The Black Lives Matter Interruption and the Relativist Fallacy

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Saturday August 15, 2015 · 10:30 AM PDT

2015/08/15 · 10:30

While the Black Lives Matter interruption of Bernie Sanders generated a lot of debate for whether it was an effective tactic (incidentally I think it was effective despite some misgivings about its execution): the thing that was overlooked was some of the motivation behind it. Looking at articles like "Bernie Sanders Can't Save Black People" the issue wasn't just how to get a more progressive campaign but an outright rejection of any kind of outside help, at all.

Of course the left has a long history of sectarianism but this one runs a lot deeper. Probably starting in the "cultural turn" in universities and then reinforced by social media among millennials, this trend of rejectionism has a lot to do with identity.

If You're Not US, Then You're Not With Us

The argument goes something like this:

1. Privileged allies have never experienced our oppression;
2. they thus do not understand our problems and,
3. because they do not understand they have no place in helping us.

That is, only those who have experienced oppression can understand the truth behind it.

This is actually a clear example of the relativist fallacy, one in which something is true for some groups of people and not others, rather than it being objectively true and thus true for everyone regardless of whether they're oppressed or privileged. To put it bluntly: things like police killings/incarceration, LGBTQ discrimination, immigrant abuse and many others can be understood regardless of whether people are themselves incarcerated, LGBTQ or immigrants. The idea that only a particular group of people can fight to stop them is deeply problematic.

This can also lead to very disastrous results, without outside feedback movements can become myopic do things which end up harming their own goals. For instance, groups like the Weather Underground or Black Bloc became so insulated within themselves that they chose tactics which destroyed their movements and actually made conditions worse.

Now I'm not saying that most or even many activists simply want to reject all outside help, but that the trend exists and needs to be resisted if we're to have any kind of progress. The issue we need to focus on is what is effective at bringing progress in the long-run, not how "authentic" people need to be in order to do so.

Edit: Just to clarify, yes lack of white support, respectability politics, trying to steer the movement etc. are all problems but they're also rightly seen as problems. No one as of yet has addressed how the opposite of rejecting any kind of help whatsoever, is also a problem.

Meet the New Spies: Argo, Skyfall and Homeland

CartoonDiablo

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Saturday November 03, 2012 · 10:08 PM PDT

2012/11/03 · 22:08

One classic Hollywood cliche is to invert the victim and aggressor whenever the aggressor happens to be us. After the Vietnam War for instance, there was a rash of films like The Deer Hunter (1978) and Rambo: II (1985) where the nefarious Vietnamese held secret gulags of American POWs.
In reality there were no POWs and the actual victims were the 2 million Vietnamese casualties some of which are still dying today from chemical defoliants.

Today, with the end of the Iraq War and the killing of Osama bin laden, we're seeing an even bigger regression especially when it comes to spies.

Take the Showtime thriller Homeland. In the show, the US has discovered Nick Brody, a long held Iraq War POW who has been tortured and brutalized for 8 years by the Iraqis. At the same time CIA operative Carrie discovers that an American POW has been 'turned' against the country. Indeed, Carrie is committed to prevent another 9/11 from happening:

Carrie: I missed something once before. I won't, I can't let that happen again.
Saul: It was ten years ago. Everyone missed something that day.

Carrie: Everyone's not me.

Lacking evidence for a new attack, Carrie desperately wiretaps and surveils Nick's house without government sanction. This is complicated by the fact that she suffers from (ostensibly) bi-polar disorder and could be imagining everything. Of course when, spoiler, Nick does in fact turn out to be a secret terrorist it vindicates the downtrodden Carrie.

Indeed, somehow Homeland turns surveillance of soldiers, which in fact is a common procedure, into an unthinkable act perpetrated by someone Just Crazy Enough to save the day. It becomes the kind of self-flattery that not even J. Edgar Hoover would have fantasized of.

It's also worth mentioning that in the universe of the show, we begin with 9/11 and end with the fictional torture of an American POW. In reality the horrors of torture were committed by our side: everything from Abu Ghraib, to Guantanamo Bay to the 30,000 Iraqis held without trial were not perpetrated by Iraqi people and go unmentioned in the show.

This reactionary trend extends into the latest James Bond film, Skyfall (2012). In it, the villain is basically Julian Assange played by Javier Bardem who releases the identities of many MI6 agents and embroils the agency into a (gasp) public investigation by the British government. We are even given an impassioned speech by M about the necessity of state secrets and espionage.

As the The New Republic points out:

...the image of the rogue CIA agent seems to be changing shape in the post-Bin-Laden world. The figure is complicating: it seems less like a way to incriminate the Agency than a way to further humanize it....The new rogue agent doesn’t go off the rails because the CIA is ineffectual or malevolent, but because the operative is resistant to the organization’s reasonable doubts about collateral damage and rule of law.

That is, the ideological landscape is screaming for the government to put aside the rule of law and go after whoever they want.

Perhaps the clearest example of this ideology was in the film Argo (2012). Directed by Ben Affleck, it takes place during the 1979 hostage crisis and follows a CIA agent as he carries out a convoluted plot to rescue six escaped hostages.

On the surface the film is somewhat decent, it gives an introduction that explains the 1953 Iranian coup and the circumstances that triggered the 79 revolution. But in the level of substance the film does something perhaps no other has done.

In it, the villain isn't just the Revolutionary Guards or Iranian government but the entire Iranian people. Save for literally one Iranian who appears for a few seconds, every Iranian is chanting angry slogans and hunting the hostages down. Even the Iranian intelligence that sifts through shredded documents to identify the diplomats is staffed by ordinary women and children.

In many ways its a paranoia reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) except that in Birds their just birds, here they are everyday human beings who become a threat to national security.

If anything this probably shows a panic among the elite that they're losing control of the world. It also shows that they're trying to convince everyone else of the same thing.

An Analysis of 'Looper' (2012)

CartoonDiablo

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Saturday October 06, 2012 · 6:06 PM PDT

2012/10/06 · 18:06

Major spoilers: seriously, watch the film before reading this or it'll ruin an amazing experience.

Usually trailers are pretty good predictors of what films will be like, but in the case of Looper (2012) the trailer does not do it justice. Touted as a time travel action yarn, it ends up being a great film that radically departed from Hollywood's cliches.

The film takes place in 2044 (the "present") and 2074 (the "future"). In a depression plagued future, time travel is discovered and immediately outlawed. However, since society is run by powerful crime syndicates, time travel is utilized illegally.

In this comes the film's brilliant answer to problems with time travel: no one knows how it works. Since time travel is run by self-interested gangs, its workings are unknown and ambiguous; if paradoxes emerge they are simply assumed to be correct. As Roger Ebert says, Looper "sidesteps the paradoxes of time travel by embracing them."

In this dystopian future, time travel works like this: when gangs need someone killed (because disposing bodies is impossible due to tracking technology) they send the person back in time where a hitman (or "looper") immediately executes them and disposes of the body. Eventually, even the future selves of loopers are sent back to be killed (to avoid links with the gangs, thus "closing the loop") and a large retirement package is awarded to them to get out of the business for good. If they let their future selves go, the consequences are gruesome.

Here enters Joe, a looper played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt who eventually has to kill his future self, played by Bruce Willis. Something goes wrong. His future self fights back and runs away.

We then see the life future Joe has made for himself. Traveling to Shanghai he gets married and discards a life of drugs and crime. However all that changes when a new crime boss, known only as "The Rainmaker" kills his wife and has him killed (or should I say "looped") by his former self. He avoids this fate and is out to kill The Rainmaker as a child.

Here we have the first big break with Hollywood cliches, we know (or at least assume) that time travel is a one way street, you can only go back in time. So him killing The Rainmaker as a child won't necessarily bring him back into the future, or put another way, he will be marooned in the past no matter what.

As the two Joes meet in a diner, the young Joe gives the obvious solution: future Joe should tell him who his wife will be so he will never marry her and thus never put her life in danger. The outcome will be the same, his wife will be saved but with the caveat that he will never meet or know who she is. Future Joe rejects this and ends up hunting for the Rainmaker anyway, going to the point of murdering children.

Thus we realize that he's not actually after the safety of his wife, who he can much more easily save the other way, but to preserve his memory of his wife. This narcissism becomes even more apparent when, after murdering a child, he cries about not being able to see his wife, not the heinous crime he has just committed.

This seems like a clear rebuttal to Hollywood's amoral familism. Instead of apparently "heroic" fathers doing whatever it takes to save their families, Joe is murdering children in order to preserve the vanity his wife provided him. Even more so, Bruce Willis, the iconic action hero, becomes the villain in this regard.

In the meantime, past Joe finds a farm which has a possible young Rainmaker, in this case a 10 year old with a single mom. We discover the child is highly intelligent but has serious emotional issues, the most likely prime candidate of the Rainmaker. Despite his earlier skepticism he ends up defending them from his future self.

Here we have the dramatic irony of the film, while the future Joe has decades more experience, the experience leads him to be even more narcissistic while the recent events make the younger Joe more selfless. This reaches its dramatic conclusion when (seriously if you read this far and haven't watched it you have a final opportunity here) the younger Joe scarifies himself to stop the future Joe and save the wife and kid.

This ends up being radical for two reasons, on the one hand a man killed himself to save a single-mother and a child (people that are typically stigmatized) and secondly, he assumed that the change he made will redeem the child from being a crime boss in the future. Probably the most "pro-nurture" move in a film in decades both in terms of moms and the nature vs. nurture argument.

While most reviews focus on the time travel logic or quality of the film (which this does to an extent as well) its worth noting that politically its a rather good film as well.

The Deeper Philosophical Appeal of Ayn Rand

CartoonDiablo

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Tuesday August 28, 2012 · 6:58 PM PDT

2012/08/28 · 18:58

With all the controversy over Paul Ryan's adoration of Ayn Rand, I was rather surprised that philosopher Slavoj Zizek (a self-described communist) wrote a sympathetic analysis of Rand's works.

It underlies the simplistic interpretation given by most people, yes there's "makers" and "looters" but most hardcore Randians (that is, people that actually read her books) will point to a different appeal. The main message behind the work is to be liberated from the gaze of others, not necessarily from caring about others but to not care what others think of you.

While it's obviously a good value to have, it's completely ambiguous as to who holds it and why. Indeed, while some of the most moral leaders didn't care what others thought of them, all the worst criminals and dictators in history were "Randian" in this sense as well.

To give an example relevant to Rand herself, the Bolsheviks that she despised were a minor party in Russia. Even after taking power in the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks decided to create an Assembly and lost in an election they held themselves. After a single day, they dissolved the Assembly and became a dictatorship.

Long afterwards the Bolsheviks had to suppress wide-scale movements against them just among the left. They weren't appealing to, nor did they care about what the masses thought, they suppressed them to get what they wanted.

It's why the villain in The Fountainhead, Toohey doesn't make sense. Take his vision for society:

A world where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thought of the brain of his neighbor who'll have no thought of his own but an attempt to guess the thought of the next neighbor who'll have no thought--and so on...
[Every man will work for] [t]he approval of his fellows--their good opinion--...public polls.

Aside from the fact that, that statement probably applies better to investors trying to "guess the thought of the" market than any left-wing ideology (hell even Noam Chomsky has described the problems with collectivism.) this would imply that Toohey was asked by the "looters" to altruistically rule over them, or put another way, the masses wanted a ruler. Rand circumvents this problem by making Toohey a manipulator who convinced the population to follow him, akin to if the Bolsheviks had won the support of a majority of Russians.

The other issue is how this strive is apparently incompatible with altruism. To assume as such, you would have to assume all altruism is based on guilt and objectification which I suppose Rand and her followers actually believe. What's amazing is not only is that view ridiculous but studies suggest that helping others not only makes us happy but makes us happier than all other activities.

Muddled Economics

The most glaring problem is the interpretation of the rich as the ones who drive the economy. In Atlas Shrugged, this is taken to its extreme when the world's rich go on "strike" and society falls apart without them. In recent years the term "job creator" was used to propagate this view. As Nick Hanauer points out, this view is completely backwards, it's consumers that drive the economy both in terms of jobs but also profits.

The irony of Ayn Rand's works is that in real life it's the rich who are feeding off both workers and the government. Indeed most great invocations like computers, airlines, satellites, the internet, GPS etc. were the result of government creation while their profits were the result of labor generating it. It's why when workers go on strike, it actually does make a difference for the CEOs that depend on them.

The appeal then is to the people in power; CEOs and administrators think of themselves as strivers that overcame the glare of a mob. In reality, it's the people that have to overcome them.

The Emotional Appeal for Blaming The Teachers

CartoonDiablo

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Sunday August 26, 2012 · 12:06 AM PDT

2012/08/26 · 00:06

I was disheartened to hear Chris Hayes on C-SPAN say that the educational "reform" movement is "winning the argument." That's not to say they're winning on any factual level, Hayes meant that in terms of public debate, anything short of blaming the teachers means supporting the status quo.

It's worth noting that this scapegoat has resonance for a reason, there's an emotional appeal for blaming the teachers.

The Poverty Problem

The US education system isn't broken, it's being disrupted by poverty. As the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test shows the United States ranked in the low 20s but at the same time it has some of the highest child poverty in the industrialized world.

When the effects of child poverty are factored in, the US actually outperforms every other country in the world. That is, all things being equal, we still have the best education in the world: an area with 10% child poverty in the US will, on average, do better than an area with 10% child poverty in Finland.

PISA Test Scores and Child Poverty

While the struggle with being poor has an obvious effect on learning, it also has effects for funding. Schools that have a higher poverty rate will have lower funding for the schools because of a lower tax base.

Total Per-Student Expenditures Versus Student Poverty Rates for U.S. School Districts with More Than 1,000 Enrollment

Indeed, these problems have been expanded by education policy and increases in poverty following the recession.

Bad Teachers

This leaves a problem, if it's objectively shown to be poverty then why is there an effort at demonizing teachers, or rather, why assume people would believe its the teachers that are the problem? It's the dominant position, everyone from Fox News to Jonathan Alter thinks its the teachers fault. So, agendas aside, why even push the story?

The answer lies in the anecdotal and emotional experience of people. Lets face it, you've had a bad teacher in your life. The problem is that one bad teacher is out of dozens of good (or at least adequate) teachers. Thus it's wrong to assume that someones personal experience accounts for a national epidemic.

Unfortunate the media does just that, it takes a personal experiences and turns it into a national problem. As a Newsweek article makes clear:

In most states, after two or three years, teachers are given lifetime tenure. It is almost impossible to fire them. In New York City in 2008, three out of 30,000 tenured teachers were dismissed for cause. The statistics are just as eye-popping in other cities. The percentage of teachers dismissed for poor performance in Chicago between 2005 and 2008 (the most recent figures available) was 0.1 percent. In Akron, Ohio, zero percent. In Toledo, 0.01 percent. In Denver, zero percent. In no other socially significant profession are the workers so insulated from accountability.

What Newsweek apparent forgot is that "In no other socially significant profession" are people exposed to dozens of such professionals. People don't just choose one teacher all their life like they would a doctor or lawyer, they go through numerous upon numerous ones. Imagine going through 20 mechanics or 20 doctors or 20 lawyers, chances are some of them won't be top notch.

Or more importantly, where's the evidence that those places needed to fire more teachers? As NPR points out, even when it's really easy to fire teachers (like, "at the click of the button" with virtually no documentation easy) many school principals don't do it.

What is to be done?

The important thing to remember is we're not dealing with an educational problem so much as a child poverty problem. That's why most "reforms" have little to do with improving education and are just done as a means to undermine it.

For instance, one favorite "reform" is charter schools, even though studies find that charters on average do worse than public schools.

If we want to get serious about education we should be fighting the cause of the problems, not making them worse.

Edit: A lot of commentators brought up good points on teacher tenure:

(A) Tenure isn't a guarantee to not be fired, it's to not be fired without just cause as well as the teacher being represented during the process. Prior to tenure a teacher can basically be fired on the spot.

(B) Those that get tenure are usually the ones that are the best and endured enough to be proven to be good teachers. Those low firing rates are because being a public school teacher is one of the hardest jobs out there and most leave teaching after 5 years leaving the good ones.
(C) A lot of bad teachers aren't directly fired but persuaded to retire. It's another reason why statistics for firing are so low.

Reaction to Red Dawn Trailer

CartoonDiablo

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Saturday August 11, 2012 · 1:42 AM PDT

2012/08/11 · 01:42

It's easy to make fun of 1984 Red Dawn, the ultimate Reaganite fantasy flick where a million Russians and Nicaraguans managed to sneak into the US and occupy hillbilly towns because the US got soft on its military and dissolved NATO. And not wanting to outdo themselves, "[i]n a neat touch, gun control has made it easy for the Commie occupiers to round up all the registered guns in the area..." which of course is complimented by shots of Minute Men statues.

But the thing most people forget is underneath the lower-than-Tom-Clancy-level plot, comes an oddly progressive tale of insurgent resistance. As Jesse Walker of Reason pointed out:

The film outraged liberal critics, but further to the left it had some supporters. In a witty and perceptive piece for The Nation, Andrew Kopkind called it "the most convincing story about popular resistance to imperial oppression since the inimitable Battle of Algiers," adding that he'd "take the Wolverines from Colorado over a small circle of friends from Harvard Square in any revolutionary situation I can imagine."

It's worth remembering how odd this was for the time; in a period obsessed with superpower military rivalry, the film portrays a popular resistance movement remote from any military campaign. As well, the characters are average high school kids who become populist heroes. Although only a trailer is out for the new Red Dawn remake it looks like even that might have changed.

In the new film, Jed and Matt Eckert (Chris Hemsworth and Josh Peck respectively) are no longer just high school kids. Jed is a US Marine while Matt looks to be a football quarterback (at best, possibly an underdog). Their father is a cop who is brave enough to openly criticize the invaders as they have him at gun point.
From the look of the trailer the rest of the kids look less like insurgents and more like a younger version of the Expendables.

The obvious point of this is to take the "formula" of a couple of kids resisting and format it into the modern action movie cliche. This ends up reinforcing a mistake in the original film, as Murray Rothbard (who surprisingly correctly) pointed out:

One big problem with the picture is that there is no sense that successful guerrilla war feeds on itself; in real life the ranks of the guerrillas would start to swell, and this would defeat the search-and-destroy concept. In Red Dawn, on the other hand, there are only the same half-dozen teenagers, and the inevitable attrition makes the struggle seem hopeless when it need not be.

And the concept of popular uprising is not only reduced but it's reduced during a time period in which it works better today. Since the 2012 movie began shooting there have been a whopping 27 uprisings across the world, the perfect time to make a film about the struggle of people to free themselves.

The other absurd thing about the film is how the official enemy was changed from China to North Korea; Hollywood thus reaches the comical zenith of selling out: they basically change the entire plot to make a bigger box office return.

And so the villain is North Korea..the same country that can't feed it's own people occupies the biggest military power in the world? And doesn't this reinforce the stereotype that all Asians look the same since none of the Chinese actors were replaced with Koreans?

Indeed the logic couldn't be any more reactionary: possibly the weakest country in the world topples the US and only the specially trained youth, through their sheer force of will, (since those scary Koreans still have tanks after all) overcome the foreign commie threat.

Of course this is just a trailer but the signs don't look promising.

Lets Just Say It: Republicans are Pro-Rape

CartoonDiablo

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Tuesday July 31, 2012 · 2:00 AM PDT

2012/07/31 · 02:00

There is a seriously disturbing pattern emerging around Republican policies and rape. In an unprecedented way, Republicans have legislated for rape to be easier to commit and with less help given to the victims.

What's sickening is this isn't just some anomaly, this is a phenomenon among the "Family Values" and "Tough on Crime" party.

Federal

- The Republicans in the House of Representatives attempted to pass a bill that would redefine rape to only mean "forcible" rape. Put another way, it would effectively decriminalize statutory and date rape.

- The House GOP is against a law that would make it easier forraped soldiers to get an abortion.

Kansas

- The city of Topeka, Kansas repealed it's domestic abuse law which would in effect decriminalize domestic abuse. While not necessarily rape, it makes it significantly easier to commit one if police don't respond to domestic abuse.

South Carolina

- Gov. Nikki Haley vetoed $453,680 for rape crisis centers and calls them "special interests." She was also classy enough to call rape and abuse victims "distractions."

Wisconsin

- Victims are being charged for their rape kits at the price of $1,200. Put another way, they are being taxed $1,200 for being raped. It also makes it easier for rapists since it's more difficult to press charges when you have to pay over a thousand dollars.

And notice this doesn't even include trans-vaginal ultrasound laws, this is the Republican party literally redefining rape to make it easier to commit and punishing victims of it.

What 'Cloud' Computing Is And Why It Should Worry You

CartoonDiablo

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Sunday July 29, 2012 · 11:43 PM PDT

2012/07/29 · 23:43

With this hilarious Onion video about Cloud computing it makes an important point: everyone is talking about "Cloud computing" but it seems like few know what it is.

It's important to know what this shift in computing is and what it could mean for the future.

What is Cloud Computing?

For a time if someone wanted to host a website they would need to buy physical servers. If traffic increased it would mean adjusting to the traffic ad hoc by buying more servers. The obvious problem is for sites like Google or Amazon it requires massive amounts of servers that can't be maintained this way on any practical level.

In order to fix this came "Cloud" computing which essentially outsourced the problem; large remote server hubs or "clouds" managed by private companies would take the place of buying servers. In these clouds websites would automatically take up as many servers as needed and the charge for bandwidth usage would work like a meter. It essentially rents server space to websites.

The thing to remember is these server farms are completely remote and hidden from the people using them, managed by whoever owns the cloud. Ostensibly this gives the user the freedom to focus on whatever he or she is hosting but it also takes away control and ownership of the server.

The Cloud Dilemma

The problem with clouds is that many of the cloud providers are big companies like AT&T who of course have a history of collaborating with illegal government searches and share common interests against things like net neutrality.

There's also no real guarantee that these companies won't filter content or go through private data to accomplish their ends. Take a company like Dow Chemical, recently it was revealed that they hired the private firm Stratfor to spy on Bhopal activists; there have been no charges or calls for investigation.

While folks like Zizek might be a little off when claiming that clouds will privatize the internet (the internet already consists of many privately owned servers) what cloud computing will do is centralize it the hands of unaccountable corporations.

Indeed, the concept has spread from just servers to the entire personal experience, from private laptops to smartphones, every file someone has will thus be floating around in a cloud network. Thus the potential for harm will be huge.

Solutions and Alternatives

With the way things are, policy solutions are a long ways off but it is possible to create collaborative and secure clouds right now. There are efforts like the Tor project on Clouds or possibly even have clouds in foreign countries (specifically ones that aren't party to ACTA which the US signed but has not yet ratified).

Now obviously there is a potential for people using secure clouds in themselves for harmful purposes (money laundering etc.) but the importance of keeping a free society away from private control is much more important.

Indeed while Clouds are just a buzz word now, if we don't do anything the future with them 20 or 30 years from now might not look good.

Review: The Dark Knight Rises

CartoonDiablo

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Tuesday July 24, 2012 · 1:38 PM PDT

2012/07/24 · 13:38

I think a lot of reviewers jumped the gun when it came to "The Dark Knight Rises." As the final Batman film by Christopher Nolan it was pretty widely (or at least wider then typical for a superhero film) described as "fascist," especially by Salon's Andrew O'Hehir (I'll leave him to define what he means by fascist) who captured the film by saying "it’s a great fascist film, and arguably the biggest, darkest, most thrilling and disturbing and utterly balls-out spectacle ever created for the screen."

I have to disagree; in the new film not only does Batman "Rise" but Nolan redeemed himself of the blatant fascism and authoritarianism he was accused of in "The Dark Knight". Indeed, it's not just a spectacle but a spectacle with a decent political sensitivity.

The film begins with an event honoring the late Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) where it's revealed Gotham passed an anti-crime bill in his name. Essentially Gotham got "tough-on-crime" and unjustly arrested thousands without parole thus "fixing" its crime problem. Indeed Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has been a crippled recluse for 8 years and Batman disappeared as well (I wondered why no one in the movie managed to put two and two together) complementing the lack of need for the Batman hero.

However the inequality and tensions remain, a literal underclass works in the sewers as it's the only place for work and attracts those that are desperate for a job. As ThinkProgress pointed out there doesn't seem to be a real middle class in Gotham, it's the lower class people servicing the city's billionaire elite. And the new villain Bane (Tom Hardey) is brewing a storm to change this.

Bane initiates a faux revolution followed by a modern Reign of Terror led by freed prisoners. This was seen by many as a betrayal of the Occupy movement and a display of Nolan's true Fascist colors: an apocalyptic scenario where the rabble take back the city and run it into the ground. As O'Hehir makes the case:

In its tremendous, almost apocalyptic action sequences, “The Dark Knight Rises” suggests a reverse-engineered version of a Soviet-era revolutionary epic, in which the masses are the villains and their onetime overlords the heroes.

The problem is that's completely false, at best the number of people that actually follow Bane are in the tens of thousands which given a city of several million is not that exactly "the masses." As the film makes clear, the city is a failed state led by Bane as its warlord and sole dictator. This new revolutionary government even has exaggerated show trials where its said "Bane has no authority here" only "the people of Gotham" which is a clear nod to the Stalinist show trials.

The most fascist element of the film is Bane and his cohorts who, under the guise of a revolution, tries to annihilate the city and commit genocide in the name of stopping decadence and corruption. Sound like a certain fascism in history?

The Big Turn

One thing that's startling is the thematic 180 from "The Dark Knight." It's no wonder "Dark Knight" was scorned or revered as a presentation of the Bush Administration, the hero uses extraordinary rendition and mass surveillance to save the day in the absence of tough policing. As Huffington Post points out, in "Rises" Bruce Wayne himself becomes a victim of rendition.

Even on a deeper thematic level, the point of the film was about suppressing the truth. As Slavoj Zizek analysis:

Batman and his friend police commissioner Gordon realise that the city’s morale would suffer if Dent’s murders were made public, so plot to preserve his image by holding Batman responsible for the killings. The film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us. No wonder the only figure of truth in the film is the Joker, its supreme villain. He makes it clear that his attacks on Gotham City will stop when Batman takes off his mask and reveals his true identity; to prevent this disclosure and protect Batman, Dent tells the press that he is Batman – another lie. In order to entrap the Joker, Gordon fakes his own death – yet another lie.

In "Rises," the noble lie falls apart and even the most intense police repression couldn't prevent the disintegration of the the city. Even the charity of the rich falls apart as Wayne can't fund orphanages because of unprofitable endeavors to help mankind.

Batman's identity is also given a progressive twist as "anyone can be behind the mask" as opposed to a specific Übermensch. This should seem odd since in "Dark Knight" the hero took out a Batman imposter who was fulfilling this vision.

A Progressive or Fascist film?

Nolan told Rolling Stone its not a political film but the reactions obviously beg to differ.

The big gripe with the film is how the villains by default become "Occupy-esque" since they literally attack Wall Street (or perhaps the Gotham Stock Exchange?) as well as a football game where an angelic boy was singing the national anthem, how anti-American can this man be!

While Nolan scrapped any appearance of "Occupy Gotham" or a protest force to help the city, It doesn't seem he was scorning them. In the film a maniacal villain falsely claimed to be the voice of the disadvantaged only to kill them; not exactly reminiscent of Occupy. And while we root for Batman to fight crime, he doesn't attack petty thieves, he confronts the crime bosses that the legal system can't in the face of extreme inequality.

Thus Christopher Nolan's biggest flaw is that Batman returns things back to normal, a state of inequality and decay. Unlike "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" which does everything short of smashing the state, Batman's existence becomes self-serving as he fights to manage the decay of certain conditions, not solve them the way a mass movement would.

The problem is Batman doesn't fight to smash the decaying Gotham system we see in Nolan's films, he unwittingly fights to maintain it.

Reveiw: The Problem with "God Bless America" (2011)

CartoonDiablo

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Wednesday July 11, 2012 · 3:35 PM PDT

2012/07/11 · 15:35

Imagine if a movie was made about a decent man getting by in a decaying society, overrun by blacks, Muslims, gays and whatever other boogeymen are conjured up to scare people; he eventually snaps and goes on a killing spree. This film didn't portray him as insane or sick but correct and asked you to empathize with him.

Obviously it would be (rightly) considered crude propaganda and apologia for people like Anders Breivik but what if it was the other way? What if there was a "liberal" version of this film about a man in a decaying society overrun by xenophobic racist conservatives, religious extremists, sensationalized media, spoiled rich teenagers and outright jerks?

God Bless America is that film. As the latest dark comedy by Bobcat Goldthwait, it follows Frank (Joel Murray, brother of Bill Murray) who after long nights of surfing through garbage on television is diagnosed with a brain tumor and has had enough with the world; he teams up with a teenage girl named Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr) and becomes a spree killer of those that "deserve to die."

What's striking is how, as the New Statesman put it, safe and empathetic the movie plays it for a film about a mass killer.

A safer and more partial movie it would be difficult to imagine. In the days before Frank blows a fuse, several things happen that are designed to ingratiate him with the audience. He loses his job after sending flowers to a depressed co-worker. Then he calls his daughter, who lives with his ex-wife, only to find that the child would rather play a computer game than talk to him. Finally he is told he has a brain tumour by a doctor who breaks off mid-diagnosis to make an abusive phone call. Cruel boss, unfeeling daughter, insensitive physician: are you on Frank’s side yet?

As Goldthwait pointed out in an interview, his premise is to get people to feel for objectionable characters:

Similarly, Goldthwait's movies tend to start with an outrageous one-liner premise based on protagonists doing the unthinkable—experimenting with bestiality, exploiting the death of a child, murdering reality-TV stars simply because they're annoying—who, over the course of the film, are humiliated and humbled by the merciless worlds they live in, putting the viewer in the uncomfortable spot of feeling badly for the bad people.

The problem with this approach is it neither shows the clear insanity of the actions of the characters nor does it come off as ironic, it ends up feeling like a justification for them.

Compare this to films like Falling Down or Taxi Driver, where the audience identifies with the characters without being asked to justify them. At one point there's even an "homage" to the gun dealer scene in Taxi Driver which really only serves to remind the audience how much better of a film that was.

Take this scene from Falling Down which manages to both have the audience identify with the character without apologizing for him and be funny at the same time:

The "liberal" version of a social decay

The biggest problem however, is that for all the easy (and literal) targets God Bless America aims at, the Westboro Baptist Church, celebrity worship etc. it seems to miss the broader point: are we actually living in a socially decaying society?

The film would like us to think so but in reality it's anything but. Crime is at an all time low, people are more concerned with serious economic issues, than social issues, and even teenage pregnancy is at all time historic low, not exactly a portrait of a degenerating society.

And for all the problems the film shows, summarized nicely as those that are “scared of foreigners or people with vaginas,” those problems were much worse during the supposed "golden age" of civility.

In many ways it seems like the liberal version of the "golden age" ideology of the far right except instead of social decay from foreigners and gays, it's from Glenn Becks and Fred Phelps(s); while they do some damage, the real problems in America are mostly economic, not social.

What the film misses is what Network (1976) showed us decades ago: that the garbage on TV isn't reality.

The Tea Party is an "Anti-Liberal" Movement

CartoonDiablo

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Saturday July 07, 2012 · 9:50 AM PDT

2012/07/07 · 09:50

One thing I've found after seeing numerous contradictory youtube videos against "liberals" is that Chomsky's hypothesis that the Tea Party (and the right-wing movement generally) is really an anti-Liberal if not proto-fascist movement, holds true.

Now at the risk of invoking Godwin, I'll just say that there is a clear difference between Nazis and the tea party but that there are troubling similarities. It's also worth mentioning that it's not much to brag about; for instance, Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, also distanced himself from the Nazis despite holding a similar extremist ideology.

It's not about spending or "big government"

The consensus around the Tea Party is that it's actually just about spending with some social conservative elements present in the background. Aside from the obvious problem of the Tea Party not holding huge rallies around the Bush wars and warrantless wiretapping etc. is that the most prominent groups are social conservatives while fiscal conservatives are left in the background.

Indeed, if big government and spending were the main thrust of the movement then Ron Paul would be its clear idol while the social conservatives would lag in the background, when the the opposite is true.
As a Tea Party Patriots straw poll showed, Ron Paul only got 3% of the votes while the social issues Michelle Bachmann got 28%. The Ron Paul folks are at best a "faction" within the movement. As it stands, the Tea Party is predominantly a social conservative movement.

While there is a clear rhetoric around cutting spending, it's for spending related to "liberal" programs. For instance, healthcare reform would actually reduce billions in deficits but is opposed while the unprecedented rise in abortion restrictions is a clear intrusion of government both in women's private life and the businesses that provide reproductive health services.

So what accounts for this?

The "Golden Age" and Liberals

To get a clearer idea of the ideology at work, we have to understand the "golden age" that many hold to be the most prosperous time in the United States. That time, incidentally, is the 1950s.

While it should seem odd that the 50s are glorified, especially since economically they were far more progressive then today; it was also a socially restrictive time. As the far right Free Congress Foundation conceptualizes:

Most Americans look back on the 1950s as a good time. Our homes were safe, to the point where many people did not bother to lock their doors. Public schools were generally excellent, and their problems were things like talking in class and running in the halls. Most men treated women like ladies, and most ladies devoted their time and effort to making good homes, rearing their children well and helping their communities through volunteer work. Children grew up in two–parent households, and the mother was there to meet the child when he came home from school. Entertainment was something the whole family could enjoy.

"What happened" according to the far right, is liberals and progressives made life worse by liberalizing society and leading it to an alleged decay. Men and Women no longer act like they're "supposed to," immigrants and poor minorities are taking all that the white working class has, and Muslims are trying to implement Sharia law, all of which are led by the nefarious progressive puppet masters.

While it might sound crazy, it offers a coherent theory for people's grievances. While most people's wages have stagnated or declined, their hours increased, their jobs outsourced because of policies that liberalized capital, public funding of education has been cut resulting in exploding tuition, the problem is instead pointed to social causes.

At worst, this leads to extreme racism of the kind you see in the Norway shooting; in a bid to restore the patriarchal, racially pure society of the 50s, there will be demands for mass deportation and violent rhetoric around the most "exotic" outsiders, namely Muslims.

The wrong correlation

Indeed, in many ways it's the wrong correlation, what made the 50s the golden age wasn't the fact that women and minorities were oppressed, it was that men had stable jobs, had wages that would increase every year, and could go to and send their kids off to college for little money.

In fact, one of the appeals of the fascist parties in Europe is that they're some of the only parties that run on economic populism. As The New York Times noted in France:

Jean-Yves Camus, a political analyst who is an expert on the National Front, said the party was the strongest advocate of state control in Europe, attracting a generation that experienced the economic boom of the 1950s and the current decline.
It remains “the last party to represent a revival of the state, based on industrial value and injection of public money,” Mr. Camus said, making it seem to some the true inheritor of Gaullism.

In the United States it's a bit different, government intervention is the code word for "liberal" meaning direct appeals towards it are out of the question. In fact, economic causes for decline are at best considered irrelevant and at worst denied altogether.

The right-wing bubble

It's important to note the real problems aren't immediately obvious and especially not for people stuck in the right-wing media bubble. For instance, people can't immediately recall their parents income and adjust it for inflation and compare it to their own income.

It's why the alternative theory of "evil liberals" has such a grasp on a certain segment on the population, you do see a clear difference between today and the 50s in terms of social attitudes but you can't directly see people's incomes stagnating.

Our job should be to illuminate these problems and to pop the bubble.

The Attack On Universities

CartoonDiablo

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday June 16, 2012 · 10:27 PM PDT

2012/06/16 · 22:27

Perhaps a bit late but there has been a controversy over the study of the supposed "liberal bias" and "political indoctrination" of California's higher education called A Crisis of Competence (pdf.) by the conservative group the National Association of Scholars.

While most of the study consists of anecdotes, one part deals with history classes at the UC schools and is what lead to Rick Santorum making his hilarious remark some time ago.

The methodology of the report is is to look at the names and descriptions of the history classes (as opposed to, you know, actually studying the classes) which evidently all have some kind of liberal bias.

Eric Rauchway has a good take down.

As he points out:

...the paper insists that even to teach about African American history, about immigration history, about race, class, and gender, about labor, about Asian Americans – about the Civil War! – is to “focus on the nation’s shortcomings, as well as on victimology and oppression.”
For many Americans, the history of the nation’s minorities is a point of pride, as indeed is the history of the labor movement – and in fact the history of our Civil War, by which Americans ended chattel slavery in the United States and created of a loose confederation of states a modern nation. The insistence that to focus on these subjects is inherently negative is, simply, bizarre.

The study actually considers it liberal, biased, subversive etc. to teach basic American history. Evidently American history (as well as reality) has a liberal bias.

What's more disturbing is people are taking the study seriously.

In a report (pdf.) on the UC schools it cited the NAS report for fears of "political indoctrination." This was articulated by the president of the UC president Mark Yudof.

This is of course in addition to the increasing privatization of college (see my kos from last year) which in many ways has been internalized in California.

As the this report on UC schools makes clear of the "real threat":

However, this report shows the real threat to the preeminence of California’s higher education is not a lack of funds....Rather, the real danger is a fundamental failure by today’s trustees and system leaders to apply the same creativity and thoughtfulness...to a new world of reduced resources and a shrinking tax base.

Your heard it right, losing money isn't the problem, the real issue is making the best of what scraps remain.

These two pressures are not unrelated. The ultimate goal is a privatized University to educate the elite, without all the pitfalls of having to know actual history. As Paul Krugman puts it in a subheading, it's essentially like "Sovietizing the universities."

If we don't act, this might just happen.

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