To read the article, I had to certify that I have no interest in learning what "tantric yab-yum" is. But I do have some interest. Only not at work.
.... said he didn't "ask for permission" and led an armed group into a Fort Worth Jack-in-the-Box.
This is going to be my new "long story short" ending.
Suggesting that the Waco siege sparked the libertarian movement is a little bit stupid.
Anyway, this whole thing confirms my view that the open carry movement is just a status quest for most people involved. That is, I'm not sure they get off on guns as much as they enjoy fucking with police officers. It's sort of understandable in that sense.
That is, it doesn't sound like they are seeking psychological security so much as that they feel like the top shit when they can make the police dance to their tune. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of them aren't unsuccessful applicants for various police departments.
The police and the counter people at Jack in the Box.
Because everybody defines "authority figure" differently.
This is right in line with what I was going to post about - campus carry passed in Texas last year, and it gets implemented in Fall 2016. Private universities can opt-out, and public universities can make specific buildings gun-free.
It's freaking me out to have all these conversations, driving home the point that we may be surrounded by guns and not know it. For example, the kids go to a state U daycare. So I filled out a survey trying to justify why I thought daycare should be a place without guns. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
When it came up at Heebie U, the faculty were nearly unanimous against campus carry here, except one good ol' boy who said, "I agree with everyone else, but I'm worried that if we're known for not having guns, we may become a target for shooters." Fuck him and fuck everyone. I hate this issue.
You'll never get any respect at Jack in the Box that way.
If you don't expose kids to guns early, they won't be able to cope with the real world when they grow up.
Just be sure to put the gun out there and tell the kids that this is a super powerful thing for adults only that they should never touch until they are smart enough to handle the awesomeness.
I already have a gun in the house. I'm not going to the store.
campus carry passed in Texas last year
Just last year? I'd have expected Texas to be more at the forefront of this issue. Bad stereotype, I guess.
According to the article, it's possible gun culture in Texas history is what swung them away from extreme gun permissiveness. When you had lots of people killing each other in duels, it made you leery of allowing open carry all the time. But don't worry, they're getting back to their roots now.
14: I'm not going to link, but the recent Chicago shooting of a 3-year-old by his 6-year-old brother followed a very strict lecture from his dad that this gun up here is a real gun and only for grownups. Oops. (The dad had bought the gun illegally because he needed protection after testifying in a gang murder trial, he says. Good all around!)
I read that yesterday and it was on my mind when I wrote 13. At least that guy got charged.
Can I just pause/play here for a minute? I wanted to report in about my first presentation on nuclear war and pop culture, and some really interesting stuff I found out.
First, I want to thank everyone for the advice - I kept my presentation pretty simple as advised. When planning it, I boiled my goals down to "students should know that images of nuclear war were pervasive in popular culture in the eighties and that the Reagan and Thatcher administrations renewed a very aggressive anti-Soviet posture". I have also been integrating a lot of the content suggestions.
We discussed "The Lucky Strike" and an excerpt from Jane Langton's kids' book "The Fragile Flag". It wasn't the world's greatest discussion (I'd do it in small groups with a list of questions if I were doing it again) but the professor told me that based on the usual class mood, the students had seemed very engaged to her.
They were a really nice group - very engaged and helpful. I was pretty impressed, actually. Not a lot of background in eighties stuff that they felt confident enough to share (the professor told me that the class as a whole has a lot of anxiety about making small factual errors) but really active listeners.
We did about half of a short slide show on popular culture and nuclear war in the last 20 minutes of class. I'm going to do the rest on Weds, plus a little bit about anti-nuclear activism.
Interesting stuff:
- There was a Mr. Rogers arc about the arms race ("Conflict") in the eighties. PBS stopped showing it in 1996 and it's never been released. Nothing on the internet except a clip of the intro and a few stills, and even those are hard to find.
- Photos from the early anti-nuclear campaigns are really interesting, just because it's Serious Fifties People In Suits. It makes you realize how public conventions of dress and behavior have changed dramatically, because I know that most of these people were, like, radical hippie weirdos before the fact. Obviously, if I were living in 1958, I could pick out stuff about their dress and hair that made it clear that they were radical weirdos, but those things don't stand out nearly as much as counterculture dress does later.
- Greenpeace evacuated the former Bikini Atoll residents from their horrible, contaminated barren second atoll in 1985. No one else would help them.
- It makes sense and is not technically surprising, but I sure didn't know it - lots of anti-nuclear activists of color starting from the fifties. Corretta Scott King was part of Women Strike for Peace. Bayard Rustin spoke at one of the early CND meetings.
- The Fishbone video for "Party At Ground Zero" is super interesting - all these great papier mache sort of deco/Picasso/downtown art/graffiti/neo-African costumes. Very, very eighties but not in the usual "hair metal and/or New Romantic" way.
Anyway, this has been a very, very interesting research project and I'm planning to build it up into some kind of community ed thing.
Also, Threads is fucking harrowing. I couldn't watch past the nuclear holocaust fiery death part because I felt I could not handle the radiation sickness, crushing deaths, etc. (Also, I have to warn everyone - I am told that there is a cat death scene in the fiery explosions. I managed to avoid seeing it but be aware.) Much more complex and different from The Day After because UK popular culture is generally smarter than American, I guess.
19: Other people have expressed some relief that he's been charged too. I'm just sad. Is it going to be a deterrant to see a parent arrested when seeing news of kids shooting others to death all the time hasn't been? What kind of rehabilitation can we really look for? Is it just to punish him? etc. I don't know. Wish we could have started with a white guy if that's the way we're finally going to go, but of course not so much.
Are there two of these out now? The one I saw was a white guy.
Visually, at least. The story didn't have a "who is white" or anything.
Glad to hear it went well. (There is something wrong with someone who can watch the fake death of a person with equanimity but demands a trigger warning for the fake death of a cat.)
Serious people in suits in demos in the 1950s - including, bizarrely, Bertie Wooster, who runs into his old friend Orlo Porter in one in "Aunts Aren't Gentlemen" (though this may have been a Vietnam War protest rather than an anti-nuclear demo.)
Is it going to be a deterrant to see a parent arrested when seeing news of kids shooting others to death all the time hasn't been?
I think it will be a deterrent. Obviously not for everybody, but there is a national movement urging people to buy and carry guns as well as blocking laws requiring safe storage of those guns. I deterrence by use of the criminal justice system is all that is left.
Things I can't quite figure out: concealed carry is permitted on our campus. Not sure if it's permitted in my son's toddler classroom. Bet your ass it's prohibited at BYU and on LDS property, of course. But toddlers? They need to defend themselves.
Vietnam War demos in Britain didn't really get going until the late 60s. If Bertram (born circa 1890. by inference) attended a demo in the 50s it would almost certainly have been anti-nuclear (unless it was 1956, in which case it would have been protesting Suez.)
I recall an anecdote about Bloomsbury types being disconcerted to find Edmund Wilson dressed just like a businessman. They already had lifestyle-and-opinion-subculture uniforms then, we didn't.
24: For me personally, I find fake people deaths both a little easier to disbelieve and less worrying than fake animal deaths. Partly because I worry about the animal handling standards in older films (the kitten sequence in Dolce Vita is really hard for me to watch because I have not been able to find out whether they took good care of the kitten afterward) and partly because for some reason it makes me more anxious when I think about how they can't understand what's happening. It's irrational to say to yourself "well, humans at least have the ability to understand that they're about to die in a fiery holocaust" but that's where my feelings come in.
With the fake people deaths, for some reason I can calm myself down by imagining how people probably cracked all these jokes during filming, or telling myself "I bet it was a really neat challenge to do all that prosthetic make-up". I'm not sure why this calming strategy doesn't work with fake animal deaths.
In short, it's a particular artifact of watching film, not a political position.
There was a Mr. Rogers arc about the arms race ("Conflict") in the eighties. PBS stopped showing it in 1996 and it's never been released. Nothing on the internet except a clip of the intro and a few stills, and even those are hard to find.
You should get in touch with WQED in Pittsburgh, where all the shows were made. They're sort of keepers of the eternal flame, and might be able to help in some way. The fact that it's for education (especially if the next step is community-centered education) should catch their attention. I'm pretty sure one of his producers is still active there; perhaps a little googling would turn up a name (I want to say it's a woman).
28: well, Bertie is ageless, though. He's certainly not written as a 60-year-old in, say, "The Mating Season" or "Ring for Jeeves".
And "Aunts aren't Gentlemen" was written in 1974 - more Vietnam demos than CND demos in London then, I would have thought.
30 reminds me of the Gary Larson cartoon of a woman and a terrified horse coming out of "The Godfather" and the woman saying "Calm down, will you? It was just a movie!"
Agreed with 25. I want to see the gun industry and their shills at the NRA come out in favor of no consequences for negligent gun storage. I feel bad for the parents, but not so bad that I don't want to see them pay a price for recklessness.
They sued Pittsburgh for making a requirement that if your gun was lost or stolen, you had to report it. And "I didn't know it was missing" was a defense. It's just fucked.
Not only did they sue Pittsburgh, they got the legislature to pass a special law giving them permission to sue without standing. No person was charged ever. (The PA Supreme Court, when it wasn't looking at pornographic emails, overturned that state law.)
Partly because I worry about the animal handling standards in older films
Never watch the 1930s movie about the charge of the light brigade.
Also, never watch Celebrity. I don't think there were any animals in it, and I actually enjoy watching cruelty to Kenneth Branagh, but it was just horrible.
37: Or the director's cut of "The Abyss". The rat is OK, but I can't believe it enjoyed the experience.
The cat in Satantango apparently became Béla Tarr's pet after the movie, which must have been awkward given that it OBVIOUSLY DIED.
I innocently showed a bunch of undergrads the opening to Black Rain. Dead silence afterwards; not sure they were all breathing. (I've said before here that the book is fantastic, right? The book is fantastic; I actually didn't like the movie. Sorry, Imamura. It's all relative.)
35/36: That makes me so angry. They're just being evil--they're not even trying. Pittsburgh wasn't the only municipality affected--the liberal government in Allentown pre-emptively revoked their anti-straw-purchasing law just so they'd be safe from a lawsuit (although they promised to bring it back if the state changes its mind). Lawsuits are pending against Lancaster, Philly, and a few others. Fuck the NRA and fuck our Republican legislature.
41: They were probably in a state of psychogenic shock induced by the sheer eightiesness of Michael Douglas' hair.
Just read a thirty page take down of Imamura's Black Rain. Imamura goes way beyond conservatism to some kind of nihilist barbarism heart of Conan shit. Still a great filmmaker with interesting social critiques expressing compassion for lower class victims.
Besides sexist issues, the scenes that pissed her off were those portraying a soldier as a victim of war, thereby I guess "Japan" as victim of war. What is this "Japan" you speak of? Housewife in Hokkaido?
When ordinary Americans literally spit on wounded veterans of Vietnam and Iraq, or current decisionmakers or operators on drones or bombing campaigns, I might listen.
Best bet is to see all as victims, or none. Systems and abstractions are to blame. Which gets us back to Imamura, and trying to find the residual human.
Yeah, we read Black Rain in a Japanese history class in college. Also harrowing.
If we have time tomorrow, I'm going to show the group a little bit of Barefoot Gen, but I'm going to stop before the "little brother burns to death in the rubble of the house" part. I could pretend that this is because I am concerned for the students' emotional wellbeing, but it's actually because I basically can't even think of that part of the movie without starting to cry (I am sniffling as I type, actually) and I would prefer not to break down in hysterical sobs in class.
I figure that at least a couple of the students will probably end up watching some of these films on their own at some point - they're smart kids, and I noticed some of them taking notes on vocabulary and historical stuff even though I am a guest speaker and nothing will be on the test - and I remember watching a few films after college speakers had mentioned them. Let the kids get traumatized on their own time, I guess.
I want them to understand - or at least start to understand - how much passionate work was done by artists, writers and activists to try to prevent nuclear war and to try to get rid of nuclear missiles. It's not just that I want them to think about the actual bombing of Hiroshima; I want them to think about what it was like for Keiji Nakazawa to go on living afterwards and what motivated him to produce this work.
I can really sympathize with someone who's been through trauma and needs something to help them feel secure, but a security blanket shouldn't be something that's dangerous to other people.
On topic: I stole a veteran's service dog at a pole-dancing extravaganza this weekend.
Shindo Kaneto was from Hiroshima, and a lot of his personal movies deal directly and indirectly with war issues and nuclear and social issues. Bells of Nagasaki, Children of Hiroshima, Lucky Dragon No 5, one 80s about the immediate survivors, an acting troupe all dying within days of the bombing of radiation sickness
Come on. You can't just say you stole a service dog and leave it at that.
It's ok, the veteran's security blanket was the pole, not the dog.
And of course there is , which even though the author vehemently states is not an anti-war movie, people still see as an anti-war movie. It's better and worse than that.
It's a movie attacking "double suicide," against pridefully withdrawing from society. With a strong anti-patriarchal subtext.
51 ugh. html fail Grave of the Fireflies
What, we have to apologize for stealing service dogs from blind veterans now?
How many blind people go to pole dancing? I think it was probably a different type of service dog.
Blind drunk, maybe. No physical disabilities evident, as he was able to repeatedly throw off bouncers and get back to his feet while being held down by a crowd.
The dog was well behaved but at some point the crowd noise and music became too much and it snapped at a nearby couple. One of the (poorly coordinated and untrained) security staff tried to physically escort him out and the guy started throwing punches at any male who came close. At one point he was well-enough restrained that I was able to unhook the dog, who really just wanted to hide.
57: For the dog's sake!
I support Ronald Reagan!
The key to getting GotF is to imagine two adults in the main roles. If you say the story couldn't work that way, then you are minimizing the flaws and capabilities of the kids and missing out on the compassion necessary to understand Double Suicide stories.
In a book about ordinary people supporting the war and fascist regime, there was a true story about an upper-class woman who wandered the hills of the Philippines for 3-4 months because she was scared (?) to surrender, and buried her starved baby up there.
Someone came up who the dog obviously knew. She took care of it the rest of the night, while the guy slid into unconciousness with paramedics and the police standing nearby.
The last time I was near him, in between progressivly weaker violent outbursts he was moaning "I fucked up... I fucked up".
One person knew what to do. An audience member ended the fight by very authoritatively telling everyone to back up, and that he has the same issues as the veteran. Once the vet had space he calmed down.
Didn't Reagan always confuse movies and reality? I wonder if that's happening again.
...it's actually because I basically can't even think of that part of the movie without starting to cry (I am sniffling as I type, actually) and I would prefer not to break down in hysterical sobs in class.
Perfect for a homework assignment then! That way you don't need to watch it yourself.
Huh, I had no idea there was a film version of Barefoot Gen.
64: I had to get it second hand on videocassette to show in class - the school AV department is able to convert stuff to DVD for classroom use. I think there's a really expensive DVD set available.
I saw it a long time ago and I've read the first few volumes of the manga (which is much longer and continues the story through the mid- sixties).
I had initially planned to show and compare sections of When The Wind Blows and Barefoot Gen but in the end I figured that the students might not have enough context for the films as eighties cultural production, and I didn't really feel qualified to teach a class about the actual bombing of Hiroshima or the actual likely consequences of a nuclear war. "Very, very bad" would be about all I could really offer. Whereas I feel like I've managed to hit a reasonable number of eighties nuclear-war-related high points otherwise.
"Very, very bad" would be about all I could really offer.
You could try the Slate Pitch approach.
67: One response I got to my anti-nuclear activism was -- "we're gonna die anyway!"
Exactly. No long term harm plus an offset for global warming.
Plus, if the Russians love their children too, not nuking them is just playing into their hands.
offset for global warming.
Nuclear winter?
That and probably fewer cars sold.
70: If we don't nuke them, how are they ever going to learn?
A good nuclear winter might actually be a long term benefit for the species: medium term cooling to counteract some of the terrifying feedback loops that are starting to show up; drastic population reduction; existing power/transportation/etc. infrastructure gets effectively demolished forcing people to rebuild it from scratch rather than incrementally phase out, e.g., coal power plants (at a very slow pace, usually) or something, etc. Plant life would be a tricky question because we'd want something pulling the carbon/oxygen balance back towards a not-potentially-human-extinction-level-change, but I'm guessing the bit where a lot of cities and farms just up and disappeared would push back against some of the loss of sunlight and the net effect might not be so bad. No you're Ra's al Ghul. Shut up.
If there's one thing I've learned from playing Civ, it's that if the Russians are another civ, you're either going to decisively lose and you're going to get nuked at some point.
Differential Trigger Warnings in a Diverse Classroom
[apropos of not much in this thread in particular]
Note: Some of the material we cover this week may cause your classmates to cry or otherwise express strong emotions. Many college students suffer from Hostile Resilience Syndrome, an underdiagnosed and widespread psychological condition in which exposure to extreme, or even minor, emotional expressions among peers causes feelings of alienation, overweening convictions of moral and psychological superiority, and in extreme cases a disturbing sense of civilizational breakdown. If you suffer from this syndrome or think you might (bear in mind that it is often diagnosed in college or early adulthood, and is much more common among women than previously believed), please talk to the instructor about accommodations. Previous accommodations have included access to smartphone games in class during a stressful discussion, time in class for quiet journaling or blogging, or in extreme cases the opportunity to skip the seminar discussion and work on other, more important things than digging around for tissues to give to classmates and censoring your goddamned comments, with students instead being allowed to submit responses by email. Other resources on campus are available to help distressed students work through their feelings of isolation, and to educate their peers compassionately about differing sensitivity to tears and emotional display. Please talk to the instructor if you wish to explore any of these options.
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I forgot.
In a not-defense of Imamura, he despised Ozu, and figured himself and his work in opposition to that hypocritical pose as the defenders and protectors of oppressed women that the generation of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Naruse liked to project.
For people attracted to that pretension, Imamura can look misogynist as hell.
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44: the Japanese have Standpipes but not in a way we can understand.