose their home...</div><div><br /></div><div>But does Nolan show the aftermath of the Gray Board hearing? Does he show Oppenheimer calling the White House and being denied? Of average citizens calling him a traitor to his country, of his colleagues souring upon him? Nope. It was dramatic and traumatic and devastating and Oppenheimer was never the same again. And we see nothing to confirm that. Nothing to indicate that his life was considerably worse for his politics or his misgivings. Nothing to suggest that his life was in some degree as troublesome as the peoples whose bodies were blown apart in Japan. Is that to say that the man didn't endure hardship worthy of being put on screen? Not at all. It's that Nolan didn't show any of that. Small looks from a lawyer, a shake of the hand or nod of the head from an old colleague testifying at the hearing. And then, seemingly paying off nothing, the triumphant redemption of the Fermi medal - Einstein was right. He was a pariah no more. Is this what constitutes compelling drama and animus in Nolan's world? Is this what's more important than showing even a glimpse of the rubble of Nagasaki, even in those psychedelic hallucinations that Oppenheimer would have as part of the lone artistic license that Nolan employed?</div><div><br /></div><div>I've used the word clinical. I'll move on now to the word bloodless. Let's head over to Los Alamos, the vacation resort. Where Oppenheimer is never shown to quarrel with a colleague over what direction to take. No, that's not right. Teller obviously wanted to make an H-Bomb. Teller was the lone thorn in anyone's side. But besides that lone instance of handholding and a single scene of conflict management with the team, the movie doesn't show obvious setbacks and then the elation of overcoming them through collaboration. It doesn't show someone clearly not pulling their weight and the difficulty of carrying someone important. It doesn't show one person who feels clearly superior to the others and the difficulty that comes from one person wanting to shine. In a movie about some of the smartest people in the world, all at the same place, all at the same time, all in the same field, all presumably with competing personalities, reputations, affiliations, priorities and feelings about the work, in isolation for three years from the rest of the world, all we see is them working amicably and unremarkably, without an ounce of passion or animus for each other until, suddenly the high pressure work of creating this $2 billion thing is complete and it's time to test. It was hard work that was somehow also effortless and then it was done. It is a bloodless recounting of things that flies in the face of every experience every human everywhere has ever had working with a group of people under extraordinary circumstances but Nolan manages to make it as memorable as watching paint dry.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then there is a meeting about how the Nazis are defeated and the threat of them getting there first is invalid. The conscientious scientists, wringing their hands over the weapon, say: let's consider stopping the work. But there is Oppenheimer, giving a 2 minute speech about how the work must continue. The protestations in the other direction have the weight of a waved white flag. The discussion can't even qualify to be termed a debate. "The Soviets." Good enough - let's keep making the weapon that has a greater than zero chance of burning the atmosphere away.</div><div><br /></div><div>Is Nolan just hemmed in by the story that he's adapting? Or is he endeavoring to make it even more boring and lifeless than the reality because those are the limits of his imagination? I don't want to be unkind but who would believe that a group like that could work without blow-up or disagreement, without passionate discourse over a beer or philosophical confrontation, without anything substantive or remarkable at all happening for three years? And what filmmaker other than Nolan could be content showing only the collegiality, and none of the personalities or contrasting difference of opinion that add weight and colour to the camaraderie?</div><div><br /></div><div>So we are left with a portrait of a man important and essential enough to make a movie about him. A movie that in no way highlights what made him so special that he should lead this team and do the impossible. A movie that leaves one thinking that anyone of the scientists at Los Alamos could have probably done the same given the resources and expertise at their disposal. And certainly, without the political leanings that were used to broaden the group of scientists involved in the project, the same leanings that were later used to demonize him, that other person might not have finished the bomb in time to drop in on Japan. But they almost certainly would have done so before the Soviet Union got it, so the actual aim of the project would have been similarly fulfilled.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now let's contrast all of this with the unambiguous horror story that was HBO's Chernobyl. The casual, almost indifferent attitude to the calamity. The restraint in reaching the conclusion - in slowly revealing the extent of the coming terror. The paralyzing absurdist rage at the Soviet status quo killing people with every moment of inaction and inertia. The unvoiced implications of the accident juxtaposed with the eerie ticks of a Geiger counter. The brief and indelible flash of melted skin and boiled flesh. The growing friendship between the military man and the man of science. The paranoia of being followed everywhere you go. Everything there - every moment of a family separated by a plastic sheet, of a hole in a reactor wall, of dead birds, of ionized radiation reaching for the sky - is crafted for the obvious purpose of conveying, with images, that this is the death of the world that you are witnessing - this is as serious as life gets. This is something you, as a human, should feel viscerally.</div><div><br /></div><div>Were there obscene artistic license being exercised there? Yes. But, it this a piece of entertainment? Or is it a documentary? Everything meant to give a sense of the seriousness of Oppenheimer is conveyed through dialogue. Not so much as one scene of a brief, potentially disastrous accident at Los Alamos, dramatized or embellished for the simple purpose of showing the danger of enriched Uranium or Plutonium. Not so much as a near miss? A calculation done incorrectly - an outburst from Oppenheimer as to what was at stake...</div><div><br /></div><div>Performative. Just going through the motions. Damon's Groves' character yells at a scientist that this is the most important undertaking in the history of the species. Is there anything else in this three hour movie so important or urgent that warrants yelling? A movie that ends with Oppenheimer saying to Albert Einstein that they feared that they'd destroy the world and then might have ended up accomplishing it anyways?</div><div><br /></div><div>By now, you know the answer.</div><div><br /></div><div>My enthusiasm for this movie, despite the crass and sensational (and cynical) declarations of the movie making community that this film was going to 'save' cinema from already failing Marvel movies was already low. Biopics are already difficult enough to make entertaining without employing creative license - what filmmaker could drain more blood from my face at the prospect of making a biopic than Chris Nolan? His clinical approach already makes his movies feel like documentaries. Now he's making a biopic, why the hell wouldn't that feel like a documentary?</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh and he filmed it on IMAX, too? Like...?</div><div><br /></div><div>A grown-up film for grown-ups? He's showing pointless nudity of American bodies in a movie about the people who made mutually assured destruction possible. That's okay. But showing the naked bodies of children scorched by a fireball? That's a little too grown up from a director hailed for making a war movie. Dunkirk is a movie about war, no? How can he be squeamish about that horrific honesty? How can people so easily call him an auteur while he takes no risks whatsoever?</div><div><br /></div><div>It boggles my mind. But, to be fair, I'm not sophisticated enough to appreciate Mr. Nolan. He wrote and directed a movie about Oppenheimer and did such a good job of it, I'm not exactly sure why I should care.</div>Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-24121349780520350652022-09-17T13:51:00.003-04:002023-11-25T12:36:29.751-05:00Being a man<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e6DmT2AzQc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e6DmT2AzQc</a></p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="2ac1" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">I’m old so this is much clearer to me than it is to younger men.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="e97d" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">There is a confusion, particularly in a society and era where everything is about appearance, about the idea of masculinity. Media sells it to us all the time but try not to blame them because they aren’t trying to warp people’s minds. They just want to put food on their table like the rest of us.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="4e5f" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">To women, they sell smallness and thinness as femininity. And to men they sell the idea of heroism.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="cecb" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">They say that to be masculine is not just to have a Y chromosome. It is to be remarkable and visibly so. You have to be able to demonstrate power. The power to remake the world as you see fit. The power to save people: from others and from themselves — whether they want you to or not. The idea of looking good doing it. Masculinity lies simply in the expression or potential expression of power to dominate, to conquer.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="48d7" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">That is the lie.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="a71c" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">Quite frankly, it’s a lie so pervasive that even in works that are overtly trying to challenge the deconstruction and demonization of masculinity, like Fincher’s Fight Club for example, it isn’t enough for the Narrator/Tyler to be at peace with his own internal rebellion. It isn’t enough for him to remake himself in his preferred image. It isn’t enough for him to redefine himself on his own terms. His rebellion has to change the entire world. He has to be a man of destiny. He has to have an army who worships him.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="2a70" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">He has to be the hero.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="c427" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">My counter argument to this and the one I hope any young man reading this might take a moment to think about is: don’t let the world sell you on heroism while dismissing courage. Because courage is what makes a man a man and a woman a woman. Courage is what makes a human being something better than an animal. Courage is what is at the heart of any virtue that we ascribe heroism. Heroism is often awesome to behold. Lowly courage more often than not will create an opportunity for embarrassment. Heroism is what has your jaw hanging low in the movie theater, and has you dreaming of adventure in the future. Courage can go really well, really badly and sometimes totally in-between. Heroism gets you likes and views and notoriety. Courage can be met with total indifference.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="0463" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">But one is essential and the other is merely the spectacle. Substance vs semblance.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="44ad" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">Trying to be the hero of your own story or someone else’s story without the simple courage to fall on your face, dust yourself off, ignore what others are saying, protect those you love or protect those in need of protecting is futile. Trying to be the hero without mastering the art of persevering and trying even when you can’t detect even the smallest quantum of progress is just a recipe for frustration.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="9a3c" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">We think of the heroic masculine figure as this lone wolf, independent thinker, unburdened by the needs or fears of others. But the ultimate courageous figure in the world is a father: someone who sacrifices for others, protects others, provides for others, cooperates with others to create strength in numbers even though that man could take his shot at beating the whole world into submission and yelling the whole world into silence.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="cee6" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">He could probably survive on his own. He could probably hit someone over the head and stand on top of the heap until someone bigger and meaner came and hit him over the head. But instead of a simple, brutish appeal to might, he can win the whole world over by trying to be right. By trying to be fair and by having the courage and strength to admit when he’s wrong so that he can stand on the side of justice again. The type of person practiced in being strong — so practiced in being strong that they become practiced in being courageous and taking the necessary risks that others would fail to take. The type of person that is so strong that they can afford to share their strength with others.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="4761" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">Someone who tries even when they are afraid, daring to be better both for themselves and for the sake of others. For a victory greater and longer lasting than standing on the top of the heap today.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="93fe" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">At a certain point, we all might meet someone who is like this. They will do something remarkable and meaningful for us, even when we know they should have been afraid to do it. Some of these people will be our fathers or our mothers. We might call them our hero.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="fe17" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">But long before they were a ‘hero’, it all just started from the risky, dirty, unglamourous practice of being brave when they didn’t have to be. Of thickening their skin, believing that what they were doing mattered and pushing forward to the future.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="e15d" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">That is what it means to be a man to me. Someone strong enough that they can afford to be generous with their strength, and take risks that other people can’t for the benefit of the entire world. Every single person in the world that I have ever called a man had one thing in common: they showed up and tried to be this way more than they failed at it.</p><p class="pw-post-body-paragraph kt ku ev kv b kw kx ky kz la lb lc ld le lf lg lh li lj lk ll lm ln lo lp lq eo bj" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="36c6" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #242424; font-family: source-serif-pro, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 32px; margin: 2.14em 0px -0.46em; word-break: break-word;">And if everyone understood masculinity that way, I honestly think the world would be a better place.</p>Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-42917211624885123922021-12-23T01:52:00.001-05:002021-12-23T01:52:09.666-05:00Academedia: The Rise of Skywalker, part 2 – nostalgia baiting, the hard work of character integrity, story-showing vs story-telling & the solution that causes more problems <br />
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">It is an interesting question - because I can see the
danger. </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">There is the danger that we don't open our minds up to allow the stories to dance in the wind - flutter and change. </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">There is the danger that we make our heroes out to be infallible,
out to be unreasonably above reproach. That we viciously try to protect
their image in fear of admitting that they are as weak and terrified as the
rest of us. But there is also the danger of simply denying how good a thing
is based on the childish cynicism that things that look good on the outside
must obviously be too good to be true. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">That thinking is often a superficial appreciation of things and beings. Just because something
seems easy doesn't mean that it is easy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">The creative mind, charged with continuing a story that they haven't any passion for and didn't create themselves, comes to the crossroads. There are characters that are plants - with arcs and stories still to be told. And there are characters that are rocks - formed and mostly fashioned with only the smallest room for dramatic change.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; word-spacing: 0px;">Ben Kenobi was a rock. Daenerys </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">Targaryen </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: 13.5pt; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">was a plant.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Rian Johnson seems to be of the mind that 60 year old Luke Skywalker is more like 18 year old D</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">aenerys </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">Targaryen</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;"> than like Ben Kenobi.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Is that fair?</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">This was the issue that I had with "The Dark Knight Rises". Ultimately it is a simple matter of opinion: could someone who could be broken by
the death of a friend become Batman in the first place? </span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Or could someone
live their life the way Ferris Bueler did and then reach their middle years and
look back on their life with regret and dispair?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">I think many people would like
to think the answer is yes. But from what I know of people who live life
at these extremes on a regular basis, the answer is usually no. I think
that someone like Ferris Bueller, who is kind and charming and smart and has
perspective, and sees the big picture of what matters (a person that is willing
to ditch school to have fun with his friends) is someone who might get knocked
on his butt, might over reach and fall short. But a person with that
outlook will never wake up one day and say "What's the point?"
They'll never say that because too many good things will always accompany the
bad things.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">I think someone who has enough
ego and pain to try and single handedly take on the criminal underworld and
expose themselves to those risks without any material reward, someone who
literally gets beat up every night to see something through, is no longer
making decisions about their life. This is his life - his life is service
to Gotham. They are a rock. Until Gotham is a normal city, his work isn't done.
Every new tragedy is nothing more than a log on the fire - fuel to further his
obsession.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://youtu.be/w2Jdi2NWq0w?t=713">So then someone comes along and says - Boring! I don't want to see the story of someone who makes everyone around them feel happy being happy. I want to tell the story of how someone who wins big deals with being a loser. I don't want to tell the story of the Batman who wins - pushes forward through anything. I want to tell the story of the Batman that is broken - the Batman that loses. That's how I'll be different.</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">But, here's the thing: loser is
isn't a fact. Loser, winner - those are mindsets. People who lose a
lot - people who are unaccustomed to good things - expect bad things and their
expectation snowballs with circumstance and chance to affect their
choices. People who win a lot expect good things and expect good things
to replace bad things with hard work and time. There are very, very few
losses and very, very few wins big enough that they can on their own
fundamentally change the mindset of one who has lost much or one who has won
much.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Or, as a Jedi master once said,
"Your focus determines your reality."<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Mind you, none of this is helped by the fundamental simillitude between the stories - Ben Kenobi - the old Jedi master that went into hiding and exile actually "killed" his best friend, who'd he'd spent the better part of 10 years training as a mentor before fighting side by side with him as a brother. Yet still he had hope for the future watching over Luke - he wasn't broken, merely biding. </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Luke - </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">the old Jedi master that went into hiding and exile after making</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> the same mistake as his father, pursuing the quick and easy path, nearly killing his nephew;</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> Luke - </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">w</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">ho </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">actually</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">triumphed in reaching his father where Ben failed - gives up on everything.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">So the urge to be different for
the sake of being different isn't just childish and egotistical. It is
also at odds with simple, demonstrable principles of characterization. I think it is very easy to try and be
subversive and claim the mantle of "edgy/daring" by simply writing
characters out of character in this way and then saying that you are deepening
the character. But without showing the specifics of that process, it
would be like seeing Sansa Stark at the beginning of ASOIAF and then seeing her
again sentencing Littlefinger to death and saying that it was somehow
congruent. No - for those two people to be congruent would require a
massive amount of obstacles and trauma and situations that would warp and forge
that person to be someone so dramatically different. Game of Thrones did
that and only by seeing the process can the product be believed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">And so the transformation of Bruce
from 'I'll save Gotham by myself if need be - I'll be the bad guy if need
be" to "I've lost Rachel I have nothing worth fighting for" when
Rachel wasn't the thing that he wanted most in the first place and of Luke from
"I have faith that there's love inside of my father who wears all black
and chops people in half with his laser sword and thus there is love inside of
everyone" to "I tried to kill my nephew before he turned rotten, but
it was a mistake and I've lost everything so I should get out of here before I
make even more of a mess" - they are so jarring that everything else that
follows seems to follow off of a faulty premise. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">The wonder of seeing <a href="https://youtu.be/XJhOpY7bh6s?t=537">Luke passing through the flames to
face the First Order alone</a> - a redemption of a sort for having left the
fight, a triumphant overcoming of his demons - could be beautiful. As constructed however, in this artificial ham-fisted way, a shoehorned story of Luke’s self-betrayal, disillusionment and redemption all in the span of one movie, it becomes
offensive and banal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s overcrafted – it’s
a moment that Rian Johnson wants you to see as beautiful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it could only be beautiful by ignoring
that he left the fight in the first place - by ignoring everything that we know
about the character before Rian Johnson got hold of him. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The person who 'stayed on target' during the
trench run, seeing it through to the very end. The person that rushed
into the lion's den on Bespin to save his friends - contrary to the urgings of
two Jedi Masters. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">We know what Luke’s greatest fear is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We saw it put on screen in 1981.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His greatest fear is becoming Vader – falling
to the dark side.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Taking the quick and easy path.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Johnson wants us to take him at
face value that the person who had his hand cut off and chose falling to his
death over falling to the Dark Side could one day raise his lightsaber to slice
his nephew in half. He wants us to believe that the person who left no
one behind and went back to Tatooine - the place in the Universe he hated most
- to save the man that saved his life at Yavin, could go <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/949v5v/luke_mourns_han_deleted_scene_how_did_anyone/">this entire movie without a moment's reflection on the death of his friend at his student's hand</a>. Johnson demands we believe that Luke is who he says he is
when we have so much evidence to the contrary. And, as a result, his
effort at 'redeeming' Luke can't be seen on its own merits. It can only
be regarded as a self-serving ploy by Johnson - a convoluted play for
sophistication made off the heels of a baseless demand that we accept this
version of the character rather than a thoughtful organic reflection on who the
character actually is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Simply put, considering Rian
Johnson thinks himself a storyteller, the chasm between Luke Skywalker
and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_jyaFejhg">'Jake' Skywalker</a> seems
like a tall tale - perhaps even a tale worth telling. But he doesn't actually tell
that tale. He tells us about one night that was apparently so momentous
that every other moment - everything that we saw of him on screen previous to
this movie - was more or less insignificant.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">That's easy to believe in a
simple life. It's a much harder sell to believe that any one moment could
be so momentous in a life full of momentous moments.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Maybe it is possible to make it
seem as though Luke could be utterly broken and defeated. But it would
always be a tall order to make it believable that Luke, a person that grew up
without a family, without parents of his own, could turn his back on his
family, in a time of need, when he created the need through his own actions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">So the question is: could
someone who could turn their back on Leia, and Han, and Chewie and Ben, also be
the person who risked his life and his soul against the Emperor and Vader to
protect them? The person who could walk, unarmed, into the clutches of
pure evil?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">That's a story that I'd be
interested in seeing. But Rian Johnson isn't interested in that
story. He just wants to benefit from suggesting that it happened.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-47553736499446872632021-08-04T01:44:00.039-04:002021-12-23T01:11:23.917-05:00An interesting observation re: the prequels<p>I had an interesting thought just now watching Infinity War again.</p><p>Namely - you're sad to see your heroes vaporized.</p><p>Revolutionary, I know. But here is the extension of that thought.</p><p>In Episode 3, when the Jedi are literally being slaughtered en masse: betrayed by their soldiers and comrades that they fought side by side with...you, as an audience, feels...</p><p>Nothing.</p><p>No animus. No regret. No empathy, no pity. You feel absolutely nothing. Shot in the back, tossed down a cliff. You shrug.</p><p>You feel nothing for two reasons. One, obviously, is that the average Jedi in the prequel trilogy has as much backstory as a stormtrooper. They're nameless, faceless, personality-less. You don't know anything about them that could possibly cause you to relate to them in any way. They are just extras in funny robes that happen to have glow-wands in their hands. You spent 30 years thinking that Jedi were the baddest mofos of them all, and then the Geonosis fight disabuses you of that notion and Lucas turns them into cannon fodder. They're running into blaster fire like infantry men in WWI facing machine guns for the first time.</p><p>And two, and more startling is: George Lucas doesn't show them doing heroic things. He doesn't seem to have any interest in driving home the point that the extermination of the Order is a bad thing. Or at a minimum a less worse thing than the Sith takeover of the Republic that leads to an authoritarian regime that starts building planet destroying superweapons. </p><p>Ki-Adi Mundi, Plo Koon, Shaak Ti. Granted Star Wars has never been about large ensemble casts. But the Jedi High Council are apparently supposed to be the wisest, most formidable people in the entire Galaxy - they ARE the Avengers. And not only do you not see them do amazing, heroic shit, most of them get a single line in three movies. In three movies, the Jedi Council overtly save fewer lives than Superman did in Man of Steel, a movie notorious for Superman not really giving a crap about massive losses of life. And they are the best of the best. So what pathos are we supposed to muster for nameless Jedi number 217 when his number comes up and the clone troopers go "Sonny Corleone on the causeway" on his non-descript ass?</p><p>This is the nagging curiosity that has followed me about the prequel series. Not that it is bogged down by trade disputes and diplomatic intrigue - Game of Thrones pulls that off. But rather that, really, in a series defined by archetypes of good and evil, the prequels don't define anything very well. You aren't really rooting for anything while watching the car crash that is Anakin in slow motion.</p><p>This curious bloodlessness in a story that is ostensibly about the downfall of a legend due to his hubris, his corruption by insidious forces and a forbidden love is not merely down to the absurd acting that Lucas settled on in his pictures. It is also typified in three narrative decisions that mystify me even to this day whenever I should chance to see a couple of scenes here and there.</p><p>The first is obviously the problematic reality of Palpatine and Sidious being the same person. It would have been so simple. The story is about the Clone Wars. What stretch of the imagination would it have been for Sidious to have cloned himself, used the Force to plant suggestions in the mind of his clone, and assiduously opened door after door, through manouever and assassination, until his puppet clone was the Supreme Chancellor? Created the moral quandary of a person, more or less innocent, being used beyond their control, to do the bidding of evil? How do the Jedi prove it? Does the Clone find the will to resist? What machinations lead to the discovery of the truth? The compromise of the Supreme Chancellor, fighting for the soul not just of Anakin but also Palpatine, creates the emotional, ethical, practical and the Light vs Dark side conflict that opens the mind and frankly deepens the weight of the Jedi's actions.</p><p>What do we get instead? Palpatine and Sidious are one in the same, and the Jedi are just fucking rubes. Literally the most powerful Dark side user in the history of the Galaxy is sitting right next to them - and they are clueless. Now you don't want to say that it runs contrary to the often self-contradictory canon represented by the Original Trilogy. And with the inclusion of Midichlorians, Lucas basically reduces your strength in the Force to a number on a blood test - no doubt Palpatine had all those numbers altered. But you have Palpatine saying that Luke is strong in the Force - something that he can evidently sense - so it gives the strong, if not unmistakable, impression that yeah, someone who is sensitive to the Force can sense when someone else is sensitive to the Force. And yet Sidious is working side by side with the High Council - FOR YEARS - and they have nary an inkling?</p><p>What benefit could the insight provided by the Force be if someone that sinister, that evil as to be plotting mass executions of people, could go completely under the radar? If that kind of hatred could be totally masked?</p><p>It raises the question why Sidious didn't just become a Jedi serial killer. If they can't sense him or see him coming, what danger was there in doing some if not most of the dirty work himself?</p><p>The second dovetails into the first and at the same time is a separate entity. So the Jedi are rubes. They take custody of a clone army that happens to be available at the same time that galactic hostilities break out. Yoda - least and most dumbass of them all - is incredulous when Obi-Wan calls the Battle of Geonosis a victory. "Victory?!?" he says. We're clearly being played. The Clone Wars is part of that game.</p><p>Fine. Lucas doesn't revisit this simple idea that this whole thing is fishy, an idea birthed literally on the first day of the Clone Wars, until Anakin tells Mace that the Sith Lord that they've been looking for since Naboo is Palpatine.</p><p>But Dave Filoni does. Episode 10 of the 6th season of The Clone Wars, "The Lost One" finally pulls at the loose thread, when the Jedi reveal that Dooku was behind the creation of the Clone Army. </p><p>So just mostly rubes.</p><p>But Filoni is hogtied. The movies are still the movies. Order 66 still has to happen. So what did the Jedi do when having ultimately discovered that their mortal enemy programmed and gifted them the army that they are trusting with their lives?</p><p>"If this was known," says Mace, "public confidence in the war effort, the Jedi, and the Republic would vanish. There would be mass chaos."</p><p>"Cover up this discovery, we must," Yoda concludes.</p><p>Uhhh...what?</p><p>You have two armies. One is working for your enemy. The other was given to you by your enemy. Mass chaos is already here. I get that it's a different galaxy and it happened a long time ago and they've never heard of a Trojan Horse. A gift given to you simply to destroy you when your guard is down. But when Mace is saying that he senses a plot to destroy the Jedi in Revenge of the Sith - yet according to Filoni they already knew that they couldn't quite trust their own army...honestly, it just kinda hurts your head.</p><p>You've already lost. The only question is how many people are going to die before you can get the target off your back.</p><p>It just seems like a small amount of thought would lead to the conclusion that if both of two options - fight with the Clone Army or abandon the Clone Army - will lead to defeat, the only chance you have is to do something that your enemy wouldn't expect you to do. But there's no discussion of this, no depiction of the Jedi thinking in strategic or unconventional terms even as they collectively get fitted for the noose.</p><p>Maybe its supposed to be some expression of the calcified nature of Jedi culture. But through Lucas's insistance on characterizing the Jedi as borderline developmentally delayed and Filoni's engaged but irrational characterization, we again get this sense that the Jedi aren't allowed to have a brain. Who is the council member that agrees that we should conceal the truth of the clones from the public but quietly look into dismantling their programming? Who is the one who concludes that the future of the Jedi is at risk and the Younglings have to have a means of escape?</p><p>Who's the Jedi who insists that with an existential threat to the Order upon them, every Jedi has a right to know that they are at risk and what is at stake?</p><p>The Jedi are like a group of German Jews in 1940 who've been informed that the Holocaust is coming and are concerned about public support and appearances. It's not a reflection of what the Order canonically stands for. It's just poor characterization and poor writing, diametrically opposed to how real people would act in an equally precarious position.</p><p>You can feel the tension of this incredulity in the last lines of Filoni's 6th season, when Yoda admits that this war is probably already lost and that they have to play for a different, longer victory. It's meant to foreshadow "A New Hope" that the Sith can't anticipate and the only victory that is left to them. But again, if you know that a war is going to be lost by doing what you are doing, doesn't that suggest that you should do something, anything different rather than pinning your hopes to 'something that might happen years from now that I may have seen during a hallucination'? Filoni is trying desperately to redeem the High Council in a canon that can't allow that to happen. And in his effort to make the Jedi 'not-complete-idiots' in the Lucas vein, he causes them to be something even worse: incompetent and, effectively, accomplices in their own annihilation.</p><p>But these are mere quibbles, no? How can they compare? What are they - nothing, really - in comparison to maybe the least scrutinized, most unheralded decision that a Jedi has ever made on film? A decision that has so much weight and magnitude, so much potential for the saga at large, that its insignificance to Lucas and to most Star Wars 'fans' speaks to a level of obliviousness that really spelled the death of the entire franchise to me. </p><p>What plot point, line of dialogue or setpiece can speak more to the value of Star Wars as a cultural product than the momentousness, the ineptitude shown, the callous disregard for the decision by Qui-Gon to use the Force to determine Anakin's fate.</p><p>In a game of chance that was to decide the freedom of Anakin or his mother, Shmi, Qui-Gon Jinn - 'Grey' Jedi, wise master, & devotee of 'the Living Force' (whatever the fuck that means, honestly it sounds like something that a Jedi came up with while high on weed)...</p><p>a) allowed the die cast to roll and land on its own, leaving the outcome up to the uhhh...will of the Force?</p><p>b) accused Watto of using a loaded die, proved that he was cheating, and used the attempt at deception as a pretext to free both mother and child from the yoke of bondage?</p><p>c) decided that the will of the Force was not something that was determined by the conventions of the Jedi Council or the Senate and started a rebellion on Tattoine to crush Hutt rule, destroy the odious practice of slavery in the Galaxy for all times and serve as an iron clad indelible memory to the impressionable Anakin Skywalker of the Jedi's commitment to equality and justice?</p><p>or </p><p>d) used the Force to roll the die in his favor to secure the release of the boy, not his mother, separating the child from the only family he'd ever known to much more easily satisfy his own selfish desire to train the boy as a Jedi as a vindication of his belief that the child was the Chosen One, to assuredly thumb his nose at the Council and their conventions of not teaching a child past a certain age, to definitely abandon his commitment of mentorship to his current padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi and without knowing, condemning Shmi Skywalker through his decision to her eventual, painful and untimely death on Tattoine which led to Anakin's start down the Dark path that would be the final precipitating factor in the annihilation of the Jedi order and the installation of a Sith Regime bent on everlasting rule resting upon the threat of ultimate mass destruction in the form of a planet destroying superweapon.</p><p>d) sounds bad...and is bad, and is the correct answer.</p><p>Did I watch the same movie as everyone else? In what world would using the Force in such an obviously self-serving way not be a path to the Dark side? You could say anything. You could say that I only cheated in this hand of cards because the money that I'll make will partially go to charity. That I only warped your mind so that I could have sex with you so that I could relieve some personal stress that I would have otherwise had to relieve by getting into a fight with someone. You could justify anything after the fact as the lesser of some other evil.</p><p>It really isn't that hard to believe that Qui-Gon's decision, should Anakin have discovered it later on, would have, could have, should have, played a massive, believable role in his descent to evil. Feelings of guilt that he left his mother. Compounded by anger that his life was worth saving to the Jedi but hers apparently wasn't. Compounded by resentment that the Jedi wouldn't let him save her himself all those years of his own training. Compounded by fear of Padme's impending demise. The noble Qui-Gon cheating in a game of chance that ultimately condemned his mother would be a fracture to every idea that Anakin ever had of the Jedi - they'd just be fucking hypocrites. They didn't believe in the will of the Force; the Force was merely a tool to make their own will a reality - just like the Sith. The only difference between them is that the Jedi tell themselves that they have good causes. Whether Watto was himself cheating would be totally fucking irrelevant. Anakin was led to believe that the Jedi were above that...that being a Jedi was a calling worth abandoning his mother.</p><p>You can't tell me that Sidious dropping the fact of Qui-Gon's act on Anakin wouldn't have been a plausible push. A wedge between him and Obi-Wan who never told him, to protect the memory of his murdered master. The shit writes itself.</p><p>But that decision, so artful, so human, so pointed (I mean, Lucas really just didn't have to put it in there) amounted to...nothing. Not so much as a single mention of it ever again. I just shake my head. I thought Star Wars was supposed to be about good and evil. How can George Lucas have no interest in whether or not that decision was right or wrong? It's one thing to let the die fall as cast. It's another to deny that the decision should be left up to a roll of the dice. But to make the decision yourself? Decide who should be free and who should remain a slave? Decide based on which one of them is more useful to you?</p><p>I mean, I get the Jedi are dicks but...come on?!?</p><p>And so it is that, the lasting impression that modern audiences have of the Jedi Order, the bulwark against...well, fucking Death Stars, is that they were 1) kinda dicks that got what they deserved and 2) so bad that Luke Skywalker eventually warmed to the idea that they should go extinct.</p><p>A view that always made me shake my head. Kinda like blaming the Holocaust on European Jewry. They got outmanoevered by someone working a plan that was hundreds of years in the making. Give Sidious some credit.</p><p>Like, okay, maybe the Jedi are dicks. Maybe they shouldn't be fighting in wars, or condoning slavery, or accepting clone armies that appear out of nowhere or trying to be an extension of the Democratic Galactic Republic...</p><p>So by extension, it would be better if say, the Trade Federation and an endless droid army allowed part of the Republic to secede? But um...if that massive Separtist army succeeded in seceding, who's to say that they don't take that army and just, take over the Galaxy, putting a swift end to any democratic persuasions. Are the Jedi just supposed to sing a song and stand off to the side while that happens? Are they not supposed to defend the status quo, if that status quo stands for some modicum of law and order and representation?</p><p>And let's say that status quo makes an uneasy alliance with the Hutts and turns a blind eye to slavery in their systems. Are the Jedi supposed to start a war for moral reasons when the rest of the Galaxy doesn't care?</p><p>And if the Jedi are supposed to fight against the Separtists and defend the democratic status quo, are they not supposed to use a Clone Army that is waiting for their command?</p><p>And if the Jedi aren't supposed to be affiliated with the Senate and the established rule, do they fashioned themselves as outside of the rule of law? Above it? Are they supposed to be judge and jury, guided by the Force?</p><p>I get that they are standoffish and dicks. But remember, Yoda is like 900 years old. He could be the wisest person in the universe and still make the mistake of thinking he's seen it all. Mace Windu can kill anyone in the galaxy one on one. Why exactly should he take shit from a politician? They can read your thoughts and your emotions. They know when you are sleeping and they know when you are awake. They literally have command of the forces of nature at will.</p><p>If you had those powers, you'd probably be a little bit of a dick yourself. The real question isn't whether you'd be a dick. The real question is whether having all that power and insight and knowledge wouldn't just cause you to see other people as so inferior that you came to the conclusion that you should be at the top of the food chain. That it was your right to rule over all of them.</p><p>Which is exactly what the Sith think. That the Jedi don't immediately or even eventually think and act that way makes them, frankly, fucking saints. Actually, real saints did more questionable things with less opportunity to do them than a Jedi ever did. That would put them a tier above saints. </p><p>Maybe we should call that tier "laser-sword space wizard" tier. Or, like, Jedi, or something.</p><p>Really think about it. One - ONE - Sith Lord was able to use the Force to manueover his way to being the 'legally' elected Chancellor of the Republic. That's what it looks like when a Force user wants to be on top and plays nice.</p><p>What could the Jedi - any Jedi or the order as a whole - do, left to their own devices, if power was their endgame?</p><p>That's the reality of the Jedi. Superman. Someone who has the power to rule the world spending his time saving cats from trees. Serving as an example to others when, by all right, they should just expect everyone to bend the knee.</p><p>It would take a writer as good as George Lucas to make Luke Skywalker - a hero that defined an entire generation. Incredibly it would also take a writer as bad as George Lucas, as derivative as JJ Abrams and as vainglorious as Rian Johnson for the entire world to be unsure whether Luke and the Order that he stands for is actually heroic. To feel absolutely no way about a Jedi being shot in the back and shoved off a cliff.</p><p>But the mad bastard and what's left of Disney Star Wars actually pulled it off.</p>Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-76713202461162901942021-05-27T01:34:00.004-04:002021-05-27T01:34:36.327-04:00Last Jedi - final thoughts<p> Not at all untenable. Just not rigorous. As a long-time EU consumer, I think I can add perspective to why the 'novel' interpretation of the Force as 'agnostic' is problematic and why TLJ is seen as a good movie but a bad SW movie by people like myself.</p><p><br /></p><p>I got a little long winded.</p><p><br /></p><p>TLDR: Rian Johnson's mantra of letting the past die seems like an appropriate emo-juvenile protest for Kylo Ren, wildly uncharacteristic for Luke (and a meta-tongue-in-cheek burn to old fogeys like me) but in trying to change the Star Wars paradigm and shake things up it raises the simple questions of how much actually changed and why no one in the Star Wars universe thought to shake things up that way before.</p><p><br /></p><p>If there is a thesis to TLJ, I would think that RJ makes it pretty clear that it is to let the past die. Luke flipping his saber over his shoulder, Kylo actually saying the words, Yoda burning down the tree. But anyone who's read the EU knows that all sort of Jedi have tried to break out of the dichotomy of light and dark and all sorts of people have tried to make the Force to be like a dispassionate tool rather than an all-consuming devotion leading to the creation of these "religious sects" called the Jedi and the Sith. Some call this the path of the 'Grey Jedi' (Qui-Gon Jinn being representative of this line of thinking via the 'Living Force'), but of course putting 'Jedi' in the term is somewhat self-defeating.</p><p><br /></p><p>The Force has had many, many interpretations but one of the core interpretations (one that I think even RJ doesn't really dismiss) is that it is like the Super Soldier Serum in Captain America. It makes the good really good in proportion to what you do for others and it makes the bad really bad in proportion to what you do for yourself and your own satisfaction and there is a fundamental asymmetry to how you progress. Just by its nature, gaining a "well-developed command of the Force" by using the Force in a dispassionate way is very difficult and time-consuming while gaining that same command using it in a passionate way allows you to accomplish things faster, easier, feeds into your passion and makes it easier to go to that well the next time. It becomes an addiction and feedback loop - power as a solution that leads to power the problem leading to a need for more power.</p><p><br /></p><p>By its nature then, or at least every major interpretation of it (including the Original Trilogy) the dark side of Force doesn't lend itself to moderation. It isn't something that you can safely dabble in. The spiritual offset necessary to balance yourself again after even one use of the dark side is severe. It's like a drug that hooks you. And so it is that while the so-called Grey Jedi could sometimes make morally ambiguous decisions, they never made outright immoral decisions because, again, using the Force is a lot easier and more seductive when it is driven by your anger, rage, selfishness, etc.</p><p><br /></p><p>But anger, rage, selfishness ... these are things that normal people feel and act on all the time. So if you are one of the first students of the Force, and understand this dynamic, what is the solution to the problem of normal people of varying Force-sensitivity emerging all throughout the galaxy? Kill them the moment they are detected? Just hope that some of them won't realize that with focus and concentration they can move things with their minds & put thoughts into other people's heads? Hope that if they do figure that out that they never move things with their minds or put thoughts into other people's heads when angry? That's just wishful thinking. Left to its own accords, 99/100 people would come to believe that their Force power came from anger and rage, and pursuing that power would lead them to become ever more angry and rageful. Now you have 99/100 crazed wizards running around.</p><p><br /></p><p>No - after enough disasters - there would slowly and surely come a consensus that the risk of leaving these people out in the wild is too much of a danger to the communities around them. Appeals for individual freedoms would start to wage a losing battle against the need to curtail the constant emergence of these supernatural threats. From early on in life, these people would need training and direction and to adopt a very specific type of lifestyle, an almost paradoxical balancing act - one that was both devoted to the service of others and yet dispassionate enough to avoid the temptations of the dark side. And in contrast to that there would rise another consensus. An antagonistic consensus. One that reflexively objected not just to the institutionalization of the Force but also to the implicit mission of eradicating the Dark Side in all its forms. But the catch-22 is: anyone with considerable ability and familiarity with the Dark Side would not only see the Jedi as a threat. </p><p><br /></p><p>Driven continually by the need for power, their own alliances with each other would be laughably short-lived - establishing a separate paradigm where there would only dependably be two Sith Lords: one with the most knowledge and ability in using the Dark side and another highly talented disciple who craved the teachings, devoted to the teachings, but had neither the ability nor the experience to kill his master. The Jedi would always be in a symbiotic relationship with each other and the Republic and so would always have numbers on their side and the Sith would have a parasitic relationship with every person that ever learned about the Dark Side, and hence always work via subterfuge, deceit and deception. Throughout the galaxy there were other people that used the Force, called it other names. But the division in how it was used was always there, because that is the nature of the Force. That is to say, the Jedi and Sith were not formed as an opinion as to how things should be. They are the natural consequence of how things are - and everyone that tried to deny it eventually understood the hard way why things had to be that way.</p><p><br /></p><p>There is a logic to all of that and this is the problem with TLJ. It confidently posits that Kylo Ren discovered that you can just shove history (like the EU) in the dustbin and start from scratch. It confidently posits that Luke would have gone through the simple thought exercise above and come to the same conclusion. That history just an old book full of mistakes that were made. That the past is an anchor weighing you down. Kylo is supposedly the first person in the "10,000 generations of Jedi" to think that we can move past from the past and towards a future that has no connnection to the past. And Luke happened to become the character that sees the past the same way. It confidently posits that if you let the Jedi and the Sith die, and then fast forwarded 1,000 years you wouldn't just have an order of warrior-monks called the Bopy who zealously followed the North teachings of the Gift and the shadowy Diru who maniacally followed the South teachings of the Gift.</p><p><br /></p><p>But there are only two types of people who believe that the past is full of ignoramuses, that this all could have been avoided, and that they know better. The first are the people who have no knowledge of the past. And the second are they people who do know the past but don't want to admit that the past has power over them - they see the past as a prison that they try to escape from. Rian Johnson - in trying to reconceptualize the entire Star Wars paradigm - is willfully the first type of person and Kylo, as a character battling his own identity and his misgivings of the path he's chosen, is the second. Luke is conveniently characterized as a person that has lost faith in the Jedi when he was literally the New Hope for the Galaxy and redeemed the Jedi's biggest failure.</p><p><br /></p><p>Then Yoda appears and, in the most confusing scene in the movie, tells Luke that the past is supposed to be a teacher that you learn from and improve upon rather that a post-mortem of mistakes (a lesson that one would think Luke learned quite pointedly from the example of his own father)...before literally burning the past to the ground. Luke who by all accounts is hoping and expecting to be the Last Jedi, is for some reason pained that the Books are being destroyed...even when the end of the Jedi is his endgame?!?</p><p><br /></p><p>And for all Kylo's advocacy for letting the past die and killing it if need be, where do we find them at the end of the movie? Negotiating a truce with his master...walking peaceably away? No - he chopped him in half, just like a good Sith would. Rey choosing to confront and kill Kylo rather than saving her friends? No, her love for the Resistance was greater than any hate she feels towards Kylo for threatening them - like a good Jedi. Even by the end of the movie you have to ask - what's changed other than Luke and Snoke being gone?</p><p><br /></p><p>It's a good movie. At times thoughtful, at times daring and in every moment extremely confident. If you never read something about Star Wars before, it would strike you as really provocative, especially if you had misgivings of the 'crazy, laser-sword wielding, warrior-monk sect that steals children from their families'. </p><p><br /></p><p>But to anyone that has any history with the EU and the work that had gone before to flesh out the Force, it's a textbook case of someone coming late to the party and suggesting that they know better. That we can get to space in a hot air balloon. Kepler and Newton and all those who created math for orbital mechanics didn't do so because they hadn't thought of hot air balloons. They did all that because they knew hot air balloons wouldn't get it done. Orbital mechanics might be hard to understand but if you want to go to space, the hardest work or all - creating the math in the first place - has already been done for you. Unfortunately Disney threw out all that work and is offering hot air balloon rides to space but plenty of us know that hot air balloons don't make any sense in this context. It's not so much gatekeeping as it is...well, this new thing that RJ made isn't as thoughtful as what has already been done.</p><p><br /></p><p>Probably a moot point now though, as Star Wars appears to exists only to sell merchandise.</p><div><br /></div>Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-64657136677157254692021-04-11T14:41:00.001-04:002021-04-11T14:46:37.125-04:00#snydercut: #marvel's vindication<p>1) Is this 4 hour movie supposed to convince us that the DCEU wasn't rushed? That it wasn't a crass and cynical attempt to cash in on the ancillary market benefits of the superhero genre as patiently crafted and honed through the unlikely and immensely risky efforts of Marvel Studios and their cache of B-C tier superheroes, made mainstream through a ten year dedication to the creation of some really well produced motion pictures? Are we supposed to pat HBO Max or Warner or Zack Snyder on the back now? If you need a 4 hour movie to make it all come together then maybe what you actually needed was at least two more 2 hour movies before your narrative could properly make a Justice League movie. Just saying...</p><p>2) To all the people saying that #snydercut is some kind of vindication of the integrity of the artistic process (sidebar: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA), I guess i have two simple questions. The first - if Zack Snyder was forced to take the 7 hours of film he had and make a 2 hour movie, would that movie be significantly better than the Joss-tice League? And the second, if Joss Whedon had the freedom to take those same 7 hours and make a 4 hour movie, would that movie be significantly worse than Zack Snyder's Justice League? I don't think anyone in the world can convince me that the answer to either of those questions isn't no.</p><p>3) Why are people fighting over Zack Snyder's artistic vision when DC/Warner are going to drop it at the very first opportunity to reboot it all and make the money all over again? It's not like the Snyderverse was in the running to still be chugging along 10 years from now like the MCU. He made a Justice League movie before Flash and Cyborg (to say nothing of Lantern or Martian Manhunter or Hawkgirl) were even committed to film. It was always going to be, at most, something to squeeze dry. It was going to run its course, make some money, and then Warner would try something new and different...the way they have with literally everything else. Christopher Nolan made perhaps the greatest film with any of these characters, The Dark Knight. Did Warner use that artistic and commercial success and spin-off a universe of characters from that world? Did they slowly and methodically do the work of taking Nolan's grounded, hyperrealistic vision and weave increasingly fantastical elements until they had something that was both gritty and bombastic? Did they interweave the fate of Gotham with some international intrigue that led Bruce to Lex Luthor in Metropolis bringing him into an uneasy alliance with the Man of Steel? No, they dropped it and everything in it, every character, every story beat, every detail. Cleared the slate to fill the board with something...better? Comparing the MCU to the DCEU is literally the same as comparing the Disney animation library with...everyone else. Disney has been doing it non-stop since 1937. Everyone else is just a tourist visiting a place that Disney lives. </p><p>The MCU builds on concrete; the DCEU builds on sand. </p><p>4) How can people wonder why the MCU has so much good will? Quick: Over-under on how many actors will play Superman on screen again before I die? Over-under on how many actors besides Robert Downey Jr will play Tony Stark on screen before I die? Can you imagine Marvel rebooting Iron Man? Captain America? The idea is ludicrous. Marvel has put in the work and has the faith that they can make an Ant-Man movie sell tickets. But Warner doesn't believe that they can make a Captain Atom movie that will sell. To quote Thanos, the Warner/DC executives see the world as it is instead of what it could be. And because they don't have that faith, they don't put in the work and because they don't put in the work, their faith will never be rewarded. So get ready to see Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman rebooted for the Nth time before you'll ever see a Black Canary movie, which incidently in a perfect world, would be a million times more bankable of an idea than a Black Widow movie. But Disney is going to make money off of Black Widow that Warner will never make off of Black Canary because 1) they got a great actress in Scarlett Johansson to play the part and 2) they were ballsy enough to put the character in like 6 movies more than Black Canary will probably ever be in.</p><p>The MCU is an avalanche gaining momentum downhill. The DCEU is a snowball melting in the sun.</p><p>5) The first appointment TV series of my life was Batman The Animated Series. The second was X-Men The Animated Series. If you missed a new episode, you basically didn't exist in school until you saw it. You were on the outside while everyone else was talking about it. </p><p>DC has the braintrust to do what Marvel did. But somewhere there is a disconnect between the creative side, the adaptation side and the bottom line people. Marvel has put together a bunch of visionary directors; DC settles for one visionary director and chooses, of all people, Zack Snyder. And that's not to say that Zack Snyder isn't one of a kind. He is. But what is the movie that someone would point to to say that Zack Snyder should be personally responsible for 7 hours of filmaking in the DCEU alone? What has Zack Snyder done to earn a 4 hour movie? I wouldn't personally sit for 4 hours through a Spielberg movie. Maybe Hitchcock, maybe Kubrick...But Zack Snyder?</p><p>Between CA: Winter Soldier, CA: Civil War and the momentous task of ending the 10 year MCU run to this point, the Russo brothers had obviously earned as much runtime as they needed to make the final Avengers movie. And they wisely broke their narrative into two parts. Infinity War and Endgame could have been one 5 hour movie. But, umm, they have some sense in their heads??? They had every excuse to make Endgame some uber-long epic a la the Return of the King extended cut. <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=endgame+runtime" target="_blank">Their movie was exactly ONE HOUR shorter</a> <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=snyder+cut+runtime" target="_blank">than Zack Snyder's 'masterpiece</a>'. So one film maker makes a good Superman film, and a mess of a crossover film and gets 4 hours for his next film. The others make two absolutely kick-ass movies and then decide to break up their swan-song into two parts and they barely crack the 3 hour mark. How does any of this add up?</p><p>Too unjustified, too unearned. Too convoluted, too audacious for too little setup. Imagine putting a vision of the future and a time travelling visitor from the future in the same scene. Zack Snyder actually put his Knightmare foreshadowing right next to the Flashpoint omen in a movie introducing Ben Affleck as Batman. But was there a Flash movie at that point in the narrative for any of that to make any semblance of sense? No - they just expected you to stick around for there to be some eventual payoff. Was that a safe assumption? Was that a reasonable assumption? Or, was the movie with the Knightmare scene as a plot element actually being made at the same time as BVS so that you could at least say - "well the movie where this happens is going to be released one way or another"? Since the odds are pretty much against that Knightmare storyline ever coming to pass, the answer is a resounding no. So it wasn't a safe or reasonable assumption that there would be a payoff to that scene AND putting that scene in the movie materially decreased the chances that the movie it was in would be good enough to make that storyline a reality. If, for whatever reason, people are watching BVS 50 years from now, they'll just be like, 'why is this in the movie?"</p><p>Contrast this with Nick Fury's appearance at the end of Iron Man. In an after-credits scene. If Avengers happens, great. If it doesn't and the entire MCU falls apart, it was in an after-credits scene. The movie it was in is affected in no way whatsoever. </p><p>6) There has to be standards. These things aren't all created equally. 100 years from now, when people have 10 decades worth of more stuff to watch, people will still be watching Batman the Animated Series. Will they still be watching The Batman with Robert Pattinson when there will almost definitely be 10-15 other motion picture reboots of Batman between now and then to choose from? The movie hasn't even been released yet but I'm pretty sure the answer is no. <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+zorro+movies+have+been+made" target="_blank">It will be like one of the 40 or so Zorro movies that have been made</a> - none of them saying anything all that different, so if you were going to sit down and watch any of them, you'd likely only look at the highest rated one and the most recent one. All the others are just cannon fodder: soulless cash grabs to exploit a property license for the sole purpose of lining a studio's pocketbooks.</p><p>We fanboys get wrapped up in Marvel vs DC and all the rest of the nonsense. But we need to take a step back and look at these properties from a more broad lens. Someone wrote the story of Hercules and you have to bet that someone wrote the story of someone just like Hercules. Why do we know Hercules but not that other guy? It is because for something to last it has to meet certain expectations. And we who love these stories and characters have to expect and demand enduring iterations of these characters, that speak to comic books lovers but also have a place in the overall storytelling heritage of this species. Stories that build on each other. Films with certain timeless qualities with some dimension compelling enough to be captivating to someone seeing it at age 5 or age 50. And a pretty easy way to tell is: will people 100 years from now still watch this? If the answer is no, we shouldn't be fighting over it, defending it or trying to save it. We should just be demanding for something that people will be bothering to watch a century from now.</p><p>I'm pretty sure people will be watching the MCU a century from now the same way we still watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 83 years later. But if someone thinks people will be watching the Snyder Cut a hundred years from now and can say that with a straight face, I'd love to have whatever that person is smoking.</p>Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-67091804008946373202021-01-20T12:05:00.002-05:002021-01-20T12:05:25.749-05:00Today, my love, you would have been 4...<p> And how much more interesting it would have been to mark the date if you were here.</p><p>- Papa</p>Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-49491054830390188102021-01-19T23:00:00.000-05:002021-01-19T23:00:20.003-05:00TrumpISM: the festivus of politics<p><br /></p><div class="entry unvoted res-selected RES-keyNav-activeElement" style="background-color: rgb(240, 243, 252) !important; border-right: 2px solid rgb(88, 102, 152); font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; margin: 0px 0px 0px 3px; opacity: 1; outline: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><p class="tagline" style="color: #888888; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a class="expand" style="color: #336699; margin-right: 3px; padding: 1px;">[–]</a><a class="author may-blank id-t2_6l3uk" href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Cassius23" style="color: #336699; font-weight: bold; margin-right: 0.5em; text-decoration-line: none;">Cassius23</a><span class="RESUserTag" res-prevent-cloning-1611088937283="" style="color: black; display: inline-flex; height: 1.2em;"><a class="userTagLink RESUserTagImage truncateTag" style="align-self: center; color: #336699; height: 11.9907px;" title="set a tag"> </a></span><span class="userattrs"></span> <span class="score-hidden" title="this subreddit hides comment scores for 480 minutes">[score hidden]</span> <time class="live-timestamp" datetime="2021-01-19T18:03:12+00:00" title="Tue Jan 19 18:03:12 2021 UTC">2 hours ago</time><span class="awardings-bar" data-subredditpath="/r/politics/" style="margin: 0px;"></span> </p><form action="https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/l0kifp/trump_is_historically_unpopular_and_it_makes_no/#" class="usertext warn-on-unload" id="form-t1_gjuqogx36c" style="font-size: small; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container " style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; unicode-bidi: isolate;"><div class="md" style="color: #222222; font-size: 1.07692em; margin: 5px 0px; max-width: 60em; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px;"><p style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0px 0px 0.357143em; padding: 0px;">This.</p><p style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0.357143em 0px; padding: 0px;">Blunt truth time.</p><p style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0.357143em 0px; padding: 0px;">One of the things that businesses need is stability. More than favorable regulation or lower taxes, corporations need to be able to predict as much as possible in order to make plans(remember that most firms plan at least a few years out).</p><p style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0.357143em 0px; padding: 0px;">If a group is destabilizing the country they are compromising stability. Usually the only time they would go along is if they felt genuinely threatened by a hard communist agenda which is absolutely not the case here.</p><p style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0.357143em 0px; padding: 0px;">I think Biden will do whatever it takes to restore that stability and make sure we stay stable. The far right is going to be hounded for at least the first year, maybe longer(think what cointelpro did to the left), Biden will get covid under control and pass enough stuff so that people are ok-ish with life in the US. Some GOP True Believers might try and fight it but they will be shouted down or pulled aside by their former donors and told very clearly that unless they want to be 21st century Whigs, they better get with the program.</p><p style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0.357143em 0px 0px; padding: 0px;">On a personal level I think 2021 will be the year of gaslighting as a lot of people have a vested interest in everyone forgetting that the rioters represented a vast cross section of the Republican party including elected officials.</p></div></div></form><ul class="flat-list buttons" style="list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><li class="first" style="border: none; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; white-space: nowrap;"><a class="bylink" data-event-action="permalink" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/l0kifp/trump_is_historically_unpopular_and_it_makes_no/gjuqogx/" rel="nofollow" style="color: #888888; padding: 0px 1px; 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border-radius: 0px; border: none; color: #2a3f4d; display: inline-block; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px !important; font-weight: 700; height: 11px; margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 0.5em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 20px; unicode-bidi: isolate; vertical-align: middle; width: auto;" title=" California">California</span><span class="userattrs"></span> <span class="score-hidden" title="this subreddit hides comment scores for 480 minutes">[score hidden]</span> <time class="live-timestamp" datetime="2021-01-19T18:55:39+00:00" title="Tue Jan 19 18:55:39 2021 UTC">an hour ago</time><span class="awardings-bar" data-subredditpath="/r/politics/" style="margin: 0px;"></span> </p><form action="https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/l0kifp/trump_is_historically_unpopular_and_it_makes_no/#" class="usertext warn-on-unload" id="form-t1_gjuxksqwtw" style="font-size: small; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container " style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; unicode-bidi: isolate;"><div class="md" style="color: #222222; font-size: 1.07692em; margin: 5px 0px; max-width: 60em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(247, 247, 248) !important; font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0px 0px 0.357143em; padding: 0px;">No one should be allowed to forget that last point.</p><p style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0.357143em 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #fcff01;">White nationalists, far-right preppers, soldiers and airmen, police officers, Vanilla ISIS, smooth-brain zoomers going to prison for the memes, middle-class white people with Twitter accounts that act like automated bots, rich (but, like, Texas rich) white people, hamfaced small-business boomers, unemployable large adult sons, failed creatives, nonwhite people assuming they're One Of The Good Ones, Cubans bitching just fucking endlessly about Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Biden, 3%ers, plenty of elected Republican officials from all across the nation, and a partridge in a pear tree.</span></p><p style="background-color: rgb(247, 247, 248) !important; font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0.357143em 0px 0px; padding: 0px;">It cannot be painted as a fluke or some fashionable alt-right thing. These people weren't just 22-year-old white guys. We can't forget that.</p></div></div></form></div></div></div></div><p>What do all these people have in common?</p><p>Trumpism is just what we call it now. But it has always existed. It is the counter to progressivism that every society, every community holds innately.</p><p>Every community has things that makes it a community - things that are essential to people living together in peace. These things have to be fundamental and unchangeable or the behaviour of the community members will threaten the very existence of community and sets us back on the path to anarchy, independance and isolation. And as sure as there are these essentials, every community has things that are tangentially associated with those fundamentals that people who are not well-sleeved, people who are not well-educated know to be familiar and conflate with what should be and what is unchangeable. Things that they know well are mistaken for things that shouldn't change.</p><p>Trumpism is the current name that we give to those who make this mistake, this reactive resistance to the natural diffusion of human influence. If it should be singled out from any other conservative strain of thought in any community of humans anywhere it should only be singled out for its inherent self-contradiction. Because America is a place of laws and of votes and of politics and the reality of a democracy, like it or not, is to meet at some eventual set point, a midway between minds. Some people derisively call this 'compromise' as if to take consideration of someone else's position is the last thing a human should ever do.</p><p>I suppose these people are the same ones that could never 'understand' their kids, or make a marriage 'work'.</p><p>Compromise to the point where you can't tell where your views end and another person's views begin is the endstate of politics and democracy. These small wins today are meaningless - they won't change where the road is headed. If anything they just make the inevitable a little harder to get to - a little messier to get to. Demands for someone to think and act as you - which is the priority for all extremists - is always going to be increasingly marginalized in a democracy. Increasingly cornered and hemmed in until the appeal to violence is all that's left.</p><p>But Trumpism is very squeamish about taking that last step. That's the other thing about a democracy, especially one like America - the people on the other side often look like them. Sometimes the people on the other side are your own family members. Government of the people, by the people and for the people invariably increases the chances that making an enemy of the government is making an enemy of yourself.</p><p>Maybe they don't think it through consciously. You have to figure that the appeal to the rule of law that they've grown up with their whole lives is a hard last shackle to shake. But one thing that they all have in common is clear: privilege. They have something to lose - something they consciously or subconsciously acknowledge that they have that 1) someone else wants and 2) fairness/justice/law/politics/democracy will eventually take from them and share with someone else. They live in fear of having what they have taken away, fear what that world looks like, and that fear drives the fight. The adage goes "When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression". What 'equality' means in that saying is up for debate, but there can be no debate that equality will be vigourously resisted by those who 1) are currently 'more equal' than others and 2) (and make no mistake, this is the subconscious part) not entirely sure they earned it entirely on their own. </p><p>Because let's face it - the people who have what they've got entirely by their own merit - who really worked harder and smarter than the next person...those people don't particularly fear the merits of a truly just world. It's like the difference between rich people and people who make lots of money. Rich people do everything in their power to avoid paying taxes - they see rejection of taxation as a moral imperative. People who make money at a fast rate couldn't care less about the actual tax rate. It's just a detail to them in the system of things they do to maximize returns. Their relation with taxation is secondary to their understanding of how to make money. But a person who is rich without understanding how the money is made would obviously see taxation as simply money going out the door...a threat to the privilege they enjoy that they have no capacity to replicate or recreate if it went away.</p><p>The people who have what they've got entirely by their own merit couldn't care less what gets taken from them in the shuffle because hard work and smarts travel. There will always be a place (and a market) for people who take responsiblity for things and keep the world running through care, commitment, understanding and engagement. It's the people who found their way to the top, looked left and right, and weren't entirely sure that they were better than their peers who didn't get as high as them who'll hear the word "equality" and break out into a sweat. It's the people who got to the top through lies, theft and fraud that are the ones who keep looking over their back. "Equality" to them sounds like going down without any path back up. It can only be oppression if they can't fathom a way back to their current standing or quality of life in a 'fair' world. And the only way they could be unable to fathom a way back would be if they were the person with such a paucity of imagination or decency that they shouldn't be on top of anything in the first place.</p><p>Every single person who supported Trump supported this appeal to the status quo in some way. Progressives look at the monumental amount of votes Trump got and conclude that half the country are racist buffoons. When in reality, half the country has a material interest in keeping things as uneven, partial, and self-centered as they have traditionally been. And this manifests in issues of taxation, gun control, border control, finance, environment all centered on one overarching issue: security. Securing what people have against what they know others deserve a share of.</p><p>Sure they go about it in the dumbest way possible. Enriching yourself at the cost of the environment is delusional...your right to own the biggest, most powerful gun merely gives that right to endanger you and your family to someone else as well. Making it harder to sue a corporation endangers everyone in society; allowing money in politics and making it harder for certain people to vote will make the country as a whole less representational and more likely to explode into sectarian violence. It only takes a couple of seconds of actual thought to realize what things people do that make living in a community more difficult and what measures would make it more easy - what things are done only for the expediency of today vs. what is done to buttress and reinforce society tomorrow. But the capacity to see these things exist on a spectrum and everyone lower on this spectrum see Trump as the loudest voice of dissent in a world trending logically and inexorably towards...something different than what has gone before.</p><p>Humanity was only going to go through so many cycles of one-man rule, toppled by another's one-man rule, toppled by another's one-man rule before some sort of representative politically driven system of administration, policy and authority came to the fore. It was inevitably going to trend away from that as the people become more literate and less patient with the arbitrary dictates of the fascist and the reactionary appeal to tradition that is the source of power of a monarch. Given enough time and growing progress/understanding, power in a community is like a drop of dye in water: diffusing away until it is held as evenly distributed as possible. That is the entropy that is built into nature and into social groups - it only takes one bad ruler out of three to be bad enough for people with half a brain to want something different than one man rule. It could happen a hundred years from now or a thousand, but the trend line is clear. There will never again be a day where power and demographics work in such a way where fascism will be a sustainable system. Too many people who knew otherwise would have to die.</p><p>The Trump supporter, like the figurehead of their 'movement' (if you can call something that is destined to go nowhere a movement) is too preoccupied with their own small view of the world to appreciate any of this. They are the left-overs of the political and social spectrum - destined to be marginalized in a world that is in everyway encouraging them to engage and move forward at the simple cost of recognizing everyone's stake in the world and everyone's right to be here. Because the one concession they ask for and expect is the one concession that a conciliatory world can't give - the right to not have to compromise. The right to not have to sacrifice. The right to have it all...</p><p>There are all the different ways to celebrate humanity - just like there are many ways to celebrate the 'holiday' season. And invariably there was going to be those on the outside of those celebrations, looking in with derision. They aren't figures that warrant pathos - they are an inevitable by-product of a world ever more loudly and defiantly inching towards a true brotherhood of man. They defiantly stuck their flag in the ground and declared themselves for Festivus. A movement for the rest of them.</p><p>Thing is - Festivus only exists in relation to what it isn't. It only exists because it isn't any of those other holidays. A political position of 'inequality' isn't really a position at all, it is just an appeal to authoritarianism which, for reasons that most people can grasp, is a non-starter.</p><p>But there are people who can't grasp this. And these people needed a Trump so we could single them out and start the hard work of explaining to them why what they are asking for can't work.</p>Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-51993324168409748362020-06-01T13:19:00.000-04:002020-06-01T13:19:41.226-04:00Life in the Age of COVID<br />
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<a class="title may-blank loggedin outbound" data-event-action="title" data-href-url="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-woman-shot-killed-after-kentucky-police-entered-her-home-n1205651" data-outbound-expiration="1591033996000" data-outbound-url="https://out.reddit.com/t3_gin551?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fnbcblk%2Fblack-woman-shot-killed-after-kentucky-police-entered-her-home-n1205651&token=AQAAjEDVXvUdF2SuxF55Ze1R4u6wzw2HhpcQ2l4vkYC34aQPnsB6&app_name=reddit.com" href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-woman-shot-killed-after-kentucky-police-entered-her-home-n1205651" rel="nofollow ugc" style="color: #551a8b; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-right: 0.4em; outline: none; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; unicode-bidi: isolate;" tabindex="1">Black woman shot and killed after Kentucky police entered her home as she slept, family says</a> <span class="domain" style="color: #888888; font-size: xx-small; white-space: nowrap;">(<a href="https://www.reddit.com/domain/nbcnews.com/" style="color: #888888; display: inline-block; max-width: 19em; overflow: hidden; text-decoration-line: none; text-overflow: ellipsis; vertical-align: middle;">nbcnews.com</a>)</span></div>
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submitted <time class="" datetime="2020-05-12T23:34:09+00:00" title="Tue May 12 23:34:09 2020 UTC">19 days ago</time> by <a class="author may-blank id-t2_3q4526xr" href="https://www.reddit.com/user/DonnieMostDefinitely" style="color: #336699; margin-right: 0.5em; text-decoration-line: none;">DonnieMostDefinitely</a><span class="userattrs"></span><span class="awardings-bar" data-subredditpath="/r/news/" style="margin-left: 4px;"><a class="awarding-link" data-award-id="award_9583d210-a7d0-4f3c-b0c7-369ad579d3d4" data-count="1" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/news/gilded" style="color: #336699; margin-right: 4px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="awarding-icon-container" style="display: inline-block; height: 12px; margin-right: 2px; width: 12px;"><img class="awarding-icon" src="https://preview.redd.it/award_images/t5_22cerq/wa987k0p4v541_MindBlown.png?width=48&height=48&auto=webp&s=a925fdb8ed532e7261b0dbc820e691423cba8ee6" style="border: 0px none; max-height: 12px; max-width: 12px; vertical-align: -2px;" /></span></a><a class="awarding-link" data-award-id="gid_2" data-count="3" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/news/gilded" style="color: #336699; margin-right: 4px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="awarding-icon-container" style="display: inline-block; height: 12px; margin-right: 2px; width: 12px;"><img class="awarding-icon" src="https://www.redditstatic.com/gold/awards/icon/gold_48.png" style="border: 0px none; max-height: 12px; max-width: 12px; vertical-align: -2px;" /></span>3</a><a class="awarding-link" data-award-id="award_f44611f1-b89e-46dc-97fe-892280b13b82" data-count="1" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/news/gilded" style="color: #336699; margin-right: 4px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="awarding-icon-container" style="display: inline-block; height: 12px; margin-right: 2px; width: 12px;"><img class="awarding-icon" src="https://preview.redd.it/award_images/t5_22cerq/klvxk1wggfd41_Helpful.png?width=48&height=48&auto=webp&s=e50064b090879e8a0b55e433f6ee61d5cb5fbe1d" style="border: 0px none; max-height: 12px; max-width: 12px; vertical-align: -2px;" /></span></a><a class="awarding-link" data-award-id="gid_1" data-count="3" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/news/gilded" style="color: #336699; margin-right: 4px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="awarding-icon-container" style="display: inline-block; height: 12px; margin-right: 2px; width: 12px;"><img class="awarding-icon" src="https://www.redditstatic.com/gold/awards/icon/silver_48.png" style="border: 0px none; max-height: 12px; max-width: 12px; vertical-align: -2px;" /></span>3</a><a class="awarding-show-more-link" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/news/gilded" style="color: #336699; text-decoration-line: none;">& 7 more</a></span></div>
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submitted <time class="" datetime="2020-05-26T11:20:01+00:00" title="Tue May 26 11:20:01 2020 UTC">6 days ago</time> by <a class="author may-blank id-t2_3cp2uitl" href="https://www.reddit.com/user/masktoobig" style="color: #336699; margin-right: 0.5em; text-decoration-line: none;">masktoobig</a><span class="userattrs"></span><span class="awardings-bar" data-subredditpath="/r/news/" style="margin-left: 4px;"><a class="awarding-link" data-award-id="gid_3" data-count="2" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/news/gilded" style="color: #336699; margin-right: 4px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="awarding-icon-container" style="display: inline-block; height: 12px; margin-right: 2px; width: 12px;"><img class="awarding-icon" src="https://www.redditstatic.com/gold/awards/icon/platinum_48.png" style="border: 0px none; max-height: 12px; max-width: 12px; vertical-align: -2px;" /></span>2</a><a class="awarding-link" data-award-id="gid_2" data-count="6" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/news/gilded" style="color: #336699; margin-right: 4px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="awarding-icon-container" style="display: inline-block; height: 12px; margin-right: 2px; width: 12px;"><img class="awarding-icon" src="https://www.redditstatic.com/gold/awards/icon/gold_48.png" style="border: 0px none; max-height: 12px; max-width: 12px; vertical-align: -2px;" /></span>6</a><a class="awarding-link" data-award-id="gid_1" data-count="6" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/news/gilded" style="color: #336699; margin-right: 4px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="awarding-icon-container" style="display: inline-block; height: 12px; margin-right: 2px; width: 12px;"><img class="awarding-icon" src="https://www.redditstatic.com/gold/awards/icon/silver_48.png" style="border: 0px none; max-height: 12px; max-width: 12px; vertical-align: -2px;" /></span>6</a><a class="awarding-link" data-award-id="award_ce5f9ce6-49d9-4905-9228-22950e889206" data-count="1" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/news/gilded" style="color: #336699; margin-right: 4px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="awarding-icon-container" style="display: inline-block; height: 12px; margin-right: 2px; width: 12px;"><img class="awarding-icon" src="https://preview.redd.it/award_images/t5_22cerq/5smbysczm1w41_Hugz.png?width=48&height=48&auto=webp&s=ebf40f79a711e9c4206f5f841235e43697f7a3f5" style="border: 0px none; max-height: 12px; max-width: 12px; vertical-align: -2px;" /></span></a><a class="awarding-show-more-link" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/news/gilded" style="color: #336699; text-decoration-line: none;">& 19 more</a></span></div>
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<br />
My darling, Soleia -<br />
<br />
You were just turning 2... <br />
<br />
I don't want to seem naive. I honestly just don't think that this is par for the course. I think that there is something more to it.<br />
<br />
I think this is what an anxious world looks like.<br />
<br />
The human animal, like everything else, is governed by vectors. We are getting stronger or we are getting weaker. We are getting richer or getting poorer.<br />
<br />
COVID-19 is like water poured on a fireplace. The wood will not burn properly for some time. But in the meanwhile, as the wood dries, does the wood remain warm? No. It only grows cooler and cooler with each passing day.<br />
<br />
With each passing day that one wakes and cannot function in those sometime pleasant, sometimes infuriating but mostly expected rhythms, the mind is filled with anxiety. Nerves fray. Thresholds to action change. Judgment becomes askew.<br />
<br />
The will to do any of the things listed above is always there - the will to destruction inside all of us. But mostly that will to destruction is kept in check by rules, by routine, by monotony of repetition. But perhaps most of all it is kept in check by the comforting notion that tomorrow everything will be as predictable as it is today.<br />
<br />
When tomorrow becomes uncertain, rationality and moderation becomes uncertain as well. This is life in the Age of COVID. Anxiety as omnipresent as the air we breathe.<br />
<br />
- DadKamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-995712981658971832020-02-06T10:13:00.002-05:002020-02-06T10:13:45.087-05:00For Soleia: Land of the One-eyedHey you,<br />
<br />
They have this saying: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.<br />
<br />
Not sure what value there would be for a one-eyed man in a land of the blind. Literally everything in that land would cater to blind people. There'd be no screens, no signs. No books to read with letters. Not entirely sure what he'd do with that one eye other than watch sunsets.<br />
<br />
But I wanted to comment on a moment from my present that I think can be a lesson to your future.<br />
<br />
If you've read my book, (and you damn sure should have by now, woman!) you will remember the lesson of the 2 eyed seeing. Its true source is of course, Aboriginal Canadian spiritual thought and the idea that there are ways of knowing that hold truths that can't be actually known and understood in other epistemological frames. Science can't really explain art, any more than you can see music. Apples and oranges - and as a result the moment that you start to believe that a certain frame of knowing has all the answers - an Aboriginal frame, a scientific rationalist frame, a humanistic frame, a sociological frame - that's the moment when you have to take a step back and ask if your focus is simply blinding you to the universe instead of revealing it to you. The second eye is representative of this "taking a step back" - this broadening of your perspective to keep from singular, insular, constrained ways of knowing.<br />
<br />
It has a near corollary in the Two Cultures critique of C.P. Snow, who posited the Western educational tradition of seeing the world in either a humanities frame or a scientific frame diminished the quality of the minds who ascend to the top of both of those respective lineages. But at a fundamental level - what I was trying to capture in my book is the very simple analogy that our biology gives to us. That if you are only looking at something through one eye, chance are you are only seeing it in two-dimensions. Adding depth and sophistication to our observations and our conclusions can only come when looking at a thing from more than one perspective and from taking in a broader perspective. Without doing at least that, you can mistake a flat picture of a staircase for a real staircase and find that your trust in your senses has led you to walk face first into a wall.<br />
<br />
This is all preamble to an observation I made just now that may very well be a structural reality of the human political interaction: The America of my time is the land of the one-eyed.<br />
<br />
They all seem conspicuously happy to see things that they want to see. This wouldn't on its own be a surprise - many humans to that. America seems conspicuous because the things that they don't want to see are incomprehensibly proximate to the things they do want to see. They have to jump through hoops to avoid the things they don't want to see because, through a combination of unfettered access to information and a voracious appetite for documenting things, the things they don't want to see are literally side-by-side things they do. And yet they find ways to remain blind to them.<br />
<br />
A new line in the sand of what we owe to each other, the laws of courtesy, was crossed at Trump's 3rd State of the Union speech. Speaker Pelosi ripped up the copy of the speech that Trump offered after he'd finished.<br />
<br />
Demonstrative? Certainly. Empty gesture or power move? Only time will tell.<br />
<br />
Unprovoked?<br />
<br />
Only an hour earlier, <a href="https://youtu.be/1Kb_mT8obfk?t=1343">Pelosi clearly offers to shake Trump's hand only for him to turn away</a>. To be clear, I don't particularly like Pelosi. But there she is extending her hand - which means that she's already a better person than me. I suppose if I thought being nice to Trump could put him on a path to being a solution in this world rather than a symptom and contributor to its problems, I could see myself ignoring his actions and shake his hand as a fellow human. <br />
<br />
Trump isn't going to be learning any new tricks. He's the rock in your garden that you don't waste time watering. Being a rock - totally inert to anything outside of his own self-interest - has gotten him into the Oval Office. You aren't going to entice him to slowly or suddenly become a plant.<br />
<br />
Now, we can argue over whether Trump missed the gesture, whether he saw the gesture and ignored it, or if he was so focused on not making a jackass of himself that he was stiff as a board and didn't want to risk being polite and erred on the side not being nice to someone he doesn't like (as he clearly appears to be).<br />
<br />
But to try and say that the first thing is unconnected wholly to the second? Trump not shaking Pelosi's hand had no bearing on her ripping up his speech? America and Americans seem to be masters of this. Of seeing only what they want to see and, in condemning themselves to being one-eyed, basically render themselves effectively blind.<br />
<br />
I don't know if this nexus of media coverage and political alienation is the fate of all ostensibly liberal, quasi-representative, 'democracies'. All I know is that I want you to be clear - it is okay to blind yourself so long as you know what you are doing. It is okay to blind yourself to the truth so long as you are willing to accept the consequences that follow from them.<br />
<br />
But if you won't be okay with the consequences of willful, comforting ignorance - of being spoonfed how to think and react to the nonsense put before you - my beloved daughter, your father implores you. Force your eyes open, as open as you can...and practice opening them. Practice not taking things at face value; practice the search for depth in a world where people are only too satisfied with what's on the surface, with that which is right in front of their eyes.<br />
<br />
If you practice these things, my love, I don't doubt that you might find yourself in a world where you are surrounded by people who'll hang on your every word: so desperate to think for themselves and so unpracticed at it and so unqualified to do so that they'll follow a thinking being like you off a cliff. You might find that you have a measure of power over your peers that you probably shouldn't. <br />
<br />
And I hope you use that power responsibly.<br />
<br />
- KKamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-52778614330356333512019-12-27T15:05:00.000-05:002020-01-06T14:54:01.562-05:00Academedia: Game of Thrones - The final season part 1There's just too much that went wrong for a true postmortem to be worth the time. To say nothing of the fact that the Youtube post-mortems (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh1BAsRfVxE">1</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz930ix978c">2</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA7UQOYskas&t=15s">3</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ikUYFK84OQ">4</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=habt4hbvJHg">5</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWeNvUFGgeM">6 Seth Rogan leading the high horse brigade!?!</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8U6kjqLkJQ">7</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QvZSeOEkrs">8</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc0dwLYUUkE&t=1084s">9</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eSBtwoVXfw">10</a>) are some of the most entertaining pop culture narrative criticisms you've ever seen. People like to say that the rush job to finish is what compromised the product but the flaw in the season is right there in the first episode. They want Dany to go crazy so they manufacture this idea that Sansa would somehow be openly distrustful or defiant of Dany, who at best is probably going to be her sister-in-law and at worst is the salvation of the North. That just doesn't make any sense. If Sansa was as politically savvy as her character arc is supposed to make her, the Littlefinger in her has to be thinking that if everything goes badly, they'll all be dead and if they aren't all dead, she'll probably owe Dany her life. Combined with the idea that her noble brother both loves and believes in her and the undeniable truth that if Dany wins the Iron Throne Jon will probably be in King's Landing with her the rest of his life - half a moment's thought identifies that Sansa has both selfish and selfless reasons for wanting to be Dany's friend and wanting Dany to be Queen - Dany is putting conquest on hold and risking her life to defend the North and when she's gone, Sansa will be the Warden of the North and have the Queen's ear for the rest of their lives.<br />
<br />
Honestly, if Sansa and Dany were really to meet, with or without the pretext that they were probably one day going to be family, would it really take more than a night and a couple of drinks, a mention of my psychotic brother-Viserys here, a mention of my psychotic husband Ramsey-there, oh you hate Cersei, so do I, gee maybe you do know what its like being a woman in a man's world, for these two people to become actual friends?<br />
<br />
Of all the character in the series, they probably have the most in common. But since the ending has already been written, the most natural of arcs between them is stifled in the crib: Sansa has to despise Dany before they even meet, because she's simply a wedge to help nudge Dany to paranoia and try and make a psychotic turn plausible.<br />
<br />
This is where the season goes awry - not in the Long Night but in the opening moments where Weiss and Benioff decide to sacrifice any notion of nuance or a natural arc to things for the endless, mindless, inexorable drumming of the story beats. You can almost feel a stop watch in every scene - 'okay by the 7 minute mark, Dany has to be pissed about this, and by 14 we have to make her uncertain about that...' It's laughably forced that Dany would even care that much about what Sansa thinks when 1) she's conquered all of Essos, 2) Jon Snow has already pledged the North to her 3) there's nothing in the North that she cares about and once she leaves she's probably never coming back and 4) uhh, she still has those two fucking dragons and the biggest army in the world...But no, they dislike each other, its a thing, and it needs to be a thing because Weiss and Benioff need it to be a thing.<br />
<br />
So, once the idea of a natural development of relationships to the end is abandoned on the alter of 'what if we did this..." everything that follows isn't stupid per se. It's just convenient, existing not because its good or remarkable but instead because it is the easiest way to get from one place to the next - and the entire final season exists solely to satisfy the convenience of Weiss and Benioff.<br />
<br />
Nowhere is this better exemplified than by the death of Jorah Mormont. I hear people say things like 'well his character arc is over'. Really? Is that how life works? Does Jorah wake up one night and say to himself, 'I've served Dany long enough...redeemed my father's name...I'm ready to die now'? Redemption doesn't work that way - its a motivation for more, more courage, more dedication, more sacrifice. His actions are the reason why Lyanna Mormont is head of their house at the ripe old age of 14 - you're telling me that a man Jorah's age could look at Lyanna and her burdens and not feel guilt or shame? Not feel a need to serve, a passion to fight for her and his house as he did Dany?<br />
<br />
A character arc lasts as long as a writer's dedication to his story and the story of those around them. But as we have established, Weiss and Benioff are not dedicated to a story anymore, they are merely dedicated to THEIR ending. And so you have Iain Glen's final baffling scenes: A seasoned military man put on the front line of a pointless cavalry charge against an unseen enemy accomplishing nothing of strategic or tactical significance. And his death there - marching into certain death for Dany without a question or a goodbye snuffed out off-screen - could have been poignant, gutting and harrowing...a clear statement of the end of plot armour...<br />
<br />
Instead he somehow survives certain death by retreating (running?). He alone survives and every other Dothraki dies?!? And he survives the impossible only to again die - conveniently - at Dany's side, when every other major character survives.<br />
<br />
It's just convenient: nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't deserve any more analysis than that. It could be considered stupid to dispense with one of the show's oldest characters if there was going to be some nuanced path ahead, but there wasn't going to be one. Dany is already destined to be her father, so if anything Jorah's death has to be hastened, because his presence compromises that.<br />
<br />
There is clearly the problem of expectation at work within the vast displeasure with the season. Nobody is going to tell me that we were to expect "THE LONG NIGHT"<span style="font-size: xx-small;">TM</span> to last just one night. It was literally the threat that weaves its way through the entire series. When Jaime leaves King's Landing at the end of Season 7 to head north we see snow falling. Winter is no longer coming, it is here - the summer of ten years is at an end and a Winter that promises to be just as harsh as the Summer was pleasant is coming as far south as King's Landing. A winter that would coincide with the march of the Dead. That isn't a close reading of things - that's what they put on screen at the end of every single season since 2010.<br />
<br />
So structurally the final season just doesn't square with the premise of the series: that the Game of Thrones is actually just a distraction. We're actually telling you a zombie apocalypse story that all the characters save for Jon Snow, are ignoring. They literally brought Jon Snow BACK FROM THE DEAD because him being the messenger of the coming apocalypse was the only chance the world had. Only to discover that the end of Westeros and the unstoppable, supernatural, existential threat to the entire world was worthy of a total of one single episode.<br />
<br />
But undeniably, no one can really know if this is a true ending to the show. Not just because everyone had a horse in the race of how they wanted it to end, but ultimately because this ending is as it was always going to be: the tacked on ending to a story by people who didn't make the story. It should and will I think be considered as significant to the story as any fanfic ending written by any fan of any story. Weiss and Benioff are just fans of ASOIAF - fans that happened to get a very high quality televison adaptation made. But they didn't make the story, so how seriously should you take their ending?<br />
<br />
Instead, I want to take issue specifically with the type of contemptable inconsistency that we should all be able to agree upon has no place in a serious drama - the kind of stuff that means that we're just wasting our time watching TV.<br />
<br />
First, there is the idea that Weiss and Benioff didn't want a 'happy' ending -- this superficial idea of subversiveness by denying us the most obvious, expected (and dare I say, earned) ending of Dany on the Iron Throne. I can understand the desire to do something that shakes the audiences' sensibilities and I can appreciate that they thought that a truly happy ending for Dany was too simplistic a resolution to a tale woven with so much complexity and compromises along the way. Yet for all those tacit assumptions about what made Game of Thrones great - D&D ultimately go the route of Nolan in The Dark Knight Rises and the Starks all get more or less, the happiest ending of all that were possible for them - all four of them survive. And it would have been one thing for the family that suffered the biggest shocks to have qualitatively the happiest outcome. But its quite another to have the final images of the series be the four of them basking in how they effectively won the Game of Thrones even though the 'super-happy-ending' is only made possible by an idea so ludicrous, it is to my mind far and away the biggest betrayal of all based on the fact that it is not an indulgence of the narrative but rather a glaring fucking black hole of logic and common sense upon which the final scenes rest.<br />
<br />
People can debate whether Dany's turn was plausible. I think intelligent, thoughtful watchers can debate whether the Night King's threat to the world was more of a threat than Cersei's holding of King's Landing.<br />
<br />
People can debate whether Euron could put 3 arrows into a dragon in mid-flight or whether Dany, with 50% fewer dragons could destroy every single skorpion in King's Landing without being shot down given the fact that one skorpion can put 3 bolts into a single dragon.<br />
<br />
But if we, as a viewing audience, as consumers of popular media, as people with even a basic understanding of characterization both fictional and non-fictional, can't agree that Jon Snow would have been torn limb from limb for killing Dany by her bloodthirsty, worshiping ministry of an army that just finished not blinking twice at drowing the streets of King's Landing in Fire and Blood TM, maybe we can't agree on anything.<br />
<br />
Fundamental understandings of the series would have to be reconsidered for Jon Snow being spared to be plausible. For that to be believable, it would really challenge a everything you've been led to believe about the Unsullied for 6 seasons and the Dothraki for 7 seasons. For starters, the Dothraki would have to be largely indifferent to her - in life and in death. The Unsullied would have to see her as a new slave master to be wholly unmoved by a desire to avenge her. To make either army spare Jon out of some sort of practical rationalization as to their strength and numbers compared to the Westerosi or the Northmen who would take up arms against them is to cast them both as thoughtful and self-interested - something that we haven't once been led to believe. The Unsullied are defined by one principle - faithful service to the master that they chose. The Dothraki are defined by one principle - might and right of conquest.<br />
<br />
Why would either of these groups regard the murder of their Queen in peaceable terms?<br />
<br />
To say nothing of the immediate context: in case anyone thought these armies were going soft in their old age, we just saw them put a city to the sword on Dany's order. We all know what anyone would have said of the relationship between Dany and the Dothraki and the Unsullied before "The Bells". The Dothraki are like wildfire and the Unsullied are like a winter's famine. Led by anyone else and they would both be a force of untold destruction whereever they went. Dany's legend - her story, her birthright, her dragons - is the only thing in the world powerful enough to tame them.<br />
<br />
So now D&D creates perhaps the most glaring botched writing job in the history of television - one where these armies have no problem killing citizens in a massacre for her but the man that kills her gets a pass. Yet a bungling of this magnitude cannot simply be foisted solely upon the writing team. No, it goes beyond the problem of bad writing - it becomes an indictment of the entire production staff - a sign of incompetence at every level of the process.<br />
<br />
How could Kit Harrington know that his character was stabbed to death by his own men, his brothers of the Night's Watch, for saving thousands of wildlings and not think it strange that murdering Dany in cold blood would get him a reprieve from her bloodthirsty, now-wholly-untamed, armies, plural?<br />
<br />
How would that conversation have gone: well he killed our Queen, but let's think it over...?!?<br />
<br />
Again this isn't just a minor plot point, easily glazed over. Jon Snow's fate represents the cornerstone pillar upon which rests the entire resolution to the Game of Thrones. And the solution they came up with is: Jon Snow lives, Bran gets the Iron Throne, the Dothraki and the Unsullied go away and Jon lives out his days at the Wall.<br />
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I mean - literally the only thing that would make that outcome impossible would be IF Jon Snow assassinated Dany. And yet D&D would have you believe it was possible BECAUSE Jon Snow assassinated Dany.<br />
<br />
It raises two simply possibilities: the writing crew were so stupid that they didn't notice or they were so indifferent that they didn't care. But who could discern between the two possibilities, when so much of the season was defined by stupidity and indifference, all the while that D&D commended themselves on their own brilliance.<br />
<br />
Just for fun though, let's just play out the scene now.<br />
<br />
Scenario 1: Jon is standing in the throne room - the Iron throne is melted - blood stain on the ground - Drogon and Dany are gone - Dothraki/Unsullied guards enter - Honorable Jon says "I killed the Queen"...<br />
<br />
<i>I don't know what happens next but the circumstances between that moment and him being in a prison cell would have to be so spectacular that they'd at least need to be on film, no?</i><br />
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One unsullied (definitely not Grey Worm): We should imprison him...<br />
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<i>Isn't the most reasonable thing that happens next to be for the 2 Unsullied soldiers standing next to that holy man to slit his cowardly throat and then hack Jon to pieces?</i><br />
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Scenario 2 <i>(already highly unlikely)</i>: unsullied, dothraki and northmen soldiers enter throne room - Jon says "I killed the Queen", Arya lurking in the shadows...<br />
<br />
<i>Doesn't that immediately turn into a standoff where northmen, Jon and Arya have to fight unsullied and dothraki and then fight through two armies to escape?</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Scenario 3 (<i>aka how the fuck could this even happen?</i>): Grey Worm sees Drogon fly off and enters the throne room. Jon admits to killing the Queen. Grey Worm considers that Drogon apparently spared Jon's life. He decides that he is in charge and he must put Jon before the Dothraki and the Unsullied to have them decide what they should do with the Queenslayer. He does and the two armies nearly destroy each other trying to be the one to kill Jon before Greyworm decides that Jon will be slowly chopped to pieces to satisfy the Dothraki lust for vengeance.<br />
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Simply put, it beggars belief that any set of circumstances could cause Jon Snow to live long enough to eventually be judged by the nobility of Westeros whom the Unsullied and Dothraki don't answer to and whose authority they sure as shit don't recognize.<br />
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They're the most battle tested army on the continent, in a land that they despise, full of people that they think of as weaklings and cowards, betrayed by a man that their Queen helped, with literally nothing to lose and nothing restraining them - they're suddenly afraid of Northmen that don't give a fuck about King's Landing? Why would they answer to these strangers, many of whom they know are happy to see their Queen gone?<br />
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And it beggars belief that such a thing could just be totally glossed over when it is at odds with 1) what we know of the Dothraki, 2) what we know of the Unsullied's relationship to Dany, generally 3) what we know of Grey Worm's relationship with Dany personally and his already grief-stricken state with the loss of Missandei, 4) what we've been shown of medieval warfare in the last episode; 5) the tension between Grey Worm and Jon Snow shown moments earlier in the episode when Grey Worm is executing defeated Lannister soldiers at Dany's order (so not even a day has passed between when they would have killed each other right there and when Grey Worm has to decide Jon's fate but D&D would have us believe that some scenario or combination of events exist where Jon Snow kills Dany and Grey Worm spares Jon Snow when he has no Dany or anyone else for that matter, to take orders from).<br />
<br />
We've seem Grey Worm slit the throats of slavers for daring to attack Dany at Mereen. We saw Varys burned to death an episode earlier for 'betraying' her...<br />
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But the crime for KILLING HER is exile...to a place where he has friends and family...<br />
<br />
A cynical observer would see this last turn as almost a gleeful final insult to one of the most crucial characters on the show that made them: the Dothraki and Unsullied not avenging Dany makes it as though she really did die unloved, even by her own men. More than anything though, it speaks to the quality chasm between ASOIAF and GOT that had been creaking open through seasons 6 & 7 only to become the Grand Canyon in Season 8.<br />
<br />
If Martin deigned to fashion an ending such as the one we got, it would have manifested in an intricate, layered series of circumstances and interests that would lead somehow to the immensely improbable turn of Jon surviving the betrayal OR Martin would simply dispense with the character of Jon Snow as his purpose and destiny was realized in service of the story.<br />
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D&D have no sense of purpose or larger destiny, no master to serve. All they have are plaititudes like "love is the death of duty" (lamely interpreted by them in such a heavy-handed way that they actually had to literally have someone kill someone they love for the sake of duty) save for hitting on certain pre-determined milestones - one of which clearly is Jon makes a sacrifice and returns to the desiny he was always meant to have at the Night's Watch.<br />
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And mistaking semblance for substance, as is the unifying flaw of all pseudo-creative types, it creates the semblance of a fitting conclusion to the Journey of the Starks at the expense of any modicum of common sense because 1) if Jon truly believed that what he did was right, he would be the first person to say he was prepared to die as his father, Ned had, 2) there is no point to having a Night's watch anymore and 3) even if we could accept that Dany's forces would recognize the authority of the Westerosi nobility (narrator: "they wouldn't"), it probably wouldn't go over well with the Dothraki and the Unsullied that the person who the Westerosi put on their dearly departed Queen's throne was Jon Snow's fucking crippled brother!<br />
<br />
How exactly would Grey Worm explain that to his men and the Dothraki without getting himself killed?<br />
<br />
unnamed Dothraki #4061 "So wait, wait, wait...He kills Khaleesi, he gets to live....AND his brother gets to be King?!?!"<br />
<br />
<i>The dothraki and unsullied get on their ships...They're cool with what went down...They crossed an ocean for one really special lady - faced down death itself because she said to - slaughtered a city at her command - that lady died - tough breaks, fun times.</i><br />
<br />
D&D asks you to imagine a world where someone assassinates Dany and her armies are okay with the assassin's brother being the person who benefits from her death most<br />
<br />
But to be clear: <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2019/05/game-of-thrones-finale-review-it-was-good.html">this is a masterpiece</a> and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/game-of-thrones/2019/5/20/18632109/game-of-thrones-series-finale-season-8-end-recap">the trouble with ending a show is that some people are never satisfied</a>.<br />
<br />
No, the trouble with ending a show is that some people go into it thinking that because they made 6 really good seasons and maybe 50 out of 73 really compelling episodes of television, the finale has to be a masterpiece.<br />
<br />
Here's the thing: it doesn't. It can be shit. A gymnast can have a wonderful routine and fall flat on their face for the landing and it's all anyone will remember. Game of Thrones, season 8 can be wonderful cinematography and the outline of something that could have been memorable, woven together by inconsistencies and plot choices that don't stand up to casual scrutiny and make less and less sense over time resulting in something that simply doesn't live up to the standard that they had established before and, adding on nothing of worth to what has gone before, accomplishes little more than retroactively diminishing the promise that they had built along the way.<br />
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And, as it turns out, that is how the watch is ended.<br />
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P.S. I'm open to the opinions of others. But to all the people who thought the finale was good or decent or even competent, my unyielding counter is this: Literally the best actor in the series, Charles Dance, expressed his "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWMRan_V1M">confusion</a>" with the ending. That does not a masterpiece make.Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-2793926652969812442019-12-27T09:45:00.001-05:002019-12-27T09:45:07.559-05:00Running startRun towards the line...Be in motion by the time the pistol sounds...Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-29632069800808555692019-10-23T20:20:00.001-04:002019-10-23T20:20:09.060-04:00Quantum of Solicitude<div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/ev-williams-is-the-forrest-gump-of-the-internet/486899/">Williams </a>still comes off like a cheerleader for this better world. He told me that a Medium user <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://medium.com/@ryanstr/an-open-letter-to-ev-williams-3ccf9850e630%23.hhabaxj4e&source=gmail&ust=1532802329617000&usg=AFQjCNFuCYFzn_hNxvnnDHBATAntTFAtgw" href="https://medium.com/@ryanstr/an-open-letter-to-ev-williams-3ccf9850e630#.hhabaxj4e" style="color: #458cd5;" target="_blank">wrote an open letter to him</a>, saying that though they had posted to the site every day for a month, they had not gotten more than 100 “recommends” on their post yet. (Every social network has its atomic unit of dopamine-like recognition: Facebook has likes, Twitter has hearts, Medium has the recommend.) He said he wanted to reply and tell the guy to step back.</span></i><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></i></span><blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">“Think about what you’re doing,” he says. “You’re playing this game for attention that half of humanity is playing. And you’re competing for not only the thousands of people who publish on Medium the same day, the millions of people who publish on websites that have ever published, the billion videos on YouTube, every book in the world, not to mention what’s on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Vine, everything else, right now—it’s amazing any people are reading your stuff!”</span></i></span></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">That this can still happen—that any subset of readers can still find and read an amateur writer’s work—is what excites him most about Medium. Talking about the centralization of the web, he continually returns to the “bad world.” </span></i></blockquote>
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<div style="font-family: "lyon text", georgia, times, serif;">
I look at the read count of my posts sometimes.</div>
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It makes me laugh - the urging to be read, to be notorious. As if being read makes my words more real or important. When, really, it just makes them more forgettable - you can't forget something that you never read.</div>
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Fleming writes of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Your_Eyes_Only_(short_story_collection)#Quantum_of_Solace">quantum of solace</a> - that minimum amount of fellow feeling that must exist between two people to have any relationship based not on mere necessity.</div>
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But the view count, the likes, the shares, the subscribes - what is all of it other than a token economy - where each of these clicks is a small quantum of solicitude? Small measures of the attention that a person is willing to invest in you.</div>
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Maybe we think that if enough people care about us for 10 seconds a day, it will add up. Certainly the way that Youtube views can lead to actual financial remuneration, it adds up in a way, of a sort.</div>
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But I can't help thinking that people - many people - may have unwittingly convinced themselves that it will add up in the other sort of way. That lots of little likes means that one is loved, lots of small attentions means that one is important or interesting.</div>
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I'm not sure it works that way. Unless what you put into the world is interesting and stimulating to you - chances are good that it won't be interesting, stimulating or memorable to anyone. On the reverse, if it isn't interesting to you and fascinating to others, you're reduced to being a slave.</div>
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People who actually command more than merely a quantum of an audience's attention are the exception to the rule, subject to that reverse affliction - invasive notoriety - stardom, fame, the violation of what little space there is for personal solace in the world.<br />
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There have and always will be - two types of writers. The first write things to be read. And the second write things that need to be written. Anything that you've ever read in your life written more than 5 years earlier was likely written by the second type of writer. Anything that is written solely for the purpose of attracting eyeballs is probably forgettable enough that no one ever gave it a second thought again. It's a paradox but an undeniably truth. Writing to satisfy or entice an audience is the surest way to never find a lasting or meaningful one.</div>
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We can't have it all. And because we can't, I can content myself with being total absorbed by things that I write. If someone else reads this and takes that to heart...well, that's just found money.</div>
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Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-63963886238550388672019-04-26T08:19:00.000-04:002019-10-23T20:27:28.431-04:00Academedia: Avengers Infinity War<br />
<ol>
<li>"We lost." This is a massive omission. It isn't some nostalgic callback. It's a clear message that this Avengers movie by the Russos is made of the same essential DNA as the Avengers movies by Joss Whedon. Cap had seen war, but he'd never seen an alien army before, a hole in space, an incredible hulk. It was the hardest battle that he'd ever fought but at the end, they won. He realized it in that moment and he said it. I find it hard to believe that Cap wouldn't have been broken yet stoic watching Bucky die for a second time. "Oh, God," to me is Cap giving into despair, which is understandable but at the same time, the failure of the Avengers is something that Cap would be very sensitive to making worse by showing his vulnerability. 'Oh God' is fear. We lost is a fact. Having said all of that, the realization that 3.5 billion people just died because you didn't get it done - is a lot to process. All in all, I would have sided on keeping Cap strong in public but giving him a chance to breakdown in private with Nat or Wanda.</li>
<li>Tony knows what just happened, he just watched Peter dissolve. Hard to think that the next thought through his head and word through his mouth wouldn't be "Pepper". Especially if he thought that she had been pregnant.</li>
<li>Needs a line when Thanos is put under about considering trying to kill him - something like if you don't do it in one shot, he's definitely going to wake up</li>
<li>Need a line from Gamora taunting Thanos, making clear the distinction between love the word and love the action. Making clear the love of family that the Guardians represent and the idea of love - the feeling separate from the devotion. Making clear the paradox of the Soul Stone. Something like saying: "You killed my mother, my family. But now you love me? You love me? Here's your chance to prove it." Make it clear that Thanos' 'love' is hollow and meaningless if it still doesn't stop him from throwing her off of a cliff.</li>
<li>Thanos, the mad Titan, is an interesting case. Where are the other Titans? Couldn't they stand toe to toe with Thanos? It would be an interesting wrinkle in a Big Bad if he was part of some Apex predator race and committed genocide against his own people in order to the biggest baddest big bad left. Like Aegon Targarayan.</li>
<li>I'm going to go ahead and say it - Movies aren't a superior storytelling format to TV. I would have watched 7 hours of this story and they definitely had at least 7 hours to tell. When are we going to break out of this mould? 2.5 hr theatrical release along with seven 30 minute-episode uploads to YouTube with 'deleted scenes' that are full of our favourite characters. You don't have to watch it and it isn't material to the story. But its a hell of a lot of fun. Again, its money left on the table. How many people who came out of that theater didn't want to see 15 minutes of catch-up between Steve, Bucky and Sam? How many of them didn't want to hear Tony, Peter and Strange getting to know each other on a long space trip or Star-Lord and Peter Parker shooting the shit about pop culture on Earth? How many of them didn't want to hear more about all the planets that Thanos' minions had conquered? How many didn't want to see some vision Thor had of Odin and Loki and Heimdahl? Hell, I would have appreciated 2-3 awkward minutes of Widow and Banner. Widow & Okoyo; Banner & Suri. Christ, load the bitch up with commercials if you want. That's the stuff we really want to see and the stuff that the writers really want to write. Why is it that TV shows can move into theaters but Movies can't move to TV screens? We get it people don't want to sit in a theater for longer than they can hold their bladder. But why does this epic story have to be bounded in this way?</li>
<li>So the one-take, no-cut panoramic continuous shot going from Avenger to Avenger that we saw in the Battle of New York and at the beginning of Age of Ultron, is that an Avenger movie thing or is it a Joss Whedon thing? Because if its an Avenger thing, it wasn't in this movie. But then again, the OG Avengers are going to get their swan song, maybe it will be in A4.</li>
<li>Was reading someone saying that Loki's death was pointless, esp. for a big bad like Thanos that believes that the Gauntlet is going to rack up the ultimate death count. To my mind, Thanos gave Loki the Mind Stone and a Chitauri Army to get the Tesseract. Not only did Loki not bring Thanos the Tesseract, he lost both the Army and the Infinity Stone that Thanos already had and went six years avoiding him. If anything, Loki died too quick. There really should have been a lot more discussion about Loki's failure in that scene. If Thanos took Loki for torture, that could have been an equally satisfying motivation for Thor to pursue Stormbreaker.</li>
</ol>
Simply put, it was all set up for the Swan Song. So there is a limit in evaluating it on its own merits, in the same way that everyone hated GOT S5 when it set the stage for a massive S6.<br />
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<br />Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-16193068654423767012018-10-01T13:56:00.002-04:002018-10-20T18:37:40.350-04:00The Cost of Winning at all Cost<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Watched the hearings. If I hadn't, this cartoon would have just got my attention. But after watching the hearings and having a daughter, i can't remember an image ever making me so angry. And really it comes down to how brazen the GOP is. They just have no shame...all they want to do is win, even if that isn't what is best for their own families and their own country. </div>
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Any halfway decent man would know that they disqualified themselves from a job like president or supreme court justice the moment they assaulted someone like that. But they don't even care about the conceit of decency that they themselves claimed to bring to the world. If Kavanaugh was a decent man, he'd 1) know that he wasn't worthy of the job and withdraw or 2) he wouldn't have anyone speaking against him in the first place. The fact of the second is reason enough for him to not to deserve the job and the fact of the first just means that he has absolutely no shame. </div>
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What kind of person strenuously covets and pursues a job when they don't deserve it? It isn't a matter of opinion. The proof that he doesn't deserve it is the fact that Dr. Ford stood before Congress and said that he didn't. </div>
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Everyone knows this and it couldn't matter less whether the the flaw in the man's decency was a single lapse or a lifetime pattern: he's applying for a job that he'll have for the rest of his life. He has to be a paragon, and he has to be universally regarded as such. </div>
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But the GOP in particular seems conspicuously composed of people who both have no shame and do whatever the hell they want to do without a moment of concern for how it looks. And this concern for power absent anything else is such a short-sighted path, a path to irrelevance, because you keep on elevating people who have no greater claim to being elevated than the next person. Any notion of the cream rising to the top is gone. Their own authority and credibility is diminished each time they use someone who is not beyond reproach as an example to and for others.</div>
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With as many lawyers as they have in that country, how hard would it be to find someone else that had no one to speak personally against them? If there is even one person in the country that had enough of a beef against a nominee for a lifetime job to swear on a bible and talk in front of strangers, that nominee isn't good enough. </div>
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But that's the story of America these days: 'not good enough' is good enough for them.</div>
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Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-86001372183339313022018-09-30T03:43:00.000-04:002018-10-01T14:00:56.201-04:00An apology for the angels of our better nature...<p dir="ltr">Grandtots,</p>
<p dir="ltr">What is even happening?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Did I delude myself into thinking my country was full of people that had thought it all out?  Sat down around the campfire and seen the firelight reflected in the eyes of people that looked different from them?  Looked left to see revenge then right to see mercy...and chosen mercy?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Maybe some people have seen it.  But I mistakenly thought for a second that on average, a Canadian's shit didn't smell.  That we have universal health care so we were, on balance, better than a bloodthirsty, gun-toting, nuke-launching American.</p>
<p dir="ltr">But it isn't being American, or being Canadian, or being female or being Black or any number of other things that allows a person to understand the virtue of mercy.  You can only understand that virtue when you let go of your ego - the notion that your feelings and experience somehow represent an unequivocal manifestation of how the world would best be served.  Trapped in our own feelings and our own perspective, seeing only through these eyes and no others, how difficult is it for people to choose the hard path - the path towards a world that some people can't even fathom.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Some people simply can't fathom a world where no one is bad.  Where every child is loved and supported, and every child grows to be a loving and supportive parent.  Some people can't imagine that the cycles of self-hate which manifest themselves in people of different generations locked into the same behaviours can be broken.  Some people can't imagine how that can be broken.</p>
<p dir="ltr">They can't imagine because they themselves are locked into the same cycle: a cycle of thinking and reacting and doing things exactly as their parents did.  They can't imagine because they think in the same way as the people who helped make the problem in the first place.  But the problems of the world cannot be solved by the same thinking that made those problems.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/tori-stafford-case-1.4840107">Robyn Urback</a> is the one I have to thank for disabusing me of the notion that the average Canadian thinks differently than the average human.  That the average Canadian is merciful.  I was naive for a moment there; I am embarrassed.  I am grateful for this clarification.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Does my heart bleed?  Am I simply weak-minded, weak-willed, weak-spirited?  I look into my 4 month old daughter's crib.  She fusses.  She has gas tonight and I know that she'll overcome.  Now I put myself in the Staffords' shoes?  Someone has taken my daughter from me.  Someone has taken her future from her.  Someone has denied the world something so precious, so flawless, so magnificent.  Someone has robbed the world of a soul that I was building from the first day to be kinder than others, more generous than others, stronger than others, more willing to suffer to help others, more sure of herself than others - a crime against me.  More importantly though, someone thought only of themselves and robbed my daughter of her life and robbed the world of my daughter.</p>
<p dir="ltr">And were they merciful?  Were they kind?  No, animals can't be kind.  Animals can't know mercy, governed solely by the extremes of pleasure and pain, the demands & dictates of survival.  No, my daughter was sport to them.  Not a person.  An object.  An object to be hurt.  An object to be raped.  An object to be beaten.  An object to be bludgeoned. </p>
<p dir="ltr">An object to be discarded.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In her last moments on this Earth, my daughter knew pain like never before.  She knew suffering.  She was violated.  She was scared.  She was alone.  Did she cry out for her father to save her?  Did she cry and pray that I would come?  Did she die having given up hope that I'd be there? </p>
<p dir="ltr">Did she die knowing the magnitude of my failure?  Did she forgive me?  Or was she long past caring about anything other than the omnipresence of her suffering?  Did she simply welcome the end when it came?</p>
<p dir="ltr">In merely imagining those who would dare to take my daughter, or hurt my daughter, or touch my daughter or kill my daughter, my blood both freezes and boils.  There is the hollow feeling, below my heart - the hole that fills like a ship taking on water.  It fills with the sin of wrath - and the certainty of it is blinding.  There is the face of the person that takes my daughter from me - the face is before me.  The rock is in my hand.  I can imagine the sound that the rock makes as it fractures bone - I've heard that sound when I've fallen or when I've heard someone else fall without breaking their fall.  But what does a face look like when it has been bludgeoned, not by a hammer, but by a rock?  What does it look like when so much bone has been broken that it ceases to be a face?  Is there a moment when I see the jaw collapse in and the teeth break away that I know that this person doesn't exist anymore?  Does that satisfy me...?  Does it cause me to stop?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Of course it doesn't.  Because I don't want this person dead.  I want them to give me my daughter back and put things as they were before.  I'm crushing their skull with a rock in the mistaken hope that if I make this person cease to exist, what they've done will cease to exist, too and I can have my daughter back. And she can have her life and the world will be better for it.  I will dance at her wedding and play with her children.  I will remember the last words she said to me as I close my eyes that last time.</p>
<p dir="ltr">That's all gone.  All that's left is the hollow feeling, a broken heart filled with rage.  A poor substitute for what filled it before.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I've lost.  Killing my daughter's killer doesn't change that I lost, doesn't change the magnitude of my loss.  Being a good man, father to a perfect daughter, has no bearing on whether I should have lost or not.  I've lost and my loss is not finite.  It is infinite.</p>
<p dir="ltr">But that isn't the worse part is it?  It isn't that I lost what cannot be recovered.  It is the truth borne out with my own hands.  The truth that I want to deny, the truth that I need to turn from.  The truth that redoubles my shame at having failed my daughter...</p>
<p dir="ltr">I enjoyed killing this person.  I didn't do it because I wanted to protect someone else's daughter.  I didn't do it because I thought it was right.  I didn't do it because I thought that it would give me my daughter back.  I killed this person because I wanted to.  Because I wanted them to suffer.  I killed them because I figured that it would give me some relief, make me feel good...if even for a second...</p>
<p dir="ltr">And it was that same need, to feel good, to feel something...if even for a second...It was that same feeling that flowed through my daughter's murderer in that moment before they took her last breath.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In that one moment, we were the same.  Made of the same things, driven by the same things.  Eager to make a person into a thing.  We could both enjoy killing something, because we were both monsters.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I was the person who could enjoy killing someone.  This time, it was a murderer.  How long would it be before I could enjoy killing a girl my daughter's age?  How long would it be before I could be relieved killing my own daughter?  The light of my life?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Is the only difference between me and my daughter's killer just the matter of time?</p>
<p dir="ltr">This is the path that lay before me as they tell me that my daughter is gone and that I will never see her again and that the person who did this has been captured.  Do I want to walk this path?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Most people don't actually get to answer, because reacting as fury and ego demands, they don't even realize that the question has been asked.  But here I am asking the question.  My answer...</p>
<p dir="ltr">No.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I want to be the exact opposite of what ever or whoever the person who did this to my daughter is.  If they sleep on their left, I want to sleep on my right.  If they pee standing up, I want to pee sitting down...</p>
<p dir="ltr">If they looked down into my baby girl's eyes and heard her plead to go home and then smashed her head in...</p>
<p dir="ltr">I want to look into their eyes...<br>
and hear their pleas...<br>
and tell them I forgive them.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I want to hate them with every fibre of my being.  But I will hate what they've done and not hate them and know that I am not like them.  It's not because I'm a better person - far from it.  It's because I don't want to be a worse one.  I want to know that I am not the person that could enjoy someone's suffering, wish suffering upon others, inflict suffering upon others.  Know that I could never be the person that they've chosen, or allowed or been forced to become.  Take hold of that lone solace to be found from the end of my life as I know it, the end of any meaning that I had: that I am not increasing the suffering in our world.  That I am not visiting my suffering on anyone other than myself.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Urback writes that "<i>In no universe is it appropriate for a child murderer to serve her sentence in a healing lodge</i>".  Will serving it in a prison cell bring back Tori Stafford?</p>
<p dir="ltr">She writes that "<i>Now, McClintic has moved to a healing lodge in Saskatchewan for female Indigenous offenders, where she enjoys greater independence, more spacious surroundings and programs designed to help her outline "what she needs emotionally, physically and spiritually to help with her rehabilitation</i>"  Is a outdoor prison, or a colourful prison, or a minimum-security prison, not still a prison?  Is your life not still subject to the whims of every guard, every official & every locked door around you?</p>
<p dir="ltr">She writes that "<i>Ideally, rehabilitation would be at the core of the Canadian justice system as the universal standard. We know that prisons that focus on rehabilitation generally mean lower rates of recidivism and cost taxpayers less in the long run. But immersive rehabilitation programs in Canada are the exception, not the rule.</i>" How would this move from being the exception to the rule if we didn't seek to apply it to prisoners?</p>
<p dir="ltr">She writes that "<i>Moving McClintic out of prison and into a healing lodge is institutional failure of another kind</i>."  If it is a failure, in what way is locking someone up for the rest of their life some definition of success?</p>
<p dir="ltr">She writes "<i>How do you rehabilitate that degree of evil?</i>"  Does anyone know the answer to this question?  Will we arrive at the answer by actively not trying?  Or is it simply that we don't want to rehabilitate that kind of evil because if someone who can commit evil of this magnitude can feel the seed of actual remorse inside and face tomorrow with that burden, we would have to come to terms with the fact that our society and our forebearers simply threw people away with the same level of interest as the people that they themselves threw away?</p>
<p dir="ltr">She writes "<i>While there is perhaps a case to be made that even the most monstrous offenders — those with the most hopeless-seeming cases — deserve a shot at rehabilitation, surely the pedophiles and child murderers, the worst of the worst, ought to be at the back of the line. Not moving into healing lodges a mere eight years after abducting and killing an eight-year-old girl and dumping her body in a field.</i>"  Curious, this notion of a rehabilitation meritocracy.  Obviously any effort at giving a second chance can't be on the basis of whether these people deserve it - clearly none of them 'deserve' it.  We aren't trying to change their ways because they deserve it, we're doing it because we don't want them to do awful things anymore and we would like to not have to babysit them for the rest of their lives. The act of prioritizing peoples worthiness for rehabilitation is simply a reflection of our bloodlust for wanting to punish them in the first place.  But isn't that the very thing that we would be trying to avoid by virtue of the attempt to rehabilitate them - wanting to punish?  And wouldn't there be inestimable value in actually rehabilitating the 'worst of the worst': to serve as proof that if they can find remorse and choose to create some meaning from their havoc that anyone can?</p>
<p dir="ltr">She writes "<i>In what universe should the perpetrator be transferred to a healing lodge less than 10 years into her life sentence</i>?" Isn't the most important part of McClintic's sentence the part about it being for the remainder of her life, not the details of where and how it is carried out?  This seems to suggest that imprisonment alone isn't enough--McClintic has to be imprisoned a certain way.  And if the life part is less important than how it is carried out, that seems to suggest that we want to hurt McClintic for having hurt Tori.  So why not just have her beaten weekly by her fellow inmates?  Why not put her in a cell with a rabid dog?  If imprisonment isn't punishment enough, why would we content ourselves with just letting her sit in a cell for the next fifty years?</p>
<p dir="ltr">She writes that <i>"There is no objective threshold to determine what constitutes "adequate" prison time for someone who lures and murders an eight-year-old. Many would consider a lifetime behind bars as too lenient of a punishment. But without question, it should be long enough for that little girl's shirt to become thoroughly outdated."</i>  Strange that one can say 'there is no objective threshold' and then immediately follow it by saying 'but without question'.  The lack of objective threshold suggest thereis a question.</p>
<p dir="ltr">And finally she writes the crux of our delusion:  "<i>We need to see that justice is being done.</i>"  But justice can't be done.  Justice would be for those who took Tori Stafford's life to give her life back.  This is well beyond their powers.  Justice - a balanced scale - can't be done.  All that is left are approximations.  There was a value to Tori Stafford's life that was taken from the world.  Does the world get that value, or some measure of that value, back by locking Terri-Lynn McClintic in a cage at the public's expense for the next 50 years?  Or by injecting her veins with drugs to stop her heart?  Or shooting her in the head with a gun and trying to forget about her?  Or by turning a blind eye to her as her fellow inmates beat upon her?  Or locking her in a cage with a wild animal as it mauls her?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Someone might think these to be deliberate provocations - an attempt to stir feelings of disgust by proposing punishment that is unusual and cruel.  But the overwhelming disgust stirred by the notion that a person that is little more than an animal should be treated not as an animal but as a human in the hopes of destroying the animal and creating a human-- this disgust suggests that in some cases, like Tori's case, we clearly want to be the person with the rock, bashing an evil person's face in, but, unwilling to do it ourselves, we want to be comforted that the punishment is happening slowly in a dank prison-cell, with little daylight, to people we wish to simply forget.  People that are thrown away, like Tori was thrown away.  The problem is two-fold: first, why the half-measure, why draw it out?  If we want to inflict pain, that pain can be exacted quickly and definitively (with rocks or bullets or dogs).  And second, things we throw away don't cease to exist, they go into landfills...or into waterways or into the food we eat.  People we lock up don't disappear, they languish, they linger and we babysit them at expense and energy to our communities, until they either get out, wreak more havoc & return, or die.</p>
<p dir="ltr">It is a system that works precisely up to the moment when we throw that one person in prison that tips the scales and makes it so that there are more people locked behind bars than there are people available to guard the locks.  How well will 'throwing people away' work when we meet that 'objective threshold'?  One hopes that the people on the outside have good robots working for them.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Urback writes that "<i>McClintic's story is one of institutional failure: she was born to a woman who worked as a stripper, adopted out to another woman who also worked as a stripper, and was in and out of foster care. As a child, McClintic was angry. She dropped out of school. Did drugs. Microwaved a live dog. She was abused. And then she grew up and remained free long enough to repeat the cycle.</i>"</p>
<p dir="ltr">Urback, and as it seems, many of my fellow Canadians, look to be the type that sees a person treading water in the middle of an ocean, and blames their drowing on their poor ability to swim.  When, in reality, what chance did they have treading water in the middle of the ocean?  How else is the story supposed to end? </p>
<p dir="ltr">We are all in that ocean.  Some of us have boats, whizzing by.  Some of us have barges, going with the flow.  Some of us are in the water linked together by arms and lifejackets, keeping one another afloat.  And there is Terri-Lynn McClintic and Michael Rafferty like so many isolated, troubled people, treading water in an ocean that never showed them a day's comfort, drifing over to Tori Stafford. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Maybe Tori looked to them like a strong swimmer.  They held that little innocent girl under the water until she drowned.  If you asked them why they did, they couldn't even tell you, filled with a desperation to stay afloat that they can't even put into words, the vain hope that pushing her under could give them something, meant that they could float a little longer.</p>
<p dir="ltr">It didn't.  The ocean is there, waiting to swallow them along with many, many others whole.  When desperate people drown they claw and pull at anyone nearby, potentially pulling them down with them.  We who can float well can extend a hand to help them float as well.  Or we can push them under and speed up what was being done to them anyways. </p>
<p dir="ltr">But for many of us, simply knowing that they are drowning - and helping them in neither one way nor the another - gives us comfort.  People like knowing that McClintic is drowning because of what she did to Tori.  And it seems clear that they'll be damned if anyone offers her a hand.</p>
<p dir="ltr">All I'm saying is that: regardless of that comfort, one more drowned person, no matter how many awful things they've done, can't keep anyone else from going under.  That's literally all that I'm saying.</p>
<p dir="ltr">- Grandpa</p>
Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-35005048482084277772018-05-15T06:15:00.003-04:002021-05-27T01:33:02.787-04:00Academedia: WNTD - Rian Johnson's The Last JediThis is literally the last time that I will watch this motion picture in its entirety. It can't be a blow by blow accounting because my mind wanders too easily as I watch it. And this second viewing is already two times too many.<br />
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https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/89gmn3/luke_skywalker_is_not_a_coward_an_examination_of/dwrfjtd/<br />
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- Is this generation redefining heroism to make it more commensurate with a social experience largely governed by virtual engagement? By clicktavism. Is the online, screentime generation trying to comfort themselves that not engaging is a form of courageous sacrifice? By turning his back and letting the universe figure it out on its own, Luke is a hero? Is a parent that abandones a young child to fend for itself a hero? Heroism for centuries has gone hand in hand with responsibility. But this conception of heroism seems to run in the opposite direction: Luke is the hero that runs from the fire rather than risking the self to extinguish it (even though he arguably provided the match). The idea is less interesting than the generation that would champion it and the cultural and social forces that can lead a person to argue that a thing was in fact the direct opposite of a thing.<br />
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https://www.tor.com/2018/01/04/luke-skywalker-isnt-supposed-to-be-nice/<br />
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- again, people wanting to have it both ways. There are two problems there. First, is Luke really just like everyone else - a person who lived an average life and was eventually beaten down by expectation? Was Gandhi or Nelson Mandela? No, these were people who, while not perfect, actually spent a lifetime considering good and evil. The implications of giving people fish vs teaching people to fish. That's not mindless hero worship, that's just the reality of certain people who were in a certain place at a certain time. It's not just a trope to be subverted. It's a dynamic that has the potential to play out whenever one person of quality or skill is tested and rises above others. MLK didn't choose his life - that life chose him. How many such people ended their lives in surrender and isolation? None of them did and Luke isn't that person either. Leia, Han, Chewie...everyone that he knows and loves would have to be dead before he could be that person. He'd have to have literally nothing left worth fighting for. Luke already faced the greatest test of his life. He was in a room with Vader and the Emperor with the ultimate temptation...and he won. He fought in war, watched friends die. He risked it all and won. But it's believable that after surviving that, Luke would be beaten down by life? That losing his students would be some kind of unbearable tragedy breaking his faith in everything? That would be like surviving Auschwitz, living your life and then committing suicide in your 90s. The worst part is long past. Nothing is ever going to be that bad again.<br />
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The second problem is: well, what are they trying to say about heroism? Is Luke right to abandon the fight or wrong? Because it seems pretty clear that abandoning the fight didn't help and it seems equally clear that returning to the fight will end up being good. Either Luke was wrong to turn his back on the galaxy or he was wrong to save the day and be the 'false' hope to millions that the story of "Skywalker standing against the First Order alone" will turn out to be. So which one is it? Is he a coward or a false idol? The movie doesn't seem to know itself but it's trying to do everything in is power to say that he isn't either. Because whichever one it is, here's the question: why wouldn't a Jedi master, one of the wisest and most responsible people of his generation, not be able to suss that out on his own? The only way that it could be believable is if he wasn't Luke Skywalker and didn't face any of the things that we've already seen him face or do any of the things that we've already seen him do.<br />
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- When in the long history of the world did a human come to the conclusion that a bad thing that happened at the end of a long string of good things meant that we should in fact do nothing at all? Who was it that failed at teaching a child how to read and in that failing decided not only not to learn how to teach reading, but also prevented the child from learning to read from others and went out of their way to burn every book that they ever saw? That is literally Luke's philosophy in this story: not just that he was a bad Jedi, or that Kylo was a bad Jedi, but that the Jedi are bad. That they are so bad that none should ever exist. That one bad turn or mistake means that absolutely no good is to be had. Disney would posit that all the good that Skywalker did in his life is either just as significant or vastly insignificant compared to his one decisive mistake: a moment of weakness against his student and nephew and its consequences. And so instead of trying to do good things that might lead to bad things, or trying to undo bad things that result from good intentions, we should all just go and live in exile. Someone else will clean up our mess. That thinking is why there is a hole in the ozone layer. That thinking will be the doom of our species. It should not be championed or celebrated in any way.<br />
<br />
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/12/star-wars-last-jedi-luke-skywalker-character-change<br />
<br />
- there is a way to make someone who runs from a fight into a hero. If you turn your back on a battle that needn't be fought. Or you run from one fight to face an even bigger or more important fight.<br />
<br />
Luke does neither of these things.<br />
<br />
Gideon ultimately has to run to protect his family from himself. But his cowardice is short term. Over the long run he is the person who runs in order to build the hero that he himself couldn't be.<br />
<br />
Luke explicitly does not do this.<br />
<br />
But I guess everyone has their limits. Apparently, the idea of Luke trivializing Rey's desire to help others even as his own sister and friends were in peril was a bridge too far for Johnson in the deconstruction of the Jedi. Pity. They didn't actually go all the way...<br />
<br />
https://medium.com/@josvchoi/the-last-jedi-on-the-character-assassination-of-luke-skywalker-38fe0190d01a<br />
<br />
- to be clear: 9000 words of exposition for this movie is a little on the high end. people who like this movie only cared about Star Wars as a pop media phenomenon: the people who only care about Star Wars when it is in theaters. People who don't actually cared about stories: read Star Wars stories, and appreciated Star Wars stories in all of its forms. It's really that simple. Machiavelli wrote that true political power was the ability to wield both secular and religious power over people - Moses, who was both the head of the army and the head of the church. Now we have to appreciate that a lasting media product has to have both popular and informed appeal - it must be accessible to newcomers yet rigourous enough to satisfy long-time fans. I feel that Marvel has done this well, GOT does this masterfully (especially in light of variance between books and TV) and Star Wars and cinematic Star Trek before it fail at it in pretty manifest ways.<br />
<br />
- Burn the past is a seductive idea. But what was the past like before it was the past? Before it had the burden of knowing? Wouldn't it have been this magical place that people imagine: a place without expectation? And if it were that place and then became the place of expectation and burden that defined the present, doesn't that mean that to create an "end to the past" will just lead right back to the place that you are trying to escape? There was once a time before the light side and the dark side. And that time led to a time where there was light side and dark side. If the light and dark should disappear, what will be different this time? What will keep the natural process from proceeding naturally? People who try to burn the past are the dumbest of all. They are the ones that don't actually care about freedom and escaping the burdens of the past. They just want life to be easier. And they see ignorance as a pancea because ignorance makes many things easier. For a time. Not opening your eyes as you ride a bike can make riding very enjoyable. You don't have to worry about hittiing anyone - everyone else has the responsibility of not hitting you. It seems like a much easier less stressful type of riding. Until you ride into something that won't move out of your path: a cliff's edge, a raised curb or a solid wall. Ignorance is easy until its the hardest thing of all. The only true way to escape the past - if that isn't anything other than a stupid delusion - is to know what has gone before, see how the terrain of history shifted people's thinking and decisions, read the terrain of the present and try and do something different. But..that takes work. And ignorance is so much...It is the quickest and easiest path of all. And again, if Luke Skywalker can't be depended upon to teach this to one of his students, he would indeed be a failure as a teacher. But the idea of all people, Luke Skywalker failing as a teacher to teach Kylo one of the most important lessons of his own life: that the past is a teacher rather than a prison, (or that Yoda would have to tell it to Luke in his 60s) runs counter to the character that Disney bought.<br />
<br />
- It's fascinating to advocate for letting the past die, as if the past could somehow stop influencing the present. Maybe if we could all forget. Is this appeal - manifested in the burning of the Jedi tree and in Rey's lack of parentage and in Kylo's matri- and patricide - some sort of new thread that is meant to become the meta-narrative of this trilogy: a contrast to the redemptive arc of Anakin and the hero's journey of Luke that had gone before? Or is it the shameless faux-auteur conceit of Disney to *wink-wink* make explicit to audiences that we aren't making Star Wars movies as they have been made and that the previous standards don't apply? Now they seem daring and edgy as they make the series as appealing as possible to a younger generation of fans. Problem is: Star Wars only has fans because of the past - Disney wouldn't have spent a billion dollars just to buy a logo. The bought a legacy -- yet they don't show any particular interest in the characters that created that legacy, doing all that they can to kill them off as quickly and ignobly as possible. But at the same time that they are saying that the past must die, they deign to introduce us to the profoundly original tale of a ragtag rebellion fighting against a much larger authoritarian force led by unlikely heroes whose actions are all tied together through the mysterious working of the Force. Untilled soil if ever there was. So, in trying to chase two rabbits while saying they are only chasing one, they manage to actually catch neither. And anyone that actually cares about stories and characters can feel all this as they sit there. But to everyone else, Star Wars might as well be a music video: a meaningless assemblage of scenes notable only for its ability to stimulate the senses.<br />
<br />
- I haven't even mentioned Rey. Because what is she fighting for? People that she met yesterday? To join a fight that she previously didn't even know was happening? She's this cipher. Luke is the kid watching the two suns set, 'always looking to the horizon' as Yoda said. Leia is the politician's child, looking for angles, quiet desperation, fighting smart, keeping up appearances. Leia was the resistance; Luke wanted to join the resistance. Who is Rey? They are so afraid of boxing themselves in by clarifying what she is that, two movies in, she ends up being nothing at all.<br />
<br />
And maybe that's the greatest flaw of these two movies: any effort at deconstructing heroism while at the same time establishing a hero would have to have the most vanilla hero of all. Otherwise there would be a strong possibility of contradicting yourself, of rehashing old patterns. And what else is Rey but the safest possible hero? A hero that couldn't possibly be less interesting or more focus-group tested. How can anyone that says Luke is made more interesting by being made 'imperfect' turn around and be satisfied with Rey? She's a person without any history, seemingly without any desires or flaws. Does she want to be normal? Does she want to be special? What does she believe in? All we know about her is that she wants to help. She's pure, effortless, uncomplicated goodness. Luke was pulled by the desire for more...pushed by the death of his adopted parents. His flaw was his impetuousness, his urgency, his lack of faith in the possibilities of the Force. His desire for more - more adventure, more freedom, more power - was the fundamental temptation that could lead him to the dark side. What is Rey's? Her lost family? The need to belong? There's no proof of that. People who have a need to belong create a family where ever they can: look for community in anything. Rey lives on a desert world and doesn't care enough about anyone on that whole planet to even think twice about leaving without so much as a word to anyone - no problem there. Suddenly she effortlessly controls the forces of nature itself - no problem there. Suddenly she can wield a lightsaber and beat Luke's best student - no problem there. She can't be a typical hero so in crafting a character that consciously avoids any aspects of the hero's journey, all that you're left with is someone who is uber-powerful, uber-capable, and can only possibly have problems of her own making. Which makes her desire for training from Luke seem reductive when she has already defeated Kylo and fights him a second time to a draw. She doesn't need anyone and it couldn't be more clear that she doesn't.<br />
<br />
She meets this guy and they are sewn together at the hip - why not? But as sewn together as they are, it's strictly platonic, comfortably at a distance, as if she was created solely on the basis of passing the Bechdel test. Oh, am I talking about Kylo or Finn? Who knows? Who cares? No one is going to tell me that Jennie Snyder Urman or Patty Jenkins or Shonda Rhimes or Tina Fey couldn't write a more interesting female lead than Rey. There's just nothing there.<br />
<br />
- Two crappy heroes: one uncharacteristically bad and the other uncompromisingly flawless. You'd think the older more experienced hero would be level-headed and have heroing down and the younger one would be overconfident in the face of effortless skill and have some lessons to learn. But that would make too much sense so let's try something different. Why even bother? Interestingly, what they were trying to do has already been done and better in the relationship between Laura and Wolverine in Logan: the broken down hero and the younger model that still believed. Disney did not accomplish the feat of turning Luke Skywalker into Old man Logan. Jesus, even Logan, broken down and slowly dying, was still protecting the Professor. How did a killing machine like the Wolverine age more gracefully than Luke Skywalker?<br />
<br />
I'm not going to waste a second on Poe or Finn: that's just deliberate provocation. The long and short of it is: Disney can't make Star Wars smart just as George Lucas couldn't make Star Wars human. Honestly for all the hope talk that goes into the average SW movie, my only hope is Pixar. If their braintrust could be given a chance - separate from the nonsense of TFA and TLJ - I would pay for that. But I won't be paying for more of this.Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-60114704663085882442018-01-07T00:59:00.003-05:002018-01-12T02:53:03.880-05:00Disney has made Star Wars Too Big Too Fail"To become a Jedi requires the deepest commitment...the most serious of minds..."<br />
<br />
- Yoda<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>It's okay that the new Star Wars is not for me, just like the new Star Trek before it is not for me. But the critical appreciation of these movies? can't we just be honest about this? Star Wars is too big to fail - we get it. But why do they have to try to convince us that up is down and down is up? That a person can become a Jedi with no training, no experience or knowledge of such things whatsoever? That it's as difficult to move things with your mind as it is to put on a uniform on Halloween? Why can't they be at peace with the fact that they don't have a meaningful story to tell? That they are in the business of selling movies and they'll do whatever it takes to sell movies and increase market share & demographic reach? That Star Wars isn't pop art - it's a product, a commodity? A business.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Which raises another, more interesting question. Are there people who loved the trope subversion of Luke saving the Galaxy by the redemptive faith of love rather than cutting Vader's head off AND ALSO love the idea of Old Luke harbouring even a single thought of murdering his own nephew as he slept? Because, to me, that raises the possibility that a lot of the people who say they love Star Wars are just frontin' because they think its something they have to say. Vader's last words were 'Tell your sister, you were right.' There was good inside of him (Vader) and that means there's probably some good left inside of everyone. That's the lesson of Luke's life. He might get burned now and again believing it but he'd never stop believing it, certainly not enough to turn his back on everyone he loved - damn sure not enough to turn his back on Ben Solo, his sister's son, his best friend's son. If someone can easily believe this characterization of Luke - that the person who at 26 threw his lightsaber away and bet his life and the lives of everyone that he cared about on the sliver of good inside his Hitler father didn't become some sort of pacifist holy man who solves every problem with persuasion but instead became the person who at 60 could think murder a solution to his problem - I would question whether they were paying attention to Star Wars in the first place.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>It would be like Martin Luther King Jr. getting elected president...and then locking every white person in the country in jail.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><a href="https://kotaku.com/star-wars-the-last-jedi-makes-the-force-awakens-much-m-1821721569">But this guy VCI commenting on Kotaku is so wonderfully cynical </a>that I can't bear to write something that has already been written with such bile. The disappointment that its all a crock of shit by talentless sell-out hacks given that singular directive from corporate to do nothing whatsoever to make it unappealing to a young demographic.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>KD</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>-----</i><br />
VCI<br />
ChaseTheSwift<br />
1/03/18 11:51pm<br />
You’re right. The statement “TLG makes TFA more interesting” is a bizarre case of the groupthink going too far. It’s koolaid overdose. TLJ was passable at best and hot garbage at worst. But the zeitgeist is that it is the next Godfather. So in aping that theme we get word salad like “It’s fun if you know that Snoke kind of sucks. “<br />
<br />
Uh, no. Part of what made TFA good was the promise and mystery of Snoke. I was not one to spend much time sussing out Snoke’s story but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to finding out more about him in the next movie. He was a very compelling villain due to his obvious power and the intimidation he exuded. Much of that was the mystery and I’m ok keeping it that way, but there was obviously a lot to work with that was left on the creative floor when Kylo kills him with a super simple headfake. To say it’s fun to know he sucks is ingsoc of the highest order. Reading this commentary was like reading “War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.”<br />
<br />
<br />
VCI<br />
psyko_faze<br />
1/03/18 11:59pm<br />
What I like best is that all those asshats from the OT are shown for what they really are, washed up losers. Han and Leia are failures as a couple. They are failures as parents. Han has to resort to shit he did 40 years ago. Like a CEO going back to flipping burgers. Leia is leading a failed rebellion into the ground, grinding it into death with weak leadership. Luke failed to train even a handful of Jedi and eventually abandoned his sister and best friend in their times of most dire need. What a bunch of sad fucks. TBH why even make a movie about such a pile of losers? Nobody wants heroes amirite? Why bother? They’re all just phony. What makes good movies is failure and shit sandwiches of douchery. That’s good storytelling. When you can take iconic character and turn them into a shell of their former selves with almost no rational explanation? That’s bold, we need more of it. Here are some more I’d like to see explored.<br />
<br />
A Back to the Future where Doc sucks at science and Marty is not cool.<br />
<br />
A Rocky where Rocky is in a wheel chair and on trial for domestic abuse.<br />
<br />
A Terminator where Arnold suffers from Bulemia and has lost like 80 lbs of muscle and testifies against his old lifting buddies.<br />
<br />
An Aliens movie where the xenomorphs are all sterile and can’t reproduce. Also, they’ve become docile and people start keeping them as housepets.<br />
<br />
I could go on, but you get the point. We want more unprecedented bravery. More subverted expectations. What’s that? You want the Terminator to terminate? LOL What an antiquated boob. A truly original Terminator movie would absolutely ignore any history of terminating. That would be true character growth and show the movie makers are being honest.<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
psyko_faze<br />
VCI<br />
1/04/18 12:42am<br />
I like the cut of your jib...<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
emotiondesigner<br />
Kirk Hamilton<br />
1/03/18 10:59pm<br />
I disagree. I’ve seen the last Jedi a pretty large number of times already and the more I watch it, the less it makes sense. It undoes everything in the Force awakens. TFA was all about finding Luke. Which was pointless. It sets up the mystery of who Rey’s parents are and why the light saber called to her and then none of that meant anything or had bearing on what comes next. They didn’t need to find the map to Luke or keep it from Kylo because Luke was never going to do anything but force phone in a fake appearance. Snoke was built up but then was nothing. They needed to destory Star killer base but then that didn’t even effect TFO. At the beginning of TLJ, TFO acts like they didn’t just have a huge planet sized base destroyed right before the film. And the Rebel victory was for nothing because there’s none of them left. If you ask me, the more I watch it, the more it feels like Rian Johnson didn’t even watch the Force Awakens. Either that or he was just like, hmmmm I need to get rid of all of this. In fact TLJ feels like the moment where Rey hands Luke the lightsaber he lost in Empire on cloud city. The light saber that belonged to his father and has played a part in the history of the Galaxy. And then Luke just throws it over his shoulder as if it has no bearing on the story. And that’s an Allegory for What Rian Johnson had to say about The Force Awakens and the Legacy of the journey to that point. He just wanted to wipe the entire slate clean. It doesn’t fit well because all the events of the previous movies amount to nothing and have little to no bearing on Rey’s Journey. I think in a story the events should form a chain of important events and choices that lead to the ending.<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
emotiondesigner<br />
emotiondesigner<br />
1/03/18 11:03pm<br />
My biggest problem was Luke. He sensed the dark side in Ben and thought about killing him because if he didn’t, he saw that he would destroy everything he loves. He feels guilty about that so he goes into hiding. Then he finds out that Kylo actually is destroying everything he loves. Kylo killed Han and his sister is in danger. This is a guy who never gave up and always risked everything. He never gave up on Vader. But now he would rather hide on an island than help his sister? It just doesn’t make sense to me.<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
VCI<br />
emotiondesigner<br />
1/04/18 12:27am<br />
Oh, shut up about your chain of events. It’s more interesting when the following events subvert our expectations by being completely disconnected and irrational. Didn’t you get the Disney memo?<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
VCI<br />
emotiondesigner<br />
1/04/18 12:30am<br />
But isn’t that refreshing!? Ugh. Luke never gave up on Vader when even Yoda and Obi-Wan did. Luke was proven right! In order for this new baby killer Luke to exist, we have to assume he learned nothing from his actions with Vader. No, we have to assume he learned the opposite. That it’s better to kill than to redeem. It’s laughably inconsistent. And the critics are losing their shit because they think it’s growth. Facepalm.<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
Cedon<br />
Kirk Hamilton<br />
1/03/18 5:32pm<br />
It’s fun if you know that Snoke kind of sucks.<br />
<br />
I loved it when Snoke died, until I realized what a horrible decision for the script that was.<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
VCI<br />
Cedon<br />
1/04/18 12:08am<br />
I didn’t mind that he died, but how he died was SO hokey and lame. They seem to have no understanding of power curves in these new movies. They just don’t care. Luke had the exact same setup in RotJ. His saber was sitting right next to the Emperor. You think if that move was possible, he wouldn’t have done it? Or perhaps Lucas knew how hokey it was. Instead he force pulled his saber to his hand, ignited it and struck. This gave Vader a chance to intervene in an incredibly powerful scene. Think about this. If Jedi could actually manipulate their saber and ignite it at range, why would they ever fight hand to hand? Why not just force control sabers from a distance? Like so many things in these movies, it makes no sense and just makes the other movies suddenly have plot holes that they didn’t before.<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
Dues1031<br />
VCI<br />
1/04/18 11:53am<br />
I don’t think it would have occurred to Luke honestly. To deceitful. Plus I imagine dueling with any skill via the force would be extremely tiring.<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
VCI<br />
Dues1031<br />
1/04/18 12:34pm<br />
It didn’t matter if it occurred to Luke. The Emperor was ready AF. Snoke was a dupe. Beaten by a dark Jedi who was beaten by a girl with no training. Looking back now, the threat of Snoke was all just perception, with nothing behind it. The audiences were dupes as well. That’s one of the reasons TLJ hurts TFA.<br />
<br />
And to your second comment, that force controlling a saber would be extremely tiring, that’s grounded in OT lore, which is burned to the ground with that hollowed out old tree. In Disneys galaxy far far away, a girl with no training can defeat a Skywalker trained from birth with a light saber she’s never used before. A girl with no training can use the jedi mind trick she’s never seen performed before. A young dark jedi can easily defeat a supreme leader with the flick of a saber. In Disneys’ galaxy far far away, there is no rhyme nor reason behind force power. No effort at internal consistency. Instead of a story device that is somewhat mysterious and slowly revealed in stages, it has become a pure and unadulterated deus ex machina playground, to be flipped and flopped this way and that with no attempt at a unified vision. In fact, the more rules we toss out, the more ground breaking we are. And if you have a problem with the stories that inevitably result from that, you’re just a butthurt fanboy.<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
popjunkie<br />
VCI<br />
1/05/18 5:59pm<br />
For a while I tried to convince myself that Snoke knew Kylo would kill/betray him and it was just part of his path further into the dark side. Alas...<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
VCI<br />
popjunkie<br />
1/05/18 6:14pm<br />
There you go trying to find a way to make it good. Don’t bother. I did that with TFA and had actually gotten to a pretty good place, at least, I realized there were lots of potentially cool options that were set up in TFA that any fool could make into a great movie. Annnnnnddddd, they ignored them all.<br />
<br />
I mean, they killed Akbar to introduce an unknown general who would go on to set a trap.<br />
<br />
I repeat, they killed Akbar to introduce a new general whose one move would be to set a trap.<br />
<br />
HOW THE FUCK DID THEY NOT USE AKBAR TO SET A TRAP OMFG!?<br />
<br />
Can you imagine that scene where Holdo slams the cruiser into the dreadnaught? Just walk with me a sec. Instead of Holdo at the helm in sacrifice (ignore the ability to program the ship), it’s Akbar, wounded from the earlier attack, bleeding profusely, slumped in his chair, fish paws on the console. Then, the cruiser slowly comes about, to face the dreadnaught. Hux (or whoever it was) looks inquisitively at it, “What is this?” Then the helmsman shouts, “It’s a trap”. We see Akbar smile as he hits the button to engage light speed. FUCKING GLORIOUS. The crowd would have been out of their seats, people talking about it for a generation. Nerd jizz on the screen. Instead, it’s only ever mentioned as visually stunning. No real story impact whatsoever. Fucking waste.<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
Kamil Devonish<br />
“FUCKING GLORIOUS. The crowd would have been out of their seats, people talking about it for a generation. Nerd jizz on the screen.”<br />
<br />
And in the 10 sec it took for you to think that up that scene, you’ve proved how much more you give a shit about Star Wars.<br />
<br />Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-19213462824763742972017-12-30T15:45:00.002-05:002017-12-30T15:46:20.230-05:00You get what you pay for...(Repost)<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 22.4px;">(Originally posted August 2014 - Reposted in light of the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7mypkq/police_release_swatting_call_video_of_man_shot_to/drxz1kw/">tragic SWATTING shooting death of a Civilian in Kansas this week</a>...)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 22.4px;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></i></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 22.4px;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.</span></i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 22.4px;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">- Soviet communism political joke</span></i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Grandtots,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Something just occurred to me as I was writing a comment on a police investigator's <a href="http://thepoliceinsider.com/the-shooting-of-michael-macisaac-justified-or-not/">blog</a>:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="background-color: white; color: #252324; font-family: tinos, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.8px; margin-bottom: 15px; padding: 0px;">
<i>“You would have to be insane to try and wrestle an edged weapon out of the hands of a deranged suspect if you had a deadly force option.”</i></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #252324; font-family: tinos, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.8px; margin-bottom: 15px; padding: 0px;">
<i>Mr. Jewell, I’m not expecting a response. I appreciate your efforts to act as an apologist for the police profession – they clearly do more good than harm. The fact that they do so much good is what makes these perceived lapses so difficult to fathom.</i></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #252324; font-family: tinos, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.8px; margin-bottom: 15px; padding: 0px;">
<i>With respect to your statement above, I suppose I myself, and a lot of people who might wonder at such tragedies, have to ask: If the deranged suspect was your wife, or son, or daughter, your father, or mother, would it truly be “insane” to expose oneself to risk, significant and perhaps even mortal, in order to secure a peaceful, non-lethal resolution to the situation. If it were your family standing before you, would you resort to the deadly force option?</i></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252324; font-family: "tinos" , serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.8px;"><i>This is why most of us don’t think that decision insane. It is because we actually see our loved ones on the other end of police officers’ weapons. We have an expectation that, for our sake, the sake of the public that you police officers swear to protect, a public that included Mr. MacIsaac, that you, too would see a citizen first, and a threat second, and act in a manner that sets you apart from the average citizen. We expect that higher standard of police officers. If some deranged person attacked me and I had a gun in my hand, that gun might go off out of fear. But we expect more of police officers. I guess what we all are wondering, sir, is: should we? Should we expect courage from police officers? No one doubts that it would take courage to close distance on someone with a knife or a bat. No one doubts that it would take courage to risk one’s life to try and control an armed attacker when you have the discretion to kill them. But as a police officer yourself, is that an unfair expectation for us citizens to have of those who swear to serve and protect us?</i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">In light of the shooting of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown">Michael Brown</a>, and <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2014/06/03/siu_clears_officer_who_shot_michael_macissac_to_death.html">Michael MacIsaac</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sammy_Yatim">Sammy Yatim</a> by police in the last year, I wanted to do a little digging as to the prevalence of these things in Canada and the U.S. I also wanted to get a sense of how dangerous it was to be a Toronto Police Officer vs. a cop elsewhere. In the 180 year history of the TPS the <a href="http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/honour_roll/">memorial wall has 40 names</a>. In the 165 year history of the NYPD, 843 officers have been killed in the line. Obviously New York has a lot more people historically than Toronto, but this can be made to suggest either that being a Toronto cop isn't fraught with daily mortal danger or that, perhaps it is, and Toronto police take extraordinary steps to keep themselves out of harm's way. New York is averaging 5 lost cops a year; Toronto is averaging one lost cop every four and a half years.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">So is Toronto generally safer? And if so, do our cops make us safer or simply benefit from that safety? A combination of both? Or is it a third option? In the pilot episode of the West Wing, a conservative lobbyist asks Jed Bartlet: "Sir, if anyone can buy pornography on any street corner for 5 dollars, isn't that too high a price to pay for freedom of speech?" The President responds: "No. But I do think 5 dollars is too high a price to pay for pornography."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Toronto cops don't die that often. On the surface, this is good. But policing isn't supposed to be a risk free endeavour. Is there an argument to be made that they are not putting themselves in harm's way to the degree that some of their counterparts do? And if they aren't, why?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">I believe the answer is that we don't pay police officers enough to buy their courage.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">I'm a hypocrite. I'll be the first to tell people to hold themselves to a high standard. Every day, I have the opportunity to excel at my job. But I don't because - they don't pay me enough to excel. They don't pay me enough to go the extra mile. There is no incentive to do more than I have to. This isn't just me - this is a human calculation.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Cops are humans, too. They are uniquely human. They have to put up with all the rest of us. They have to get yelled at, and stand in the hot sun. They have to drive around in cars looking for something to do. Then, when they find something to do, chances are they are called into a place where there is danger. If they are lucky the danger will come from an object rather than a person.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">The human condition is uncertainty. Uncertainty is the nature of policing.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">We have this vision of police officers, don't we? Unflappable in the face of danger. Eager to be in harm's way, rushing into danger, fighting the good fight. Kind to children, an example to look up to. Heroic and precise: they can put a bullet in a man's leg at 50 yards, dust him off, apply a tournaquet and call an ambulance for the dude that just tried to kill him. In other words, we think of policemen the same way we think about Superman.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Then reality hits us like a screen door in the face. Policemen aren't Superman. They are you and me. With a badge and a gun.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Sure some police officers, like some of us, can display acts of conspicuous gallantry and courage in the face of danger. But statistically, that percentage should be expected to be low. Courage is not mankind's defining quality. If I were to say what was it's defining quality I would say - staying alive, through fighting, fleeing or freezing. But facing fear is not something that I would say we all excel at. The world isn't the shape that it is today because the majority of humans do things out of love.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">So if police are us, and we are mostly panicky wusses, how can we incentivize police to feel compelled to err on the side of courage? To risk a little more on behalf of the citizens they swear to protect? To think about the ramifications of their actions to society for half a second before they think about the personal jeopardy to themselves?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">The same way we seem to incentivize everything in our world. Cash-money.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">People are quick to say that for $100,000 a year, we deserve better cops. Sorry, but this is what we are paying for. This is what you get from $100,000 a year cops. You want better cops, tougher cops, braver cops - we need to pay cops more. Because they obviously don't feel like their cheating society out of anything. We pay them to deal with unpleasant, unsavory people. Serve warrants. Arrest suspects. Drive around and deter crime. Clean up and catalog the mess that comes from heinous violence.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">But do we pay them enough to be brave? To deliberately go into mortal harm? To err on the side of risking their own lives? Simple question: how much would somebody have to pay you in order to do that, to run INTO gunfire?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">I know my answer: $500,000.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">For $500,000 a year, I'd be willing to risk my ass. For $500,000, I'd feel bad if someone called me a coward and said I was overpaid. If I was expected to be brave, for $500,000 a year, I'd be brave. Everyone has their number. But I'm pretty sure that at $100,000/yr levels, most people, including cops, would say, even if only in the back of their minds: psssht, they don't pay me enough for this shit. They don't pay me enough to feel bad for this guy coming at me with a knife. They don't pay me enough to risk my ass. They want the world to be safe. Well I'm part of the world, I want to be safe too. Law says if I'm spooked I can shoot, and that's what I'm going to do.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">I think that would be the analysis for a lot of sane people, if they were cops. But we have this expectation of more from them, for reasons I don't entirely comprehend. They aren't Superman. They aren't Spartans trained from birth.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Mr. Jewell's response:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252324; font-family: "tinos" , serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.6px;">James G Jewell</span><br />
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<i>As hard as this is going to be for you to hear the answer is definitely yes, it is to much for you to ask.</i></div>
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<i>No one should have the expectation a Police Officer would unnecessarily risk their lives by using less force than is required for a situation that requires deadly force. Your suggestion makes absolutely no sense and has nothing to do with courage.</i></div>
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<i>Universally accepted Police use of force protocols dictate Police Officers are legally authorized to use a level of force higher than the level of force used against them. That standard has been upheld in our Courts and is the law of the land.</i></div>
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<i>Your suggested approach would drastically increase Law Enforcement deaths and dramatically increase danger to the public.</i></div>
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<i>I understand where you’re coming from but I’m afraid you are way out of touch with reality.</i></div>
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<i>Police Officer’s have to protect themselves so they are able to protect the public.</i></div>
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<i>You clearly see things differently.</i></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">Clearly. Clearly I'm out of touch with reality to suggest that cops be brave. I couldn't have written a more a propos response than the one coming out of the mind of this 26 year vet.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">I notice he didn't answer my question as to deadly force with respect to a loved one. But honestly, I didn't expect him to. We all understand that contradiction, to objectify someone when we're afraid and reduce them to simple euphemisms: threat, target, assailant. Not person. They can't be a person in that moment, the same way my brother is a person, or a friend is a person.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.4px;">He took what I was saying as a suggestion of cowardice. But that wasn't my intention at all. I was really wondering if he'd wax philosophical about whether a police officer is paid enough to behave the way the public expects them to. Whether, in the thick of things, there is an calculation that weighs public good against personal risk to the officer. To Mr. Jewell it couldn't clearer: the greatest public good <i><u><b>IS</b></u></i> the safety of the officer. There is no greater priority. Because there is no greater priority, anything that puts a cop at risk warrants deadly force. Public faith in the police, protecting the mental ill - all those things are secondary to the safety of police officers. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.4px;">I've been wondering for a while about the legality of ordering someone - a senior police officer to a junior police officer - into harm's way. How do the courts reconcile a person's right to not get themselves killed with a police officer's duty to serve and protect? If I'm a cop and it's looking a little too hairy for me in there, do I actually have an obligation to run into near certain death?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.4px;">It's something to think about. But maybe the problem really doesn't lie with police, maybe it lies with us. Maybe there is no amount of money you could pay someone to expect them to be Superman. When Officer John came to our school in Grade 1, he couldn't be more proud to say that he'd never fired his gun. As little kids, we thought how nice and safe we all were.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.4px;">But as adults, maybe we should ask ourselves: if this cop has never fired his weapon, why should I think that he will know the difference between when exactly he has to and when he doesn't? How would you know, if you were a cop? </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.4px;">I'm not sure that I would know. I'm pretty sure cops don't know.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22.4px;">- Grandpa</span></span></div>
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Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-51436548795541350522017-10-16T06:33:00.001-04:002017-10-16T06:35:08.240-04:00I=Σ1>uI never assume this of myself. I suspect. I suppose. I consider the possibility. But I never assume this.<br />
<br />
Case in point, Sunday at the TPASC. Shooting basketballs, dribbling, minding my own business. Little kid walks up to me. 8-11 years old.<br />
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"Hey, do you want to play with us? We don't have a ball."<br />
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"Why can't you just get a ball from the desk?"<br />
<br />
"The desk wouldn't give us one."<br />
<br />
"Why not?"<br />
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The kid shrugged. I was pretty tired, having been there for nearly two hours already.<br />
<br />
"Sure kid. Here you go."<br />
<br />
The kid was confused. "You don't want to play? Come and play." The other kids behind him agreed.<br />
<br />
I wouldn't get any better playing little kids. "Nah, go on. I'll just be over here." The kids took the ball and started taking turns chucking.<br />
<br />
Now you see what happened there. No of course you missed it, so did I. <br />
<br />
I'm sitting there for 10 minutes and the kids haven't even made teams as yet. There arguing, gossiping, laughing at each missed shot. And I'm sitting there patiently, like an idiot, watching. Watching the profound absence of urgency. Watching the lack of enthusiasm to play, the listlessness.<br />
<br />
And above all, watching the absolute absence of skill, both athletic and technical, in playing basketball.<br />
<br />
They couldn't do anything. They couldn't shoot, they couldn't pass. They couldn't cut, they couldn't defend. I don't think they knew what a screen was.<br />
<br />
Near as I could tell, their understanding of basketball seem to be that the aim was simply to throw the ball in the direction of the net at the first opportunity that presented itself.<br />
<br />
I watched for another few minutes at their antics before strolling onto the court.<br />
<br />
"Guys, let run threes. I gotta leave in a few minutes." <br />
<br />
They looked surprised, shocked almost at the notion that anyone was paying attention to them or that people play basketball on basketball courts.<br />
<br />
The teams were made and I made sure to take the runts of the litter, the ones that got laughed at the most. The oldest kid was on the other side, a young buck, no more than sixteen. He was fast. But that was all he was.<br />
<br />
They didn't really have a shot. I hit the wide open ones given to me, hit the kid with the first step just as a reminder and the rest was just set-up for my teammates. Our opponents were becoming more and more snippy, more and more critical of one another as the game goes on, as the points started raining down from kids that, to their mind, shouldn't be winning.<br />
<br />
My guys weren't good but you don't have to be good when an old man tells you you have a green light. They knew that they'd get the ball, they knew that they'd get a shot. That knowledge does a lot for anyone's shooting percentage.<br />
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Three games later, the runts were three and 0 and I had to bounce. I daps them up and tell them good game and make my way out. The runts are bigging themselves up for their performance; the vanquished are playing it off.<br />
<br />
I took one last look at them as I went to the showers shaking my head. Something was up. Something scratching the back of my mind that I couldn't figure. What was it though?<br />
<br />
I'm a grown up, I thought to myself.<br />
<br />
My father taught me to play ball, but he didn't do it because he was my father. He did it because he was a grown up. He did it because he had something that I didn't and had it to give.<br />
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He did it because he was someone greater than me.<br />
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I was greater than those kids. But not taking that responsibility seriously - not addressing it consciously - those kids will continue sucking at ball. Is that good for the world? Me minding my business and allowing - if not outright encouraging - kids bad at basketball to continue being bad at basketball?<br />
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Had I taken up the challenge - had I allowed myself the opportunity to look at myself honestly and be generous in my superiority - I could have taught them a thing or two. They could have appreciated it. They could have gotten better and taken it more seriously. They could take ball into their heart and it could make their lives better going forward.<br />
<br />
But I didn't do any of that. I made the assumption that small children should be wholly free to determine their own destiny. Where would I be if that were true? If my father didn't assume that he was better at basketball than me, and that he had something worth teaching, would I know basketball at all? Or would one of the greatest blessings in my life be invisble to me?<br />
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I can see that it stems both from my selfish desire not to be bothered reinforced by my genuine respect for people finding their own paths. I honestly do believe that anyone deserving of help has to first get over themselves enough to ask for it in the first place.<br />
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But kids have to be taught. They have to be. And that will always require grown-ups acknowledging that kids have to be taught...and then acknowledging that if grown-ups don't do the teaching, no one will.<br />
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<br />Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-60202947769499543922017-09-25T14:59:00.001-04:002017-09-25T14:59:39.964-04:00Here's the thing about Trump...<a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2017/9/25/16359908/protest-national-anthem-colin-kaepernick-donald-trump-police-brutality">https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2017/9/25/16359908/protest-national-anthem-colin-kaepernick-donald-trump-police-brutality</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.theringer.com/nba/2017/9/23/16354556/donald-trump-steph-curry-white-house-visit-golden-state-warriors">https://www.theringer.com/nba/2017/9/23/16354556/donald-trump-steph-curry-white-house-visit-golden-state-warriors</a><br />
<br />
Whether you consider him to be a politician or a person, the thing about Trump is: he attacks his enemies in such a way that they almost invariably unite against him. Whereas other people would be content to play enemies off one another, he almost encourages resistance to come at him from all sides. Who makes enemies of Football and Basketball players in the same weekend? Who else basically forces the most recognizable people in sports to speak out against them? Who or what else could unite LeBron, Steph, NFL players and NFL owners uniformly against anything other than say, cancer?<br />
<br />
Donald Trump is seemingly driven by one thing and one thing only: saying whatever he thinks will increase his appeal to the person standing in front of him. Would he have the total conviction of his beliefs to call all football players unpatriotic in a room full of the most popular athletes in the country or to deny the Warriors from coming to the White House before he first realized that they didn't want to come? He's an opportunist and the thing about him is he's so short-sighted that he doesn't see that the horizon is filling with people who don't particularly agree on anything save for their contempt for him.Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-34355760125047837592017-06-06T13:04:00.000-04:002018-10-07T04:46:27.190-04:00Kingdoms and Democracies of BasketballI've expressed this sentiment on Reddit before. That LeBron is an enabler of low quality basketball. <br />
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I don't think the Cavs have low BBIQ. I think they haven't been asked to have any basketball IQ. They have three scorers and one playmaker. The rest are not even role players - they are one-role players. <br />
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They have so many highly specialized pieces that they aren't even a team of basketball players. They are a team of basketball specialists. Ian Clark can: defend, shoot, drive, pass. Iman Shumpert can: defend? LeBron surrounded himself with guys so specialized in one part of the game - offensive rebounding, isolation offense, three point shooting - that if he can't maximize that thing each of them do really well, they don't really do much of anything. <br />
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On top of all of that, they were so focused on scoring as much as possible that the Cavs really just accept that there are only, at most, 3 capable defenders on the whole team.<br />
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TT is the case in point. He's a decent perimeter defender, solid protecting the rim, but if he isn't getting offensive boards, he's not playable. He doesn't bring enough on the offensive end. He can't set a screen and pick & pop. His footwork isn't great. His free throws are poor. You wouldn't trust his interior passing. Neutralize that one thing he does and he's not on the court, so Zaza (no basketball genius himself) is able to rob you of one of your biggest assets just by boxing out. Against other teams, all you see is TT's upside as a unidimensional specialist grabbing those o-boards. But against a team full of multidimensional players or any sort of deliberate game-planning? TT's playing time is just a massive tradeoff. At best, you hope to break even.<br />
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Maybe I'm overstating it but these guys can't grow as ballers when they are only expected to do one lone thing. They play with the best player in the world and they don't seem any better at basketball from year to year. Meanwhile, Zaza and JaVale are the counter example. They've never played better when in fact they are a lot worse than the Warriors system makes them look. The difference is the Warriors expect them to make plays - out of PnR, finishing around the rim. To the Cavs, that's found money - making plays is LeBron's job.<br />
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- less than the sum of their parts vs more<br />
- Heat and Cavs being less<br />
- Warriors being more<br />
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I felt just as hollow watching the Cavs win last year. Because we've been conditioned to know that all that matters is who won the last game of the season. The Cavs won. They are the Champs. Their brand of basketball was vindicated by the victory and Cleveland got to celebrate.<br />
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By extension, Warriors basketball was flawed. They didn't win. They needed to improve. They weren't the champs.<br />
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It is this line of thinking which is the only reason that KD is on the Warriors. Because if there was any sense that the Cavs beat the better basketball team, or that their win was a fluke, a 1 out of 10 occurance, if everyone put an asterisks next to that massive accomplishment, then maybe the Warriors are more okay with losing. Maybe they don't look to break up their roster. If the narrative was that the Cavs got more lucky breaks than buckets, maybe no one messes with a 73 win team.<br />
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But that's not the narrative. The narrative was that the team wasn't good enough and they got their butts kicked in embarrassing historic fashion. They won the year before but maybe they got lucky because LeBron just didn't have Kyrie and Love. LeBron willed his team to a win and he is a legend for doing so and he had the Warriors number.<br />
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This is an important point because there have been very few times in my 26 years watching basketball where the 'lesser' team won. And even when the 'lesser' team did win - say 2004 - they generally won in overwhelming decisive fashion, leaving no doubt. But the Cavs won in 7 games and won game 7 by 4 points. To consider the Warriors season an 'F' when it was really a 'B' is ludicrous.<br />
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But the Warriors were losers and they had to make their 73 win team better. And they did, in an obscene and frankly, nauseating way. And for all the blame KD gets for doing this, if the Warriors won last year, or at least derived some comfort from the loss, this wouldn't have happened. Incidently, if Barnes accepts his contract extension, or if OKC beat the Warriors, or if the TV deal didn't go through the way it did, or if Jerry West doesn't sit down with KD, or if Russ has a heart-to-heart with KD, or about a dozen other things happened in a slightly different way, this also doesn't happen. So at one point, you just wonder if it wasn't meant to be.<br />
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Cleveland got a ring that they deserved and now the league gets the superteam that no one deserves. But like last year, we have to look at the silver lining. That ring that Cleveland got made a lot of people in Cleveland happy. It made a lot of people in other places happy that the Warriors lost. And maybe in the end that will be worth the 2, 3, 4 years that only people in the Bay Area are happy and entertained.<br />
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We saw hero ball at its highest level in Game 5 and 7 last year. And IF this Finals goes the way we all think it will, that ball is totally dead and if you don't have a team of guys who can play both sides of the ball, make plays in the half court, run a 94 foot sprint multiple times a night and fill the cup at a staggering rate, you aren't in the running. You aren't even close. And even if you have all of those things, they'll still probably do all of that better than you because they have a DPOY, two former MVPs, 4 top 15 players and the two greatest pure shooters in the history of the game.<br />
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That means my Raptors are playing at best for second place. But I'm okay with it because at least now there is no doubt. There is no doubt as to who the best team in basketball is and everyone else has to pull up their panties and take it from them. Every other team will throw the kitchen sink at them every night, front offices have to get their house in order and the standard has been established. I'm comforted that Dame Lillard has taken up the challenge and I hope that he's the one that eventually takes them down. Mike Tyson seemed invincible, too, once.<br />
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I feel for you. It doesn't seem fair. But if 'fair' had anything to do with it, the Warriors would have won last year. If you're looking for the next great storyline, it starts with a team obliterating LeBron in the Finals this year. And it ends when someone finally takes them down. Winter isn't coming - it's here.<br />
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TLDR: Warriors won't last forever - try to enjoy the process of teams finding chinks in the armor.Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-40977308205990017892017-05-11T11:45:00.001-04:002017-05-11T11:45:45.388-04:00A Calling makes one Courageous<span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web"; font-size: 17px;"><i>The primary mandate I had for myself in making this decision was to have it based on the potential for my growth as a player ... But I am also at a point in my life where it is of equal importance to find an opportunity that encourages my evolution as a man: moving out of my comfort zone to a new city and community which offers the greatest potential for my contribution and personal growth.</i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web"; font-size: 17px;"><i>- Kevin Durant</i></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17px;"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><i>I'm willing to not win it. If I can't build it where I am.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17px;"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><i>- Damian Lillard</i></span></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17px;"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><br /></span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17px;"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";">Grandtots,</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17px;"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";">It's difficult I think for most humans to appreciate how both of these statements can be described as courageous. I think most humans would minimize any equivalency between Kevin Durant joining a super-team and Damian Lillard pledging loyalty to his team as some kind of equivocation. But this is just trying to make binary things that are not.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web"; font-size: 17px;">Courage is not easy - that much is clear to everyone. If courage was easy, everyone would be courageous. What escapes most people most often though is that courage also is not simple. It isn't a question of doing this and not doing that. Any meaningful definition of courage would have to include doing something (taking action) under conditions of fear. But while fear is easy to describe, how simple is it to define? What fills us with dread and terror is as individual and unique as a person’s fingerprint. How else could it be in a world where some people look forward to getting their heads bashed in by an opponent in a fighting ring, while others become terrified at the idea of speaking in front of a crowd?</span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">One person’s walk in the park is another person’s greatest test of all. To someone practiced in not caring about the opinions of others, following your own heart is as natural as breathing. But to someone who is practiced in deferring to others, that simple act, of doing what you want most, might be the biggest and most challenging decision of an entire lifetime. They are fighting their own nature, bombarded by thoughts of consequences to come. This is a very heavy burden - and the doubts that will follow will probably be very heavy.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;"><a href="https://theringer.com/the-bill-simmons-podcast-kevin-durant-returns-to-okc-d9740c5282e1">Kevin Durant was on Bill Simmons</a> and Simmons asked him what he thought of LeBron leaving his team. And Durant said that at the time he wondered why he'd do that, especially since Cleveland was LeBron's home town. And Simmons pressed him into whether he thought that it was in poor form, abandoning his supporters like that. And Durant was adamant, saying why would someone think that LeBron owed more to his community when he'd given so much already? Who was being selfish: LeBron for making decisions about his own life, or the fans for expecting him to satisfy their expectations?</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">Simmons kept pressing: "Well, I didn’t like that he did it that way. I just thought it was tacky, especially since he was from Ohio."</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">"But you don't matter," was Durant's response. No fan should feel entitled to feeling a certain way about what someone else does or should do with their life. The notion that Bill Simmons or Charles Barkely or Jim Whatshisface would have made a different, better decision if they had Lebron's memories, pressures, contracts, family, endorsements, doubts, frustrations, insecurities, body, shoe size, commitments, expectations and more is laughable enough. The idea that someone could have little to no idea of any of those things and still think their opinon of what he should do held some sort of value is simply absurd. You don't matter - you may be entitled to your opinion, but you have no basis for feeling entitled. Durant just kept saying it, over and over, almost as though he had to hear it as often as possible. Almost as if he was convincing himself and not Simmons.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">To someone trying to convince themselves that the opinions of others should be secondary, making a decision to do something unpopular is the very definition of courage. But the simple minded, they don't see turmoil, they don't see beneath the surface. All they see is making a decision that makes your life easier. To them, you are the winner. But if it makes your life materially easier and socially or emotionally more difficult, did you really win outright, as they would imagine? Didn't you actually just break even?</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">Kevin Durant wanted a change and wanted a better chance at a title. That was his standard, and by that standard, given the opportunity that presented itself, it was one of the most obvious decisions in the history of decision-making. When people say that his going to the Warriors was strategically the best decision for the Warriors by eliminating the threat of the Thunder in the West, they're seemingly oblivious to the fact that it is also the best decision for him if he is on the Warriors. He strengthens himself and weakens an obstacle as well. That other people don't think that he should have made the mathematically most obvious decision given those standards speaks loudly to how much importance anyone can give to the counsel of strangers. Because more often than not, without the dimension of aiki - seeing yourself within someone - the counsel of strangers amounts to them telling you not what is best for you but what is best for them. People who claim to tell you what you need to hear usually use that as a smokescreen to tell you what they want to say. It isn't about the recipient at all.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">Damian Lillard has a different standard - a different outlook. One might say his youth is coloring his outlook but then again, I'm 36 and I tend towards his line of thinking. It's all arbitrary. If Damian Lillard never wins an NBA Championship, does that make him a loser? When out of all the basketball games he's played in his life - one-on-one, elementary, high school, college and pro - he's probably won well over 80% of the challenges he's faced? How many people on the planet has he lost to one-on-one...20, maybe? How many games did he play in in his life where he was the highest scorer and far and away the best player on the court?</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">All that satisfaction and joy that comes from competition, accomplishment and victory in all those smaller battles - do they not add up to that one time that Dirk won a championship? I really don't know that they don't...and people who have no idea what its like to be one of the 20 best people in the entire world at something have even less of an idea. But that doesn't stop them from saying that if you didn't win it all, you aren't even worth remembering.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">It is important to strive to be the best in all things. But it is even more important to win on your own terms - meeting your expectations. Damian Lillard isn't content to win a ring to silence the naysayers. His standard is higher - to win with the team he built from scratch. This is all but impossible now. Which means it probably won't happen. There is a fear there. But Steph won with the only team he ever played for. So did Dirk and Timmy D and Hakeem and Magic and Isiah and Bird. So with this hope, he walks his path despite this fear. People see this as loyalty. But this is courage first.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">I remember fighting at the dojo and fighting someone much better than me. One of the senpai was yelling at me to keep my hands up, keep moving - filling my head with all my mistakes. And I just kept getting hit. And through the pummeling, I remember hearing Sensei's voice above the din, saying something like "YOU'RE THE ONE GETTING PUNCHED! TRUST YOURSELF!" And when I finished he said, "No one can take the punch for you. They won't be taking the beating, and getting the bruises. The noise from outside won't block a punch. So you have to do the fighting. If you're going to do the dying, you should do the living, too."</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">No one else is going to die your death. Don't let others live your life.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">Everyone has different standards. I’m pretty sure if Kevin Durant never wins a championship he’ll still be happier playing for that team. I’m pretty sure that if Damian Lillard wins a championship the thing that he’ll hold closest to him was earning it his way. We all have different conceptions of victory - define victory in different terms. But it's having a mandate - having a calling - that makes courage obvious. When you understand what matters most to you, fear gets put in the proper place.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">At the ripe age of 36, I feel now that I've found my calling. I'm going to use that patient ear of mine and listen to the burdens of others and help guide them to a safe place inside of their minds. I've always had that Stillpoint inside, that place of solace that it seems so few people have nowadays. It eluded me just for that one period in my life - at university - but I would love to be the comfort to others that I couldn't find for myself. I would love to offer counsel to others and to help them build the tools to trust in their own counsel. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">And having realized all this, suddenly I feel quite brave.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: "publico text web";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">- Grandpa</span></span><br />
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Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30666912.post-34735404132300627332017-03-15T17:40:00.002-04:002023-12-04T04:45:40.957-05:00Playing politics<i>Politics is downstream from culture.</i><br />
<i>- Andrew Breitbart</i><br />
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I think its time to retire the word politics. It pains me to say it but the word has too much baggage. It's been made into a dirty word for a dirty mean-spirited thing that makes us into worse and worse people. We did this, we created this understanding. And we underestimated the influence that market forces have on access to decision makers and the decisions they make. But <i>Politics</i>, that word that once represented the triumph of reason over barbarity, the promise of mankind, is now in shambles. It's a shell of its former glory, a cipher that now represents only the base machinations of operatives and professionals that put a premium on winning at all cost over winning in lasting, sustainable ways...victories that hint at some proximity between action and right and truth.<br />
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Politics has reduced perhaps the most important social exercise of all - namely the administration, caretaking and shared security of large groups of people - to a high-stakes game. It infantilizes us, rendering those who participate less and less sensible while filling the rest on the periphery with disgust and resentment for the 'system' of games that are played, the nakedly selfish interests of the players and the obvious inequities of the system. The tragedy is that while politics fills us with disgust of the 'system', the 'system' is not separate from us. It is us. It is our cities, our provinces, our states, our countries and our world. It is our community, made up of us, made for us, made by us. Politics as it stands today, removes this personal investment in these real communities and in its place is fealty to the theoretical, the putative...the ideology of the party, the professional political class, the players in the game that observers are left to root for from the stands.<br />
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The well-being of a single human is difficult enough - ask any parent. And no one would argue that one or two parents trying to decide what was best for a child was some kind of game. How then could the arguments over what's best for 30 million people, 300 million people end up being full of less substance and more performance? Be full of more empty promises and less patience for finding the path forward? It may be an ideal notion that politics should be full of the most serious of people but it shouldn't just be a notion. Anyone who thinks about it for a second would see why it should be a reality. But once the human mind moves from wanting what's best for everyone including yourself, to wanting what we want - then it just becomes a matter of building relationships of convenience, relationship solely as a means to an end. And then the games begin...<br />
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Perhaps we can try the word politics again in the future when every human understands this. But for now, the word is simply too abused, too mistreated, too battered and bruised. Communication. Dialogue. Debate. Convince. Persuade. All these words speak of something sophisticated, something important, something done while listening to someone else, something done while looking someone in the eye. Something that is earnest and respectable.<br />
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'Politics' does not have that same ring. At this point, we simply do it because we don't know how to do something else. Maybe using a different word might help us to escape this losing game.Kamilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12216057008638038108noreply@blogger.com0