I feel like I may have posted this video in the past, but I’m sad to say that it’s still relevant. This is a decent overview of modes of authoritarian thought, as well as the reasons why it’s better to put your effort into building collective power and winning, rather than trying to persuade authoritarians to be less authoritarian.
I lost track of time, so here’s a short video about the weasel family!
In discussions surrounding the recent death of Queen Elizabeth the Second, there were a number of criticisms raised. One of them was that she acted as a powerful propagandist for the British Empire, and as that faded, the Commonwealth. No matter what the government of the UK did, she was the face of the country – a kindly, dignified lady that was treated almost as a papal figure by some. I suppose that’s fitting, given that she was the head of the Church of England. Even if there was nothing to criticize in her own actions, the role she played in putting a friendly face on a not-so-friendly country is worth some discussion, at least.
Likewise, it’s important to discuss the role that dogs play in putting a friendly face on the police. How’s that for a transition? Thematically consistent? I’ll leave that up to you.
I’ve heard of Paw Patrol once or twice over the years, but I never cared enough to look into it. I knew it was some show involving dogs acting like cops, I think? Regardless, nothing could have prepared me for the reality. This video is apparently part of an established tradition of thought-pieces that take this cartoon for children very seriously. More than that, it joins the chorus of voices calling this show downright sinister.
I suppose it might be more accurate to say that it’s part of a sinister societal pattern of media portraying police as hyper-competent heroes, to cover up the horrific reality. This video touches on that aspect of the show, but it also delves into that same reality. Thankfully, the video does not show pictures of the injuries inflicted by police dogs, but the list of described injuries, that include amputations and other life-changing injuries. And for all we talk about the hundreds of police shootings in the United States, police dogs send thousands of people to emergency rooms every year, and you’d better believe they’re disproportionately non-white, and poor.
Maybe things have changed since I left – is adequate medical treatment still out of reach for poor people in the U.S.?
Paw Patrol seems to be an absolutely terrible toy commercial disguised as an even worse show. From what I can tell, it’s worse than the original Transformers or He-Man stuff, but at least those weren’t putting a cutesy face on systemic racism and bloody horror.
"Why don't you just do the thing?"
— people without ADHD that don't understand there is literally nothing I want more than to do the thing, I am desperate to do the thing, but my brain simply won't fire the neurons required to move me into action.
— ADHD Jesse (@adhdjesse) September 13, 2022
This tweet fired a couple neurons for me that made me realize something new about the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. I’m going to talk about a central part of how the story works, so if you haven’t seen the movie, please watch it before continuing (unless you’re at all vulnerable to photosensitive seizures, because this movie has a lot of strobe effects throughout). Maybe a couple of entirely hypothetical people could watch it with a visiting relative! Seriously – don’t read this blog post if you haven’t seen the movie, and you’re going to at any point. It’s an emotional rollercoaster that you won’t regret, and I don’t want to take away from that.
Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.
Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
— Pranay Pathole (@PPathole) April 12, 2019
Digital security is an actual nightmare. We are surrounded by internet-capable technology at all times. Even if you personally do not have a smart watch, a smart phone, GoogleGlass, a car run through a computer, a smart doorbell, a smart washer, a smart fridge, a smart printer, a smart tv, a smart thermostat… the chances are incredibly high that your neighbor does.
And every single one of them is tracking you.
How could advertisers know what to sell you if it didn’t know that you mentioned ‘oreos’ in a conversation just seconds ago? What makes it even more frustrating is that this kind of technology is useful.
A switch has silently been flipped in millions of instances of Google Chrome: those browsers will begin sorting their users into groups based on behavior, then sharing group labels with third-party trackers and advertisers around the web. https://t.co/2sepjJaNcK
— EFF (@EFF) April 4, 2021
A woman I know with mobility issues and extreme temperature regulation problems has a smart thermostat because she can adjust it from her phone; an obviously helpful aspect for someone who’s bed-bound and having temperature problems. What is less helpful is the built-in feature where the power company can override any of her settings and decide FOR HER what temperature her house should be. Another woman I know has her smart watch connected to her pacemaker, all the better to moniter her health. Many of the technologies in my earlier list have equally helpful aspects to them. But just as people with sleep apnea have their CPAP machines locked or taken away from a perceived ‘lack of compliance’, each of these life-saving technologies are primarily being used to erode personal liberty and privacy.
What is honestly even more frustrating than this kind of monitoring is how easy they are to hack. There are countless stories of baby monitors being hacked, not to mention cars, smart tvs, and smart fridges. Each one of these systems, logged into your personal network, is a door to your personal data that could be used in a myriad of ways. Some of the reasons for this is that tech companies often don’t bother putting any effort into dealing with security. How many of us have gotten letters or emails informing us that Macy’s, or WalMart had a security breach and “your credit card information may be among those affected”? But with the prevalence of technology in every aspect of life, that risk is both compounded, and an expected part of life.
Ah well. We are adults. We can make the call about what is an acceptable invasion of privacy for improved ease of living or comfort. What then about the increasing amount of technology on children? We know the effects of long-term surveillance on developing minds: extremely negative. There have been discussions of the the impact of Elf on the Shelf (and it’s 24/7 surveillance of the child) for nearly a decade.
This was about the status of the interaction of life and technology up until 2020. Then the pandemic and its resulting lockdowns began. Jobs and schools alike went remote. Workers were observed at all times (Fun fact: my admin job in 2009 put surveillance software on my computer, so my boss could observe every action, every mouse movement, every keyboard entry. My boss could also override my own actions on my computer. I put in my two weeks that day. But how easy is it to find that type of job without it now?) But of course the mandatory laptops and tablets provided to students are monitoring their every move, too. In the case discussed above, think about the long-term implications of your child accidentally uploading child pornography just because their phone put their (fully clothed) selfie on the cloud or the school district’s network? This is a problem with far-reaching implications and I Want It Gone. The reckless and unrelenting monitoring of private information needs to stop.
Which brings me to the spot of good news: remote test proctoring software has been ruled a violation of constitutional rights. Cleveland State University, much like every other university on the planet, used a third-party monitoring program to assess whether students taking remote exams were cheating (My opinions about the over-reliance on exams and a pathological fear of ‘cheating’ is a different story). But a student went to court claiming that the proctoring software, which scanned his room and stored that information, was a violation of his privacy. The judge agreed! This type of monitoring is a violation of the Fourth Amendment right protecting citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures. Which is absolutely wonderful news! Now to get from Stage: ‘It’s Illegal’, to Stage: ‘It’s Not Used.’
This is a long fight ahead, since laws always lag behind technology by at least a decade. But it’s a start.
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This is an old video, but given current events, I think it’s worth sharing. Part of that is because the crown of the UK just changed hands (heads?), and a lot of people are voicing their opinions about the institution, and their justifications for keeping the House of Windsor in their palaces and finery. I also think it’s relevant because a couple people have been arrested for voicing their opposition to hereditary monarchies. Aside from one or two folks literally making the case for the Divine Right of Kings, mostly the arguments I’ve seen have been about how much money the Crown makes for the UK.
I talk a lot about the need for rapid systemic change, and I sometimes worry that I don’t do a good enough job drawing a line between the kinds of individual action for which I advocate, and the scale of change that I want to see in the world. I’ve been hoping for something to help build a sort of social momentum on climate change for a long time. Back in 2011 or so, I started advocating for members of the New England Quaker community who could, to contribute to a loan fund so members of that community could get zero-interest loans for stuff like solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and so on. The idea was to have people pay back the loan out of savings on their power bills (always assuming they could afford to), and then contribute a little extra, as able, to grow the fund and help the next person. Ideally, over time, the number of people helped by that project would grow, and the speed at which they could make change would increase. There have definitely been a number of group efforts on solar panel installation since then, but I don’t know if anything that organized ever cropped up.
Since then, as you may have noticed, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to address the systemic problems that are blocking climate action, but that basic principle remains the same – if you have the patience to do things right at the beginning, you build a movement that’s flexible, hard to eradicate, and capable of achieving great things seemingly overnight. Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay that discussed similar topics a while back, and she recently shared this cartoon illustrating a section of that essay.
I once titled an essay "The Slow Road to Sudden Change," because even what is imagined as overnight change or revolution usually had a long build-up. Mushrooms give us a great metaphor for this. pic.twitter.com/I8hXWX1jtM
— Rebecca Solnit (@RebeccaSolnit) August 12, 2022
For those of you who can’t see it, the image in the tweet is three horizontal, rectangular panels, arranged vertically under the title, “Mushroomed:”. The top panel has a picture of a single mushroom, the second shows several in a cluster, and the third shows a cross-section of the soil, revealing all of those mushrooms to be part of the same organism lying beneath the soil. The images are accompanied by the following excerpt from Solnit’s essay:
After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many come from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus.
The passage in question then goes on to make the metaphor explicit:
Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but it is the less visible long-term organising and groundwork – or underground work – that often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists and participants in social media. To many, it seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights.
Right now we’re at the foundation-laying stage. We’re forming those underground connections (called “hyphae“, if you’re interested), and extending our ability to interact, pool resources, and plan for the future. For me, this process is frustrating, and painfully slow, but it’s important to recognize that the small actions we take can be part of much larger change, especially of those actions are made with the larger change in mind. Altering consumer choices is an “individual change”, but it’s one that has proven itself to be incapable of supporting the more dramatic change that we need. To switch back to the building metaphor, it’s a weak foundation. It might support a small shack above, but any attempt at something bigger will collapse.
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There are patterns in this society of ours, and the most reliable one is rich people screwing over poor people, because the greed of the rich is endless. It’s frustrating to see the same problems happening year after year, decade after decade, without even any real change in the justifications given for poverty around the world. Our political and economic systems are designed to reward profit-seeking above all else, and this is the result:
Russia’s war on Ukraine has wreaked havoc on global commodity markets, driving up energy and food prices and exacerbating hunger emergencies around the world.
But while disastrous for the global poor—millions of whom are living on the brink of famine—the chaos has been a major boon for Wall Street giants, according to new data showing that the world’s 100 largest banks are on pace to smash commodity trading profit records this year.
“The 100 biggest banks by revenue are set to make $18 billion from commodities trading in 2022,” Bloomberg reported Friday, citing figures from the London-based firm Vali Analytics. “That would be the highest in the data, which goes back 14 years, and exceed the previous high watermark in 2009.”
“The prediction is the latest evidence that the wild swings in energy prices triggered by the war in Ukraine are delivering a boon to commodity traders, even as they push European nations into crisis,” Bloomberg added. “Vali, an analytics firm that tracks trading business, compiled data that includes the leading five banks in commodity trading: Macquarie Group Ltd., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., and Morgan Stanley.”
I would argue that in addition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the volatility of the markets and the rise in food prices also relate to the climate emergencies that keep happening. I do not think we’re currently at the point of climate-driven famine. The current crisis is being caused by the same thing that has been causing most of the planet’s problems in my lifetime: Capitalism. I’ve discussed before how the profit motive leads corporations to grow food to feed to livestock, rather than people. This is another piece to the puzzle. In the magical land of Real Capitalism, “market forces” will take care of supply, rationing, and so on. If something becomes scarce, the price goes up, and people at the bottom just… do without. The problem is that there’s nothing in the system that actually places a value on people. We’re valued for the work we can do for those with money, but actual people? We’re just another over-regulated commodity, in the eyes of the aristocracy. That means they get to play games with human life, so they make more money:
“People’s misery makes capitalists’ superprofit,” Salvatore De Rosa, a researcher at the Lund University Center for Sustainability Studies, tweeted in response to Bloomberg‘s reporting. “How do you reform this?”
Wall Street banks have not just benefited from the commodity price increases—they’ve actively helped fuel them, experts say.
“We’re in a market where speculators are driving prices up,” Michael Greenberger, former head of the Division of Trading and Markets at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told Mongabay in July.
“Commodity markets are supposed to be hedging markets for people who are dealing with the commodity involved,” Greenberger said. “In the case of wheat, it would be farmers and people buying wheat. But if we looked at it, there would be banks in there with no interest in what the price of wheat is, writing swaps and controlling this price.”
“It’s too easy to say the war in Ukraine has unbalanced all these markets, [or that] supply chains and the ports are shot, and that there’s a supply and demand reason for these prices going up,” Greenberger added. “My own best guess is anywhere from 10% to 25% of the price, at least, is dictated by deregulated speculative activity.”
There will always be an excuse. There will always be some justification for why things just have to be this way. This is not something that can just be reformed away. This is the inevitable result of an economic system designed to funnel money and power upwards. This is the system working as intended.
There’s also not any point at which things get so bad that the people just rise up and change everything. Maybe there have been revolutions like that in the past, but from what I can tell, the story of Les Miserables paints a more accurate picture of what happens if you expect “the people” to just rise up because life sucks.
Change – meaningful change – will only come from the bottom, and only through organization. Whether it’s getting people vital supplies, or communicating in a crisis, or bringing a nation to a halt with a general strike, organizing will be key. Humanity’s greatest strength is our ability to work together to achieve better results than we could alone. That stuff requires coordination, and we’re at a point where we need billions of people to pull in the same direction. Historically, we’ve left that kind of work to our governments, under the notion that they would work on our behalf. There are ways in which that abdication of responsibility does makes life easier for a great many people, but both history and current events show just how catastrophic that can be in the long term.
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Growing up, a lot of my taste in media was influenced by my older brother. I’ve encountered a lot of good stuff (and some bad stuff) based on either his recommendations, or on what he just had on his bookshelf. The Sandman was “good stuff”. It’s a surreal, and sometimes horrific comic about the anthropomorphic personification of The Dreaming – a world made up of the collective dreams of all beings. Those of you with the fortitude to read my first novel will probably notice rather a lot of influence from him in my writing at that point. While I’m grateful that I’ve outgrown that copycat phase in my own writing, Gaiman’s work – especially Sandman – remains some of my favorite fiction.
So I felt nervous when I hear there was going to be an adaptation of it. My mind tends to hold on to details from stories I read or watch, and so film adaptations have been a sore spot for me for a long time. The effects tend not to be as I imagined or hoped, the characters are interpreted differently, the plots are changed – it’s annoying to see an adaptation that falls short of what I feel the story deserved.
I was very worried about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation. Overall it was wonderful, and the effects were fantastic, but there were choices made that bothered me enough to sour the experience. I didn’t appreciate Frodo being turned into a sort of piteous burden, carried through the journey by others. It’s not that he didn’t need their help in the books, but he didn’t go catatonic every time the ringwraiths showed up. Likewise, I feel that Jackson butchered the character of Faramir, and his justification for it was rubbish.
All I will say about his adaptation of The Hobbit, is that I could barely make it through the first film, and didn’t bother with the others.
So yeah – my initial intent was to avoid this new adaptation like the plague. I don’t appreciate having schlocky film versions cluttering up my memories of a good story. That lasted for a while, but eventually my curiosity got the better of me. I’m glad it did.
I’d heard that Gaiman was working closely with this adaptation, which was a good sign. I also liked the recent adaptation of Good Omens – a collaboration between Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. The fact that the original was in comic form also meant that the original vision was already there to copy. Combine that with recent advances in visual effects, and you’ve got everything you need for a good adaptation, at least in theory.
Even with newly elevated hopes, this show exceeded my expectations.
The first thing to note is that it’s very clear a lot of care went into recreating the visuals from the comics. The story will be familiar to those who’ve read them, and most of the characters will be largely what you expect. There are changes in appearance, and in some cases gender for a number of the characters, but in my opinion, they’ve done an admirable job in capturing the characters I’ve loved for so long.
Second, I want to talk about the changes. Any adaptation has changes from the original text. For all they’re both visual media, comics and film are still very different, and Sandman relies heavily on text narrative in addition to visuals and dialogue. The Sandman comics were also a part of the DC comics universe, and so a number of characters from that universe, like John Constantine or Martian Manhunter, needed no real introduction. This series is separate from that superhero universe, so some changes were made to allow for that, while keeping the central plot intact.
And honestly? A lot of the changes just made the story better. Violence and gore are some of the things that don’t tend to have a one-to-one translation from comics to film. While this series does have violence and gore, it’s less explicit than in the comics, and much more in service to plot and characters. A great many side characters are far more fleshed out, in ways that serve the story very well. The show also makes masterful use of suspense that’s effective even for those of us who know where the story’s going.
I get the feeling that Gaiman’s view of his own work has shifted, slightly, in the decades since the the first volume came out, and this show was a chance for him to do it all better. It may be that they’ll blow it in later seasons, but that seems unlikely to me. I now have very high hopes for the rest of the series, and I expect that this will remain one of my favorites for a long time.
If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!
I doubt this is a shock to any of my regular readers, but yeah – the GOP wants to get rid of public education, or at least public education as it exists today. I could believe that they’ll find a new love for it if they take full control of the U.S. government, but I think it’s more likely that public education would become more explicitly about job training for the working class, with a real education being locked behind a paywall. Money will buy education, and if you can’t afford that, then you can always put yourself into debt peonage, to guarantee you’ll spend your life working for the benefit of those at the top.