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kapitaali · 7 months

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PSL statement: Free Palestine, free all Palestinian political prisoners, end all U.S. aid to the Israeli apartheid regime!

The unrelenting oppression, murder, torture and occupation carried out by the Israeli apartheid regime has precipitated a counter-offensive by Palestinian resistance forces. The Israeli war machine and its attendant systems of oppression are bought and paid for by U.S. imperialism. U.S. tax dollars fund the grinding oppression of the Palestinian people to the tune of $4 billion each year.

Resistance to apartheid and fascist-type oppression was labeled “terrorism” by U.S. politicians when the African National Congress took up arms against the racist, apartheid regime in South Africa. The same false “terrorism” label is being applied to the Palestinian people.

The PSL says: Resistance to apartheid and fascist-type oppression is not a crime! It is the inevitable outcome for all people who demand self-determination rather than living with the boot-heel of the oppressors on their necks.

The people of the United States are going into the streets right now to say “free Palestine!”, “cut all U.S. aid for the apartheid regime” and “free all Palestinian political prisoners!”

Israel is currently carrying out a massacre of historic proportions against Gaza and all throughout Palestine, slaughtering hundreds. The bombs and missiles that are raining down on Gaza right now are paid for by U.S. tax dollars. Instead of using money to meet people’s needs, the U.S. government has shamefully extended Israel a long-term military aid agreement worth $38 billion.

The corporate media and politicians want the public to believe that Israel is simply defending itself from “terrorism.” That’s a lie. The actions of the resistance over the course of the last day is a morally and legally legitimate response to occupation. It was brought about by escalating Israeli oppression on numerous fronts.

Less than a year ago, a new, far-right government came into office in Israel. Regardless of which party is in power, the Israeli government has always imposed occupation and apartheid. But the new administration — which includes openly genocidal, fascist senior ministers who control the police and prison system — is intent on taking this to unprecedented heights.

A wave of killings is under way in the occupied West Bank by Israeli troops, cops and vigilantes that has claimed over 200 Palestinian lives so far this year. Already horrific conditions for the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails deteriorated even further. Far-right mobs stormed the al-Aqsa mosque on numerous occasions under the protection of Israeli police. The construction of illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land was hugely expanded. The new government announced its intention to create a “national guard” — a thinly-veiled death squad that would operate under the personal command of the main fascist politician in Israel, Itamar Ben-Gvir.

To provide diplomatic cover as this was taking place, the U.S. government has been aggressively lobbying countries in the Middle East to sign “normalization” agreements with Israel. Since the state of Israel was established amid a deadly campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948, most neighboring countries have rightfully refused to officially recognize Israel’s existence. But in the last few years that has begun to change. In exchange for what amounted to massive bribes from the United States, the reactionary governments of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco established formal relations with Israel. In recent days, the United States was reportedly on the verge of securing the biggest normalization agreement of all with Saudi Arabia.

It was in this context of an existential threat to the Palestinian people’s very survival that the resistance organizations chose to launch a bold counter-offensive. This does not constitute terrorism. It is a basic fact of history that any people who are subjected to an occupation will resist that occupation.

The Israeli government is carrying out a bombardment of unbelievable proportions targeting Palestinian civilians in an effort to take revenge on the resistance. Shortly after the war broke out, Lloyd Austin pledged that, “Over the coming days the Department of Defense will work to ensure that Israel has what it needs.” The U.S. government is just as complicit in this massacre as Israel. Now is the time to mobilize and demand freedom for Palestine!

#Palestine #Israel #Free Palestine

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wolfandwild · 4 years

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My Shadowlands Wish List

Now that we’re getting closer and closer to pre-patch and the inevitable launch of the expansion, I thought I’d rattle off a wish list of things I hope we get to see in Shadowlands, largely from a lore/story perspective. (Or rather, my stupid foot was hurting so badly I couldn’t concentrate on writing my fic properly, so I decided to ramble off some not-so-hot takes, honestly they’re pretty mild in the grand scheme of things). I was in the first alpha wave, so I’ve had a pretty good opportunity to play the game as it is thus far, and I did want to make it clear up front that I’m fully aboard the hype train. Shadowlands is looking like a great expansion for a number of different reasons, and while I do have a few areas of concern, on the whole I am currently feeling very positive. Please also note these are just my random, late-night personal musings - your mileage may vary, and that’s a-okay. Mild Shadowlands spoilers below the cut.

You Get A Customisation! You Get A Customisation! Everybody Gets A Customisation! This one is pretty much a no-brainer. I don’t necessarily think Blizzard need to have absolutely every possible character customisation ready to go before launch, but I’d like them to continue adding further options over time. I move in a couple of different circles in Warcraft - I’m obviously involved in the writing/lore/character aspect of the game, but I’m also GM of a raiding guild and closely follow the gameplay/competitive side of things too - and customisation is one of those few things that gets everyone excited, regardless of their reason for playing the game. I’m looking forward to seeing a much more vibrant, unique and diverse Azeroth come Shadowlands pre-patch. (Mostly irrelevant side story - when Wrathion returned in the Patch 8.3 cinematics, my Twitter and lore Discords were basically going berserk with excitement, meanwhile there’s a hundred very confused dudes in my raiding guild who don’t read quest text being all, “What the hell is a ‘Wrathion’?”. I live in two different worlds, honestly). Another reason I’m excited about customisation (and I’m probably in a very small minority on this one) is because I actually really dislike allied races, and I think it gives Blizzard an option to add more flavour to character creation in the game without always having to cobble together a new race. I honestly think they should have simply gone for sub-race customisation from the beginning, to avoid having to ass-pull allied races out of nowhere. Using customisation over allied races also makes it far simpler to give something to both factions (e.g. high elves), or to add something for one faction without necessarily having to always add something to the other faction to keep things in balance. Giving an extra hairstyle to humans but not orcs generally isn’t going to cause that much of a fuss, but if one faction were given an allied race and the other wasn’t because there wasn’t a logical racial option, there would be a shitstorm of epic proportions. So you end up in a situation where one faction* gets saddled with a really random, sucky allied race just to be ‘fair’. *The Alliance. It’s the Alliance. Leave Britney Arthas Alone Arthas has never been a personal favourite of mine, but I respect that he has a fantastic story, and that he’s a cornerstone of Warcraft lore. His story is both satisfying and complete, and that’s exactly why they should leave him the hell alone. I don’t mind if he’s visited in flashbacks (like the Bastion cinematic), or if we explore how he affected still living characters (e.g. Jaina, Sylvanas, Bolvar), but I think it would be a mistake to try to make him a central character in the expansion. In contrast, someone like Kael’thas is an excellent choice for an additional arc, because his original story was a bit all over the place and there is still plenty of room for his character development. Arthas doesn’t need it, and I don’t think the minute potential gain is worth the risk of retroactively making the rest of his story worse. On a similar note... Warcraft III Was Released Nearly 20 Years Ago, It’s Time to Move On The Warcraft RTS was a landmark series of games, and was obviously without them we wouldn’t have the World of Warcraft. However, I think the future health of Warcraft’s lore depends on the ability of the writers to grow the story outwards and upwards, not to always default back to the same handful of characters for nostalgia’s sake. While characters like Jaina, and Thrall, and Sylvanas are great, they can’t carry the narrative forever. Shadowlands represents a unique opportunity to build up the next generation of characters and to blow the cosmology of the universe wide open. From what I’ve seen on the alpha/beta, Blizzard are definitely taking a step in this direction, and I’m hoping that’s what we get instead of Patch 9.2 - Oh Look, It’s Thrall Again. On an additionally similar note... Sylvanas Is Crazy, And She Needs To Go Down (I don’t actually think she’s crazy, but one should never miss the opportunity for an Avatar reference). One of my complaints about the recent lore developments in Warcraft its that it’s starting to feel a lot less like the World of Warcraft, and more like the Sylvanas of Warcraft. She’s playing 469D chess; she’s behind everything; she’s the sole driving force of the narrative. I don’t think that works in an MMO that’s meant to tell the story of an entire expanded universe. It makes things feel small. And before I get eaten alive, I want to be clear that I don’t dislike Sylvanas as a character - in fact, I think she’s very compelling and on a night when my foot wasn’t killing me so much I’d be happy to get into an argument as to why she’s actually one of the most consistent and well-written characters in the World of Warcraft. I don’t necessarily think she needs to die, either, but I think it’s time for her narrative to come to a close to make room for other characters in the story, and I don’t think Blizzard are going to get a much better opportunity to give her a satisfying ending than in a death-themed expansion. Justice for Tyrande (Or Vengeance, Whatever Uther Wants to Call It) Tyrande got done dirty in Battle for Azeroth, probably more than any other character. I’m not a massive night elf fangirl by any means, but their entire race was basically used as grist for the mill in Sad Orc Dad’s story, with no next to no narrative follow-up besides a cool cinematic that went absolutely nowhere in game. Outside the game, her character then got subjected to the cacophonous misogynistic crowing of the fanbase that occurs whenever a female character dares to be angry in the World of Warcraft. Much like Jaina, she’s decried for being ‘crazy’ or ‘irrational’ for, you know, being pissed that her people and her homeland were wiped out in an act of wildly disproportional aggression. I don’t know about you guys, but that would tend to make me a wee bit testy, but maybe I’m crazy and irrational too. In any case, I want to see her go off in Shadowlands. Fuck ‘em up, girlfriend. You Get One Villain. If You Drop It, I’m Not Buying You Another One I think most people will agree with me that the two weakest expansions (at least from a narrative perspective) were Warlords of Draenor and Battle for Azeroth. There are a few reasons for this, but for me one of the biggest issues was that they were chop-and-change expansions. Both were advertised and started off with narratives and themes that were wildly different from where they finished up. Warlords was part Iron Horde expansion, part Legion expansion; BFA was part faction war expansion, part Old God expansion... and that’s exactly the problem. Both times, I felt like we got two half-done expansions, instead of one single, cohesive narrative experience. If you look at expansions like Wrath of the Lich King and Legion, both of which were very well received, a lot of their success hinges on their presentation of a consistent narrative with a clear goal for players within the story. The Lich King, for example, was a consistent and very present villain. He menaced you throughout your entire journey, and so his eventual defeat on top of Icecrown Citadel was meaningful and impactful. Defeating N’Zoth, by contrast, felt pretty hollow, as we hadn’t had enough narrative build up to really care about taking him down. Part of the reason I’m excited for Shadowlands is it looks like we’re getting a nice, focused story development that builds up to a logical and satisfying villain in the Jailer. Why Can’t We Be Friends? Look, I bleed blue. I love the Alliance... but the faction war should not continue to be a driving narrative element in the World of Warcraft. I don’t want the factions to be removed, I think they’re a core part of the Warcraft experience and I’d be pretty sad to have to let them go entirely, but the cycle of hating one another then teaming up in an uneasy alliance in order to defeat a bigger bad, only to go back to being at one another’s throats the next day is... tiresome.

Ideally, the war would have ended after Legion - it was the most logical place to do so, and I think it was a big missed opportunity that they ran with Battle for Azeroth immediately afterwards. Unfortunately, I think this means the Alliance is going to just have to forgive and forget, which doesn’t really make a lot sense at this point given everything that happened in BFA, but for the sake of the overall story, it might be a necessary sacrifice. That said... I Am Once Again Asking for Alliance Narrative Agency I know there are a lot of (valid) complaints to be had about the Horde storyline, but the one thing the Horde has always had over the Alliance is that they actually get to drive the narrative forward. The Alliance are pretty much exclusively reactionary, and in a lot of ways are side characters to the main Horde storyline. I’ve made this argument elsewhere, but it honestly wouldn’t be too hard to remove Anduin’s part in Saurfang’s storyline in Battle for Azeroth and have it turn out more or less exactly the same way... which says a lot about the importance of the Alliance in the overall storyline. In short, the Alliance are secondary players at best, and downright irrelevant at worst. One of my biggest hopes for Shadowlands is that we’ll actually get to see some Alliance narrative agency. To be clear, however, this does not mean a simple rehashing of Horde conflicts with a blue coat of paint. Alliance stories are not Horde stories, and nor should they be. Having an Alliance leader turn into a genocidal despot is not the only way to create conflict or agency in the story - there are plenty of opportunities for character growth, development and conflict on the Alliance side without having to have one of our leaders do a heel turn (e.g. Tyrande as the Night Warrior, Anduin dealing with his experience in the Maw, Jaina confronting the fates of people like Kael’thas and Arthas, Taelia meeting her father, etc.), and I really hope we get to see some of those narrative threads come to fruition. I Want to Mount Everything Add a hundred new mounts. Two hundred. A pot plant with googly eyes, the four hundredth Alliance horse, your mum. I’ll ride anything; I don’t even care. (Please note this is the most important opinion I have).

#world of warcraft #shadowlands #shadowlands spoilers #battle for azeroth #lore #turns out i had a few more opinions than i originally realised #anyway shadowlands looks cool guys y'all should check it out #but i would always rather have some warcraft than no warcraft #so take that how you will

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twiststreet · 3 years

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I'd be curious for more of your thoughts on that Hibbs piece. I've read him for years and often find him insightful, but this one seems very reactionary in a very typical retailer way ("blinkered" was a good word Kim O'Connor used). Particularly, he seems to pretend that Diamond is just fine as is and that DC had no reason to want to switch distribution. I recently swore off DC, but I've noticed since the switch that those comics have been on time at my lcs each week. Diamond, not so much.

Yeah, I don’t really agree with that (I missed whatever Kim said), though I really don’t know what’s going on at a retail level. I haven’t gone regularly to a comic shop in years.

(Setting aside the health stuff, which is the most striking thing in there:) Hibbs is a retailer writing from a retailer perspective, so wishing that he was saying something else”... I mean, we know what we’re signing up for when we read it; we know how to slot it into our own personal worldviews. I’m not to going to complain that Hibbs isn’t going to tell me how long to cook a steak for, or that he’s not yelling that the Direct Market should be dismantled because if those were what I was looking to read, the egg should be on my face for pulling him up to begin with.

The question with Hibbs I think I always have is “how representative is he of retailers generally, as a store in San Francisco.” (And I think people slightly overstate how non-representative he is because if you hear him talk about his operations, he makes clear he operates differently for different retail audiences, when he had that second store going-- I don’t know if that’s still a thing, but. And also: I don’t fucking know what it means to be San Francisco anymore because what is that city even...). But generally, you know, you take that data point into consideration but still try to get at what you’ve signed up for, when you read what he says-- where are retailers’ heads at... You know, you go “well if Hibbs is at 8 then even adjusting -2 for factors x y and z, that mean Joe Median-Store might be at 6 and 6 is great / isn’t great, etc.”

Hibbs has always erred slightly worried, on the spectrum of human reactions, so you know, (even though I personally tend to be drawn to that more than optimism), I’m not sitting here going “I bet DC’s going to license all their characters tomorrow because he says so” because it’s not like the first time I’ve heard that-- though it remains entirely possible, possibly a good idea for the suits (though probably not for anyone else), who even knows. (Though if you’ve been listening to Rob Liefeld talk on Robservations about Heroes Reborn you’ll already know a significant challenge that would face-- that if they do a trial balloon, the people who already entrenched will do whatever they can to poison the trial balloon so as to make the case for not doing it and remaining entrenched...)(that becomes tougher after multiple waves of layoffs, though).

But what he’s talking about-- DC just did its own Heroes World...? As soon as I heard all that to begin with (and I didn’t pay close attention because the world was happening), my first reaction was “oh shit, Heroes World!” So a comic retailers saying “this is looking the same after __ months in these specific ways” ... I’m going to pay attention to that. I just remember how spectacularly unlikely it was that comics cleaned up the mess they’d made of themselves in the 90′s. It was a ridiculously unlikely set of events that turned things around, and I don’t think you can reasonably expect those events to happen again. (Especially after the “we learned a lesson from the 90′s” part turned out to be a lie, which is something I know I was yelling and screaming about for years and I was getting called like “ungrateful” or something by the Serious Comic Voices of Seriousness for it, there were entire CBR blog posts about how I didn’t understand how great things were now, etc, etc, etc... I don’t think they pull that “we learned not to rip people off” lie again, not this batch of assholes. Though who knows, maybe....)

I mean, sure there are criticisms of Diamond to be had, of trad retail to be had. And there’s the giant black box of “how desperate are people right now” that hasn’t been reported on. There was a time in ‘02-’04 or so when a book distributor or somebody like that went down, and it almost took out Fantagraphics with it. And this seems worse than that! Where’s the money flowing here and whose debts are getting paid first? I don’t have any idea. There’s all these systems in play that have been knocked out by COVID, and who knows who’s owed how much money or how much product is sitting in a warehouse collecting warehouse fees, etc., like this is all a fucking disaster and there’s no reporting on it (comic reporters are too busy encouraging Damon Lindelof to make Watchmen TV shows) and there’s ... DC is a black box in a black box in a black box (he said, having waited for 3 years for DC to answer an easy question once).

But even if DC had good reason to do whatever it did? It doesn’t seem to matter much if the rest of the comic market’s built around Diamond and if no one has the health of the Direct Market on its radar. And DC doesn’t if they fucking fired everyone who understands the health of the Direct Market as even being a fucking concept to begin with, which is extremely likely at this point. Or ... I don’t know-- it’s the old comic problem of people wanting to argue that “the thing is bad an we need to replace the thing.” Diamond’s bad and we need to replace it. Okay. With what? And with comics, the answer is usually “moonbeams and hopes and hugs.” There’s just a lot of wishful thinking out there that a Better Answer just shows up. I don’t know about that...

Comic retail’s built around selling Batman. For DC’s moves to be this impactful, that’s a problem at the core of the system. The undoing was in the origin. So i get that criticism, and it’s well taken (except to the extent there’s an entirely speculative argument built around it that either (a) there would be some other system that’d exist but-for and (b) there’d be some flourishing of human creativity but-for). But that’s still a lot of people and a lot of human energy that’s at issue. And the few life rafts that are out there, you’re not going to get a lot of people on them. Digital is a joke (according to me, a digital comic publisher! hahaha)-- hibbs if anything overstates the possibilities there because as a retailer, he doesn’t want to bring up that we’re in the Golden Age of Comic Piracy. (And ... I like being a digital comic publisher! I’m having fun. But). And bookstores-- bookstores are great, provided your readership expectation are 10-14 year old girls. Which might be better for comics if that became the default comic as compared to 35-50 year old bachelors that’s the DM’s bread and butter, but... I think you probably have to be okay with a lot fewer people having gigs. Bookstores can’t even remotely support the same level of human activity that comic shops can, by the look of things. (You know at some point you have a larger cultural heat death going on, that’s the part I find interesting, but...)

I don’t know. Hibbs might be to an extreme. I might be to an extreme. But having seen people voting for Biden and then going “wait, he’s going to hire racist industry-controlled centrists?? we got nothing for our vote? we’ve been betrayed!”... having seen people talk about what a great human being George Bush was (I saw a tweet fucking today that was like “George Bush was underrated because he was nice to a trans person once”)... I’ve become very cynical about the human memory or ability to learn lessons. I don’t think people remember 1995-1999 in comics, and just... how ridiculous it was when that got turned around. It was like watching them pull off a fucking heist to turn things around last time... Comics are selling-- people are buying comics. So it’s not as bad as last time. It’s nowhere close. But... People overestimate how structured the industry is, and obviously the DC layoffs suggest that the people looking purely at the bottom line don’t understand and didn’t account for the unique levels of institutional knowledge required for the industry... Other media, you don’t hear about hand-selling as much. When have you ever seen a movie because the guy who owns the theater told you it was good?? Or because you saw the director standing over a flea market table looking like they were about to cry...? Like... I don’t know.

I do know for me, I want to start thinking about a next project, and I’ve been looking again at what the Big Hit Books have been these last couple years (I kind of avoided new stuff when I was working on my things) and... You know, part of what changed things in the early 00′s was there were new voices with a new style ready to come in. Now? Jesus, I don’t know. At first blush, everybody’s writing books nearly identically, and it’s just this massive level of bombast and confidence (good for them!) and huge splash pages and hyper-emotional narration and... it all just is this blockbuster schmear that’s very impressive but entirely skippable anyways. None of it’s as a bezerk or strange or just weirdly interesting to me as 10 seconds of a Metal Gear Solid video essay... it’s a lot of big splash pages of Thanos or Thanos-for-creator-owned-comics... But it all seems like halls of mirrors-- none of it seems very outward looking... You know, Kojima did halls of mirrors by the 4th game, too, but in Death Stranding, he had like Amazon deliverypeople, and you’d play the game and go “oh shit, this gig economy is making my formaldehyde-baby cry” and like... he had something besides the hall of mirrors to him. (And I mean, the 4th game is a criticism of the hall of mirrors, according to a video essay I saw, but...). Or you know, it’s like the thing that Rebuild of Evangelion 3 is criticizing, they’re doing unironically... I don’t know. It’s weird; the books are weird; I keep wanting to ask like “what should I be reading here” because I’m mostly ignorant besides a Hulk or a Long Con or Sink or ... I never saw the end of Seeds but I thought Seeds had something...

Sorry to ramble.

#Worst Hobby or Worstest Hobby?

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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In the wake of Trump’s election, Brexit, and the growth of anti-EU populism, the placid doctrines of establishment politics are now being remade. But perhaps more significant is the absolute and utter collapse of Western self-declared “anti-establishment” politics: the “socialist” left has proven to be one of the earliest casualties. The cresting wave of left-wing populism turned out to be illusionary; as it receded, its only lasting legacy was bitter acrimony, rotting political hopes, failed analyses, and stranded careers in academia and the NGO-world.

This is not to say that “the left” has lost. Only the romantic narodism of the 21st century left has truly died: the belief that “the people,” or “the working class,” can be relied upon in the political struggle. One need only consider the riots going on even now in the US, or the one of the many institutional revolutions playing out (at foundations, newspaper editorial boards, and academia), to recognize that the movement is still in good health. But after the disappointments of late-2019 and mid-2020, those revolutions will no longer maintain any pretense of being waged by the people. They won’t even pretend to be waged for them.

…

The left may prefer to talk about a supposed “precarization,” of the college educated, and the right may be more comfortable talking about ”useless college degrees,” but neither side denies the facts on the ground: that for some time now, the West has been using a massive expansion of higher education to create a new class of functionaries—”knowledge-workers” and would-be managers—in numbers far in excess of what the labor market can or could absorb. Yet, it is only just now that we are seeing, with clear eyes, that this class of people (which, again, nobody denies the existence of) might begin acting as a class.

…

Rather than try to pin the blame on American television, or even social media, it behooves us to recognize that the conditions for this new “Springtime of the Managers” are just as ripe in London and Berlin as they are in Portland and New York City. What we have now on the left and right—on both sides of the Atlantic—is an open and bitter class war. It is a conflict between a growing cadre of imperial lords and the peasantry they hope to subjugate; between the managers and petty nobility of the much-prophesied “knowledge economy” and those they aim to manage.

Just as few took the existence of this class of people seriously, no one took the existence of this class war seriously until recently. The left was forced to outright deny it because they were already on the side against the working classes, and any acknowledgment of that fact would destroy their legitimacy. What is East Germany, without Communism? Nothing; it is merely part of greater Germany. The left faced a similar dilemma, and so the charade, emptied of all class conflicts in favor of “cultural” ones, had to be maintained.

Meanwhile, a minority of left intellectuals have already begun jettisoning ideological ties to a people it no longer belonged to or recognized. In the UK, thinkers like Paul Mason diligently sought to replace workers with young (educated) people who have a smartphone as the natural constituency of the left. In the US, Nathan J. Robinson, the publisher of Current Affairs magazine, pleaded for the left to finally abandon Marxism and historical materialism in favor of couching its arguments in moral terms. These characters were, almost without exception, mocked and ridiculed. But time has vindicated them. It is now clear that they took heat not because they suggested a new and different strategy, but because they were advancing the end to the left’s doublespeak and doublethink. The left had long since abandoned the workers; Mason and Robinson were merely preparing the ideological contingency plan for when the workers would abandon the left, as has now well and truly happened.

In the leadup to the 2020 election, the right faced a different dilemma. For them, the class conflict they refused to recognize was internal. The Democrats, having fully consolidated its new political coalition between petty managers, Silicon Valley grandees, and a dwindling base of minority clients, could not only defeat the likes of Bernie Sanders, but also reabsorb all of the hammer and sickle-brandishing “revolutionary communists” back into the machine. Unfortunately for the GOP—as with the Tories in Britain and the Sweden Democrats or Rassemblent Nationale in Europe—the consolidation of “the ascendant” into center-left parties has left them stuck with the political leftovers: an entirely ad-hoc coalition consisting of disgruntled heartland workers, small business owners, and big business also-rans. For this reason, and in part due to the intellectual legacy of the Cold War, talk of actual class conflict comes at a very high risk for the right. Trying to unite the competing interests that make up the extant and potential base of the Republican party is nigh impossible. The Democrats—and the Western left in general—talk about culture rather than political economy because they know the makeup of their coalition, who their enemies are, and what their plan is. Republicans—and the Western right in general—talk about culture rather than politics because they know none of these things.

…

As a political cause, Black Lives Matter seems to thrive just as well among the surplus managers of Dublin as it does in San Francisco—never mind the complete incompatibility of the Irish situation with the American. Sweden, for example, never had a plantation economy nor a period of formal or informal Jim Crow rule. But this in no way impacted the formation of a Black Panther movement in immigrant-dominated suburbs. At first blush, the children of immigrants to Sweden—predominantly of Middle-Eastern descent—cosplaying as 60s-era Afro-American freedom fighters reads as a hilarious anachronism. But there is an institutional logic behind it: Sweden already has a state-funded patronage network geared towards “community organizers” in particular, but also the surplus professional class in general.

Behind most declarations of proletarian solidarity or racial justice, one tends to find repeated and urgent demands for the state to simply create more jobs. How do we solve the thorny issues of racial justice? By diverting more federal and state money to employing the various temporarily embarrassed aspiring commissars currently stocking the shelves at Target, of course! While the language of economic redistribution today maintains a veneer of proletarian radicalism (often eagerly assisted by various red-baiters on the right, as seen during the fairly anemic “Joe Biden will usher in SOCIALISM” run-up to the 2020 election), only the truly credulous could believe that demands for the state to directly and indirectly employ more and more college graduates—creating as many ideological commissariats as necessary to rescue them from the ignominy of having to work at Starbucks—merely represents some innocuous side effect of the political project as a whole.

A full accounting of the scope of the Swedish patronage machine is neither possible nor necessary in this essay, but it does serve as a valuable example. Most of the country’s patronage machine actually predates the class that currently subsists on it. The “one percent rule” which states that at least one percent of the budget allotted to new buildings or infrastructure must be paid to artists for the express purpose of creating art, is just one example. The Swedish Inheritance Fund, (Allmänna Arvsfonden) was established as far back as 1928, when the country abolished the automatic inheritance rights of cousins and other distant relatives in the absence of a written will or close family. Originally, the intention was that the state would use this newly “orphaned” money to fund the care of orphanages and related causes. The fund’s mission has expanded over time to the point where it now funds a great variety of overtly ideological causes—often with next to no oversight. As such, the fund has become controversial, especially in the eyes of the Swedish right.

The various incarnations of the “one percent rule” or the Inheritance Fund only scratch at the surface. On every level—state, regional, and municipal—myriad grants, privileges, subsidies and direct cash transfers are available, aimed at a heterogenous group of race hustlers, artists, activists, and academics. It hardly needs to be said that cultural minority status, or fluency in the shifting language of wokeness, is a strict and unavoidable requirement for those seeking to access these resources. The state also pays the salaries of many Swedish journalists, either directly (through the various public service channels) or indirectly, through massive distribution subsidies. Are you perchance a radical syndicalist on a holy quest to crush the capitalist value-form while also grinding the running dogs staffing the reactionary Swedish state into dust? Have no fear, that state will gladly subsidize both your salary and cost of distribution for your newspaper urging the workers to destroy capitalism! Even as larger and larger parts of Sweden succumb to deindustrialization and lack of opportunity, this money tap will keep flowing.

All of this is to say that there is a very real, non-ideological endpoint for many of the fervent demands coming from the Red Guards of the American cultural revolution. The state can take it upon itself to create and sustain an ever increasing number of jobs for the surplus elite generated by our universities. Moreover, even systems that were originally not intended to serve as patronage machines for surplus managers—such as a state fund for orphans—can easily be repurposed into a job creation program controlled by woke guild rules. Again, to reiterate: very few of our institutions that are now notorious as liberal-hegemonic patronage machines were created for that purpose; they were colonized. American conservatives should thus be very careful in their quips about “socialist Sweden,” given their own immediate future.

…

The left populist project is very much a project of social democracy for young professionals. Joe Biden’s electoral victory—such as it is—would have been impossible without the immense class solidarity and sense of purpose uniting the supposedly “ascendant” or “reality-based” half of America. (Drunk on victory, there is already talk of drawing up lists of people who in any way abetted the old regime.) They no longer feel any need to hide their power, or their plans for the future.

Broadly speaking, these surplus managers have two complementary goals: the above-discussed expansion of the social-democratic state, and the establishment of formal and informal guild protections and structures within the newly-expanded or pre-existing professional fields they hope to inhabit. Some characterize this secondary goal as one of ideological domination of the workplace, but this confuses the means with the ends. Put plainly, the ideas that are getting people fired today are not only empty of content, they are also constantly and arbitrarily changing. Compared to the often murderous totalitarianism of, say, a crusading religious fanatic, there is a distinct lack of object permanence at play here. The religious fanatic, obsessed with forcing everyone to bend to the True Faith, chooses his doctrine once and then sticks to it. But in the world of the woke, doctrine is ever-changing, and the commissars of today will gleefully sign your proscription sentence for holding opinions they themselves held only yesterday.

Yet, in this cultural revolution, the fickleness of its dominant ideas is an essential feature, not a bug. The point of this “totalitarianism” is not to force everyone to think correct thoughts at the risk of getting fired; it is to get them fired. Full stop. Like the medieval guilds of old Europe, surplus managers are threatened by the existence of a mass of people willing to do any job within their ambit that cannot be comfortably accommodated without inviting the pauperization of their entire profession. For the medieval guilds, guaranteeing that only a select few who could actually hope to become carpenters or glove makers had nothing to do with improving the economic efficiency of the towns, but rather to secure the living standards and social status of those carpenters and glove makers already in practice.

Guilds, unlike unions, are institutions meant to inflate scarcity. It is hard to imagine an American auto workers union threatening strike action in order to forestall Ford or GM from producing more cars. After all, more cars means more workers, means more potential union members, means more power for the union. The specific political opinions of any one worker does not factor into the basic arithmetic. For a guild, however, the arithmetic of power is very much concerned with the ability to discipline its own members, as well as raise barriers of entry into the workplace via social, cultural, or other grounds. For the union, having more members is (almost) always just a good thing. For the guild, it is a nightmare scenario. (Of course, exceptions exist. In some narrow vocations, unions maintain scarcity through licensing requirements and other means. But even then, the interests at play are economic, managing qualified labor scarcity for the benefit of its members.)

It is significant that the figure of “the boss” is imagined by these surplus managers as being evil not because he is a capitalist, but because his myopic profit motive or outdated personal morality is an obstruction to the creation of committees staffed by employees for the purpose of firing and disciplining other employees. Today, one can even be a millionaire capitalist while maintaining a properly anti-capitalist, revolutionary outlook, denouncing other companies that refuse to discipline their workers for ideological commitments.

…

To illustrate the hopelessness of any conservative or right-wing project which aims to somehow “shift the debate,” consider the way those same efforts played out on the left before the election. Take the case of Jacobin magazine’s recent article entitled, “Trying to Get Workers Fired Is the Wrong Way to Fight Racism.” Within minutes of its being published to Twitter, the article was inundated with angry and shocked reactions from mostly self-identifying socialists. The idea that bosses shouldn’t be trusted with the power to arbitrarily dismiss workers over allegations of racism produced a firestorm of controversy among the people who, we are supposed to believe, represent the vanguard that will lead those same workers into a revolution against those same bosses.

If this is just a modern expression of “Marxism,” then it has certainly come a long way.

…

Just as the Boston Tea Party looms large in the minds of Americans, the entrance of the black ships into Edo bay occupies a place of importance in the Japanese historical memory. It is seen as the moment in which the simmering social and political contradictions irrevocably boiled over. Neither the British monarchy nor the Japanese shogunate recognized what was happening until well after the point of no return. The fight against Trump has already forced such massive changes that the old social compact no longer exists. Silicon Valley has merged with the larger progressive machine, taking it upon themselves to guide (if not outright control) political discourse, picking political winners in a completely open and blatant manner.

The old order that was constituted in the US in the 90s depended on the separation not of church and state, but of the separation of civil servants, technical expertise, and scientific empiricism from politics. Without it, end-of-history liberalism lacks any legitimating mechanism. But it is precisely this separation that has just been destroyed; often violently and publicly. The election—with its artfully coordinated media blitz, the monumental failure of institutional polling (again), and the sudden about-face on the existence of electoral interference, is just the final swing of the knife against what remains of post-war Western liberalism.

This is not some trifling ideological point. The last year has seen very large institutional changes in the real world—huge cash transfers from business to various progressive NGOs, the embrace of political education in government institutions as a matter of course (briefly and ultimately meekly resisted by Trump’s executive order, now poised to return stronger than ever). On top of that, the US has seen a series of rolling purges of politically unreliable people from all positions of importance within academia, journalism, and similar sectors. Are those people going to suddenly be rehired now that Trump is gone, no harm, no foul? Will the alliances forged between progressive liberal causes and big business be voided, and all that money returned?

Even so, it is very much in doubt that many people actually want to go back. All these new alliances, all of these new technical and social instruments of political control and discipline, are far too useful for anyone to willingly give up. You can hear it clearly coming from congresswoman Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez: the tune for the future seems to be a mix of revenge and reeducation, not restoration. But since the deplorables are unlikely to whip themselves in penance, the reeducators will have to be trained, deployed, and (one would assume) amply paid for their work.

The class war is here. It will not go away on its own. After 2020, not even the staunchest anti-communist or “traditional conservative” on the right should indulge fantasies to the contrary. Donald Trump, whatever else one may say of him, was not defeated by ideas, but by a society-spanning managerial omerta, organized by a stunningly impressive (and frankly, terrifying) class alliance working together in total discipline.

In an era of elite overproduction, the only realistic means of sustaining the unsustainable elite’s social status and standard of living is by increasing the exploitation of the rest of the population; demands, taxes, and tithes levied against the two-thirds of America that does not attend college by the one-third that does. And so more institutions will be built, more money will be transferred from the undeserving poor to their educated superiors. Our media personalities, academics, and experts will continue the work of inventing new crimes for their gardeners, gig workers, and unemployed countrymen to commit, so that they might maintain this process of looting and extortion.

Those of us outside this coalition of the ascendant—whatever else we may lack in commonality—are now called upon to realize one very basic point: regardless of whether you call yourself a national conservative, a one-nation Tory, a part of Blue Labour, or a labor populist, this class war cannot only be analyzed and complained about. It must be vigorously prosecuted and won. It is one thing to debunk the “Marxism” of the surplus managers, but another thing entirely to strike against the structures of their guild privilege, dismantle their networks of patronage and access, and defund and marginalize their institutions and money pipelines.

The battle lines of the class war have been drawn. For those of us who would fight against this miserable vision of the future, it is high time we proclaimed our own Sonnō jōi. Only then can we hope to restore some semblance of dignity. Only then can we hope to halt the creeping rot that is eating us from within.

#malcom kyeyune #the bellows #class warfare #professional managerial class #read the whole thing

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hogtown-socialist-alternative · 4 years

Link

Can the Working Class Change Society? Socialists Say Yes

By Tom Crean -September 10, 2018

One hundred years after the Russian Revolution and 50 years after the revolutionary general strike in France in 1968, many on the left question whether the working class has a central role in changing society. This is understandable given the enormous retreat of the labor movement in recent decades. Working people in the U.S. [see the companion piece “The American Working Class“] no longer look to the unions as the leading force in the struggle for a better life as they did in the 1930s and 1940s and to a degree after World War II. Also the U.S. is virtually alone among Western countries in having no historical experience of a mass working-class political party which challenges for control of the government.

For a Self-Aware Working Class

Karl Marx, the pioneer of scientific socialism, in describing the modern working-class, differentiated between it being a “class in itself” as opposed to a “class for itself.” The working class, defined as those who have to sell their ability to work to the employer class to survive, has enormous potential social power because of its ability to stop the wheels of the economy. As the accompanying piece explains, contrary to those who say that globalization or automation have eliminated the American working class, it remains without doubt the majority of society. While the capitalist media is at pains to obscure this, just-in-time production, logistics hubs, and other large concentrations of workers, like in airports, show that the big corporations are vulnerable to collective action.

But the key issue is whether the working class moves from being an objective reality, a “class in itself” to being a force that sees its interests as counterposed to those of the capitalists and organizes to challenge their power. Since the Great Recession, working people in the U.S. have become keenly aware that the top 1% and even the top .01% have gained disproportionately while the bottom 99% and especially the bottom 50% are sliding backwards.

Progressives often point to how the tax system has increasingly favored the rich. This is absolutely true but there is a deeper reality: Massive gains in productivity have been made by American workers, yet their wages have barely risen while profits have skyrocketed. The bosses have been winning a one-sided class war. It has recently been reported that even with virtual “full employment” wages in the U.S. are not keeping pace with inflation. This reflects the lack of an organized challenge to the bosses’ power in the workplace.

A Grim Future

There is massive anger at social inequality and the social crisis which faces large sections of the working class. There is a loss of faith in institutions and especially in the political establishment. There is a growing awareness that the future under capitalism promises endless inequality, automation replacing good jobs, and a developing climate catastrophe. In poor countries, wars, famines, and massive displacement of people are likely to intensify. Capitalism no longer pretends to offer a vision of a more abundant future for ordinary people.

The growing anger of working people and young people was reflected in the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders who called for a “political revolution against the billionaire class.” It is also reflected in the massive interest in socialism, especially among young people. This is continuing with the wave of “democratic socialist” candidates including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But in the absence of a political force that clearly represents the interests of the working class, the door was opened to the right populism of Donald Trump who also attacked “free trade” deals and proclaimed himself a champion of the working class. This has led to a dangerously reactionary regime which threatens to destroy any remaining gains made through past struggles by workers, women, and African Americans.

But until recently, working class revolt was only expressed in a partial way and largely on the electoral plane. The retreat of organized labor continued – less than 7% of private sector workers are now in a union and strikes at historically low levels. The recent Janus decision by the Supreme Court aims to drastically undermine organization in the public sector where union density remains higher.

This is why the revolt of teachers in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, and North Carolina is so important. Now there is the potential for a major fight by the key UPS workforce against a rotten contract. There are important organizing drives among airport workers. In Missouri, voters defeated an anti-labor “right-to-work” law brought in by the Republicans by a two-to-one margin. In Europe, Amazon warehouse workers in three countries went on strike in July which could inspire workers in logistics here. These are the signs of a desire to fight. What is desperately needed is leadership and a new direction away from the failed approach of labor leaders of the past 30 years – refusal to use militant tactics or to assert labor’s independent political interests.

Lessons of History

The American working class has a rich tradition of struggle over the past 150 years. In the 1930s and ‘40s, powerful multiracial industrial unions were built using bold tactics including local general strikes and workplace occupations (“sitdown” strikes). Black workers were the driving force of the civil rights movement which brought down Jim Crow in the South in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Working-class women were the driving force in changing chauvinist attitudes in the ‘60s and ‘70s as part of massive rank and file labor upsurge.

And yet working people in the U.S. never had a true mass political party that expressed their interests. The absence of this helps explain why our pension and heath care system is so much worse than most advanced capitalist countries where there were powerful social democratic and labor parties. Recent commentary in various mainstream publications asks why socialism was not stronger in the U.S. in the past although some have correctly pointed out that socialists have played a major role in the labor movement at all the key points when it has been moving forward.

There are many arguments for why the U.S. is allegedly “exceptional.” Seth Ackerman, an editor at the widely-read left magazine Jacobin, has argued that at the end of the 19th century the U.S. moved on a different course than other capitalist “democracies,” placing onerous restrictions on the development of third parties. The two main (corporate dominated) parties were institutionalized and Ackerman concludes that “the United States [like the Soviet Union] is also a party-state, except instead of being a single-party state, it’s a two-party state. That is just as much of a departure from the norm in the world as a one-party state,”(“A New Party of A New Type,” Jacobinmag.com).

There are elements of truth in Ackerman’s analysis but it is missing an underlying historical reality. Despite all the obstacles, it was hardly inevitable that a workers party would not be created in the U.S. This could have been achieved in the ‘30s and ‘40s for example but was blocked by key labor leaders – unfortunately with assistance from sections of the left, particularly the Communist Party.

The broader truth is that the obstacles to creating a workers party in the past were not primarily legal but lay in the strength of U.S. capitalism which was increasingly dominant in the 20th century on a world scale. The capitalists were able to concede a higher standard of living for a period but they also made relentless use of racism and nativism to keep the working class divided. But again the rise of the CIO industrial unions in the ‘30s proved that common struggle could begin to overcome profound divisions.

Compared to the postwar boom or even the neoliberal era which began in the late 1970s, the situation today is very different. It is very clear that U.S. capitalism is in decline on a global scale. Restoring the previous position through trade wars or other means is an illusion. The workforce is more diverse and integrated than ever before and, despite all the differences in lived experience, there is a burning need for collective struggle to push back the relentless regime of workplace exploitation and the immiseration of wider and wider sections. When 40% of adults don’t know how they would pay for a $400 emergency while the billionaires’ banks accounts grow ever fatter – it’s time to fight back.

Can a new party representing these common class interests be built? Bernie Sanders raised over $200 million with no corporate money – which all pundits said was impossible – and was only defeated because of a rigged primary. Most progressive workers and young people today continue to pursue the idea of reforming the Democratic Party. As working-class struggle reemerges in a more developed way, the need to for political independence will become clearer and the need for a program that challenges capitalism itself and points towards democratic socialism. This will truly be the emergence of a working class “for itself” in America.

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thesinglesjukebox · 5 years

Video

youtube

MILEY CYRUS - SLIDE AWAY

[6.29]

Baby let all them voices slide away-e-yay-e-ay-e-yay [massive wall of sound appears]

Jackie Powell: "Slide Away" might be Miley Cyrus's most focused song since "Wrecking Ball," but it also represents so much more than just similar lyrical themes. It illustrates her evolution as an artist and a queer human being. Cyrus was trying to fit in a box with both that 2013 music video and her very short hair. In 2019, she's wearing black in her VMA performance of "Slide Away" with her wavy dirty blonde hair. She's no longer embarrassed to wear a cowboy hat nor is she shoving her love of women down our throats. We all just know that this is who she is. Her desire is to be herself, but she also craves substance and quality over just plain erraticism. She doesn't want to be milquetoast. "Slide Away" also proves that Cyrus understands which collaborators allow her to shine. I was pleasantly surprised by MikeWillMadeIt's involvement on this track. I didn't think he had the potential to contribute something so subtle yet fruitful. Cyrus has found her match with Andrew Wyatt. Alma has also assisted on this one as with "Mother's Daughter" without taking the song away from its artist. This combination just works. "Slide Away" is a breakup song about not only letting go of someone but Cyrus liberating herself simultaneously. She doesn't drown in sadness but rather rises and reflects gracefully. She did this purposely. [9]

Tobi Tella: Refreshingly mature and grounded, it's always nice to hear a Miley Cyrus song without the forced guise of The Music I've Always Wanted To Make. It's a meandering, repetitive song and while that's normally something to criticize, here it's just another addition to the sullen, mellow vibe. It lacks the theatrics of something like "Wrecking Ball" because that's not where she or the relationship is. People grow up, grow apart and stop being compatible. Despite not feeling the need to announce it, it's the first time I've been able to feel real artistic growth from her. [7]

Pedro João Santos: It's alright. The sound is translucent; the words distribute the overbearing weight of a breakup between mature avowals and trite metaphors. Aside from poor hooks and metrics, "Slide Away" is full of gaps, which is not counting that crystalline outro. You're free (even encouraged) to fill those in -- second-hand People literature and even Cyrus's recent tell-all Twitter thread are not just supplemental gossip, they charge the anodyne lyrics with meaning. The VMAs rendition is gaining traction for a reason: it taps onto something rawer -- not sure whether in spite of, or due to the vocal strain. Perhaps the latter is more enchanting as a natural flaw, unlike the studio version's disconcerting vocal treatment -- the stinging, affected "won't you slide away" parts awake you from even trying to indulge in its vibey, patched nature. Can't let this one slide. [5]

Scott Mildenhall: Hackneyed as it may be to call something like this "raw," there is a particular rawness to that call to "move on," both for its surface-level sting and the pain it belies. It's the pretence of greater control -- I'm fine, you're not and I can affect superiority with that lie. It's a front that brings extra texture to a desperate bask in angst for which the tone is struck just right; so right that it's more of a mood piece than something that would jump out of the radio. [7]

Kylo Nocom: I wish I loved this, but every one of my qualms feels so damn fixable that I can't even bother to like this. The pre-chorus's piano presets are ugly and out of place, those constant pitchy distorted moans are like nails on a chalkboard, and the fact that the song ends on the weak pre-chorus and a full minute of meandering strings is confusing. All of these make that sun bleached chorus of alternating shouts and swoons sound so much better, and for the briefest moments I can feel immersed in Miley's pop psychedelia. Unfortunately, moments aren't enough to make "Slide Away" sound like anything revelatory, or even just a simple return to form. [4]

Alfred Soto: Her voice starchier, Miley Cyrus sings country lyrics over a basic chord pattern, mourning the collapse of something or other. Her ability to personalize any genre into which she chooses to insert herself remains impressive as gesture. [5]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Miley's music has always sounded very calculated, but I've never quite had a grip on who she genuinely is as an artist. This isn't to take anything away from her creative agency, but rather to say that, as opposed to a Lady Gaga or Beyoncé who can proactively bend pop's trends to their will, Miley's constant persona changes seem mostly reactionary: the Hannah Montana era was curated by Disney, Can't Be Tamed was built to disown the show, Bangerz attempted to ride the waves of hip-hop's popularity and Younger Now shed blackness in favor of country-lite during the Trump era when early 2010s pop was dying and pop stars were appealing to authenticity. (Note: I refuse to acknowledge Her Dead Petz.) Even her most recent work follows this pattern: the SHE IS COMING EP's excessive vulgarity felt like another reaction to the underwhelming fan reaction to Younger Now's mellower tones. It's interesting then, that post-starring in a Black Mirror episode satirising the process of pop music creation, that she released "Slide Away," the most at home she's ever sounded singing anything. There's nothing gimmicky here, just an honest reflection about her life and career, sung compellingly. It's full of songwriting gems: the subtle inflection of her past being both a "paradise" despite feeling "paralyzed"; the 180 from life being "made for us" to being "turned to dust"; and the tender assuredness with which she sings "It's time to let it go." Never has she crafted her own narrative so simply or so powerfully. Over and over again she sings, "I'm not who I used to be," reflecting on her persona rather than labouring to create a new one. Finally, she sounds at peace as an artist. [7]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Miley Cyrus #pop #music #music review #writing

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bharatiyamedia-blog · 5 years

Text

Adil Hussain on the response to Delhi Crime, energy of streaming, and why he is not a reactionary anymore- Leisure Information, Firstpost

http://tinyurl.com/yxuflrft Adil Hussain finds his newfound golden patch in mainstream cinema amusing. He truly laughs out loud. Maybe it’s the modified perspective of an actor’s worth in current day Hindi cinema and streaming primarily based content material, at 55, Adil Hussain has discovered his place within the solar. “I’m loving it (working in Hindi movies). There are two causes that make me need to work in mainstream movies. Filmmakers search credibility of their actors immediately so components come your manner. Second, it helps me subsidise my participation in impartial cinema. Folks get to see an actor acquainted from Hindi movies in content material pushed, impartial movies and that helps. I get time to be with my nine-year-old son, prepare dinner for my household and give attention to them.” Hussain’s plate is full with coveted components for critically acclaimed filmmakers, new age impartial administrators and mainstream filmmakers. He’s slated to begin taking pictures for Jahnu Barua’s subsequent with Manisha Koirala this month. He started one more challenge within the USA in April. “I depart finish of this month for Geeta Mallick’s India Candy and Spicy. Ivanhoe Footage (of Loopy Wealthy Asians fame) will produce this movie. We shoot throughout Atlanta,” he says. Adil Hussain. Picture through Twitter/@khaskhabar He has loved working in a Dharma Productions movie completely. The truth is, his current expertise of taking pictures for Good Information, set to launch this December, validates positives of mainstream films. “I had a gala time. Working with Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Kiara Advani and Diljit Dosanjh was an absolute pleasure. My co-actor, Tisca Chopra is a delight to work with. Akshay Kumar may be very punctual, and he wanders round units, milling about and talking to everybody. They (Dharma) take excellent care of actors and the crew.” Bridging the mainstream and content-oriented cinema is Hussain’s subsequent Hindi function as main man, Prakash Jha’s Pareeksha. A return to roots for the gritty filmmaker, Pareeksha is the story of an auto-rickshaw driver, and his aspirations for his son. “The movie attracts from a real story, and it’s an exquisite story. Priyanka Bose, Sanjay Suri co-stars within the movie, and Shubham Jha, the younger actor that performs our son stands out. Prakash Jha has written and directed the movie and has had it in thoughts for years. It’s a heartwarming story centered on training, a universally related subject.” Having quietly launched a primary look poster, Jha’s movie will launch in the course of the summer season. A theatre veteran and star from his days on the Nationwide College of Drama, and a stint on the London stage, Hussain’s recall amongst millennial audiences has grown massively, due to his distinguished presence on alternate content material on streaming platforms. “We’re grooming and educating a special set of viewers with streaming platforms, which I hope will seep over to bigger, widespread viewers. You see the charges at which 4G and now 5G are being provided to Indians, and with enormous entry in all places, there’s enormous quantity of appreciation for recent, undiscovered content material and movies. Content material led collection are larger attracts immediately. We’re sitting right here in Assam and watching Narcos. This wouldn’t have been doable just a few years again. And it is a incredible state of affairs for actors,” he says. Hussain’s Norwegian movie, What Will Folks Say, is an Oscar-nominated International Language movie and pretty common on Netflix. He’s additionally within the competition favourites Un-Freedom, Maaj Rati Keteki (Assamese), Arunodoy Dawn amongst different movies. However the quantum leap in viewers recall is his flip in Delhi Crime, the Netflix collection. As unique content material from India, this collection has reached audiences worldwide successfully and suits the format of police procedural, a universally common type of collection. “Richie Mehta and I’ve recognized one another for 5-6 years and have been discussing a challenge with a Hollywood manufacturing firm for a while now. When he provided Delhi Crime, I used to be already taking pictures in Delhi for a movie. Because the function concerned simply a few days’ shoot, I agreed. I met Mr Neeraj Kumar, former Police Commissioner, Delhi Police, a gathering that Richie facilitated. Whereas I didn’t mimic him, I did imbibe components of his persona in creating the character. Richie has a incredible sensibility in relation to appearing, which is real looking. I had a superb collaboration with Shefali Shah and Rajesh Tailang, my classmate from NSD days. We’ve completed loads of performs collectively, so taking pictures for Delhi Crime, and the response to the collection, has been gratifying. Streaming is just not limiting, it means the present was accessible on 190 nations worldwide. I’ve been getting reward and compliments from throughout, Jap Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, America.” Hussain’s stint with worldwide cinema follows up on a stellar profession in theatre right here in India and in London, the place he fine-tuned his training within the subject. However with Abhishek Chaubey’s Ishqiya and Lootera by Vikramaditya Motwane, he started work in mainstream Hindi movies, coinciding with the start of the present new wave. His main function in Hindi cinema was reverse Sri Devi in English Vinglish, as her husband who tended to downsize her capability. The liberty to interpret his function, as he understood it, clinched his determination to work on this Gauri Shinde movie. “I didn’t see the husband as a villain. I advised Gauri that I needed to play him as a male chauvinist who merely didn’t imagine his spouse was able to some issues. I had seen males like that, all my life, together with my father. They weren’t imply or nasty however simply chauvinistic naturally. When the movie launched, compliments poured in particularly from ladies, who might relate to the husband’s behaviour.” A consummate performer, he credit his new give attention to movies to the evolving Indian filmmaker at residence and overseas, a brood that’s open to concepts and eager to experiment. He traverses multilingual cinema commonly. Developing is Gautam Ghose’s Raahgir, a global movie titled The Unlawful and Jahnu Barua’s subsequent. As our dialog attracts to an in depth, a query within the present polarised political local weather turns into important – why has Hussain, an outspoken man in relation to intolerance up to now, chosen to keep away from taking a political stance with fellow artistes? “I was pretty reactive up to now, usually voicing my opinion in opposition to sure conditions right here at residence and throughout the globe. Then for fairly a while I grappled with the question- as actor, what’s my Swadharma? What’s my function in society? I can’t be a partial activist but I’ve an urge to protest and to precise. It was each emotionally upsetting and disturbing for me so I spoke to my appearing trainer, my guru who lives in Puducherry. What he mentioned to me made full sense. He mentioned that as an artiste, our function is to construct empathy with those who we hate. We’d have completely contrarian factors of view, however our function is to convey society collectively. Artwork is glue that brings folks collectively. I see my function as that one who may even construct empathy for Hitler amongst folks. Relatively than be a reactionary, I want to give attention to this.” Politics apart, Adil Hussain’s progress as a performer in cinema in his fifties units a brand new commonplace for the altering norms of appearing in current day India. It additionally paves a path of hope for many who come from the remotest locations however have a present and tenacity to see their ardour by means of. Up to date Date: Jun 01, 2019 15:58:26 IST Your information to the most recent election information, evaluation, commentary, dwell updates and schedule for Lok Sabha Elections 2019 on firstpost.com/elections. Comply with us on Twitter and Instagram or like our Facebook web page for updates from all 543 constituencies for the upcoming common elections. !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) {if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function() {n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)} ; if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '259288058299626'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_GB/all.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.9&appId=1117108234997285"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); Source link

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sarahburness · 5 years

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How Going Offline for 10 Days Healed My Anxiety

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a while, including you.” ~Anna Lamott

I wake up anxious a little past 4am. My heart is beating faster than usual, and I’m aware of an unsettled feeling, like life-crushing doom is imminent. For a moment, I wonder if I just felt the first waves of a massive earthquake. Or perhaps those were gunshots I just heard in the distance.

But no, it’s just another night in my bedroom in the Bay Area, and everything is utterly fine. But somehow, my central nervous system isn’t so sure.

The problem is the thick swirl of news media, social media, and talk among friends I carry with me every day. It’s a toxic milkshake of speculation, fear, and anger that I consume, and it has me deeply rattled. I absorb this stuff like crazy.

I suspect I’m not alone.

I know for a fact that my anxiety isn’t just some vague menopause symptom, but the result of my deep immersion in the current zeitgeist. I know this because recently I left the whole thing behind for ten glorious days. I went to Belize, and left my phone and my laptop sitting on my bureau at home.

For most of that time, my wife and I lived on a small island thirty miles out to sea with only a bit of generator electricity. We avoided the extremely spotty Wifi like the plague. Instead, we woke with the sunrise, and sat on the deck outside our grass hut, watching manta rays swim in the shallow water below us and pelicans perch nearby. The biggest thing that happened every morning was the osprey that left its nest and circled above us.

It was life in slow-mo all the way. And it was transformative.

For ten entire days I didn’t think about politics or how America is devolving into an angry, wild place where public figures regularly get death threats, and social media has become the equivalent of High Noon with guns drawn.

The toxic interplay of who is right or wrong, or the future of our democracy ceased to exist as we sailed toward that island on our big, well-worn catamaran. In fact, by the time we reached our refuge, those tapes had disappeared altogether.

Instead, we swam and we rested. We snorkeled. We read. We had some adventures involving caves and kayaks, and we hung out with the other guests. The two Belizian women who cooked for us observed us Americans with our expensive toys, and they took it all with a grain of salt. In their presence, I could suddenly see how silly and overwrought all this intensity has become.

Ironically, when given the opportunity to present a gift to a school in one of Belize’s small seaside towns, I brought along a laptop and an iPad I no longer used. An elementary school teacher received the gifts with gratitude. Yet, as I gave them to her, I noticed I felt wary.

I could swear she seemed wary as well.

What new layer of complexity was I bringing onto these shores? And was it even necessary for life to go on happily and productively?

When we returned to the so-called civilized world, here’s what I immediately noticed:

1. I was now leery of all my previously trusted news sources.

Suddenly I could clearly see the anguished bias all around me, going in all sorts of directions left and right. The newsfeeds I’d previously consumed with abandon now seemed more biased than I’d realized. I was left with one option—either drop out and start reading the classics for entertainment, or proceed with caution.

2. I had more time to sit alone with nothing in particular to do.

Before my media fast, that was a bad idea. Hey, I had social media to check and emails to catch up on. The day’s events were going by in a high-speed blur, and I had to keep up. But now life had slowed to the pace of my emotions. I could breathe again. And so, for a while at least, I enjoyed spacing out.

3. My anxiety disappeared. For a while.

So did my knockdown ambition, and my desire to overwork. Everything had just … chilled. Enormously. For a while I slept easily. I no longer drove myself to do the impossible, and my to-do list now seemed balanced and reasonable. In turn, I no longer woke up with my heart pounding, nor did I have qualms overcome me during the day. Instead, I got ideas. Inspiration landed on me, and I was energized enough to pursue it.

4. Life became lighter and more fun.

Now I found my day-to-day routine to be far more delightful. It simply was, and for no particular reason. I laughed more. I found myself singing while I did chores around the house. Since I wasn’t consuming the same fire hose of media, I now had time to have more fun.

5. I complained less.

Now that I was unplugged, I found that I didn’t have to share my opinion on every last political matter happening around me. Nor did I need to engage in fights on social media. In turn, I didn’t lie awake as much, gnashing my teeth.

6. I thought about things I’d long forgotten.

Like my childhood. I tapped into long buried feelings sitting in that glorious deck chair of mine, like how it felt to be a vulnerable kid at school, and what joy I found in standing in the water, letting the waves rush my legs. I rediscovered the great internal monologue I have going all the time. It had long been forgotten.

7. I had more time just to hang with people.

This was, perhaps, the greatest gift of all. To quietly sit at a table, chatting over empty coffee cups with relative strangers, or perhaps my wife. There we all were, on our island for days on end. So we might as well talk, right? I found people to be fascinating once again.

In fact, I was discovering JOMO—the Joy of Missing Out. Turns out this is a thing. Those exact words were projected on the screen behind Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, at a recent developer’s conference. Apparently even the tech people want to turn off their screens.

So one must ask the question: did all of this good stuff last?

In a word, no.

It’s been several months since this experiment ended, and I am, of course, back online. The pull is simply too great to ignore and avoid. Since I actually make my living online, disappearing off the grid is not even an option. And yet, I’ve learned a lot.

I no longer subscribe to certain reactionary newsfeeds. While I may be more out of touch, this is alarming material, guaranteed to not make me feel better. So no, I no longer read these emails. And I cherry pick what I read in my newsfeeds with care.

I no longer reach for my phone as soon as I open my eyes every morning. I also try not to check my email on my phone at all, something I often did while waiting in the Bay Area’s many lines. In fact, I’ve learned to leave my phone at home when I go out.

Instead, I chat with other people while waiting in the line, or I just look around. Or I zone out and enjoy what brain scientists call the “default mode,” the fertile, random, and enjoyable hopscotch the brain does while at rest. I realized now that I’d been missing that hopscotch. Instead, I enjoy the fertile luxury of a good daydream.

My late daughter Teal would have understood my need to drop out perfectly. Even at age twenty-two, she refused to have a smart phone. She embraced the world, eyes forward and heart engaged, making friends wherever she went. And she did so until her sudden death from a medically unexplainable cardiac arrest in 2012.

“Life is now,” she liked to say. Usually she reminded me of this as she headed out the door with her travel guitar and her backpack, on a spontaneous decision to busk her way across the other side of the world.

At the time, I couldn’t begin to fathom what she was talking about. “Too simplistic” I thought, dismissively, as I wrote it off to my daughter’s relentless free spirit. But as it turns out, Teal was right. So now I am left with this very big lesson.

Not only is life now, life is rich, random and filled with delight. The trick is to unplug long enough to actually experience it.

Illustration by Kaitlin Roth

About Suzanne Falter

You can find Suzanne Falter on Facebook at the Self Care Group for Extremely Busy Women or on her podcast, The Self-Care Soother. She is also the author of Surrendering to Joy, a collection of essays she wrote in the year following her daughter’s death. She keeps a blog at http://suzannefalter.com/blog/.

Web | More Posts

Get in the conversation! Click here to leave a comment on the site.

The post How Going Offline for 10 Days Healed My Anxiety appeared first on Tiny Buddha.

from Tiny Buddha https://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-going-offline-for-10-days-healed-my-anxiety/

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nickyschneiderus · 6 years

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Just say no to viral ‘copaganda’ videos

If you are Facebook friends with conservative family members or co-workers, you’ve probably seen it in your feeds: Videos, photos, and news clips of police officers dancing, praying, or handing out free food. Just last week, a video of cops lip-syncing to “Uptown Funk,” while grooving through their station, went viral. While this all might seem like harmless fun, the internet has a word for this kind of media: copaganda.

Not that it doesn’t make sense for police to film and promote videos like this. In the era of Black Lives Matter and body cameras, law enforcement is understandably looking for a PR bump. What is less understandable is why every one of these videos is picked up by news outlets large and small, then spread across social media like wildfire.

In recent days, police officers, like the ones in Norfolk jamming to Bruno Mars, have been making videos and releasing them online as part of a nationwide “lip-sync challenge.” As challenges are wont to do, this one made the Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube rounds. Some garnered so many views that the New York Times felt the need to run an article about the contest. The “Uptown Funk” video, with hundreds of thousands of views, is so popular, it has been shared by numerous major media companies.

youtube

While the challenge was going viral, another headline was being made: Chicago officers had shot a Black man, Harith Augustus, in the back, sparking a wave of protests in the city. While the timing of the two stories was a coincidence, the making of these videos was not unintentional. They are carefully planned propaganda made to get at least as much media coverage as the bad stuff does.

Police officers have admitted as much. To quote the Times: “‘It is allowing the country to see us in another way,’ said Corporal William Pickering, a public information officer with the Norfolk Police Department, which created the ‘Uptown Funk’ video. ‘We aren’t all robots.’”

And it worked. Again, from the Times:

“The video from the Norfolk Police took off online after it was released on July 9. More than 191,000 people commented on the department’s Facebook page, most of the remarks supportive. The actress Sharon Stone gave the department a shoutout on Twitter. Fans sent the officers cheesecake. And the stars of the video held a meet-and-greet, giving the first 100 people to arrive a signed photograph.”

Lip-sync challenges aside, national news outlets run copaganda all the time. BuzzFeed has pushed out “This abandoned dog was adopted by an entire police association.” At CBS, you can find “Police officers and K9s join boy with tumor to pray before his brain surgery.” And over at Fox News, there’s the hard-hitting journalism “Police officers help out 9-year-old’s lemonade stand after he was robbed.”

It’s hard to understand why national outlets find content like this to be newsworthy. People, even businesses, adopt rescue dogs every day; lemonade stands unfortunately get robbed. These acts, while kind, are not remarkable. Meanwhile, local papers are folding incessantly and big city papers announce new billionaire owners who then announce massive layoffs with enough regularity to make any professional writer suspicious of an Illuminati conspiracy. And yet it seems that outlets of every size have the bandwidth to do PR for the police.

Why do media companies do it?

Working in digital media, we understand that feel-good stories get clicks. The Daily Dot covers our fair share of “actor in Marvel movie visits hospital” stories. And to a certain aging (white, conservative) segment of the Facebook population, police and the military are a version of movie stars and superheroes. The clicks are there. While an outlet like Fox News has an ideological motivation, BuzzFeed is likely just covering these videos because they know they drive traffic.

However, while an article about Robert Downey Jr. visiting a child dying of leukemia doesn’t have an impact on the public perception of criminal justice, copaganda does. If a disproportionate number of articles about the police engaging in “random” acts of kindness pop up in your feed, while stories about police corruption or abuse are suppressed or go uncovered completely, the public perception of the police eventually looks far different than the reality.

If the only image you ever see of cops is them lip-syncing to Bruno Mars, that’s going to affect the way you view the next story you see about police shooting an unarmed Black person.

The police are winning this PR battle and they are using it to fight against the gains of activist groups. Blue Lives Matter bumper stickers and flags are adorning cars and hanging from houses across the country. The energy behind this ill-named movement has led to the introduction of “Blue Lives Matter bills” on a local and national level. These bills criminalize protest and exacerbate the very racial inequalities that the Movement for Black Lives is trying to fight in the first place.

The Protect and Serve Act, which made it to the floor of the House of Representatives in May, is a perfect example of just how pernicious these bills can be. The legislation would functionally make police officers a protected class, rendering charges like “assaulting an officer” hate crimes. As we’ve seen across the country, protesters are often saddled with trumped-up charges; many fear a bill like this would functionally criminalize protest.

In a piece about these laws—which have already been passed by several states—the Intercept’s Natasha Lennard explains its larger implications:

“By explicitly modeling their bill on existing hate crimes statutes, the Senate has denigrated the very notion of persecution. Treating cops as a persecuted minority equates a uniform—which you can take off—with skin color, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. And as the Blue Lives Matter bills’ sobriquet suggests, this legislation is a direct a response to anger over the actual—if not quite legally defined—hate crimes against black people, perpetrated by those in blue.”

At first glance, it might feel like a stretch to argue that videos of police officers breakdancing lead to legislation like this, but proposed bills are made and broken in the court of public opinion. If law enforcement officials are presented to the public as the smiling faces behind viral memes and lip-sync battles while their victims are described as “thugs,” “demons,” and monsters, then the media is doing the work of right-wing reactionaries for them.

The police officer said it to the New York Times: These videos are meant to encourage the public to see law enforcement in “another way.” This means that they are meant to shift the conversation away from police brutality and deny the grievances of its victims.

Copaganda is by no means a new phenomenon. In 2016, media critic Adam Johnson outlined the eight most popular types of copaganda in media. While he discussed issues like “pinkwashing” (playing up the LGBTQ friendliness of the police force) and the smearing of victims of police violence, two of the items he mentioned, “saving kittens” stories and “Christmas gift surprise” stunts, are age-old versions of what we’re seeing today.

Copaganda is so old, you can find it in Nick at Night reruns. The media has been regurgitating police PR since the days of Andy Griffith, and now in the era of Brooklyn 99, it is just being used more often and more effectively.

What are we going to do about copaganda? It’s not necessarily practical to burst the bubble of your Blue Lives-loving grandmother the next time she shares a video of “Cop Pool Karaoke” (we regret to inform you we didn’t make that up), but one step we can take is actively recognizing that these videos don’t exist in a vacuum.

These videos are part of a carefully orchestrated PR campaign, and like any branded content, you can choose not to click on it or hide it from your feed.

from Ricky Schneiderus Curation https://www.dailydot.com/irl/cop-viral-videos/

#Ricky Schneiderus Curation

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bethanygraphicmedia · 7 years

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Class Lecture Wk3

Gaming and Computer Videos

Back in the 1940’s Military hardware was one of the very first electronic technology on which to play Rudimental games on. As technology has progressed so too did the interests of the computer scientists in the creation of electronic games. Although at this point in time they were nowhere near where we are today, the amateur production of computer games became exceedingly popular within the computer science community / industry. In the mid 1960’s Steve Russel created a ‘Shoot em up!’ game known as Space War. It didn’t take too long until this game was known and played almost everywhere in the UK.

In the 1970’s computer games began to produce and distribute their commercial games, the 70’s became known as the ‘Golden Age for computer gaming’. The rise in arcades / arcade games, games such as, Galaxian (which was a game based upon Space War), the fairly simple tennis game called Pong, and towards the end of the 70’s so too did appear Space Invaders and the well-known Pac-Man which paved soon paved the way for the arcade industry. Although these games seemed fairly simple / basic, they actually / basic these older games actually operate in a very similar way to that of the arcade games on today, with similar graphic interfaces but less depth. The 70’s also saw the launch of the home-based console gaming. These consoles played either interchangeable game cartridges or some were already pre-programmed with a limited variations of games, though even with the cartridges there was a fairly limited range of games at this point as they hadn’t yet been around for long at all.

Not until the late 1980’s did the home console gaming really launch, when the home console gaming became that bit more affordable. The 80’s was the decade of the personal computer. With-in the UK, Sinclair, Acorn and Amstrad were the major players in the world scene. Home computers such as the Commodore would cost somewhat up to £400, they set the pace for the home based gaming, out-selling consoles such as Atari due to the difference in cost and programmability. Although, other gaming consoles were relatively cheap, Audio is far cheaper when compared to its older cousins. Computers such as the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum soon attracted a large following of gamers accompanied with the knowledge of programming. Towards the later 1980’s and into the early 1990’s the Japanese developed consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment system and the Sega Master system gained much popularity. Through a combination of ‘Killer Games’ these being games that can only be played on that one console, games such as, Super Mario, Sonic and many more. These newer gaming systems marked a true change / development in gaming, for many years the Joystick had been a dominant player, but with the new wave / shift in gaming consoles also came the new gaming pad. The game pad proved to be just one in a long que of gaming changes.

The 1990’s was the decade of the console. With each generation came a improvement in hardware architecture resulting in the progressions of games having new dimensions, and more importantly, improvements in graphical capabilities seeing a shift from two dimensional sprites to three dimensional polygon based graphics. Over the years gone by graphical restrictions in games to in return led to very intensive visual illustrations, creations and interpretations. Although graphics have progressed and improved dramatically there is still a true fondness for the older two dimensional more “Retro” type games. Although graphic capability has progressed enabling the creation of more realistic gaming environments, the more simplistic graphics still hold / play a very important role in aesthetics. in the mid 90’s there was a huge increase in popularisation of a brand new form of game distribution, this was the Media CD for both consoles and PC’s. hard wearing with a high information capacity and the cheap manufacturing costs boosted their sales. With the CD also came the revolution / genre of multimedia. The first multimedia games / interactive movies allowed the inclusion of video footage and sound and were heralded as the new face of gaming. In reality many multimedia games including Phantasmorgoria, Mad Dog and Night Trap were severely lacking in both interaction and writing / visual worth.

Since the turn of the century, games have continued to grow and develop their popularity increasing with every passing generation.as a result the home video gaming system is now a common fixture in most / many Western homes. This isn’t entirely due to the increase in popularity of gaming as a whole. The role of the console has changed, their not only gaming devices, they are now also highly powerful multimedia machines capable of delivering a huge variety of content.

Multiplayer Gaming;

For some time, gaming was considered to be a solitary pursuit with players often pitting against either a computer, a pre-programmed routine or a certain degree of reactionary computer responses. However, with a lot of games either fighting, driving or sports related have often offered two, three or four player options. Though multiplayer can have its limitations when interacting on the one screen, with the screen being split up into two halves or four quarters your all situated in your own box rather than seeming like your all on the same single screen you essentially have your own personal screen. The communication revolution has changed this allowing tens of thousands of people to interact at once. Online gaming has actually been around for near 30 years plus, since as long ago as the 1980’s.

Modern equivalents such as the OpenFeint platform insert social and competitive dimensions with mobile gaming. Providing games with communication technology has led to the formation of these types of games and gaming communities. The number of genres now in support of the multiplayer features are many. In addition, playing games via broadband allows you near flawless connectivity and visual / text interaction. Alongside the networking aspect / applications such as social networking sites, online multiplayer gaming is working towards expanding globalisation. Connecting people on such a high interactive level removes geographical boundaries. One massive phenomenon that online multiplayer gaming given a rise to is the massive multiplayer game. Runescape, developed by Jajex is one of the largest free online multiplayer games. These types of games enable people to create their very own avatar (an online representation of themselves). Multiplayer games are no longer limited to just Win or Lose dynamics.

Game Interaction;

Recently the way we interact with games has changed. For many years we used a Keyboard and / or Joysticks and then moved onto the gaming pads. For a great number of games, the traditional controller has always been the best tool for the job. However recent developments have resulted in improved possibilities within games. Apart from the touch screen devices, of which will for sure revolutionise our interaction with the screen, motion sensor technology has changed the way we play games. The Nintendo Wii was impressively successful considering the drastic turn it took in comparison to the traditional controllers. both the standard Wii remote and the more advanced motion plus allow more interaction for / between gamers. There has also been a great increase in health and fitness games such as many Nintendo Wii games and Pokemon Go for example (encouraging people to get outside more). However, Wii’s interaction was still remote controlled despite the huge leap in Human Computer Interaction H.C.I. they still represent interaction by Proxy.

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autumnchanelcharley · 7 years

Text

Lesson 3- Lecture 3

Gaming and computer videos

Brief history; although short is varied and interesting, way back int the 40s military hardware was one of the first to use and play rudimentary games. As tech progressed so too did the interest in computer scientists in the creation of electronic games. Although many years away from being anything like today, the amateurs production of computer games became popular with the computer science community. so much do that in the mid 60s Steve Russel created a ‘shoot em up’ game called space war. Before long it was shared UK wide.

In the 70′s computer games began their commercial journey. The golden age of video games. The rise of arcade games. Games such as Galaxian, the simple tennis game pong and, towards the end of the decade, space invaders and pac-man paved the way for the entire arcade industry. Although relatively basic these game operated on a similar basis to arcade style games of today, with simpler graphic interfaces and less depth. The 70s also saw the beginning of the home based console gaming. These console either played exchangeable or interchangeable game cartridges or where pre-programmed with a limited range of games. As a result of tech cost and other arcade competitions consoles did not gain the popularity until the 80′s.

The 80s was the decade of the personal computer. In the uk, Sinclair, acorn and amstrad were major players in the world scene. Alongside the likes of commodore, they set the pace for home-based gaming out-selling consoles like the Atari on the basis of cost and programmability. Computers such as the commodore 64 and the zx spectrum attracted a large following of gamers with knowledge of programming. Game distribution within this community along with cheap media formats meant that games were far cheaper than cartridge based-machine. Towards the end of the 80s and the early 90s Japanese made consoles such as Nintendo and set master system gained popularity. Through a combination of ‘killer games’ such as Mario and sonic the NES and master system dominated the home gaming scene. important these systems mark a shift in gaming UI. for years the joystick had been a dominate peripheral-Wit the new wave of game consoles came the game pad.The game pad proved to be in a long line of UI changes.

The 90s was the decade of the console. With each generation came improved hardware architecture and as a result, games begun to have different dimensions. Importantly, improvements in graphic capabilities saw a shift from 2D sprites to 3D polygon based graphics. Over the years graphical restrictions in games have led to very inventive visual interpretations and creations. The generations of simple pixel images of basic hardware, can still result in very atmospheric and sophisticated design solutions. Although graphic capability has improved enabling the creation of more realistic game environments, simplistic graphics still play an important role of aesthetics.In the mid 90′ the CD arrived. Hard wearing and with a high information capacity and cheap manufacturing cost boosted sales. CD spawned the genre of multimedia. The first multi-media games allowed for the inclusion of video footage and sound and were heralded as the new face of gaming. In reality many multi-media games such as Phantasmorgoria, mad Dog and Night Trap were severely lacking in both interactivity and visual worth.

Since the turn of the century, games have continued to grow and develop their popularity increasing with every passing generation. As a result, the home video game system is now a common fixture in many western homes. This is not entirely due to the increase in gaming popularity. Todays concorde are not just for gaming, they are capable of delivering a variety of contents. The market for gaming has boomed.

Part 2 Multiplayer gaming-

For some time gaming was considered a solitary pursuit, either pitted against either a computer pre-programmed routine or a certain degree of reactionary computer responses. However some games often fighting, driving or sports related, have offered two, three of four player options. However multiplayer can have limitations while interacting on one screen. The communications revolution has changed this. The multiplayer game has changed from one entering around a handful of players to one which involves tens, hundreds or thousands of players. Online gaming has been around for 3o years, albeit very basic form. Dial-up bulletin boards allowed players to post game scores.

Modern equivalents such as the OpenFeint platform insert social and competitive dimensions with mobile gaming. Providing games with communication tech has made the formation of these types of gaming communities possible. Driven largely by the desire to compete. The number of genres that support multiplayer features are many. In addition playing such games via broadband allows for near-flawless connectivity and voice. Along with networking apps such as social networking sites, online multi-player gaming is working to expand globalisation. Connecting people on such a highly interactive level removes geographical boundaries. One phenomenon that online gaming has given rise to is the massive multi-player games. Multiplayer games are no longer limited to mere win or lose dynamics.

Part 3-Game interaction

Recently the way in which we interact with games has changed. For years we used a keyboard or a joy-stick and then moved to game pads. Meanwhile throughout the history of home consoles, consumers have been sporadically bombarded with game specific, one of prephials.

However recent tech developments have resulted in improved possibilities in games. Apart from touch screen devices, which will revolutionise our interaction with the screen, motion sensor technology has changed the way we play games. The Nintendo wii was very successful considering the drastic turn it has taken away from traditional controllers. Both the standard will remote and motion plus remotes ask gamers to participate in game. There has recently been a huge increase in health and fitness games. However the wiis interaction was still remote controlled despite the huge leap in human-computer interaction (HCI), they still represent interaction by proxy.

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: A Collection of Poetry Interviews Is a Work of Poetry Itself

When its doors opened in 1966, The Poetry Project was intended to inspire cross-generational conversations between writers in a space that felt safe and artistically generative during a time of social and political unrest and intolerance. It quickly became a vital forum in which political ideologies fueled exchanges and spurred literary movements that enabled a community of writers to become prolific and experiment with form. To craft a history of such a community is a complicated task, as most of it is undocumented. The Project’s staff made an initial attempt to create an archive in the 1970s, publishing a quarterly newsletter that included articles on writing and interviews with members of the community. The newsletter has served the vital function of maintaining a written record of the Project’s intellectual activity.

In his newest work, What Is Poetry? Just Kidding, I Know You Know (Wave Books, 2017), poet Anselm Berrigan has carefully curated a selection of these interviews between emerging and established writers to render a history of The Poetry Project. The critical and foundational thoughts of writers such as Charles North, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Schmidt, Kenneth Koch, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, Bernadette Meyer, Fred Moten, and Ann Waldman punctuate the work. It’s because of these seminal thinkers that notions of Language Writing, praxis, conceptualism, and collaboration are understood as they are today. According to Berrigan, the work “will reward readers who take on the experience of reading it from beginning to end. Characters appear, recede, and pop up again in surprising places.” It is a stellar anthology and, ultimately, a work of poetry in itself.

* * *

Anselm Berrigan (photo by Michael Grimaldi)

Michael Valinsky: What was your inspiration for this book?

Anselm Berrigan: I actually thought it could be made out of these interviews back when I was directing The Poetry Project, between 2003 and 2007. I was specifically interested in the interview as a way for poets to talk about all the things that are around a work but don’t show up literally on the surface. It was mostly about a set of stories that would expand into a larger story that the Project’s history could be folded into. When the interview form really works, it’s a piece of writing that has its own dynamic and energy. I read a lot of the interviews originally in the context of the newsletter, so pulling them out of that context, reimagining them, and then making this manuscript was an unusual thing to do. A total reconfiguration of things that you’ve already read — which I guess is what an anthology is. That’s why when I had to sit down and write an introduction, I wound up in this space where I had to list all the things this book isn’t — but almost is — in order to try to define what it is.

MV: As you looked at the complete work, did you realize anything about The Poetry Project that hadn’t occurred to you before?

AB: The perspective I got, which maybe was a reinforcement of something I’d already suspected, was that any kind of history or representation of it as an ongoing entity was going to have to be conducted through conversation. This makes sense aesthetically, in that speech-based American poetry movements from the mid-20th century on, really inform where The Poetry Project comes from. It all really came out of a person talking. You have to engage both the language on the page and the language in the air to get the fullness of the work.

MV: Several writers in the interviews bring up discovering Gertrude Stein and share differing views on definitions of Language Writing. Did you notice this too?

AB: Most of the people involved with the Project have worked very closely with sonic and semantic particulars. So Stein is going to become a force to reckon with. Frank O’Hara is going to become extra-interesting. The Project also comes out of the different kinds of experiments going on in music and film and visual art, especially painting. It gets going in 1966, so you’re deep inside American involvement in Vietnam. You’re inside of Civil Rights and the Great Society program, all the political assassinations taking place, and massive changes in the culture. I think what’s often misunderstood about Language Writing is that it’s presented as a kind of reactionary academic fact of poetry. It’s really an extension of the New American Poetry as anthologized in the Don Allen anthology [New American Poetry, 1945-1960, 1999], merged with anti-Vietnam war activism, and an intense interest in linguistic theory and literary theory, in an attempt to try to have a different relationship with politics show up in the work. All of those things are going to produce something that goes in a direction nobody can control.

MV: Language Writing wants to forget lines and focus on word-units and their autonomy. It messes with syntax and expectation just like Stein would.

AB: I think Language Writing is a point of differentiation because the influences of the Beats, Black Mountain [College], the Black Arts Movement, and the New York School were so heavily inside of a certain space. The people associated with them were also artistically really at odds with something like a literary establishment, while others were being courted by or absorbed into that establishment.

There’s a way in which it’s more interesting for me to think of Language Writing as a willful misunderstanding of second-generation New York School writing than as a point of opposition to the New York School. But then a lot of these people were also arguing, both publicly and privately. The Project is a place where readings took place by people involved in both parties. You could hear Charles Bernstein one week, but John Godfrey another. You could get these different takes. They’re all way more overlapping than people realize. At the same time, all kinds of people who don’t fit into these spaces are reading too, so it’s always more complicated. The total fabric is always un-seeable for anybody that’s inside of it. And if you’re outside, it isn’t what anybody thinks it is either.

MV: Do you still see the same energy at the Project today?

AB: The Poetry Project has recently been good at recognizing how multimedia work and different types of cross-genre work overlap with poetry. The professionalization of poetry through MFA programs is also both a fact of the landscape in the country right now and a problem for the art, and it has to be treated as both at the same time. Simone White has been doing really interesting work by facilitating public conversations about that. She’s tried to talk about “community” as a word people use all the time, but one that doesn’t have any purchase unless you locate it within a set of factors and inside a landscape that can be really hard to control. Since the election, there are bigger, more focused crowds. People who are specifically coming in to listen to others talk about how they’re reacting and responding to this massive political upheaval. They want to hear angles that they’re not getting from media sources. That’s been heartening to see.

What Is Poetry? Just Kidding, I Know You Know (2017) is published by Wave Books and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

The post A Collection of Poetry Interviews Is a Work of Poetry Itself appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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ara-la · 7 years

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Is there a “White Working Class”?

The following article is apparently getting a lot of currency among white anti-racists locally and nationally, though I am not sure what response it is getting:

"What So Many People Don't Get About the US Working Class" https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class

Despite the title, it is not about the "US working class," but about the so-called "white working class," and primarily about blue-collar white males. The article is seething with, and justifies, white racial resentments disguised as class sentiment, or "manliness." The author's "five key points", all of which I disagree with, are:

1. "Understand That Working Class Means Middle Class, Not Poor. ...When progressives talk about the working class, typically they mean the poor. But the poor, in the bottom 30% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose median income was $64,000 in 2008."

2. "Understand Working-Class Resentment of the Poor. Remember when President Obama sold Obamacare by pointing out that it delivered health care to 20 million people? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor, said the WWC, and in some cases that’s proved true: The poor got health insurance while some Americans just a notch richer saw their premiums rise."

3. "Understand How Class Divisions Have Translated into Geography. The best advice I’ve seen so far for Democrats is the recommendation that hipsters move to Iowa. Class conflict now closely tracks the urban-rural divide. In the huge red plains between the thin blue coasts, shockingly high numbers of working-class men are unemployed or on disability, fueling a wave of despair deaths in the form of the opioid epidemic."

4. "If You Want to Connect with White Working-Class Voters, Place Economics at the Center. ...Back when blue-collar voters used to be solidly Democratic (1930–1970), good jobs were at the core of the progressive agenda. A modern industrial policy would follow Germany’s path. (Want really good scissors? Buy German.) Massive funding is needed for community college programs linked with local businesses to train workers for well-paying new economy jobs."

5. "Avoid the Temptation to Write Off Blue-Collar Resentment as Racism. Economic resentment has fueled racial anxiety that, in some Trump supporters (and Trump himself), bleeds into open racism. But to write off WWC anger as nothing more than racism is intellectual comfort food, and it is dangerous. National debates about policing are fueling class tensions today in precisely the same way they did in the 1970s, when college kids derided policemen as “pigs.” This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. Police get solid wages, great benefits, and a respected place in their communities. For elites to write them off as racists is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society, class-based insults still are. I do not defend police who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But the current demonization of the police underestimates the difficulty of ending police violence against communities of color. Police need to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations. I don’t. If I had to, I might make some poor decisions too. [Italics added--MN]"

Wrong on every count. Despite some truths about the elitism of "progressives" and the pro-Wall-Street orientation of the Democratic Party, this is an incredibly reactionary article to be getting serious consideration among white "racial justice" advocates first motivated to "show up" by Black rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore.

“Back when blue-collar voters were solidly Democratic from 1930-70,” Black people were broadly disenfranchised and prevented from voting, especially (but not only) in the US South.

It was not white progressives who imposed geographic segregation and apartheid on people of color in the US through driving Black people off their land in rural areas, or through ghetto-ization, suburban-ization and ex-urban-ization in the cities.

It is not the left that made it so that lower-income white people tend to be more dispersed within and among communities of other white people, as opposed to being concentrated with and among other poor people who are of color.

It was not "college kids" who started calling police pigs in the 60s and 70s, but the Black freedom struggle and the Black Panther Party in particular.

It is not "national debates about policing" that are fueling class (or racial) tensions. Calling for police and prison abolition, calling racist police murders with impunity systemic, and critiquing the institutional role of police and prison guards, are not examples of "class-based insults." Recognizing that police "unions" are not an authentic part of the labor movement is not anti-working-class elitism.

The author says: "Class trumps gender, and it’s driving American politics." Having just described how so-called "WWC" women voted for Trump -- just as a majority of ALL white women did -- and that the voting of "WWC" voters in general mirrored the support for Trump among voters with above-average incomes, what has actually been demonstrated is that "white racial identity" has once again trumped class, or at least income, as a determinant of behavior and voting, since in fact "non-white" sectors of the working class, and "non-white" women, voted overwhelmingly against Trump.

In fact, what so many people don't understand about the "US working class" is that it is international and multi-racial. A great deal of the US working class comprises people of color, particularly in its lower ranks.

The US working class is not co-extensive with the geographical borders militarily imposed by the US empire. The global supply chain means a great deal of the US working class is not inside the US. A great deal of it is incarcerated. The majority of the US working class domestically and internationally is female.

There is no "white working class" that exists as a separate social entity; there are of course working class (and "poor") "white" people, but that's a different matter. There are people of European descent suffering a class fall and lumpenization under the ongoing and deepening crisis of capitalism. Class and racial resentments under conditions of an actual or feared class fall by members of the petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy are classic breeding grounds for "fascism."

Any strategy for economic, political and social transformation must take these realities into account, be prepared to defend itself against and disrupt the consolidation of fascist forces, and strategize about how to drive a wedge between some sectors of working class white people and the imperialist bourgeoisie. Conscious internationalism and solidarity with the self-determined struggles of resistant and colonized peoples seeking decolonization and liberation are key to that now, as they have always been. We need to break down identification with and as our oppressors, and break up white racial solidarity in favor of true class consciousness, which is anti-racist and internationalist or inter-communal.

The author says of her father: "He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican. He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return."

I also grew up in a working class family. My father was an immigrant; he often worked two jobs. He and my mother met on a picket line when my mother was fired for joining a union. He joined the army during World War II with a wife and child (my older sister) in order to qualify for citizenship. But throughout the 1950s and 60s, he (and the rest of the family) read union newspapers and the NY Post when it was left-liberal, with columnists like Langston Hughes. Our whole family was quite aware that "the union" was why we had health care, a dentist and could get eyeglasses. My parents' union transitioned from being entirely European-descent or European immigrants to majority people of color, and fought for contracts that gave across the board dollar-amount raises rather percentage increases, in order to reduce rather than increase the pay gap between more senior white workers and more recent Black and Puerto Rican members. That's not revolutionary class consciousness, but it's closer to it than the cramped and selfish resentments the author describes as "WWC" consciousness.

Authentic working class consciousness and leadership today is coming from those resisting racialized, patriarchal monopoly-finance capitalism and colonialism, struggling for justice, equality and liberation.

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