A Pleasurable Headache: June 28th 2020
Links
How a Right-Wing Movie Studio Enabled the ‘Harvey Weinstein’ of Indie Film
The Daily Beast (reporter Marlow Stern) reports on Cinestate and its employment of producer Adam Donaghey, despite allegations of sexual harassment following him around for years. This shit is endemic, as the last few weeks have proved.
On Finding Out Your Heroes are Monsters (Or: Detoxifying A Culture)
Staying with the same subject, Dr Nerdlove (a regular user of the old WEF) covers the fallout regarding Warren Ellis:
“But that same sense of irony and iconoclasm, the same willingness to roll our eyes at Ellis’ horndog behavior made it so easy to overlook just how fucked up some of this was. The weird flirting-yet-not with young women, the inappropriate behavior with so many, the culture of pushing back against the “funwreckers” (mostly, but not exclusively, women) who said “hey, this shit isn’t cool”… we took that in stride as being part of the Cool Club.”
Sidenote: In the wake of the above, and countless other bad actors in the comic industry, a few creators banded together to form the Association of Comic Creators. Their mission statement can be read here. A Discord has been set up and there’s some helpful, hopeful and interesting conversations happening. Here is an invite link. We’re currently at around 170 members at time of writing. If you’re a comic creator of any stripe I hope to see you there!
The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time
Katherine Miller at BuzzFeed covers the changes in tech during the last decade, a kind of year zero to a huge number of issues we find ourselves entangled in during this year of hell, 2020.
“In the 20 months between Hillary Clinton’s campaign announcement and Trump’s inauguration, everything from Apple Music to HBO Now to Apple News launched or relaunched; the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple Watch hit the full market; publishers established the current form and tone of the news push alerts that you receive; Facebook launched a livestreaming function and then deprioritized the function when people aired violence; Instagram launched the ephemeral, inexhaustive stories, so you can share — as they put it — “everything in between” the moments you care about; Twitter introduced the quote-tweet option, which formalized and democratized a function from the earlier days of Twitter, and transformed every Trump tweet into an opportunity for commentary.”
George Monbiot on the hypocrisy of the current Conservative government. Our buffoon of a PM has called foul on throwing statues of slavers into the river, saying it censors our past. At the same time, there has been a concentrated and focused effort by the establishment to hide some of the hideous crimes of British colonialism, crimes the general public are not widely aware of. Monbiot’s example is British rule in Kenya, an era that produced some of the most vicious acts of barbarism and torture in the modern age.
“Only in 2012, when a group of Kikuyu survivors sued the British government for their torture and mutilation, was an archive, kept secret by the Foreign Office, discovered. It revealed the extraordinary measures taken by colonial officials to prevent information from leaking, and to fend off questions by Labour MPs with outright lies. For example, after 11 men were beaten to death by camp guards, Sir Evelyn Baring advised the colonial secretary to report that they had died from drinking dirty water. Baring himself authorised such assaults. In implementing this decision, Eric Griffith-Jones warned him “If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly.” When questions persisted, Baring told his officials to do “an exercise … on the dossiers”, to create the impression that the victims were hardened criminals.”
Noam Chomsky: “Trump Is the Worst Criminal in History, Undeniably
Jacobin covers the recent Michael Brooks interview with living legend Noam Chomsky, covering the ongoing protests, the killing of George Floyd, the ever present climate crisis and the absolute shit show that is modern day Brazilian politics.
Fox News publishes digitally altered and misleading images of Seattle demonstrations
‘A chain of stupidity’: the Skripal case and the decline of Russia’s spy agencies
The Guardian is kind of burying the lede here. The longform article mostly focuses on the efforts of online group Bellingcat in uncovering the truth around the Skripal case. Fascinating feats of online, open source, detective work.
Re-centering the Black experience in the horror genre, from ‘Beloved’ to ‘Get Out’
A great round table discussion headed by Noah Berlatsky at The Document Journal featuring Tannarive Due, John Jennings and Robin R. Means Coleman.
“I’m also a child of the South, and I have a work in progress that’s about a haunted reformatory, where the real-life research is more frightening than the haunting. In fact, I feel I need to water down the true history because I can’t subject a 12-year-old protagonist I’m going to sit with for 500-plus pages to the kinds of things that were done. Hopefully I don’t do a disservice in reimagining that [historical] horror as ghosts and curses. But it gives me the strength to tell the story, and gives readers the strength to listen to a story about an individual and not a statistic, so that there is a feeling of empowerment that comes out of it rather than being dragged down.”
A small, but interesting, post on some of the unconscious politics you may be practicing when choosing a domain name.
“The first one describes how the UK gets profits for .io while denying any claims from the Chagossians, the people native to the Chagos Islands whom they expelled from the islands (a matter which is still actual in 2020!). The second article describes how, in response to the first article, the UK government denied receiving profits and therefore defended that no profits should be shared with the Chagossians.”
sidenote: Those wishing to read more about the British government’s horrid treatment of the population in the Chagos Islands should read Mark Curtis’ excellent Web of Deceit.
The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis
Finally, CrimeThinc has an amazingly in depth after-action report of events that lead to the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis being abandoned by the police. It talks about tactics, lessons learned and succinct but clever analysis of the actions committed on the ground. Of particular note is the way in which traditional power structures were ignored.
“here was practically no one there from the usual gamut of self-appointed community and religious leaders, which meant that the crowd was able to transform the situation freely. Organizations rely on stability and predictability to execute strategies that require great quantities of time to formulate. Consequently, organization leaders can be threatened by sudden changes in the social conditions, which can make their organizations irrelevant. Organizations—even self-proclaimed “revolutionary” organizations—have an interest in suppressing spontaneous revolt in order to recruit from those who are discontent and enraged. Whether it is an elected official, a religious leader, a “community organizer,” or a leftist representative, their message to unruly crowds is always the same: wait.”
Status
My brain wasn’t happy enough just dealing with Project Sapling it appears. Instead another short story idea has muscled its way in during the past two weeks. Ironically, this latest idea is more fully fleshed out in its initial inception than sapling. Looking to break some ground with both ideas in the coming two weeks. More to come.
I’m still in the middle of Six Four. However, I have been distracted (there’s a common thread here, I know) by the second book in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. I loved the first one and they’re very quick and enjoyable reads. Highly recommended.
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A short one this week, I’m afraid. I’m off to prep and cocoon myself from the world in prep for Britain’s pubs reopening.
Absolute madness.
See you in two.