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onebillionstarsff · 3 years

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if you think c!dream deserves torture, you don’t know what torture is

alrighty, it’s time for me to do annoyingly in-depth lore analysis again because i have seen way too many people on my dash and twitter timeline saying that c!dream deserves to be tortured.

i don’t really think people have a comprehensive, reality-based understanding of what torture actually is, what it can do, and the motivations behind it. i, unfortunately, do: i’ve done extensive professional-level study on torture, so i’m going to do my best to put out some knowledge into our little dsmp-related world.

obvious content warnings for references to torture and to violence below the cut (nothing too graphic, though; i know this isn’t an academic forum or government work)

all of this is /rp /dsmp

i’ll also list some sources at the very bottom if you want to learn more

alright then, let’s start: what is torture, anyway?

there are two types of definitions, general and legal. i’ll reference both, but the message they carry is essentially the same, so i’ll just paraphrase the united nations definition that’s party to (read: supported/enforced by) 170 countries:

torture is any act that intentionally causes SEVERE harm to someone, physical OR mental, for the purposes of extracting information or punishment for failure to do so, with explicit consent from an acting public authority.

i’ll break down those components in the context of the dsmp in a second, but i first want to make it very clear what torture ISN’T. torture is not manipulation, it is not "trauma” in the way trauma is broadly conceived, it is not even direct physical abuse. you can suffer abuse from, say, a parent or a partner, and that abuse is about a power dynamic, where one person is being forcibly subordinated to the other. torture, on the other hand, is not necessarily about power, and it’s definitely not ONLY about power dynamics; torture, by its very definition, has to be intensely and officially coercive, and it has to be SEVERE. there are not degrees of torture, like there are degrees of abuse: being deprived of sleep for days or even weeks at a time is just as psychologically impactful as losing a limb or being waterboarded (simulated drowning- a common torture method that the us has been known to employ).

this is my first major issue with the way some viewers of the dsmp approach this whole debacle. i constantly hear c!tommy’s manipulation by c!dream cited as a perfect justification for c!dream’s torture. what c!tommy, and others on the server- particularly the kids- went through is horrible, and intensely traumatic. i will never deny them that, especially as a survivor of abuse myself, but torture is not just another form of trauma. that’s a very important distinction that we, as viewers, have to draw: torture is considerably worse because it is sanctioned, it is coercive, and its explicit goal is not just to cause pain or make someone feel powerless (common goals of abusers), but instead to shatter someone.

in more specific terms, the mental goal of torture is to completely unmake someone’s conception of the world, how they interact with it, and their basic sense of identity. if you read accounts or speak with survivors of torture, it is frequently mentioned that their very way of processing everything in life was destroyed by pain and had to be rebuilt, completely different, after escape. by destroying one’s individuality, will, and their most integral of processing abilities, you destroy their grasp on the world; and, to put it lightly, such a breaking event is awful enough that, in an effort to make it stop and regain some sense of normalcy, the victim will tell their persecutors what they want to hear. it’s the reason why confessions obtained through torture are notoriously not admissible in courts of law. this goes far beyond abuse or manipulation, and i need everyone to understand that.

now, let’s get to c!dream’s situation. did he do awful things? yes, undoubtedly. i’m a c!dream apologist, but his manipulation of c!tommy and c!tubbo was very fucked up. beyond that, his notable “crimes” that others on the server aren’t also guilty of committing (e.g., murder, theft, arson, to name a few common ones) really just consist of especially massive destruction of property (people leave c!techno and c!phil out of this equation, much to my chagrin, but i won’t get into it here). punishment for his actions is understandable, and is typically what justice systems aim to do. but, even if we completely ignore the inherent inhumanity of pandora (HOOO BOY that’s a lot to ignore but i digress), c!dream is not being punished, he’s being tortured.

going by the definition i used, let’s break it down:

c!sam knows what c!quackity is doing to c!dream, allows it, and even encourages it. as the warden, he is the person in an official, authority position giving their consent.

c!quackity is, by his own admission, doing what he is to get information out of c!dream. it’s not a confession in this context, but very specific piece of knowledge, with the promise of death also hanging right above it.

list of extreme psychological abuse: long-term solitary confinement (torture if it’s more than 22 hours. c!dream has been in solitary confinement for more than 60 days now), deprivation of the passage of time, general verbal abuse, incredibly limited social contact (people start to fray without basic interaction after a while).

list of extreme physical abuse (god where do i start): prolonged starvation, malnourishment when he isn’t being starved (you will die without protein intake); use of Warden’s Will Breaker pickaxe (it can hack through obsidian, so i think that’s all i need to say), shears (can be used to do things like pull nails, break limb’s bones, amputate toes/fingers/a whole arm in c!ponk’s case), and an OP axe (a sharp blade capable of slicing easily through wood with brute force, and bone is significantly easier to crush than wood).

so, we have consent of authority, coercion for the sake of extracting information, and severe physical/mental abuse meant solely to cause extreme pain. c!dream is being tortured according to the proper, internationally-sanctioned definition of the term, and that is not okay in any circumstances whatsoever.

if you haven’t ever read survivors’ accounts (or the accounts of their victimizers), it’s difficult to understand just how uniquely despicable torture is, and the lifelong effects that remain after it’s over and done with. i honestly recommend you read some testimonials, because it absolutely changes the way you view authority and the world in general.

no one is deserving of this treatment, no matter what atrocities they may or may not have committed.

it’s a basic tenet of human rights, and i don’t think it should be a hard pill to swallow that it’s never excusable in any circumstance. so, defend c!tommy & co. and criticize c!dream’s actions all you want, but please never say that torture is alright. that statement has real consequences, and real moral implications. don’t be an asshole, and don’t be disrespectful to people who have survived it.

if you’re curious, look into these events:

The Argentine Dirty War

Chicago Police’s Jon Burge and his torture regime

Abu Ghraib prison

Extensive torture by Pinochet’s regime in Chile

Guatemalan Civil War

Ugandan policing in the 21st century (Human Rights Watch report here)

if you want some reading, i recommend the following. tumblr will probably nerf this post because of links, but oh well.

Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (very important work in the literature on torture)

John Conroy’s Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture

Levenson (e.d.) Torture: A Collection

#mine #text #jfc this ended up being LONG #sorry about that #long post #dream smp #dsmp #dsmp analysis #dsmp meta #prison arc #pandora's vault #dreamwastaken #dream #torture cw #abuse cw #c!sam critical #i doubt this will go anywhere lmao but it's nice to get my thoughts on (digital) paper

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centerforartlaw · 6 years

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By Alexandra Taylor*

‘Serious and organised crime is growing in sophistication and constantly adopting new and advanced technologies to undertake illegal activities…It is expanding its reach globally and injecting itself into new markets—both legitimate and illegitimate—in order to increase its opportunities to generate illicit wealth.’ (ACC 2015, p. 2)

In December 2000, the Australian Federal Government passed the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 (Cth), releasing the following three moral rights into legislation:

Right to be attributed as the author;

Right against false attribution;

Right of integrity of authorship of a work.

These moral rights are principally concerned with the integrity and attribution of authorship: the author of a book, director/producer/screenwriter of a film, and entertainers of live or recorded musical performances. Questions around attribution/authenticity right down to civil questions about property law are raised in court proceedings. Yet, while money laundering, technology and identity crime are listed on the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s list of serious financial crimes, there is no mention of art fraud.

Art crimes such as theft, fraud, smuggling or illicit trafficking, are major international problems. In Australia, some believe that historically “art fraudsters escape[d] punishment.” With the art world being generally unregulated, many difficulties arise for art owners wishing to obtain objective advice regarding the authenticity, value, and condition of a work in their collection. Experts avoid litigation, bringing about correlative concerns for the judge or jury to determine the outcome of cases in civil or criminal courts. Unless compelled, auctioneers will avoid legal proceedings in fear of adverse publicity discouraging potential buyers and sellers. As there is no effective law enforcement dealing directly with the prosecution for art fraud in Australia, organised crime in the art market is able to operate with impunity.

Depending on the scholarship that produced it, asserted provenance cannot be relied upon as verification of an artwork’s history. Scientific methodology is therefore a necessary service for authentication, particularly in the absence of reliable provenance. Despite being ascribed “problematic” by an authoritative source, if a questionable work has featured in an auction catalogue it can be re-offered in the Australian market using the catalogue image as a claim of “good provenance”. The fact that forged works are often accompanied by forged provenance stresses the need for other forms of validation. Proving fakes “beyond reasonable doubt” (criminal standard), or “on the balance of probabilities” (the civil standard) presents scientific enquiry as a possible benchmark for truism.

In order for forensic analysis to be effective in court, the presented outcomes need an accurate and complete database of materials and techniques that “best fit” the results promulgated. Securing the link between an artist and their work requires a rigorous analytical approach that involves all disciplines related to provenance, materiality and technique. Judgement on ‘oeuvre’, scientific reasoning and personal experience are all counted toward the rudimentary examination of materials and aesthetics. If the evidence collected can be verified, along with the intention to commit fraud for profit, the prosecution may be successful. However, herein lies the problem.

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (based in Texas and offering certifications and trainings worldwide) defines occupational fraud as, ‘The use of one’s occupation for personal enrichment through the deliberate misuse or misapplication of the employing organisation’s resources or assets’ (Albrecht & Albrecht 2004, p. 7). Proclaiming expertise as an art market professional with the intent to breach trust instils the absence of ethical bias, thus fitting within this bracket. However, Australian legislation requires that false representation or evidence of fraudulent intent needs to be verified and proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The Supreme Court of Victoria’s Blackman & Anor vs. Steward and Anor in 2010 highlights the concept of unsubstantiated opinion. The validity of three works being attributed to Charles Blackman and Robert Dickerson were brought to legal consideration when the two artists alleged that Melbourne art dealer Peter Gant had wrongly attributed the artworks as theirs. Justice Peter Vickery, upon hearing the expert evidence, ordered the destruction of the three artworks, claiming that ‘I am left in no doubt that [the artworks]… were deliberately contrived to deceive unsuspecting members of the public in this manner. The false signatures drawn on each of the works could have had no other purpose’ (VSC 2010). This case is one of few examples in which the collection of evidence successfully proved the intention to deceive.

The 1999 O’Loughlin case concerns distinguished Indigenous artist Clifford Possum Ttjapaltjarri, and presents an entirely different outcome that exemplifies the difficulties in the Australian legislation. Upon investigation, the artist’s commercial associate and wholesaler John O’Loughlin was found to have had a hand in producing multiple dot paintings, selling them off as authentic Clifford Possum works. He was charged with 19 counts of “obtain[ing] money by deception” and, pursuant to the provisions of the NSW Crimes Act 1900, was also charged with three counts of “use false instrument” (p. 71). Although committed for trial on all 22 accounts, the prosecution believed it would have been too difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt that O’Loughlin had the requisite dishonest intent to commit the alleged crimes, particularly after he’d claimed to be working under the assumption that Possum requested assistance in the dot paintings’ creation. As a result, the number of counts for which O’Loughlin eventually stood convicted was reduced, resulting in a three-year sentence on account of a ‘good behaviour bond’ (Chappell & Hufnagel 2014, p. 72).

Not only did the prosecution fail to identify the importance of the Indigenous art market for Aboriginal communities but this case also generated shaky ground around the idea of legitimate provenance. Instead of utilising more flexible systems in the crime arena, Prosecutors continued to stand by archaic methods.

According to the New York Times, cited by Paul Baker in his paper on Policing Fakes, between 10% and 40% of paintings sold at any one time are fraudulent (Baker 1999, p. 2). Only a fraction of these works are ever identified, with the fear of financial and reputational loss spurring the reluctance to come forwards. Incidentally the draft of the New York State Bill to provide enhanced protections to art experts for their opinions has stoled in New York Assembly. For now it is clear that criminal activities continue to invade the lucrative art market and the failure to specifically address art fraud is a universal problem.

About the Author: Alexandra Taylor is a Masters student at the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Disclaimer: this article is intended for educational purposes, and does not purport to provide legal advice.

Bibliography:

Albrecht W S, Albrecht C O 2004, Fraud, Examination & Prevention, Thompson Learning, United States of America.

Australian Crime Commission (ACC) 2015, Organised Crime in Australia, Commonwealth of Australia, Australia, available at https://www.acic.gov.au/sites/g/files/net1491/f/2016/06/oca2015.pdf

Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission 2017, Serious Financial Crime in Australia 2017, accessed January 28, 2017, and available https://goo.gl/yCDnU3

Baker P 1999, Policing Fakes, Art Crime Protection Act: Protecting Artists and Protecting Consumers Conference, Australian Institute of Criminology, Sydney, 2-3 December 1999.

Chappell D. Hufnagel S 2014, ‘Case Studies on Art Fraud: European and Antipodean Perspectives’ in Contemporary Perspectives on the Detection, Investigation and Prosecution of Art Crime, Eds. Chappell D and Hufnagel S, Ashgate Publishing Ltd., England, pp. 57 – 77.

Victorian Supreme Court (VSC) 2010, Blackman & Anor vs. Steward and Anor, VSC 98, accessed February 2, 2017 from https://jade.io/article/148486/section/140746?asv=gloss_widgets

Federal Register of Legislation (n.d.), Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000, accessed February 3, 2017 from https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2004A00752

Fitzroy Legal Service Inc., 2016, The Law Handbook 2017, Nelson Wadsworth Thomas, Nelson, Australia.

Givoni S 2015,Owning It: A Creatives Guide to Copyright Contracts and the Law, Creative Minds Publishing Pty Ltd., Melbourne, Australia.

Nall S 2014, ‘An Art Dealer’s Perspective on Art Crime’ in Contemporary Perspectives on the Detection, Investigation and Prosecution of Art Crime, Eds. Chappell D and Hufnagel S, Ashgate Publishing Ltd., England, pp. 101 – 118.

Sloggett R 2014, ‘Considering Evidence in Art Fraud’ in Contemporary Perspectives on the Detection, Investigation and Prosecution of Art Crime, Eds. Chappell D and Hufnagel S, Ashgate Publishing Ltd., England, pp. 121 – 133.

Spencer R D 2004, The Expert Versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts, Oxford University Press.

Spotlight on Art Fraud and the Law in Australia By Alexandra Taylor* ‘Serious and organised crime is growing in sophistication and constantly adopting new and advanced technologies to undertake illegal activities…It is expanding its reach globally and injecting itself into new markets—both legitimate and illegitimate—in order to increase its opportunities to generate illicit wealth.’ (ACC 2015, p.

#art law #Australia #criminal law #fraud

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carriebradshawsprotege · 4 years

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Cyber Criminal offense By means of the Eyes of a Normal Online User

Guy has constantly strived to find out new things to make lifetime superior and additional comfortable. He has been normally inspired to uncover new vistas and consider new solutions and technological progress making use of the intellect. A single enhancement prospects to another and he by no means just stops and advancement and progress in never ever ending and is an on going challenge. Absolutely nothing has transformed the globe far more dramatically as the online. Considering that the extensive earth of website this earth is no for a longer period divided by invisible boundaries. It has become a worldwide village and the advancement in the information technological innovation has altered the life-style of the people radically. This change is noticeable only given that the final 15 decades when the idea of individual personal computers came into existence. Persons are normally linked to their electronic gizmos and nearly all functions of our day-to-day lives are dependent on the web or the related technological know-how. Execs and disadvantages of the cyber room: As normally the good and the evil are like two sides of a coin. Although the advantages outweigh the negatives it is higher time we seemed into them prior to they spread. Personal computer, web or information know-how connected crimes are termed as cyber crimes. So what actually is cyber crime? How significantly can these crimes impact prevalent man or business enterprise establishments? What steps can be taken to control this kind of crimes and what lawful action is essential to restrict the criminals who are into this? Cyber criminal offense is escalating to be a finest threat to mankind and consequently really serious factors and actions are unquestionably needed to check out its spreading further more. We need to have to first have an understanding of what cyber criminal offense is and what all things to do are termed as cyber crimes. Cyber criminal offense simply just implies felony routines utilizing the telecommunication and net know-how. Generally cyber crimes can be categorized into two varieties. They are, Crimes which are instantly specific on broad computer networks or other related devices. For instance, malware, computer system viruses, assaults on denial of providers and many others Crimes that are facilitated by the computer system networks specific not on any impartial community or machine. For case in point, identification theft, cyber stalking, phishing, e mail frauds, hacking and many others. Cyber crimes are also viewed as or at least in lieu with white collar crimes, as the perpetrator are not able to be conned really conveniently as the world wide web is open up to the huge entire world. While most cyber crimes are not associated to any violence or serious crime however identity risk or authorities secrets and techniques can be almost stolen in no time if the stability actions fail. Terrorist, deviants and extremists stand increased odds of making use of this engineering for their unlawful and anti social things to do. Online linked frauds: Pretty much 163 million customers are estimated to use the web this yr as from just 16.one million in 1995. as a result the have to have for a extra secured community becomes very important retaining in mind the user's in general security. The nameless nature of the web is the breeding ground for criminals who engage in routines which are termed as virtual crimes or cyber crimes. Governments have launched cyber guidelines to curb this kind of functions but then no major punishment is awarded to the felony or people who are included in cyber crimes. Suitable authorized infrastructure is yet to be designed and effective regulatory mechanisms fashioned to protect netizens. Permit us now have a glimpse of the different types of cyber law and the quantity of hurt they launch to the modern society or specific. Commonly the cyber threats resources are of three styles. They are, hacking similar threats traditional legal threats ideology Threats Hacking: This is just one of the prevalent forms of cyber criminal offense uncovered in the cyber house globally. It has been described as "whoever with the intent to result in or recognizing that he is most likely to lead to wrongful decline or problems to the community or any person destroys or deletes or alters any information and facts residing in a personal computer useful resource or diminishes its benefit or utility or impacts it injuriously by any suggests commits hacking". A hacker can crack into computer system technique therefore gaining obtain to all interior information and facts. Several hackers just do it for enjoyable or pastime. Hacking is deemed significantly less damaging than other stability relevant crimes. Essentially the hacker's primary purpose is to disrupt a method or network. Irrespective of whether he is a white hat hacker or black hat hacker his degree of destruction is to stop or get the accessibility to the pc methods. Repeated hacking or tampering consistently may well acquire a hacker powering bars but several instances these crimes are taken lightly. Traditional cyber crimes Criminals whose aim is on financial gains only are called common cyber criminals. Most of them are identified as some interior supply. Recent analyze has verified that nearly 80% criminals of these crimes belong to the linked company or agency.In the event you adored this short article as well as you would want to receive guidance relating to how to access the dark web generously go to our own web site.Industrial espionage, mental home criminal offense, trademark violation, unlawful fund transfers, credit rating card frauds, and many others are some of the conventional cyber crimes. This sort of criminals who perform these crimes are extra probably to conclusion up guiding bars if the crime is proved. Ideology cyber threats: Stolen data are circulated as versus the intellectual property legal guidelines according to these types of ideology threats. These criminals think about them selves as Robin Hood and unfold the details which is preserved below mental property legal rights. Quite a few terrorist things to do are also termed as ideology threats in the cyber globe. They distribute their possess ideology or oppose government's by utilizing the net technological know-how. Cyberanarchistsis how they are called and their principal purpose is to distribute their ideology or ideas and opposing what is towards their pursuits. Lots of terrorists' options and data's are also deemed as cyber threats. So what ever be the nature of cyber criminal offense stringent rules ought to be administered to help a secured cyber area. As far more and much more of our day-to-day activities becomes related or interlinked in cyber space the require for a comprehensive safe technology has turn out to be the have to have of the hour. Be is simple e mail hacking or phishing, the people concerned in this kind of pursuits are surely invading the privacy of folks and enterprise companies. Identification thefts, cash swindling and credit rating card scams are grave challenges which can trigger irreparable problems to the particular person involved. Avoidance is unquestionably far better than remedy: How can we avert our community or laptop or computer units from the so the cyber criminals? How can the governing administration assist in curbing this sort of high chance threats to the culture? As individuals it is critical that we use the very best online safety process to secure our systems from cyber attacks. It is important to use solid password to guard the emails or other important facts or doc saved on line. Crucial facts like lender account person names and passwords have to not be stored on-line or in the personal computer. Bear in mind that the cyber place is an open up community and has no stability or basic safety towards such significant facts. Never ever open unidentified e-mails and by no means reply or consider in email frauds indicating that you have won tens of millions of bucks in an on-line lottery. Credit rating cards will have to be utilised sparingly or sensibly on the internet. Unsecured sites and limited web pages are often higher on chance and as a result utilizing your credit history playing cards on this kind of websites is hugely unadvisable. Often hold altering passwords and set up a effective anti virus software package to safeguard towards torzons, viruses and malware.

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years

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Bright Wall/Dark Room September 2018: For Love or Money by Kellie Herson

We are pleased to offer an excerpt from the latest edition of the online magazine, Bright Wall/Dark Room. The theme for their September issue is WORK, and in addition to Kellie Herson's essay below on "Goodfellas," they''ll also be featuring essays on "Sharp Objects," "Paterson," "Support the Girls," "Five Easy Pieces," "You Were Never Really Here," "The Sting," "Fat City," "Blue Collar," "The Hours," "Mildred Pierce," "Only Angels Have Wings," "Beautiful Things," and "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy." The above art is by Tony Stella.

You can read our previous excerpts from the magazine by clicking here. To subscribe to Bright Wall/Dark Room, or look at their most recent essays, click here.

I don’t think the world needs another definitive declaration of what Goodfellas is about. There are far too many, and the vast majority represent a particular viewer’s desire to claim ownership over a cultural phenomenon rather than any substantive effort to engage with the narrative. But since we’re here: it’s a movie about capitalism, or, more specifically, about the way capitalism structures not only our labor and how we get compensated for it, but also our families and our relationships. Every successful mob narrative is on some level a workplace comedy, and Goodfellas is the most incisive one we have. Yes, it’s also about friendships between men, and food, and jealousy, and it offers some tremendous dog content—but the thread holding all those disparate parts together is its comprehensive dissection of the belief that if you get the chance to do a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

That idea is coercive bullshit, of course. Not being miserable at work is something to aspire to, but having a job you love doesn’t magically liberate your labor from its economic or social context, even if that job ostensibly exists outside the bounds of polite society. If anything, love makes it far easier to let your work absorb your life and suck you dry. It doesn’t exempt you from wanting something in return for your work, whether it’s status or money or validation; it just makes it harder to distinguish the things you do joyfully from the things you do transactionally, to figure out the difference between who you are and what you do. It’s like graduate school, if graduate students weren’t quite as into stimulants.

The protagonists of Goodfellas choose their work early in the film because it’s thrilling and fun, because it’s something they love to do, and love to do together. The way these characters sustain themselves is always illegal and often immoral, but their joy is so contagious that I catch myself envying them despite my better judgment. Why, I inevitably ask myself while watching, do my friends and I sit in offices all day when we could be managing a tiki bar that’s a front for other illicit business and then burning it down for the insurance payout? (The answer is, just for the record, Catholic guilt and health insurance. Please let me know if any crime syndicates offer a full benefits package.) At first, the money and respect they accrue seem tangential, an unnecessary bonus. You assume they’d be engaging in theft, assault, and murder anyway as some sort of perverse but exciting group bonding activity.

But their fun decomposes as they get older, and the fantasy of Goodfellas gradually becomes a cautionary tale. Stretching the limits of what they can earn for themselves—whether it’s money or respect or belonging—through these activities becomes all-consuming. Their gradual lurch into the transactional is neither as nihilistic as Casino’s or as hedonistic as The Wolf of Wall Street’s. But it represents a similar effort to excise the rot at the core of events that seem fun and glamorous and aspirational, to expose how people who seem wholly unbound by the rules end up with lives just as limited as the rest of ours. The narrative that emerges here isn’t unsettling because it’s about social deviance; it’s unsettling because it’s deeply normal. Carefree, collective youthfulness gets devoured by individualism and acquisition, unraveling not only these characters’ separate lives but their relationships with one another. By the time Jimmy, who loves to steal, nears the end of his career, he can’t even enjoy executing the most impressive theft in American history. The success leaves him miserable, consumed by paranoia that anyone involved could send the whole thing tumbling down. These characters constantly expand their wealth and their influence, but none of them can ever have the specific kind of power they want—Jimmy and Tommy, in particular, can never become made men. And this perpetual dissatisfaction becomes the core of what motivates them, gradually replacing the love and excitement that once sucked them in.

Of course this journey into the mercenary shapes both the collective and the individual rises and falls of Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy. But for me, the film’s most compelling window into how people struggle to navigate a system that depends on constantly striving for something that’s always held just slightly out of reach is Karen Hill’s journey from (hilariously bored) date to wife to unofficial business partner. It’s a thread some viewers lose—and, to be fair, there’s a lot going on here and the run time is, like that of every Scorsese film, at least a hair too long; it’s easy to hold onto the scenes that stand most memorably on their own and forget the larger narrative context. But I’m always fascinated by her, and left struggling to separate out the things she does for money from the things she does for love, to mark where her desire for things she can never have ends and her resigned willingness to grab whatever she can get begins.

In fact, I would argue that her development is the backbone of Goodfellas, the piece that enables much of its thematic and emotional heft. It’s a narrative achievement, of course, but most of the credit belongs to Lorraine Bracco, whose performance is one of my all-time favorites: funny and charming, dark and terrifying, sometimes all of these things at once. Through her, we get to know Karen’s point of view better than any other characters’, and through Karen, we get to understand what it’s like to be simultaneously inside and outside the illegal, immoral, and violent work the movie depicts. Her perspective lends the movie much of its complexity and nuance—not just because her voice-overs frame so many pivotal moments, but because her narration so compellingly contradicts not only itself but also what we watch her see. When she tells us that Henry and his friends are “just blue-collar guys,” gaming the capitalist system, it’s not an effort to convince us but to convince herself. She’s close enough to see what’s happening, distant enough that she can recognize that it’s spiraling out of control, and embedded enough to have a vested interest in talking herself out of that recognition. Her domestic labor is inseparable from but not identical to her husband’s criminal labor, and her negotiation of her own complicity swings wildly between mercenary pragmatism and hopeful idealism.

You could read her constantly shifting relationship to her work as unrealistic character development, or interpret her inconsistency as yet another troubling entry into the “Bitches Be Crazy” canon—or you can understand her as a liminal subject trying to navigate an overwhelming context with mixed results. Her journey is not so much a straightforward arc from idealism into greed as it is a messy recursive process, a constant cycle of learning and unlearning and relearning how to get by as a woman who supports and is supported by this particular work. In a less biting movie, Karen would be a well-behaved middle-class Jewish girl corrupted by a criminal husband; in a Scorsese movie, the boundary between polite society and its criminal underbelly is far too blurred for such simplicity.

From the beginning of Karen and Henry’s relationship, love and acquisition are hard to separate from one another. She loathes him instantly, identifying him as a selfish dirtbag and spending their first double-date wearing an expression that I am, as a sufferer myself, both allowed and required to note is a god-tier achievement in resting bitch face. But the moment Henry signals that he’s unattainable, she must correct this, hunting him down in the street to yell at him. And while she’s intrigued by the expensive dates that follow, she doesn’t fully commit to loving Henry until he pistol-whips the man who sexually assaults her and then asks her to hide the gun. That decision—and it feels like just that, a decision, albeit one in which desire is included in her calculations—captures exactly what being attracted to an asshole entails. It’s a combination of the hope that his unearned confidence wears off on you, the validation of occasionally being the exception to the rule of how badly he treats people, and the thrill of getting to borrow that bad behavior for your own ends.

But even after this decision is formalized at their wedding, she still harbors reservations about Henry. She’s always evaluating her surroundings, trying to determine whether this life is worth what she receives in exchange for participating in it. Whenever she verbalizes her fear that the trade-off isn’t worth it—a fear that often emerges from her awareness that she will never fully belong—Henry talks her out of it. And as Henry grows more absent, she takes over this responsibility, talking herself out of everything she knows. Her rationalizations of her role in her husband’s work aren’t a regurgitation of things he’s told her previously; her explanations are far more nuanced and observant than his, grounded not in the desire to have an exceptional life but the need to hang onto a normal one. Her rationalizations offer a way of making her life livable, of holding onto the hope that she might get what she wants from adulthood—but they serve a meta-purpose as well, exposing the logic the film critiques and revealing the ways we convince ourselves to comply with our own destruction.

Karen’s compliance is never permanent, of course. She can explain in meticulous detail how her husband games the capitalist system, but she still knows what she knows. And the most urgent thing she knows is that the things she wants in exchange for her work—some influence, but also some loyalty, some kindness—are never going to take shape. Henry fails to be reliable in any capacity beyond the material: he lies to her, cheats on her, gaslights her, and leaves her isolated for long stretches of time, sometimes because he’s incarcerated but other times because he just feels like having more fun elsewhere. The only power she can leverage is the fact that her husband’s colleagues are terrified of her—because while Henry has compartmentalized her away into a very small section of his expansive personal life, his friends already know she’s part of their enterprise. Of course, this minimal power is not enough to get her what she wants; even if it did, the fact that this is her one small measure of influence still reveals the extent to which her life is interwoven with her husband’s violence and greed.

As Goodfellas nears its end, Karen seems resigned to her perpetual dissatisfaction, treating her marriage like a miserable job at a floundering company and grabbing whatever she can get before it goes under. She has every material possession she could want—an expansive wardrobe, free cocaine, a truly hideous remote-controlled rock wall—but this glamorous excess is contradicted by the empty affect of someone who’s just trying to get through a workday. As Henry’s solo business reaps more and more chaos, she gives up trying to assert herself or find a coherent explanation for anything; she is, in a few scenes, literally just along for the ride. No one in the history of cinema has ever come down with such a severe case of the fuck-its.

And yet when everything implodes, she comes alive again—briefly. As her husband is arrested and her home is surrounded by police, she disposes of everything that could incriminate him. It’s an act of love, or at least one of loyalty; it once again makes her complicit in Henry’s business, but it also protects Henry and their family. But when Henry learns what she’s done, he’s not grateful, just furious that she flushed $60,000 of cocaine down the toilet. His reaction lays bare the void at the core of their marriage, the extent to which their conflation of love and money turns even acts of pure, irrational loyalty into a question of exchange value. She sees it clearly, but it’s far too late to extricate herself; even Henry selling out his friends, entering witness protection, and leaving his work behind doesn’t grant her a way out. His job has ended, but hers has not. Just like the men she’s surrounded by, she loved it once—and we know, finally, that love, not money or glamour or interminably delayed gratification, is the force that allows her work to consume her life.

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The 6 Most WTF Hollywood Depictions Of Donald Trump

Before he became the inciting incident in the post-apocalyptic thriller that is our age, Donald Trump spent most of his life cultivating the image of a disgustingly wealthy businessman and cameo-worthy celebrity. He was the rich bully of his time, inspiring many movies and TV shows to feature barely fictionalized versions of him as villainous characters meant to symbolize the greed and cynicism of 1980s capitalism. Interestingly, none of the following examples ever went so far as to imagine a future in which this character would become president.

A Trumpian New York City Developer Starts A Hate Campaign Against The Ninja Turtles

It was only a matter of time before the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles squared off against the most quintessential of all New York City foes: rising property values.

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In the fourth season of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show, the Turtles are beleaguered by real estate magnate and rotund blowhard Fenton Q. Hackenbrush, who runs the not so subtly named Donald J. Lofty Enterprises. Hackenbrush wants to demolish the sewers completely and turn them into Donald J. Lofty luxury condos. For that, he needs the Turtles to disappear. (If Hackenbrush is anything like the real Trump, he probably thinks the Turtles are the wrong color to live in one of his buildings.)

In an interview with April O’Neil, Hackenbrush sells his greedy plans to the public on the basis that his sewer reconstruction will “flush out the worst menace in the city: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” Of course, the people of New York don’t have any problems with the Turtles, so Hackenbrush forces a group of employees to dress up in those bad Turtle Halloween costumes we all used to wear and go commit crimes.

Then an evil turtle named Slash arrives in the city, and Hackenbrush immediately mocks him as “some kind of foreigner,” but then bribes him into sowing mayhem, fanning the flames of turtle racism.

Hackenbrush is eventually exposed by some ace reporting by O’Neil (New York Times, pay attention). As punishment, he is loudly fired by the actual owner of the company, Mr. Lofty — who looks surprisingly a lot like Fred Trump, Donald’s father. We’re not saying TMNT intentionally created a world in which Fred Trump would repeatedly yell “You’re fired” at his heir, but that’s immediately the best Trump origin story we’ve ever heard.

The Devil’s Advocate Features A Rich Murderer Who Owns Trump Tower

In The Devil’s Advocate, Al Pacino is the titular Devil (not a spoiler; you don’t cast Pacino in a movie about Satan and make him the lovable dad), who has set up a law firm in New York in order to subvert justice and release evil into society. And who is Satan’s favorite client? The guy who lives atop Trump Tower.

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Though it is slightly inaccurate, since he never claims to have the best murders ever, just fantastic.

Alexander Cullen, played by a suitably balding Craig T. Nelson, is a Trump-esque real estate mogul accused of murdering his wife, stepson, and maid — dire straits for a guy based on someone who once bragged he could shoot a person in the middle of the street and get away with it. His arrest immediately prompts Pacino’s law firm of Fire, Brimstone & Ham to send their new ace attorney, Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves wearing his dad’s suit), to defend Cullen. Why? Because, oddly, he’s Lucifer’s best client, having racked up “16,242” billable hours in one year. That’s a lot of shady business.

Warner Bros. Pictures 1.85 years of shady business, to be exact.

But being a hated New York business tycoon and employing a massive team of evil lawyers doesn’t necessarily mean Cullen is a Trump clone, right? Luckily, for the sake of subtlety, when we finally arrive at Cullen’s home, we see that it’s literally Trump’s apartment in Trump Tower. The filmmakers managed to rent it out, preserving its natural appearance as Liberace’s mind palace.

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Warner Bros. Pictures “Try not to touch anything — you’ll get metal poisoning.”

In the end, Cullen is found not guilty, despite Lomax knowing that he murdered those people, thereby finally giving in to his true nature as the son of Satan. That’s right, the Devil’s son loses his innocence by defending Trump. Burn.

A Sci-Fi TV Show Villain Morphs Into Donald Trump … Played By Donald Trump

Night Man was a late ’90s low-budget TV show based on the Malibu Comics series about a San Franciscan saxophone player who can sense evil and wears a laser eye. Despite that, it somehow managed to run for two seasons, possibly because of its reliance on magnificently bizarre cameos — none of which were more utterly mystifying than Donald J. Trump in technically the only real acting credit to his name.

In this episode, Night Man is chasing a face-changing villain called Face to Face, who decides to engage in some quick identity theft to make a large withdrawal from the bank. Who better to transform into than the self-proclaimed richest man in the universe, Donald Trump? (No really, please suggest someone better.) In one of the most perfect sequences in the history of the medium, Face to Face slowly morphs into The Donald, dazzling audiences with peak mid ’90s CGI while simultaneously reinforcing the idea that Trumps looks like a melting Claire Danes.

Donald Trump — remember, this is the real Donald Trump playing a man who has shapeshifted into Donald Trump — walks into a delightfully green-screened bank, and then sits down with the bank manager to illegally withdraw $10,000. Sadly, the nuanced layers of a real man pretending to be a fake man pretending to be him do not translate to Trump’s performance:

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Could they not find a real bank that would allow Trump to walk in?

Weirdly, in his utter boredom and bad acting, something spectacular happens: Trump seems … nice. He’s subdued, polite, even charming. It seems that all you need to do to make Trump likable is carefully control what he says and make sure he’s not physically in the same room with any human beings.

A Disney Show Paired Donald Trump With A Dead Pirate

Before Disney found a way to become rich off Johnny Depp wearing a lot of eyeliner, it first got its pirate feet wet with The 100 Lives Of Black Jack Savage, a lighthearted romp wherein the undead spirit of a mass murderer teams up with a fictional Donald Trump analogue to save both of their souls from burning forever in hell.

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Luckily, Disney would never reuse “Jack Savage,” or his ship the Black Bird, or anything like it ever again.

When Daniel Tarberry, a rich real estate mogul from New York, has to flee the country because of legal troubles, he buys a luxurious Caribbean mansion to lie low in, but doing so summons the ghost of Black Jack Savage, who was hanged on the island for his crimes. The two are now forced to save the lives of 100 people in order to save themselves from eternal damnation.

Tarberry is a greedy shark who insists on hanging a portrait of himself in every hotel room he owns and constantly tries to weasel out of paying his contractors a dime. He’s not very respectful to women, referring to every lady who talks back to him as “the poster girl for PMS.” He’s also a straight up racist, first assuming Black Jack is his cabin boy, then loudly exclaiming that he wants to change all the locks because he “found a black man in my kitchen.”

The writers had intended to start Tarberry off as a real piece of Trump, only to eventually learn from his mistakes and become a better man. He even occasionally refrains from treating Black Jack like some weird Jim Crow genie.

But the show never got to the redemption part, as the network pulled it after only seven poorly rated episodes. Believing that people are interested in seeing a Trump redemption story might have been the most misjudged part of The 100 Lives Of Black Jack Savage — a Disney show that opens with a black man being lynched.

Gremlins 2 Had Trump Fight Gremlins

Nobody really expected Gremlins to get a sequel, especially not its creators. And when it did, no one could have predicted that the real villain wouldn’t be gremlins, but the world’s most notorious New York City mogul.

Director Joe Dante wanted to have the Gremlins run amok in a fancy New York skyscraper. But the movie still needed a villain, a rich guy so obnoxious that audiences wouldn’t feel bad about watching midnight demons tear him several new assholes. And then it hit Dante: “At that time in New York City, there was one major character who was Mr. Billion.”

At the time, Trump was known for being “overbearing and obviously kind of goofy,” said the film’s writer, Charles S. Haas. “He was an emblem of what was going on in the ’80s and ’90s with greed and money and crassness, and [the idea of] the whole world being for sale.” And so they created powerful millionaire Daniel Clamp, a Trumpian mogul (with a dash of Ted Turner) who also happens to be running violent animal experiments in his tower Clamp Center.

Actor John Glover modeled his performance of Clamp on the director, whom he saw as “incredibly gentle, supporting and encouraging,” rather than on Trump, which is why Clamp can say weirdly racist nonsense like “Let’s lose the elm trees. People see elm, they think Dutch. [pause] Disease” and still sound like a swell boss. It’s also why we unreservedly root for Clamp when he shoves a Gremlin into a paper shredder.

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And also because he seems to be the only one who realizes gremlins aren’t that difficult to kill.

Consequently, Gremlins 2: The New Batch offers a peek at an alternate universe in which Nice Trump helps us fight small-minded rage goblins, as opposed to the universe we live in, where those goblins got him elected president.

Sesame Street Thinks Donald Trump Is Garbage

Over its nearly 50-year history, Sesame Street has striven to be not just entertainment, but also a tool to teach children. And many times over, it has tried to teach them that Donald Trump is the king of the trash people.

The first time we encounter Sesame‘s Trump is in ’88, as a grouch named Ronald Grump. Grump is trying to con fellow grouch Oscar into letting him build a three-trash-can-high Grump Tower on his spot in return for a “duplex can-dominium.” Oscar simply adores Grump at first, because he exemplifies grouch values, as “his name is on every piece of trash in town.” Grump is also grouch-famous for building “a swamp in a day,” a line so apt that the Sesame Street writers should get a retroactive Emmy for it.

“What about dumpsters?”

However, Grump immediately tries to evict Oscar for keeping pets in his fantastic, just the best tower. This forces all the Sesame Street residents to band together to buy Grump off with their garbage, making the first lesson most American kids learned about Donald Trump was that they need to pay him to go away before he ruins everything.

Donald Grump returns during the show’s 2005 parody of The Apprentice, in which lesser grouches are fighting for the privilege to assist Grump in peddling his trash all across town. After a series of pointless tasks, Elmo, whose hard work and positive attitude wins the day, immediately gets fired by Grump, who exclaims, “I can’t have a good helper! I got my reputation to think of.”

However, the Trump animosity really boiled over during the Street‘s 25th anniversary show in 1993. The entire special episode revolves around the residents of Sesame Street fighting Grump (this time expertly portrayed by human forehead vein Joe Pesci), who’s trying to convert the entire block into a garish Grump Tower. At first he sweetly attempts to convince them that having their street become an overpriced boutique is a good thing. But when the residents don’t agree, Grump starts threatening Muppets like they’re in Goodfellas.

Fortunately, Grump’s plans fall apart because Oscar and his trash heap (which are on city property) keep Grump from selling a single condo. Furious, he rips up his plans and screams that Sesame Street didn’t deserve a Grump Tower anyway. So that’s charm, bully, and now abandonment. If the show had ended with Grump taking Oscar to court for loss of potential revenue, Sesame Street would have achieved the quadfecta of the Trump negotiation style long before Nancy Pelosi coined it.

Since he became president, Trump has not been shy about his desire to gut PBS, the public station that was home to Sesame Street until 2016. We can’t help but think that Ronald Grump has something to do with that.

Cedric will never stop politicizing Muppets. The best way to boycott his leftist agenda is by following him on Twitter but then never interacting with him in any shape or form. That’ll show him.

Why should you have to deal with the Trump presidency alone? Make your cats miserable too with this Donald Trump cat costume.

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