Passing the Time in Quarantine

As the covid19 quarantine stretches on, it's important to find ways to pass the time. So to take a break from the more serious things, I just want to do a quick run down of some of the stuff I've been watching during over the last few months.

Funnily enough, haven't been watching a whole lot of movies even though we have all the time in the world to watch them. But what I've watched, I've really enjoyed. I watched Mulholland Drive as part of my girlfriend's ongoing quest to expose me to the works of David Lynch. I enjoyed most of Twin Peaks, less of Blue Velvet, and positively adored Mulholland Drive.

Mulholland is definitely the most effective of Lynch's work I've seen so far. Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return ends with an awe-inspiring, surrealist montage that sees Lynch at his best, but in Mulholland Drive we see Lynch maintain a surrealist, dreamy tone for more then an inscrutable set piece or to spite his fans for daring to ask for cohesive narratives. 

For all its turns, Mulholland Drive is straight forward, relatively speaking, and is easy enough to untangle if you pay attention to what Lynch lays out if front of you. What I like about it is how, at heart, its an incredibly human story of longing, passion, regret, resentment, jealousy, and envy and how all of those feelings are born out of and strengthened by each other until we feel like we're drowning so we do something drastic to break free. Its only when we come up for air that we realize what we've done, when we hope against hope that this time, too, the world will scoff at our plans so we won't have to live with the consequences of our choices.

Except, we're never that lucky, are we? Come for the exploration of the misery of existence, stay for the heavenly cover of Roy Orbison.

In other good movies, we also checked out Uncut Gems with Booksmart as a chaser. Gems is perfect showcase of if you give Adam Sandler a project he wants to put in real work for, you're going to get a real performance out of him. Paul Thomas Anderson knew it, even Spanglish has good moments in it. I know he makes movies so his friends can take vacations and get paid at the same time. But it's ridiculous that we're going to throw away someone with actual skill out of resentment for making movies that get him and the studios paid. He played the game more obnoxiously then others for sure, but is that really worth tanking his career so we just get more horrendous shit like The Ridiculous 6?

Anyway, watch Uncut Gems. It is a stress inducing experience that throws you right in the middle of life as a gambling addict. The thrill of a bet paying off, the despair when it doesn't, and, underneath it all, the irresistible pull to keep going back for more. I can understand if it isn't your cup of tea, but it's still worth checking out at least once.

And, you'll need a relaxing movie to come down with. And for that, I Booksmart will do just the trick. Directed by Olivia Wilde, Booksmart is the last night of school coming-of-age story like Dazed and Confused or Superbad, but with girls. That twist helps the movie feel like a fresh new take on a well established genre all on its own, but the movie doesn't just rest on that alone. The uber ride with their principle has one of my favorite jokes in movie history. Beyond all that though, the movie works better then most gross out teen comedies because unlike most, it wears its heart on its sleeve from the beginning and doesn't feel like they have to hide it because having emotions is gay or whatever. Cutting to the chase saves everyone so much time, time the movie wisely spends on jokes and satisfying character arcs.

But, you gotta make room for trash, too. Aquaman fits that bill really well, albeit surprisingly so. Jason Momoa is still incredibly charming as the lead, the movie as a visually popping color palette which is a welcome relief from the visual slop of the Synder movies. The movie is unfocused, changing genres almost every half-hour, the romance between Momoa and Amber Heard is pitiful to watch since what chemistry they have comes overwhelmingly in their platonic moments with the soundtrack doing its level best to force the romantic aspects.

Mostly, I appreciate the movie for being a prime example for why superhero movies should be animated as a rule and live action only by exception. The underwater scenes in this movie are hilariously bad. It's so awful that they gave Patrick Wilson and Wilhem Dafoe short hairstyles so they'd only have to animate the flowing hair of two characters at a time. I mean, compare the underwater scenes from The Little Mermaid to anything in Aquaman and tell me why do we have to wait another ten years before live action CGI capabilities catches up to what 2d animation could do thirty years ago?

It won't happen, obviously. Americans are too conditioned to view animated works as kids shit except in extraordinary circumstances. That unimaginative way of doing things pigeonholes what is considered an economically viable  medium to tell our stories so even though everyone is starting to get sick, with good reason, of superhero movies awash in obvious CG fakery, the bias against animation means you won't see the push to tell these stories in the way that they'll be most effective and compelling so, that's cool.

For the real garbage though, the silver screen provides. And there's no one who does entertaining garbage like Shonda Rhimes. She's built a primetime empire with Shondaland on ABC and after watching two seasons of Grey's Anatomy and How to Get Away with Murder, it makes sense why she's been so successful.

Grey's Anatomy is a fascinating watch because it tries to capture the real world feel of ER and the tragicomedy moves that Scrubs pulled off so well. And it faceplants, hard, on both of these fronts. The voiceover is so heavy-handed that any pathos it wants to delivered is crushed by its self-serious, armchair philosophizing tone. The jokes are rarely funny, mostly because the show is so committed to the soapy serious feel of being a serious show about serious people with serious problems to work through.

Also, so much of the conflict in this show just doesn't matter. Like, at all. For one arc, Meredith Grey is competing for a medical research prize and needs permission to use something from an old, Spanish doctor. As these things go, it turns out the original patent holders daughter is an old friend of Meredith's mother who we come to find out co-developed the technique that made Meredith's mother famous. All she asks for is that Meredith rename the technique to reflect this fact and she'll let Meredith use her patented technology free of charge.

It's a simple enough request, but Meredith refuses. She has a lot of long talks with people about how she shouldn't have to pay for her mother's sins or why she shouldn't throw away her mother's legacy so she makes the decision to potentially sabotage her own research to keep her mother's name clean. And then there's a sexual harassment revelation about the man ran the foundation who provides the prize required all the women who settled their accusations against him to withdraw from competing for the prizes his foundation put on. Meredith's sorta godmother was one of those women, hence why her mother covered up any of her involvement and took sole credit for a revolutionary procedure.

After all this comes out, Meredith does what her godmother wanted from the beginning and everything just... goes on like nothing happened. The show is an exercise of Drama created via drama of the high school variety; it's never ending, borne out of stubborn pride or easily fixed miscommunications if anyone bothered to just tell each other anything. But that's what makes things so palatable, for all the drama, there are rarely any stakes. All the dramatic escalations come so fast and so often that they just pass over you like a wave but in a soothing, background noise kind way.

Which makes How to Get Away with Murder a testament to Rhimes talent for variety. If Anatomy is the fake fireplace you turn on with a light switch to pretend you have warmth, Murder is a man on fire jumping into a pool of kerosene. There are so, so many things wrong with show that I have a hard time believing everyone involved isn't in on what a trashy mess it all is. Everything related to the legal aspects of the show feel like the staff googled a term or procedure, read a paragraph about it, then made everything else up. Literally every episode the team commits at least one crime connected to their defense they build for their client and it's honestly amazing. You're supposed to feel like Annalise Keating is a complicated woman who will do anything for her clients, but I genuinely believe the show doesn't know the depths of awful they've taken her to.

In the first episode, they have Annalise take her entire first-year law class to an interview with her client while the client tells them all detailed aspects of the case. As this video points out, none of those students are lawyers or employees of Annalise, attorney-client privilege doesn't apply to anything Annalise's client said. Later, Annalise sneaks an illegally obtained piece of evidence into the record by lying about its chain of custody, saying that they didn't include it in their discovery to the prosecution because she just assumed her client's previous counsel included it in their discovery pack.

This doesn't even touch the crimes Annalise and her student employees commit independent of their cases. The murders and coverups are so extensive, involve so many coverups, that Annalise is basically Saul Goodman without the self-awareness.

The one unequivocal thing I can say about that show is that Viola Davis is a goddamn hero. She takes the ludicrous situations she's handed on the page and through sheer force of will turns it into something compelling. Her ruthlessness and vulnerability are the nuclear reactor that powers the show but also the danger that if she ever collapses, everything goes down with her. It's a stellar performance and I can't think of anyone who could've come anywhere close to carrying this circus on their shoulders so easily. 

Honestly though, bad as both of those shows are, they are still nowhere near as infuriating as Sword Art Online. I wanted to like this show, I really did, because its premise is so goddamned promising. The anime is about this game, Sword Art Online, that's an MMORPG in the vein of World of Warcraft, without elves, orcs, or magic. When the players login on the game's launch day, they find out that they can't logout of the game and, if they die in game, they'll die in real life, too. Oh, and, if anyone tries to take the VR headset they all put on to play the game, they'll be injected with a poison that will kill them anyway. The only way to escape, is to clear all 100 floors in the game, proving themselves worthy in the designers little psychodrama.

Why I like this premise is that it opens up a lot of potential to explore the fact that humans will adapt to pretty much any condition and carry on life as normal. And the anime does touch on this, a little bit. There are villages on the lower floors made up of people who aren't all that good at the game and just want to spend time fishing, building relationships, and making a home for themselves in the circumstances they've been dealt. There's also the potential to explore how, as the floors get harder and harder, the pool of players with the skills necessary to clear them and get everyone home dwindles, making the possibility of ever leaving further and further remote until the question becomes "should we even try to leave?"

Again, the anime dips its toes into all of these conflicts and themes, but it suffers from what can only be described as "I'm the writer and I'm bored with this" disease. Right as the heroes clear the boss of the 75th floor- which mopped the floor with them and killed about half of the party- the despair that things only get harder from here starts to set in, leaving us at just the right nadir for season 2 to pick up from. Instead, what happens is that the main character figures out that the developer wouldn't be sitting on the sidelines watching everyone play the game, and deduces that he's actually masquerading as the leader of one of raiding guild most of the players work for. Sounds like a cool cliffhanger, right? Finding out that the boss is actually the guy who made the game and can change the rules on a whim, making the chance of escape seem even more impossible and out of reach?

Except... the season ends with the main character and game designer fighting in a duel that kills them both. The hero lives thanks to a resurrection item he collected and gave away earlier in the story, and hurray, everybody goes back to life as it is.

It'd be bad enough if things ended here but no. We move on to the real world to introduce a love triangle, huzzah. But not just any love triangle, that wouldn't do at all, oh no. This triangle is extra special because it involves the main character's sort of but not really sister, who's been in love with him for years. Isn't that tragic, isn't it heartbreaking? What's more, she doesn't even know it's him because she thinks she falls in love with a different person because most of their interactions happen in the new VR game that's exactly like the first except everyone can fly and they all look like fairies. Imagine how crushed the not-sister is when she finds out that the man she thought she could abandon her illicit love for was in fact, her own not-brother all along. Does your heart not ache for her? Is your vision not blurred by the tears welling up in your eyes as the not-sister sacrifices herself (but not really) so her not-brother can finally meet up with his virtual love in real life?

Wait, hold on, I'm being told that none of this is very moving at all and is just a massive waste of everyone's time. Every body carry on, nothing to see here.

There's a third season, which introduces a new game where everyone has guns instead and we didn't finish it because holy shit is it so much worse then what came before and that is saying something.

To end on a good note, I decided to check out later era Miles Davis and gave A Tribute to Jack Johnson a listen. I felt stupid afterwards because I don't know what took me so long to give this album a spin because it's everything I love about music rolled into one package. The album was a soundtrack to a documentary about Jack Johnson's life, and was taken from two sessions in February and April 1970. The album consists of two 26-minute tracks and it was an absolute joy to spend an hour listening to this.

The music is driving, restless, brooding on riffs until the band has come at them from every possible angle before they move on the next. Like most of Davis' fusion output, there's no formal structure to the songs, the band moves from one improvised theme to another as they feel the need to, with Davis's trumpet cutting in and out as he's needed. It's not everyday you feel the need to talk about the political aspects of instrumental music, but it feels appropriate here- you can feel the restlessness brought about by the struggles of Johnson's life plus the fallout of all the assassinations at the end of the 60's bleeding leading into the cynical edge of the 70's. It's all there without a word and, for me anyway, is proof all over again that music itself is its own voice, if you just listen to it.

I can't recommend this album enough although it is with the caveat that if you're not familiar with Miles' music, don't make this the first thing you listen to. You gotta ease your way in to something like this, it's not an easy listen and it's not something you can just have in the background while you pay attention to other stuff. If you're new to Miles, start with his 50's stuff like Birth of the Cool, Bag's Groove, 'Round About Midnight, and Kind of Blue. Then you should move on to the second great quintet albums in whatever order you please, there's no bad option as far as that goes.

Once you've worked your way through those, then you should be ready to take the plunge and give yourself over to the experience of A Tribute to Jack Johnson. I know it feels ridiculous getting what's basically homework to listen to an album but, you do need that context to understand what Miles uses his music to do and how his approach to doing it evolved over the years as he kept questioning and exploring every avenue of expression he came across. Plus, you get to listen to some of the greatest music ever recorded, so, what are you really missing out on?

The summer is going to get bad. Please, resist the urge to act like things are dying down or we're going back to normal, and stay as safe as you can. Peace out, and I'll see you on the other side.

Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 3

The last season of Avatar: The Last Airbender had a monumental task in front of it: how to effectively tie up the war in as grand a fashion that outdid everything else they'd already done. For the most part, they succeeded and are one of the few shows to acconplish that feat. However, the show makes uncharacteristic blunders that lead to the grand finale feeling unearned, which has caused no amount of controversy among the fans ever since the episodes aired. 

But we'll get to that. Let's focus on what the show did well and for that, we have the lovely concept of the filler episode. 

For those of you who don't know, filler episodes are episodes in the series that don't have any relation to the main plot. They're usually used for wacky, one-off comedy villains or beach episodes with low stakes, easily resovable conflicts, and little consequence. Used effectively, however, they can be explorations of character and themes that otherwise couldn't be done because of plot demands. 

What season three essentially does is split itself in half with two segments of filler arcs- one where the Gaang explores the Fire Nation before their invasion of the Fire Nation capital with the second half comprised of the Zuko field trip episodes. 

This works extremely well for the show as a whole because it allows us to explore the Fire Nation as it exists beyond the trappings of its army while also giving time to deal with the burdens of Katara's team mom characteristics and Sokka's insecurity of being the one normal guy on a team of master-level benders. The work done in these episodes are why people remember the characters of the show as fondly as they do, they do the actual meat-and-potatoes work that give the bigger, spectacular moments their heart and weight. 

All that said, the show fumbles the balance between the individual episodes and the larger plot demands in the back half of the season. Namely, it's decision for Zuko to withhold the information about his father's plans to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground throws everything off, leaving the four-part finale as the weakest written episodes in the series. 

I can understand the choices behind withholding that information until the very end; dropping a bomb like that threatens to overshadow every other conflict and can make the stories in the field trip episodes feel irrelevant- who cares about a random ship captain when the world is about to end? The Zuko field trips are some of the best in the entire series so I don't blame the writers for wanting to make sure that their crown jewels were overlooked because the audience was focused on something else. 

However, doing things this way means that when you do reveal the endgame, you have a much smaller time frame to deal with the characters to process, then attempt to counter whatever the evil master plan is. It's a thin rope for the show to walk with such an enormous load on its back. 

The burning of an entire continent is simply too big, too horrific on scope, to deal with in just four episodes. Every one scambles to do something, anything, in the face of such a genocidal ambition so the finale feels rushed, underdeveloped, and arbitrary. These are the last things you want the conclusion of your narrative to feel like, especially one the has such careful setup along the way. 

To be clear, I don't think the concept of energy bending is a bad one. Having the hero kill their way out of their problems isn't as mature a storytelling technique as its made out to be, especially in a show where one of the core underlying themes is that trying to resolve conflict by escalating violence only perpetuates that conflict under new, brutal terms. 

Devising a third way out of this based on a deeper understanding that all things are connected, that the separation of people's, nations, and elements is an illusion, isn't bad writing. On the contrary, it's how the show fulfills its premise that compassion and empathy are ultimately the tools to defeat the roots of violence. 

No, the thing that ruins this idea is how little time Aang spends looking for it. On top of that, he doesn't earn it or discover it himself, it is simply handed to him at the last minute. Then, right when he needs it most, he gets pushed into a rock that removes the block keeping him from going into the Avatar state, allowing him to use the new technique gifted to him a half-hour before he needed it. 

It's all just very convenient, which, behind being boring, is the second worst sin a story can commit. Every thing in the finale happens because it must happen, there's no time for anything else so everything's good now, yay. 

So how could they avoided this? First thing, is Zuko spills the beans much, much, sooner. To be specific, it should happen in the same and Aang learn the true roots of fire bending. It could be an end of the episode stinger of "Good thing you know all four elements now, you'll need it when the comet comes and my dad literally burns the world to the ground."

Even if you're worried about this threat overshadowing the arcs in the individual episodes, that, too is easy enough to avoid. It wouldn't take much to establish that this news has driven Aang into a panic-induced isolation from the group as he tries to figure out what he's going to do. As for why Sokka and Katara would pick this time to run off on their own, well, if you found out the world could end in a matter of weeks, wouldn't you want to tie up as many of your loose ends as you could?

Sidelining Aang like this let's us know he's obsessing over the problem so when we do get his direct deliberations in the finale, it's with the sense that he's been doing this for weeks, cycling through his past lives looking for something, anything, which will allow him to keep his soul and save the world at the same time. 

Disappointing as it is that the show didn't stick the landing cleanly as it could have, it's still a masterclass in long-form storytelling, with character and theme development as pretty much any other classic you could name. For all the nitpicky quibbles, the show is still one of the best to come out of the mid-00's, and I think it's worth watching start to finish at least once, just to experience it for yourself. 

Oh, right, Korra is better, go watch that if you can find it.

This Little Piggy Went "Weeeee"

Earlier this week, free-speech advocates across the political spectrum started raising alarm bells at the news that Google had cut right wing magazine The Federalist from its online ad revenue. Google later clarified that no, they didn't do that, they just threatened to do so if The Federalist didn't shape up their content around the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. 

To be honest, I have complicated feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree that the threat to demonetize an entire site gives Google de facto editorial control over not just the content the website produces, but also how it moderates their commentators as well. That is a massive cudgel to have on hand and naturally looms over every decision every content creator makes while they're using Google's platform.

On the other hand, though, this whole thing is hysterical and I think The Federalist deserves everything that's happening to them.

Like most rightwing outlets, The Federalist is a rag who's only purpose is to push the Republican political agenda at any cost. It was cofounded by Meghan McCain's husband and is funded by... nobody knows who. Given that its brethren The Daily Caller, Breitbart, and the YouTube channel Prager University are all funded by billionaires who have no problem operating at a loss, it stands to reason that a similar situation brought The Federalist into existence. That their response to "Where does your money come from?" is nearly always a riff on "We aren't legally required to disclose that," is nothing but a vote of confidence in the editorial and journalistic independence from that fundings source. 

The reason I find all of this so funny is that like any rightwing rag worth their salt, The Federalist is all in on the power and sanctity of the free market. In their minds, all government regulation is a jackboot on the neck of free entrepreneurs who would be usher in a Galtian paradise if only the resentful, freedom hating government bureaucrats weren't standing in the way. 

As far as the tech world is concerned, the deregulators have gotten their wish. There are very little rules or pressures on tech companies which have allowed Google, Facebook, and Amazon to grow to monopolistic proportions. What these companies couldn't compete with, they bought and now it's virtually impossible to go anywhere or do anything on the internet that doesn't involve one of those three companies. (Think about it- how many things have you skipped a sign up process for and just tied it to your gmail or Facebook account?)

Because of all this, the internet is an unregulated hellscape that is more and more being brought under heel by an ever diminishing board of directors. And The Federalist was fine with this. Domains and ad sharing programs are essentially private property which the owners can do with as they please. 

At least, until they became victims of their own ideology, that is. See, once Google threatened to cut The Federalist off, they suddenly gave a shit about whether or not it was a good idea to give ultimate discretion of what or what is not publicly acceptable expression. Google isn't bound by the 1st amendment so it has no obligation to allow speech it doesn't approve of to make money off their platforms if they deem it bad for their business. 

Furthermore, this episode should be an example of The Federalist's ideology in action. To elaborate, The Federalist engages in speech that its fellow market participants find objectionable and no longer wish to associate themselves if The Federalist continues behaving that way. At this point, The Federalist can change its behavior to conform to the market's demands or, it can continue as it currently is and risk losing out on their revenue streams. 

As the market giveth, so it taketh away. For other people, not them, obviously. 

All snark aside, this is something I worry about all the time. The adpocalypse on YouTube sent most historical, political, and current events channels scrambling for revenue as YouTube demonetized their channels in an effort to make sure the advertisers only had their products associated with "noncontroversial" content. 

Likewise, the amount of control Google exerts on its search result algorithm is staggering. It gives the company the ability to eliminate all but the most mainstream information and entertainment sources so if you want to find something off the beaten path, you're going to already know where to look because Google sure as fuck won't tell you. 

People have this idea that, because social media is so prevalent and makes us so publicly available, that all the content on the internet exists in some kind of public square with all the inherent constitutional protections that implies. That's wrong, on every possible level. 

Every where you go on the internet is proprietary in some way. Think of it like walking into a store- you're on private property with the understanding that being there obligates you to buy or at least pretend you want to buy whatever's on sale. And just like a private business can throw you out of you get unruly, so too can Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. put you in the corner until you learn to behave. 

Who could stop such runaway behavior? Who could lay out rules that provide user protections to the denizens of the internet. But with how hollowed out our regulatory agencies have become, the FCC couldn't come up with or enforce the kind of comprehensive rules we need even if it wanted to. 

As one of my favorite sites likes to say, if your business depends on a platform, you don't have a business. But how to you survive that when literally every step of internet transactions pass through someone else's platform? Amazon can ban you from selling products on their site, YouTube can demonitize or delete your channel at will, and Google can adjust its algorithm so even if you get ad revenue, your site will be so pitifully low that you won't be able to generate any revenue for yourself. 

Even if you try to get paid "directly" by donation or subscription, Patreon and PayPal can freeze your account or again, lock you out of it entirely. No matter where you go, someone has to let you through the door which means every step of the way, someone has the power to cripple or end your flow of income. 

Like I said, I don't care what happens to The Federalist- that they're getting churned up in the libertarian market dystopia they want everyone else to suffer through but remain exempt from is nothing to cry about. They're scum, propagandists who, if they're lucky, might one day rise up to the level of dog shit they obviously aspire to. That we all risk getting dragged down with them into that corporate hellscape though, is something to worry about and we should work to save the internet from that fate before it's too late. 

It Goes It Goes It Goes It Goes It Goes

So I've been thinking about the autonomous zones in Seattle and Asheville and my thinking is split along two lines. 

The first is the inevitable backlash. In Asheville, police immediately dismantled the zone the protestors set up so no one would get any wild ideas about the necessity of police. Which leads me to believe that CHAZ's days in Seattle are numbered, too. Look at any revolution in France in the 19th-century that involved barricades and you'll see the same dynamics at play, now. 

Any display of the citizenry organizing and maintaining a community by cooperation is an existential threat to the power of the state. The foundation of the state is violent coercion- laws find legitimacy in the state's capability to violently enforce them against an unwilling population. So if all of a sudden there's wide spread, community led efforts to maintain order and public security without violence, that brings up a lot of uncomfortable questions that the police would rather citizens not ask in the first place.

The other major aspect that I don't have a clear answer to is what happens when Biden starts saying his usual spiel about how change only comes through the slow, incremental processes of Congressional politics? That argument was already on its last legs but how do you expect to hold up now? Two months ago if you talked about abolishing the police, you would've gotten strange looks before dismissing the idea because they've never heard of it. Now, there are debates on Twitter about finding a different slogan because the idea is catching on so fast. 

Anytime you have concerned liberals or media figures saying that we need to find a slogan that isn't so divisive, what they're telling you is that they don't believe in this idea. Saying "Think of what the Republicans will say" is a distraction, because whatever they're going to say whatever you're worried about no matter what you do. Like, do you really think Trump isn't going to spend the next five months talking about how Democrats want to destroy the police if the slogan changes? Come on. 

What makes "defund the police" so compelling is that it presents a clear, identifiable goal and policy initiative all in one. If someone is made uncomfortable by the idea, it's a good way to start a conversation about how yes, the idea is to gradually reduce police funding and redirect it to other, targeted projects like mental health crisis responders and housing that eliminates the need for police in the first place. 

Changing that to something like Stacey Abrams "Transform the Police" is really the best way to destroy every bit of momentum the protests have built. Because what the fuck does that phrase even mean? What are your policy goals, how will you enforce them, how will you measure their effectiveness or lack thereof? The only possible outcome of such a slogan is to add a level of vagueness so impenetrable that people just give up talking about it because the conversations devolve into endless bickering over what the goals are even supposed to be. 

Again, this isn't the result of incompetence or fear on people like Abrams part. The point is to co-opt, then sabotage, and this is the best way to do that. I have hope though, that they're too late and will have to reckon with the movement instead of kneecapping it.

Hell, the protests got Minneapolis to defund their police department, Los Angeles to propose cutting $150 million from their departments budget, and Louisville to ban no-knock warrants that killed Breona Taylor. Point is, people are figuring out that they can get shit done of they make it happen. Thanks to covid, everyone has plenty of time on their hands and no worries about losing a job, so what else are they gonna do? 

Sidebar: I hope this also makes everyone realize the 40-hour work week is a tool meant to exhaust and demoralize people so these kind of mass political movements don't happen. Just saying, if we're throwing out old bullshit, that should be on the list of things to go. 

Back on point, who really going to accept anything about incremental change again? The problem of revolutionary moments is that official leaders who could capitalize on the movement are reluctant to do so for obvious reasons. But it's hard to think of someone more committed to orthodox politics than Biden so I have no idea how his "I'm going to do literally none of these things" will play out over the next few months. 

My guess is, not well. The noise that Kamala Harris is his current VP frontrunner is also not reassuring. Harris' career as a prosecutor presents the same liability that it did with Klobuchar, with the added bit of flavor that Harris declined to prosecute Steven Mnuchin for his foreclosure factory mortgage company. That Harris received a $2000 donation from Mnuchin is also bound to come up, more then once, if she ends up being Biden's pick. 

These contradictions- puffing herself up as the tough-on-crime top prosecutor who was ruthless against truancy but took money from someone who kicked old women out of their homes for being 27 cents short- destroyed Hariss' campaign. They'll do nothing but harm to Biden's, too, but, then again, the man has nothing but bad VP options so it's really just a case of picking your poison and praying. 

A nice side effect of all this will be that the failure to contain covid19 will be blamed on the protestors, sliding past the multiple failures on both the federal and state level and that the thousands of cases in Florida, Texas, and Arizona we're seeing would've been exposed weeks ago before the protests started. Buuuut these things will quickly stop matter as the media looks for a way to discredit the protests since the usual canards of "but the looters" isn't working. 

Sidebar 2: It's really telling how the death of black men and the destruction of property are treated as moral equivalents. That this is such a reliable go-to reveals how slavery- both the classical chattel model and the current penal model- have embedded the idea that black men especially are little more than biological pieces of property. 

One thing I have been absolutely loving though is the destruction of all those Confederate and Columbus statues. Columbus was an idiot who was called out, correctly, by everyone in his time fire being wrong about every thing. It's baffling that we celebrate a dude who never set foot in any part of the future America's- let alone credit him for "discovering" the continent- so we can do without the ultimate example of failing upwards. That he sold 9-year-olds into sex slavery is also a pretty good reason to decapitate whatever statues of his we can saw through. 

Of course, there are naysayers. Tut-tutters more concerned with perpetually hearing both sides of an issue rather then recognizing illegitimate arguments both current and historical. 

A quintessential example of such a person is Andrew Sullivan. Like most people who were wrong about the Iraq War, Andrew suffered no consequence for his actions and developed the idea that criticism of his empty, pretentious opinions was an attack on free thought itself. 

Sullivan riffs on this theme again in his latest column, Is There Still Room for Debate? which, I'll be honest, I tried really hard to read all the way through but just couldn't. Still, there are two points Sullivan makes that I want to engage with. 

He notes that in the current discourse there are two main thoughts- namely, the rejection of the idea that America is an "imperfect but inspiring work-in-progress, gradually including everyone in opportunity, and binding races together, rather than polarizing them," and that ultimately, America is "in its essence not about freedom but oppression... all the ideals about individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and the equality of all human beings were always a falsehood to cover for and justify and entrench the enslavement of human beings under the fiction of race," with the conclusion being that "the liberal system is itself a form of white supremacy — which is why racial inequality endures and why liberalism’s core values and institutions cannot be reformed and can only be dismantled."

The first point I wavy to look at is that America is an imperfect work in progress that slowly but surely improves itself. My beef with this idea is that it treats the myriad sins of America's past as innocent mistakes, like they were the equivalent of a toddler who shit their pants just after being toilet trained. The thing is, none of that is true. If you go back to all of our worst atrocities, there were people advocating those things happen specifically because of the harm they would cause.

Pretty much every awful thing we've ever done has been done with explicit intent. Busting out the "we're imperfect but trying" trope is an act of denial, a refusal to acknowledge the causes, idealogies, and consequences of our past and how those things linger into our present. 

What kills me in this argument is the treatment that the principals of religious freedom etc. etc. were all just a smokescreen for slavery like it's some kind of joke. Because you know what slavers, and Jim Crow, and the homophobes of the present all use as justifications for their oppressive policies? Religious freedom, limited government, personal freedom, and the equality of all human beings.  

Sure, the liberal ideal of equality of all humans sounds really good, on paper. But if you question and interrogate that philosophy, as Sullivan advocates, you find that the proponents of that idea had a very stringent definition of who qualified as a human being. 

If you were black, mixed race, or a woman, your humanity was nonexistent, questionable, or negligible, respectively. So, you could say, that under this liberal order, in order to gain the so-called inalienable rights granted to all free people, you first have to go through a blood soaked gauntlet to prove you deserve the basic dignity and recognition of being a person. 

This liberal order is why we even need a slogan like Black Lives Matter. Why would we need to be so insistent about this fact if we didn't live in a society that treated the death of innocent black men and the theft of merchandise as equivalent losses? Maybe the fact that this hallowed liberal order doesn't recognize the inherent value of life is probably why it's losing legitimacy?

I don't know where things are going or how they'll shake out. Mass public movements are like rivers carving new paths out of the rocks, you can't predict the exact course or the speed the current will develop. Mix that in with out of touch, hilariously incompetent political elites and well, there's a lot of ways this clown show can go. 

Stay safe out there, and remember to wear your masks. 

You Can't Fix What Isn't Broken

The violence is the point. 

The terror, the humiliation, the death, that's the way the job is supposed to go. It's why cops get so mad when people question their killings, no matter how unjust or murderous. You wouldn't fire the guy at the movie theater for handing you a ticket, so why should you be mad when they kill someone?

Our only option is to completely dismantle policing as we know it. The military hardware confiscated and destroyed, the unions disbanded, the penalties for engaging deadly force immediate and punative. 

We've become so attached to the idea that police are a necessary component to social safety that we ignore why crime happens in the first place. Crime is the result of societal failures to provide necessities like housing, healthcare, food, etc. etc. so people get desperate to fulfill them. The idea that police are essential crime fighters only works if you assume that crime is a problem on an individual level so it's the cops job to catch 'em all like Pokémon. 

What we have to come around to is that we don't need them. If we address the things that cause crime in the first place, we can drastically cut down our police forces because there literally won't be as much for them to do. 

If we don't, police are just going to keep killing people. They'll keep killing, keep brutalizing, and treat any attempt at accountability as a direct attack on the foundation of the job. If they keep telling us that if they can't get away with killing whoever they want whenever they want they can't do the job correctly, shouldn't we take that to heart?

The most important thing to take away from these events is that there is no compromise to be made. To compromise is to recognize the legitimacy of the other side, which is unacceptable. How can you legitimize three cops doing nothing while listening to a man beg for his life? What legitimacy is there to breaking down a door in the middle of the night and killing an unarmed woman in her bed? What possible justification could there be for clapping in solidarity for your colleagues who left a man to bleed to death on the sidewalk?

I don't care if a cop is in your family or your friend who you grew up with is one or your neighbor is one and they're good people, alright? This isn't about them. It doesn't matter if they're individually a good person. Assuming that they are, it's human nature to identify with their own group against an outside threat. 

And that's the fundamental problem. Even if you believe that cops aren't our enemy, we are obviously theirs. We are an unruly, chaotic horde that is forever threatening to swallow them whole. The only way for them to be safe in our presence comes from our complete and total submission, anything else is to invite the collapse of society. 

We can't live like this. If nothing changes, sooner rather than later the crowds who surround cops to film their abuses are going to attack them to save whatever life they can. As always, there's a better way. All it needs is for us to be brave enough to take it.