Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons

Leonard Cohen wrote the title of this post, but many of those depraved on account’a they’re deprived might have first encountered them when Brian Williams wet his drawers on national TV over the awesomeness of US warships launching missiles with big, big fire. For Williams, the awe at the destructive power of the missile was somehow an affirmation that the US was right, that the US was working good.

Of course, Cohen never intended to mean anything like this. Cohen’s the kind of person who might have said this sarcastically, meaning to satirize the Brian Williams of the world, but in fact he didn’t even intend that. Instead, in Cohen’s song First We Take Manhattan he’s talking about changing the world not militarily, but through individual effort:

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Kelly Marie Tran Harassed Out Of The Galaxy

You want to talk intersectionality? Kelly Marie Tran, someone who created an exceptional portrayal in a popular movie, has been harassed off the internet for no other reason than the intersection of her race, gender, and prominence.

NME has more details of the story, but the details don’t matter for most purposes. This is enough:

Tran was the first woman of colour to play a leading role in the franchise and it was reported back in December that she faced sexist and racist comments after her appearance in the film.

The Rose Tico description on the Star Wars ‘Wookieepedia’ website was altered to feature offensive, racist language while alt-right internet personality Paul Ray Ramsey took aim at Tran’s appearance.

According to Star Wars Facts, she has now deleted all posts from her Instagram account due to the harassment.

By all accounts, Tran was a Star Wars fan and on top of the excitement any actor would have to score a large role in any major motion picture she was particularly excited to be involved in creating a Star Wars film.

Way to fucking ruin the universe, sexists and racists!

Zero Fox Given: Stephanie Walter

Ran across this great illustration by Stephanie Walter, a European programmer, designer, & blogger:

Sleeping red-orange canid with unnaturally colorful tail gives zero

Zero Fox Given

 

She blogs primarily in french, and I have never read any tech-news in French some I’m learning a ton of new terms, but if you’re comfortable reading French and do any design or programming (or are willing to scroll through a bunch of things you don’t understand to find cute designs!), you might just find her blog worth checking out!

 

Great American Satan Too Quick On The Draw: Valve Just Killed Good Faith, Again

So our dear colleague Great American Satan just put up a post on the failures of Valve to police its content and its vendors, creating headaches for its customers and sometimes even permitting scammers and/or abusive sellers to make customers feel worse than that. Go read, if you’re so inclined.

But, oh, the post was put up just hours too soon. PCGamer is reporting that the new Valve game to be sold through its Steam portal is getting calls for removal before it has been officially released. What kind of game could do that? Active Shooter, a game that, as far as I can tell, is Castle Wolfenstein where you get to choose to be the allies or the Nazis. There are two options for game play. In one, you’re a cop chasing down active shooters. In the other, the enemies are (on at least one level) fellow students in your imaginary high school and the cops that come to help rescue them. It looks like there may be additional, outside-of-school levels as well where your targets would not necessarily include high school students but would still include cops trying to do their jobs.

Yes, this is imaginary. Yes, there is a constitutional right in the US to design and attempt to sell such games. But no, people who create this type of content don’t get to be free from criticism, and the same right that protects the ability of dumb sociopaths to produce such a game also protects the rights of the rest of us to not only decline to buy the game, but also use our free expression to persuade other not to buy the game and even to persuade Valve/Steam to end their business relationship with the stupid-ass company (Acid) that produced this. Interestingly, even in places where speech is decidedly less free than the US, opposition is strong and vocal: PCGamer’s article leads with the news that a non-profit in the UK is calling for Valve to deep-six the game.

Despite correctly pointing out that other terrible games also exist, Acid deserves to take a major hit to its bottom line over this game, and if Valve continues to facilitate its wide release and to sell other games that encourage players to role-play malicious violence that simulates real-life situations, Valve deserves to lose money as well.

The Genius Excuse

Correction Below.

Since we’re talking about Watson again, I thought I’d recommend a post on BitchMedia about how genius is used as an excuse for sin in the arts (thought the article focuses on film specifically). Despite the seeming differences in the scientific enterprise and the artistic enterprise, the observations in that piece seem quite relevant to how our society treats Michael Shermer, James Watson, and Inder Verma.

Consider this:

Auteur theory, originating in French film criticism, credits the director with being the chief creative force behind a production—that is, the director is the “author.” Given that film, with its expansive casts and crews, is one of the most collaborative art forms ever to have existed, the myth of a singular genius seems exceptionally flawed to begin with. But beyond the history of directors like Terrence Malick, Woody Allen, and many more using their marketable auteur status as a “business model of reflexive adoration,” auteur worship both fosters and excuses a culture of toxic masculinity. The auteur’s time-honored method of “provoking” acting out of women through surprise, fear, and trickery—though male actors have never been immune, either— is inherently abusive. Quentin Tarantino, Lars Von Trier, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and David O. Russell, among others, have been accused of different degrees of this, but the resulting suffering of their muses is imagined by a fawning fanbase as “creative differences,” rather than as misogyny and as uncompromising vision rather than violence.

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