politics

Gun Control, and Why Partisan Politics Need to Die

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

As you have probably heard by now, during this past week President Obama has taken executive action to try to push some more gun regulation in the US. Predictably, there has been considerable backlash to this decision, particularly by the NRA and Republican Presidential candidates. However, this condemnation obviously has nothing to do with the actual content of Obama’s action, but rather partisan politics at their absolute “finest”. This is an effective demonstration on just how politicians treat us like dog shit for their political ploys, why politicians can’t have any sort of integrity and one reason why our democracies are so horrifically ineffectual. For the good of the public, this is my short diatribe on why partisan politics need to die now.

Before moving ahead, I guess I should probably clarify exactly what I mean when I say “partisan politics”. At its broadest, partisan simply refers to identification to a political party in general, but in the last few decades it has been twisted into a political strategy. Now, politicians have to solely serve their party’s interests and refuse to compromise with their opponents. In a Canadian context, this quote by Stephen Ledrew from The Globe and Mail illustrates our own partisan politics quite well:

“Party loyalty is a crutch for those with lazy minds, and stark partisanship simply makes public discourse cheap and ill-informed. For example, how often has one heard that Stephen Harper is an elitist Conservative, not reflecting Canadian values? How often has one read that Justin Trudeau is just a Liberal scion who represents a last-ditch attempt by his party to resuscitate itself to its former glory? Or that Thomas Mulcair is a tax-and-spend NDipper? Certainly often enough to persuade an outsider that party labels are a major factor in political decision-making in Canada. But will voting by party label provide good government to Canada?”

As you can probably see, this mentality is clearly where the opposition to Obama’s executive action is stemming from. Ted Cruz in particular has jumped on this and has claimed that “Obama wants your guns” and has promised to roll back this action. The way he tells it, it’s almost as if Obama has made gun ownership illegal before punching Jesus in the face. So what exactly did Obama even do? From this article on CBC, here’s a basic rundown:

  1. Make it so that private sellers have to make background checks before selling guns. Considering that licensed sellers have to do this already and that was making background checks a farce, it was a pretty ridiculous loophole to begin with. I actually read a study back when Sandy Hook occurred which recommended that this loophole be closed. Then there’s, y’know, the Cracked article about how easy it is to get private sellers to skirt the law.
  2. Crack down on illegal gun trafficking and improve crime gun databases.
  3. Improve access to medical help for people with mental health issues. This is a refreshingly unexpected step in the right direction, one which I imagine was meant to throw a bone to Republicans as well – they often blame shootings solely on mental issues, after all, rather than the guns themselves.

Those all sound like common sense stuff, right? The unlicensed seller loophole has long been considered a major issue which renders background checks useless. Filling it in is going to make private reselling more annoying, but considering that these are freaking weapons we’re talking about, I am lacking in sympathy for them. That said, if you’re a person who is concerned about extensive gun rights, then I can see why this might be a sticking point, even if I personally think that it is a reasonable restriction. As for improved police databases and better access to help for people with mental issues, these aren’t even restrictions on existing freedoms for people who are interested in gun rights. Furthermore, it is fairly well-known that the existing mental healthcare system in the US is in a deplorable state, so this is solution is extremely pragmatic in a number of areas.

So why did Ted Cruz make these bold claims about stuff that is so obvious? It would seem to me that the main reason he is doing so is because it will rile up potential voters and get them to support him. It doesn’t matter whether what he says is true or not, as long as he gets the votes. This has also earned him an endorsement from the NRA, and if he is able to leverage their support then this should help him significantly in the leadership race*. We have seen this sort of fear rhetoric put forth numerous times this year – Stephen Harper’s inexplicable focus on the niqab, Trump’s comments on Mexicans and Muslims and the numerous talking heads that have been freaking out about Syrian refugees being terrorists.

If you think I’m being hard on the Republicans though, then let me also rip into the Democrats a little bit. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have both lent their support to Obama’s actions, but they could have done so much more. It doesn’t take a genius to see that Obama’s executive action is very limited in scope and will likely do very little to curb American gun violence (in the short term at the very least). Basically, it’s going to be a little harder for the wrong people to acquire a gun, and people who are mentally ill will have more access to treatment. This should help prevent some shootings, but all of the other issues with the American gun culture are still present – access to high-capacity and high-fire rate weapons, ability to open and concealed-carry weapons in public places, the existence of “stand your ground laws”, a culture which heroizes those who commit violence, etc. Sure, Clinton has beat around the bush, saying that more needs to be done from this foundation, but there isn’t a lot of dissent about how limited Obama’s executive action was. He’s patching some of the holes in the system, but unless America totally overhauls its gun culture, there won’t be a meaningful reduction in violence any time soon.

Political rhetoric is one thing though, but let’s get into arguably my biggest beef with partisanship. In his article, Ledrew also puts forth this gem which sums up my feelings quite well:

“not only is partisanship no longer accurate, it is contrary to the very essence of democracy, because it leads people to cast their vote a certain way for the wrong reason. It negates an informed electorate.”

I alluded to this sort of political bullshitting in the dying days of the 2015 Canadian election, and this is just another example of how the partisan system fosters voter ignorance. Rather than having an educated voting public, parties have found it much more successful to focus on individuals, talking points, rhetoric and fear-mongering in order to manage their voter bases – the key word there being manage. With the proper curation, politicians can predict how to manipulate public opinion in their favour and choose to ignore entire chunks of the population as irrelevant to their interests. Look at the timing of this executive action, for example. It’s in Obama’s last year in office – he doesn’t have to worry about this affecting his election prospects. It’s likely that he has wanted to implement this program for years, but was unable to pull it off until now. Furthermore, it is being used as election-fodder. For the Democratic candidates, this becomes something to protect. By Ted Cruz, this is suddenly something that he can manipulate as something that he’ll tear down if he becomes President – he just has to convince his voter base that the executive action is something bad first, which shouldn’t be too hard if they’re on board the partisan system.

People are always whining about how politicians are a bunch of liars and that all of the parties suck. This isn’t how it has to be though – politicians lie or, if we’re being super generous, stretch the truth because it has been proven that the system benefits the ones who do so. This isn’t how it has to be though. Politics are a system which we created and which we can reshape. Start rewarding politicians with real integrity, who treat you like an intelligent individual and not just some statistic on their voter demographics spectrum**. Also be willing to look into what politicians are saying and try to keep yourself informed from other angles as well. Just because people are calling Obama an anti-gun fascist because of this executive action doesn’t mean that they’re telling you the truth. Furthermore, just because he’s being praised for this action doesn’t mean that Obama suddenly solved America’s problems either. Partisan politics need to die, and we’re the ones who need to need to put this wretched system in the ground for good.

*You also get inexplicable tough-talk, such as Cruz’s gem: “Those executive orders are not worth the paper they’re printed on, because when you live by the pen, you die by the pen, and my pen has got an eraser.” What the literal hell is that supposed to mean Cruz? You also realize that this is a reference to Matthew 26:52, in which Jesus himself warns his apostles not to commit violence and not to use their weapons. That is a terrible reference to make for someone who is trying to advocate for gun rights.
**Hopefully this is obvious, but this is not an endorsement for Donald Trump! Being a “politically incorrect” blowhard is also a political strategy, especially when attempting to stand out in a right-wing leadership race. It also doesn’t mean that you’re being honest or have a shred of integrity. Use your damn head.

So… What’s the Point?

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

There’s a recurring argument which seems to occur within my family every couple months. Most recently it was triggered by Rajon Rondo’s anti-gay comments to a gay referee in an NBA game and his two subsequent non-apologies. On one side, the argument was being made that Rondo was being an asshole, but how was this different than player ribbing one another by making comments about their mothers/sisters? There was also the free speech argument being tossed around (even though this is a case where an employee is being punished by his employer because of a positive image that they want to project, not an opinion in the public forum). One particular party was also arguing that people are just too “soft” these days, love to complain about stupid bullshit and need to grow thicker skin (this party, for the record, is only 22 bloody years old). These comments did get me thinking though – when we SJW-types stand up and make a fuss about something, are we just doing so because we’re a bunch of cry babies? Are we doing anything productive? When I write about womens’ representation in pop culture, what am I actually trying to achieve? To put it as simply as possible: what’s the point?

Well let’s make one thing clear – for all of my feminist criticism, I don’t think that any one example of objectification is going to be the tipping point where someone becomes a misogynist. However, I’m not sure if that’s an excuse to go entirely the other way – in one of his videos, TotalBiscuit says that he doesn’t believe that video games cause real-life violence, so it would be hypocritical of him to believe that video games can cause misogyny. In my mind, this is not an equivalent analogy. Violence is something which our society looks down upon, whereas (if you’re a feminist at least) negative attitudes towards women are still quite prevalent – just look at a few of the things I have written here for some examples in “liberal” Hollywood. As a result, it would seem to me that examples of sexism are not the problem, but rather the social perceptions which they help to foster. Actually, Robert Evans put out a very interesting article on the mindsets of mass shooters while I was writing this post which helps illustrate the difference between causation and cultural perception.

Considering that pretty much all of western society has agreed that racism = bad, it’s probably best to demonstrate perception in that area. First of all, getting to the point where we could agree that racism was bad in the first place required a shift in social perception, which we’d all look back on and consider to be a good change, right? People also seem to be fairly familiar with examples of racism within culture: black guys are criminals, love fried chicken and have huge dicks, Asians are all geniuses with tiny dicks (it’s all about the dicks in racism), Muslims are women-hating savages, terrorists and have wild beards, etc. These sorts of things get passed around in our culture, but they are not necessarily true (and even if they are on a person-to-person basis, the fact that they colour our perceptions of a whole race is definitely problematic). I have seen this sort of mindset still persisting on white supremacy forums over this last week. This sort of hateful ideology must be stamped out and the only acceptable way to do so is through proper education and social dialogue.

Perceptions change over time. Islamophobia is not a thing which necessarily “is”, it is based on a perception that has developed based on the narratives put forth by various sources. For a non-SJW example, look at the Ebola panic last year. The American media threw people into a frenzy as they worried about whether this disease would come to America, go airborne and then kill millions of people… even though basically every expert agreed that there was basically no threat of an outbreak in America (not that they gave a shit about helping the 5000-10,000 people who died from the outbreaks in West Africa). Furthermore, before this story hit the news cycle, the public wasn’t worried at all about Ebola or pandemics, at least not since 2009’s Swine Flu “scare” anyway.

So how does all of this relate to blogging about Quiet’s sniper-stripper outfit then, for example? The point is quite simply to change the existing perception. Keeping it in the video game sphere, I have stated numerous times in the past that the status quo for female representation is to objectify, to damsel or to fridge them. By blogging about such representations and drawing attention to them, combined with all of the other feminists who are doing the same, we hope to create a shift in the social perception. The same can be said in other areas where people have been questioning why people even care – from sexual harassment in the military, to Black Lives Matter, to Caitlyn Jenner becoming the face of trans-rights. We are creating a dialogue by questioning the status quo. After all, if we did not speak up about an issue, the issue would never change.

The secondary consideration is that a change in perception will also (hopefully) lead to more diversity. If the status quo is never questioned, then most of our media will never even think to try something different. This is why so many video game protagonists have been white males, especially in the past console generation. Diversity also means that certain “negative” portrayals can also be totally acceptable. For example, in an early post on the blog, I questioned why it was wrong to objectify women, but men were fair game (eg, the Wolfpack in Twilight, Magic Mike, etc). I have come to realize that objectification is not inherently the issue here, but rather that women have been disproportionately objectified for decades. As a result, we need to rein back the objectification and make it more egalitarian. This is also why most SJW-types don’t give a shit about DOAX3 or Pirahna 3D, these are experiences which are really obviously little more than a softcore fantasy with a very limited audience. Conversely, The Phantom Pain‘s Quiet is problematic as she is the sole female character in an otherwise-serious, high-profile release who is dressed very inappropriately for her supposed role.

With all of this in mind, I don’t think my criticisms are going to suddenly turn you into a feminist/progressive Christian/etc either. However, my hope with this blog is that I can help push you in that direction, little by little. After all, that’s how I ended up where I am now in basically every walk of my life. Very few people just radically change in one instance, it took me years to understand why we still needed feminism, that dogmatic evangelicalism was killing my Christian faith and that I should value other people rather than being a self-interested prick. Just remember to keep an open mind and be willing to listen to other peoples’ opinions.

Postscript: I have this article scheduled to post within 2 and a half hours, but even in that time new supplementary material has presented itself which I felt that I must share. The article from To Do Justice on the Patheos network lambastes Christian misogyny, along with our culture’s casual sexism which stems from the perceptions of what is acceptable. Even if you think that binding and gagging women and saying “Peace on Earth” is “just a joke, don’t take it so seriously”, you have to admit that it is both an extremely tired joke and in really poor taste (you bound your freaking little daughters’ mouths as well!?!?!).

SJWs Part 2: Xtreme Beach Volleyball

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Depending on how much attention you pay to gaming news, you might have heard about the latest controversy to engulf SJWs. Koei-Tecmo’s refusal to release Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 outside of Asia has created a torrent of ill-will, the ferocity of which is hard to fathom. So how about those SJWs, amiright? Taking away our erotic volleyball matches and cartoonish breast physics! Well… the I think that the truth is far more complicated than the prevailing voices in this controversy would have you believe.

First off, I need to make one thing clear: unlike most people on either side of this controversy, I am actually a fan of the Dead or Alive games. I bought 3 different DOA games in the past couple years. I have actually played one of the Xtreme spin-offs. I follow Tecmo’s Facebook page, meaning that I actually got to see the progression of this controversy. I also have been mulling over a blog post about how the DOA franchise actually has some very positive and progressive elements about it for the better part of a year now. Hell, I even thought the DOA movie was a hell of a lot of fun. If there’s someone qualified to comment not only on this controversy but also on the DOA games themselves, then I think I’d certainly fit the bill as a reasonably educated party.

Hitomi is my fav! <3 I also really like Momiji and Ayane though, probably because I got into the series through Ninja Gaiden.

With that in mind, let’s look at how this controversy game about. From its very announcement, it was obvious that Koei-Tecmo was targeting the Asian market with DOAX3. They had a character poll to determine which girls would make the cut, and it was only open to Asian voters. Furthermore, while they did leave some possibility of a western release, they iterated during its reveal and all subsequent marketing that the game was going to release in Asian territories only. There was certainly some complaining and disappointment among people interested in the franchise (not to mention a petition to drum up interest in a Western release), but it was fairly muted and there was an assumption that these fans would just import it or create a Japanese PSN account to play it.

So what were SJW-types saying during all of this? Honestly, very little. When the game was announced, there was the expected head-shaking and “oh look, another one of these games are coming out”, but that’s more or less where the media coverage began and ended. There were no calls to ban the game or anything like that. This was not another Hatred-level controversy – people just didn’t care.

Context: you should learn it.

The problems began when someone asked why the game wasn’t coming to North America on the “Dead or Alive Game” Facebook page. A Koei-Tecmo employee responded with:

“Do you know many issues happening in video game industry with regard to how to treat female in video game industry? We do not want to talk those things here. But certainly we have gone through in last year or two to come to our decision. Thank you.”

Obviously, this is a pretty poorly-translated response which makes it hard to discern the exact meaning. However, based on what is there, I can actually understand why people would assume that the comments meant “SJWs took away your bewbs!” There also seems to be an undercurrent of wanting to avoid controversy in these words. However, it’s hard to be sure how seriously to take this, between the bad translation and the fact that Koei-Tecmo have since put out an official statement distancing themselves from this post (albeit, one which is extremely non-committal and unenlightening).

Even then, things still didn’t truly blow up until almost a week later when PlayAsia threw in their own 2 cents. Looking to get some sweet, sweet controversy dollars, they put out the following tweet:

“#DOAX3 will not be coming to the US due to #SJW nonsense. However, we will have the English Asia version available”

At that point, the floodgates absolutely poured open as DOAX3‘s lack of localization was no longer a point of consternation for what few fans of the series existed – it was now a political battlefield because damn those SJWs for taking away games that I never even planned on buying!

Oh, and by the way, during all of this SJW were still saying “guys, we don’t care about DOAX3, Koei-Tecmo can release it if they want to and you can play it if you want to as well”. There were no calls to get the game banned, meaning that all of this “SJW nonsense” was merely an accusation or a scapegoat rather than something which was actually happening. However, there was one troubling response which helped to fan the flames of the controversy. Likely in response to PlayAsia’s attempt to bait anti-SJW-types by creating another wave of controversy, a former IGN employee “Carolyn Velociraptor” tweeted that they had industry connections with PlayAsia who would be boycotting the company. This sort of strong-arming was obviously the wrong approach and just gave the anti-SJW crowd more things to complain about. Look, I’m not going to Carolyn Velociraptor’s actions here because they were ineffective, thuggish and out of step with the average SJW’s position on the whole controversy. If you have a problem with her response then that’s fair enough, but don’t think that this is concrete evidence of your crackpot SJW conspiracy theory.

Dammit Anita, we were so close!!!

Normally, when a controversy like this happens, it stems from the actions of one extreme individual or from some stupid action which ends up colouring the whole group as a result. For an opposing example, think of how feminists were shouting down all MRAs for the comments of a single blog poster who thought that Mad Max: Fury Road was going to be propaganda. Normally this is how these kinds of controversies come about, but this case is a little more interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, it stemmed from the poorly-translated and unsubstantiated words of a single community manager, which were then passed on with the “SJW” hashtag thrown on to foster controversy. Secondly, we see that the hate for SJWs has hit such a boiling point that people will oppose them just based on principle. By and large, non-fans of the DOAX games didn’t give a shit about the franchise until someone publicly associated it with SJWs, at which point it became volatile as all hell. Thirdly, it demonstrates that “SJWs” and their actions are defined by those who are opposed to them. SJWs got our game banned! Oh wait, they didn’t actually do anything of the sort? That doesn’t matter, SJWs have created an environment which kept the game from being localized! When you have control over the label, it becomes… er… “xtremely” difficult to prove or disprove these sorts of grand assertions that have made up the bulk of the controversy – in the anti-SJW ideology, they already believe that they’re right and can spread the hate amongst themselves easily.

When it comes down to it, the SJW argument just seems to be incredibly overblown, especially when compared to the economic factors. Despite what the controversy would have you believe, DOAX is a niche spin-off of a second-tier fighting game, a relatively mediocre sales history at best, subject to poor reception in the West and hasn’t seen a proper sequel in almost 10 years. The fact that they’re even bothering to make another DOAX game is shocking enough to me, but the decision to not localize it actually does make some economic sense.

First of all, let’s look at some of the realities of game localization. There’s a pretty interesting thread on Reddit which has some info on the costs associated with it, from which I pulled this quote:

“Some publishers like releasing niche games in the west and such, but remember this is the industry obsessed with low risk-huge sales formula. 10-100k sales in the west even if localisation cost a fraction of what you earned or just reclaimed it’s budget? Fuck no, too few. 300-500k sales are more like it for a niche game in eyes of big publisher. That’s why we don’t see Yakuza 5 localization from Sega. These games just don’t sell a hundreds thousands copies.”

Koei-Tecmo is a relatively small publisher whose focus is clearly on the Japanese market – most of their games don’t even get an international release at all. As a result, they don’t really have a ton of money to throw around on a release that won’t earn them much of a return, especially with the rising costs of development, distribution and (especially) marketing. You also need to keep the market potential in mind – in Japan, hyper-sexualized voyeur minigames are far more economically viable than they are in North America. This isn’t necessarily a consequence of SJWs destroying the market, it’s just because we as North Americans aren’t all that interested in beach and pool party minigames, we want action, shooters and other traditional genres (such as RPGs, platformers, sports games, etc). In fact, I think this might have actually been what the Koei-Tecmo community might have been referring to in that fateful Facebook post. Is it so hard to believe that these comments might mean “the west has different views on female sexuality, which I believe make voyeur minigames and dating sims economically unviable”? I mean, if you’re freaking out about DOAX3, how many games like this have you picked up over the years? Perhaps the market might be more welcoming if we were exposed to a more diverse assortment of game types…

Hardcoregamer has some pretty interesting stats on the DOAX games’ sales figures and how small the North American market share is compared to Japan:

“According to VGChartz, 2003’s Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball has sold 0.59 million copies worldwide to date. Here’s the breakdown by territory:
North America: 0.36 million
Japan: 0.14 million
Europe: 0.08 million
Rest of the world: 0.02 million
By the time we get to 2006’s Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, the numbers drop precipitously. Xtreme 2 has sold just 0.25 million worldwide to date, less than half of what Xtreme Beach Volleyball sold. The ratios by territory are roughly the same, but the numbers are much lower for each.
At first glance, you’d think that means that North America is the obvious market for the game. After all, it sold more, right? Well, take a moment to consider that while Japan is a single country of 145,000 square miles and 126 million people, North America is an entire continent of nearly 10 million square miles, made up of 23 different countries and has a population of 565 million people. Simply put, it costs a lot more to market and distribute a game in North America than it does in Japan; it’s not a 1:1 comparison of sales figures.”

This is why I’m surprised that the game is being made at all. If the North American market wasn’t there back when the original DOAX games were released, how much worse will it be now? To get an idea, I used VGChartz to look into the sales of the most recent game in the DOA franchise, Dead or Alive 5. After I added up the sales of the 4 separate releases this game has gotten on various consoles, we end up with a rough worldwide aggregation of around 1.15 million copies sold. Looking at the regional breakdowns, the North American sales are usually only slightly more or slightly less than the Japanese sales, but considering the costs of localization and the much wider distribution that is required to actually give the game a chance of selling, this is pretty wretched. If you factor in the fact that the DOAX games tend to sell even less worldwide, then the economic prospects for a worldwide release of DOAX3 looks pretty grim for Koei-Tecmo. As a result, it actually makes some sense to release it in only one territory, go through certification and distribution expenses only once, focus your marketing, allow those who are interested in the game to buy it via import and, yes, avoid any potential criticism that might come its way, if that’s really something they care about.

With all the economic factors which are almost certainly the primary issue with the game not receiving localization, can we really pin any blame on “SJWs” for Koei-Tecmo’s decision not to release? Perhaps, but I’m really not convinced. For one thing, I can’t recall the last time there was a major feminist outcry about a video game since Dragon’s Crown. Anything since then has basically boiled down to criticism, which is something that you just have to deal with if you’re going to put out a piece of art. On the other side of the coin, you didn’t see Anita Sarkeesian stop her video game tropes series over the criticism she received, which was significantly harsher than anything that has ever been said about the DOA franchise. If she can stick to her guns and put out a product she believes in, I have a hard time believing that Koei-Tecmo can’t, especially if there’s a significant amount of money to be made.

If Koei-Tecmo were concerned about the opinions of SJWs, then why would they have released Dead or Alive 5: Last Round just this past year? In this release, they doubled-down on the fan service by adding Honoka, easily their… er… “biggest”* slice of fan service ever. Even with Honoka, DOA5:LR really didn’t make much of a splash amongst the SJW-crowd, who basically just shrugged their shoulders as they have with DOAX3 (and DOA5:LR even received reasonably good reviews which were more critical of it being a cash grab than anything else). If Koei-Tecmo were truly concerned about SJW backlash, then I doubt that they would have put out DOA5:LR in the first place, or especially made it “sexier” than ever.

Which brings me to my final, and definitely most important, point: guys, please stop freaking out about this game. I can guarantee you that DOAX3 is not worth your outrage. I seriously question how many of these angry people have actually played a DOAX game, because they are utter shit. For a laugh, I tried out Dead or Alive Paradise, and it was absolutely wretched. If all you wanted to do is oogle girls in bikinis, you should realize that that is barely a feature in the game. Most of what you do is boring menu-based busywork until you decide to play a minigame for about 30 seconds. It has more in common with dating games than you would expect. Now obviously there is a certain niche market for that kind of game, which is fine, but I doubt that they’re the ones doing the bulk of the complaining here. The extremely creepy tone and general pervy-ness are just a veneer over a husk of a game which very quickly goes sour. At least the DOA fighting games are build upon great game mechanics which make them very fun in their own right, even if you aren’t interested in the voyeurism. DOAX lacks that though and ends up being nothing more than sexploitation in the same vein as such esteemed “classics” as Bubble Bath Babes or one of those pornographic Tetris machines you see in the especially seedy bars.

As if that wasn’t enough, Koei-Tecmo have demonstrated through DOA5:LR that DOAX3 is going to be packed full of many of the corporate practices that gamers have been rallying against for years now. If your favourite part of the old DOAX games was unlocking all the skimpy bikinis then prepare to be disappointed – DOAX3 is going to be a DLC factory. Every re-release of DOA5 has been packed with a glut of DLC. DOA5:LR alone had over $200 worth of DLC available on day 1!!! Want to know what’s even worse? A significant portion of that (around $90 worth) was already on the disc and available in previous releases of the game as DLC. Usually when you put out an enhanced re-release, you pack all of the content that was available in the previous release, not sell it to everyone again…

Arguably the absolute worst offense they have committed though is releasing a $90 season pass… which literally was good for only a few months of mediocre costumes. Without warning, they launched a second season pass for the next year of content for the exact same price, meaning that super-dedicated fans of the franchise can be looking at upwards of $240+ to get the “full” experience of a game which came out years ago. Koei Tecmo is just taking the piss and this is almost certainly going to carry over into DOAX3. Oh, and all of those characters who failed to make the cut for the game, including such main characters as Tina Armstrong and Lei Fang? They’ll almost certainly be added in as DLC in the future as well.

After all of this controversy though, I wouldn’t be surprised if Koei Tecmo relents and announces in the next couple months that they’ll release the game exclusively via PSN and Xbox Live. Anti-SJWs will declare it a victory for free speech, while SJWs will just continue to sigh, shrug their shoulders and not care. Personally, there seems to be room for games like DOAX3, similarly to how we can have movies like Piranha 3D and Magic Mike. At this point, we’re more concerned about female representation in AAA games like Watch_Dogs and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, rather than the business of softcore porn fantasies. If you’re looking for someone to blame for this controversy, here’s where I would direct you: Koei Tecmo. If they really are being strong armed by us nasty SJW-types, then they should just have the balls to stick to their guns and trust the market.

And anyway, if they don’t release it in North America after all, then that’s what Rule 34 is for, right?

*Man, I’m really killing it with the puns today.

SJWs Part 1: Warriors, Come Out to Plaaaaay!

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

The amount of hate out there for SJWs at the moment is insane. I haven’t seen this much vitriol directed at a social group since around 2010 when “hipster hate” was just beginning to hit its stride. The backlash against SJWs has been playing out quite visibly lately, which has made me feel a need to put out a more comprehensive post on it than I have in the past. I had originally intended to put up one big piece on the current situation, but it ended up being really sprawling and incoherent, which has prompted me to split this into two parts. In this part, I’m going to try to unpack some of the issues people have against SJWs, while also pointing out some of my own criticisms about both sides of the divide. If you’re reading this on the publication date then be sure to come back in a couple days for my response to one of the current controversies that SJWs have been dragged into and some conclusions on the matter.

The cynical viewpoint… about half of these were cherry-picked from less-important titles and a couple of them are actually player customizable. It is emblematic of a the wider problem though when you consider that these are just game heroes from around 2005-2010.

WHAT IS AN “SJW”?
This is the million dollar question, isn’t it? Believe it or not, it is actually harder to define what an “SJW” is than you would expect. This is mainly because it is an insult thrown around by people who disagree with people advocating social justice causes. Naturally, I like the Rational Wiki’s definition which claims that it is “used primarily by right-wingers on the internet […] to describe liberals, progressives, feminists, and supporters of political correctness. The term is used to insinuate pretense and to label opponents as disingenuous people engaging in social justice arguments to raise their personal reputation”.  In many ways, this makes it seem to be similar to the “check your privilege” phrase used by some of the shittier SJW-types to shut down opponents without actually engaging them.

On a more neutral note, Know Your Meme has a brief article about the rise of social justice blogging (basically the source of SJWs as a group) and has some very fair criticisms of the movement. They state that “the group has been criticized for propagating unreliable information and espousing slacktivism and herd mentality, as reflected in the pejorative term ‘social justice warriors'”. That said, they acknowledge that “the influence of online activism on public opinion has grown significantly with the emergence of social justice bloggers”, meaning that these “armchair activists” are actually contributing to social change and aren’t as useless as your average flash-in-the-pan online outrage (anyone remember Cecil the Lion?).

Now to be fair to the anti-SJW side, I have also looked into the definition posited by Encyclopedia Dramatica… which, if you’ve ever been there, is about what you would expect. If you are curious about the mindset of someone who is against social causes, filtered through the voice of an angry, sarcastic teenager, then Encyclopedia Dramatica puts forth a very informative sketch of what you can expect anti-SJWs to think. This also helps to show why the term is so hard to nail down, because anti-SJWs range from people who just don’t care about social justice causes to full-on misogynists, Dugger-style proponents of patriarchy, racists and the like – in such an environment, “people I don’t agree with” can vary significantly.

That brings us towards the heart of the issue though. The big disconnect between “SJWs” and the people going around calling them “SJWs” is a difference in worldview (the ol’ ideological divide which has popped up on this blog many times in the past). Specifically, that SJWs are interested in advancing various causes, whereas their opponents don’t feel the need to change their worldview, could care less about social causes (or are actively opposed to such a thing) and want SJWs to shut the hell up. Obviously, “SJWs” are not the ones who came up with this label, nor are they the ones who affix it to people. This make it more difficult to properly pin down what makes a SJW. After all, a feminist will self-identify as a feminist based on their belief, whereas a SJW is defined by a third-party opinion as a reductive label. In many cases, there seems to be a strong vein of left vs right politics in the arguments – traditionally, the left tends to advocate for social justice for marginalized groups, whereas the right tends to want to maintain the status quo and are averse to change. Obviously, this isn’t always the case (I happen to know some moderately left-leaning individuals who tend to clash with SJW ideas), but it does give a general idea of how the lines are drawn.

I also feel that I need to say that I have always felt that “social justice warrior” is a pretty wretched blanket term for socially conscious people. Whenever I see or hear someone using this term in a serious manner to describe a group of people, it makes me cringe. I understand that there’s supposed to be a certain amount of sarcasm to it, but I think anyone who actually could be called a “social justice warrior” would see it as anything but insulting. I actually like that the Rational Wiki points this out, with many probable-SJWs (myself included) “reclaiming” the term and self-identifying with it, making it into a label of pride and robbing it of its intended power. That said, it is also just horribly unspecific, covering the causes of gender relations, LGBTQ rights, racism and ableism, amongst other things under one umbrella. Considering that there are already sub-factions and differing opinions within each of these movements, it makes SJW an extremely useless and potentially ignorant term.

It’s also worth pointing out that SJW is a term that is almost inextricably linked with video gaming. It seems to have its roots in Tumblr blogging about various social causes within the wider culture, but it really became a mainstream term thanks to feminism and LGBTQ voices that have cropped up in gaming within the last few years and the resulting backlash. As a result, I’m mainly going to focus on the SJW label within video games, but it is worth remembering that it can apply to a much wider cultural context as well (although with considerably less backlash in those areas).

The wishful thinker. When you think “video game protagonists”, many of the “diverse” options on display here are from unsuccessful or only moderately-successful, non-AAA games (eg, Gravity Rush, Brutal Legend, Rayman Legends, Guacamelee!, etc). This means that, again, the meme-creator was cherry-picking hardcore.
 
WHAT ARE THE PROBLEMS WITH SJWs AND THEIR OPPONENTS?

As much as I am obviously ideologically biased in favour of SJWs, I don’t think that they are perfect by any means and certainly have their flaws. For one thing, a lot of backlash against SJWs seems to stem from an exhaustion of activists constantly pointing out flaws in society and media. Considering that one of the main breeding grounds of SJWs, Tumblr, is seen as “the place where teenagers go to air their causes”, I can see how this would happen. In such an environment, social justice activism will often be reactionary and poorly educated as posts go viral, not unlike the shitty, unreliable image macros that make their way around Facebook. This sort of social justice activist is also responsible for such irritating argument-enders as “check your privilege” – a phrase which, while perhaps true, is extremely uninformative and only serves to jerk off the ego of person spouting it rather than actually inform the person they’re arguing with that they may have been brought up in an advantageous environment. To such individuals, I would suggest that they need to learn how to pick their fights, write more eloquently and try to avoid sounding frivolous.

Let’s be honest as well, as much as we decry the death threats, doxxing and other strong-arm tactics employed by anti-SJWs, these tactics are also employed at times by misguided SJWs who haven’t heard of the “moral high ground”. Let me make this clear – I don’t give a shit which side of the ideological line you place yourself, if you’re utilizing terrorist tactics to try to get your point across, you’re an utter asshole.

This segues into the next point though, that the group is defined by its worst constituent parts. This applies equally to SJWs and anti-SJWs. I am trying to keep my words in general terms throughout this post, because there probably are some SJWs who want to see everything they dislike get banned and maybe even a few who are radical feminists or full-on misandrists. However, in all of my experiences within a culture which would certainly be considered “pro-SJW”, I haven’t seen anything of the sort and they do not have a prominent voice in the culture of the various SJW groups. Most of us are reasonable people, so long as you have the presence of mind to consider “someone who disagrees with me” reasonable, and are just acting out of a belief that our actions will be more beneficial to others in the long run. Whether you agree with the details of that assertion is your own business, but if you’re one of those people who thinks that liberalism is a mental illness or that SJWs are just trying to get into womens’ pants (an assertion which says more about the accuser than the accused in my opinion), then you’re being disingenuous.

Similarly, many anti-SJWs aren’t MRAs, misogynists and crazy conservatives as they are often portrayed to be. As I wrote earlier, I know some people who at least seem to be rather anti-SJW, but this seems to stem entirely from their negative interactions with SJW-types. I was hanging out with these friends on the weekend and one of them said that he had been accused of being an “ableist” because he didn’t have a problem with movies using able-bodied actors to portray people with disabilities. Throwing around such labels isn’t exactly conducive to a dialogue, especially when they had a pretty damn reasonable argument to begin with (you can’t exactly get a severely autistic person to portray such a character on film, for example, nor can you get a paralyzed individual to portray someone who is seen walking elsewhere in the film). I also have a brother in the Canadian Forces who is strongly opposed to “keyboard warriors”. With the Canadian Forces starting to crack down on sexual harassment, he has been whining about how bullshit these policies are. In my opinion, these complaints stem from a self-centered aversion to change, as he has expressed many complaints about how he’s sick of hearing about how everyone else wants things to change – it’s not the arguments that aren’t swaying him, it’s just the fact that some people have the audacity to want things to be different and a rather ridiculous expectation that this might work out for him. In both of these cases, the individuals in question are not crazy, regressive individuals – they are just normal people like you and I who have different priorities and experiences which have coloured their interactions with the SJW crowd. We should keep their kind in mind when we attempt to spread our ideology.

No discussion of the “bad apples” would be complete without Anita Sarkeesian though. To the anti-SJW crowd, Anita Sarkeesian is The Devil. It’s hard to go through an argument about feminism in gaming without having her name pop up and driven into the ground as they decry what an awful person she is (and I have literally seen people say that she is the absolute worst person they can think of). With all the shit she gets, she is basically seen as the face of feminism in gaming… by the anti-SJW crowd anyway. The fact of the matter is that most feminists don’t seem to actually care all that much about Anita Sarkeesian (myself included). I think you’ll find a general acceptance of her basic points and some respect for her attempts to further feminism in gaming, but from everything I have seen, your average feminist could care less about her opinions and even criticize her for some extreme views and for her inaccurate, cherry-picked examples. The only reason that she has any sort of clout at all is because:

  1. She receives a disproportionately severe amount of abuse and harassment.
  2. Anti-feminists won’t shut the hell up about her, keeping her in the public consciousness.
The realist. This is probably the most accurate (if somewhat outdated) distillation of  major video game protagonists, but even then you’ll notice that there’s only 1 woman represented (although, to be fair, Samus could have easily made the list as well, not that that would make a real difference).
SO WHAT DO SJWs ACTUALLY WANT?

I can’t really speak for the other side, but I feel that a lot of hate against SJWs comes from a lack of understanding of their positions. I was reminded of this recently when a friend of mine tried to make a joke about how SJWs are trying to boycott Starbucks coffee because they don’t have “Merry Christmas” on their cups. Myself and a couple friends respectfully let him know that that is not an SJW cause, to which he replied that he had been put under the impression that it was something that they cared about. This friend has complained about how much he dislikes SJWs in the past, but this revealed that he really has no idea what SJWs actually stand for. Obviously this is anecdotal and speculative, but it does help paint the picture that there is a good deal of ignorance being fostered and used to fan the flames of the conflict. For another example, the Encyclopedia Dramatica definition claimed that SJWs “are currently the biggest hindrance to the arts, and are overall a cancer to society that needs to be put down”. Obviously, this is a completely idiotic claim (I’d say that mass market homogenization, lack of funding for artists, studio-enforced censorship, etc are all far worse for the arts), but it does show a lack of understanding of the driving ideology behind SJWs and the “destructive” power that people seem to think that they wield.

Just a couple weeks ago, I made a blog post about how feminism has been gaining influence within gaming in the last few years and how it has positively impacting female representations. Since I don’t want to repeat myself too much, put simply representations of women in gaming have often been ridiculously objectified or marginalized, if not completely absent, since games were traditionally marketed towards a young, white, male audience. However, since feminist and LGBTQ commenters have begun to receive a voice in gaming culture, we have seen strides made in their representations (Mass Effect, Saints Row, Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, etc are some of the quality experiences which have been positively impacted by these efforts). Other SJW-types have begun speaking up as well, and we’ve even seen PlayStation implement control remapping on PS4 to allow greater accessibility for people with disabilities.

Now, just the simple act of writing about this is enough to have some people frothing at the mouth, but if that is the case then they’re probably missing a key point of context which runs through most social justice commenters: they generally aren’t calling for flat-out bans or censorship on things that they find objectionable. This is a point I have hammered home in the past whenever I write about feminism and pop culture. For example, Ninja Gaiden Sigma is one of my all-time favourite games, and it ticks off pretty much every negative female portrayal trope in video games. Would it utterly ruin the game if Rachel, our supposed action heroine sidekick, wasn’t dressed in stripper/bondage gear? Did she need to be rescued by Ryu on two separate occasions, despite the fact that she’s hyped up as a badass demon hunter and gets to do a far bit of ass-kicking in the Sigma rerelease? Asking for this sort of consideration isn’t a call for censorship, it’s a demand for better writing. Damseling the main female character and then giving them enormous boobs is probably not a key artistic choice, but it is extremely lazy writing and artistic direction used to shuffle the player from place to place and is directed at the lowest common denominator in the male demographic. Is it so bad for us to hold game writers to a higher standard, to think of the wide variety of audiences that are going to consume their product, or at least to make them consider their choices when they choose to use a trope? Or what about the glut of games on the market with white, straight, male characters in their lead roles? That said, I still love the Ninja Gaiden games, but I just think that they could be improved if they weren’t so juvenile in their approach to female sexuality and could stand to make their “badass” female characters more than MacGuffins in need of rescue (now much an uproar would there be if Ayane, Rachel or Momiji had to spend a good deal of a Ninja Gaiden game rescuing Ryu Hayabusa?). If that’s enough for you to still think that social justice-based criticism is nothing more than censorship, then maybe you should reevaluate whether “censorship” is such a bad thing after all, or whether you are just opposed to “censorship” as an concept.

Put simply, SJWs want gaming to become more of an even playing field which is directed at everyone, not just the young, white males that are generally the assumed demographic. As I have said, strides have been made in the past few years and we have begun to see developers respond with new IPs and sequels with better representation in them (such as Horizon Zero Dawn and Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate). I have a feeling that those who push against this often just don’t care about SJW-causes, are sick of hearing about them and are afraid that they might somehow make games worse. In response to this, I will put forth this great little quote I found by Kelly Flatley on Link Saves Zelda:

“It doesn’t stop there either as these people also disregard the push for equality of race and sexual orientation in games because “who cares?” I typically see this type of argument placed before me by white, straight, cisgendered males. I know it’s hard for some people to see the other side when they have privilege. […] Take a step back and realize that simply because your demographic is most often represented in games doesn’t mean that other people’s demographics shouldn’t be recognized because ‘oh well, I got mine’.”

What this quote demonstrates for me is that people need to broaden their horizons and realize that other types of people like the same things that they do. If you’re apathetic to SJW-causes, then you shouldn’t be opposed to more female representation, right? You also shouldn’t be surprised that those who are interested in female representation are advocating for it. Maintaining the status quo isn’t the neutral choice, it’s giving the middle finger to tons of people who would like to see it improved. Think about transgender rights for example. Up until a year or two ago, I had some pretty poor views on trans people just because I knew basically nothing about them. They got absolutely no representation in media outside of being the butt of jokes. When a person I knew from school had gender reassignment surgery, I made the (idiotic, in hindsight) observation that it felt like I had walked into some sort of sitcom because I had never been faced with this sort of thing actually happening. However, with the lives and stories of trans people becoming more and more visible in society, I have become aware of a whole kind of experience which I had never even thought about before. What this all says to me is if you’re just annoyed that people won’t shut up about things that you don’t care about, then they aren’t the problem, you are.

SJWs don’t necessarily want to take away you stuff, they just want there to be media that acknowledges them as well. There will, after all, always been macho shooter games and there even is a place for fan service and objectification to some degree – it just requires some balancing out.

Well what about Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 you might ask? Didn’t the SJWs get this game banned? If you did think of this, then I’m glad because that is what we’re going to be covering in Part 2…

The Christian Jihad

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

I have been kind of withholding a post on the Planned Parenthood shooting because I have been waiting for more details on the shooter’s ideology to be confirmed. However, I read a pretty great article this morning about the theology of Christian terrorism which has prompted me to make a response. I want to make it clear though that I cannot confirm the motivations of Robert Dear and, as a result, cannot be certain that it was a terrorist act. As a result, I will try to keep this in general terms, speaking on the social structures surrounding this event and the responses that it has evoked.

Luckily, it seems that the vast majority of people seem to condemn the actions of Robert Dear, even those who would identify as “pro-life”. However, in certain right-wing circles of the US, the response has been disturbingly muted. For example, most of the GOP Candidates have been avoiding giving an opinion on the shooting, or have deflected the blame. You could make the argument that they haven’t commented because we can’t confirm whether it actually was a motivated terrorist attack yet or just a crazy guy committing a mass shooting at random. However, this is clearly a weak argument, as a lack of facts wouldn’t have stopped them from immediately commenting on a more “convenient” event, such as the Paris massacre, which fits into their message. Put simply, I have little doubt that the GOP Candidates would condemn this shooting in a heartbeat, but the bullshit of American partisanship is forcing them from being seen as defending Planned Parenthood, because there is a sizable contingent of their voter base which is sympathetic to Robert Dear.

For a laugh, I decided to check The Blaze’s responses to the shooting, as I expected them to have the most publicly toxic responses and to provide me with a window to the mindset of the militant American evangelical crowd. I was actually happily surprised to see no outright sympathy for him, but there was (predictably) a ton of deflection of blame from the right. One particular article caught my eye though, by IC2S veteran Matt Walsh, which claims that “Abortionists and Planned Parenthood shooter are just two sides of the same coin”. Now, thankfully Walsh actually states in the article that he does not approve of the methods that Dear used against Planned Parenthood, he also states unequivocally that he feels no need to publicly condemn it either. He also makes the incredibly bizarre assertion that “the Planned Parenthood shooting only proves that Planned Parenthood is evil”. I find these points to be equal parts strange and extremely callous. Presumably, Walsh feels that this shooting is a case of a murderer murdering mass murderers. Within Walsh’s conservative, “eye for an eye” morality, this makes Dear’s actions difficult to condemn… which is the whole problem.

Look, you don’t have to be a left-winger to condemn the Planned Parenthood shooting which, in all honesty, looks likely to be a case of domestic, Christian terrorism. You don’t have to be right-wing, or even “pro-life”, to oppose abortion either. However, partisanship and tribalism has soured our morality and taken away our humanity when we can’t even acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, terrorism is something that we can commit as well. If it turns out that Robert Dear was indeed motivated by Christian anti-abortion rhetoric*, then this is pretty clearly a case of a Christian committing an act of terrorism not unlike the Islamic terrorists we have been condemning and killing for so long.

This brings me to the heart of the matter – if you kill innocent people in order to bring about an ideological end, you’re a terrorist. If you support Robert Dear then you’re on the same level as those who support Al Queda or the Islamic State. The only difference between the two comes down to ideology. If you support the Planned Parenthood shooting but cry out for us to keep Syrian refugees out of the country because they might be terrorists, then brother I would suggest that you remove the plank from your own eye. I pray that we may learn how to come to understand and reconcile with our enemies and become a culture in which such acts of violence can be rightfully condemned without fear of oppression.

*Even if he was insane, this rhetoric still matters, as it would be what influenced him in the first place. I’m not entirely convinced that it should shoulder the blame per se, but they should at least acknowledge that maybe their messages were a part of the problem.

Quick Fix: Advances in Poppy-Wearing Technology

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

So Remembrance Day is coming up here in Canada, that transitional period between Halloween and the Christmas blitz where we honour our veterans. There’s one little squabble which seems to flare up more and more in the past few years though, and that’s in regards to the “proper” way to wear your poppy. If you aren’t familiar with Remembrance Day traditions, basically you give a donation and receive a poppy in exchange (not a real poppy though, obviously) which you pin onto your clothing to show your respect for the veterans. However, the pin which is used for the poppies is notoriously problematic and causes quite a few painful jabs every year, which prompts some people to replace the default pin with something more secure and without the exposed pin, such as a “butterfly clutch”.

In fact you will notice that the style of pin used with the poppy isn’t even offered from this custom pin website. The long pin is the closest analogue, but even then it is far more secure and safe than the traditional poppy pin.


However, Veterans Canada has stated that they do not condone replacing the pin, and this has caused many people in the public to shame those who do so. In fact, this whole post was inspired by this one Facebook picture someone had shared:

As you can probably tell, I’m totally in favour of relaxing the standards of what “acceptable” poppy-wearing should be, but the whole situation as it currently stands leaves me conflicted. On the one hand, the whole point of the poppy is to show respect for the veterans, so I feel a need to wear it as they would like us to when it comes down to actually displaying the poppy. That said, I also feel like veterans should be more open to improvements in poppy-wearing technology, since these pins are notoriously inadequate and rather unsafe.

Maybe I just hate adherence to tradition for tradition’s sake, even when there’s a better way to do things. After all, wasn’t one of the key lessons of WWI that soldiers died due to the generals’ insistence on adhering to old, outdated traditions? Or what about our modern veterans whose injury and death is kept at astonishingly low levels thanks to technological increases, innovation and efficiency over the past few decades?

Again, if the vets say that it’s disrespectful to wear the poppy any other way then we’re probably going to have to deal with that, but I do think that they should be open to the possibility of change. I’m sure that there are some people who will bristle at my position on this, perhaps justifying the poppy’s current pin by saying that the pain is nothing compared to what the veterans suffered. That’s true obviously, but it’s a pretty poor justification as far as I’m concerned and is little more than a shaming tactic to try to eliminate any questioning of potentially outdated tradition. As innovation has helped to improve the lives of soldiers, so too should innovation improve the lives of us who don’t want to get pricked every November for choosing to openly support the vets.

Shirking Responsibility

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

The spark for this post came to me a while ago, back when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was in the news with its recommendations to ensure that Canadians were aware of the awful legacies of the residential school system. However, as soon as they mentioned that the church was involved with the cultural genocide and abuse which occurred at these schools, my parents’ gut reaction was to blurt out that it was only the Catholic church which was responsible for this.

Setting aside the popular perception that it was only the Catholic church involved*, this reaction bothers me for a number of reasons. First of all, I don’t think it’s being honest – do they really give a shit about the supposed (and in this case incorrect) “facts” of the matter? If I told them that their comprehension of the facts was incorrect, would it cause them to feel real shame for the church’s involvement in the residential schooling system? Somehow I don’t think so, I think that the blame will get shifted in another direction (“oh, well our church and our family aren’t even close to a residential school!”).

This brings me to the second reason why their statement irritated me. If they aren’t really interested in the facts of the situation, then I believe that this attitude is merely a knee-jerk reaction to shift blame. After all, if we believe that the Catholics bear all of the responsibility for residential schools, then it is easy for us to say that they’re the ones who should do something about it. Consequently, this means that we end up not having to do anything – we don’t have to change our worldview, we don’t have to change our attitudes towards people, and hell, we don’t have to make any restitutions to help out people who have been getting screwed over for generations.

Let’s get theoretical though for a moment – let’s pretend for a moment that it was just the Catholics who were involved with residential schools. If this were the case, then our response still shouldn’t change. In spite of what some more fundamentalist Christians might think, Catholics are just as legitimate ambassadors of Jesus as the rest of us. As far as most people outside of the church are concerned, the differences between Catholics and Protestants are minuscule. How do you think it looks for them if we, as Christians, say “residential schools were bad and all, but we weren’t responsible, it was those other Christians who you should be mad at”?

If nothing else, we should accept the responsibility rather than trying to squirm out of it by shifting the blame. Ideally, we should seek to repair the situation as well, even if we do not necessarily believe that we bear any real responsibility to do so – especially since we are always so quick to declare ourselves the “moral” center of the country which is keeping it from slipping into evil. If we become people known for helping others and being a positive force in society, then we won’t need to try to point out that it was “someone else” who was responsible for committing evil – people will realize that they are not representative of the Christians that they know.

I can remember myself saying less than 10 years ago that I didn’t feel bad for indigenous peoples who complained about losing their land, because it happened hundreds of years ago and they should all be over it by now. I am ashamed of the ignorance my past-self. However, I was completely ignorant of the repercussions that the actions of our ancestors had. I was unlearned enough to understand that indigenous people aren’t concerned about the evils of the past, they are concerned about inequalities which affect them today as a result of the echoes from the past. Similarly, people don’t understand why people still complain about slavery, racism or the Confederate flag, but this is because they don’t understand how their effects continue to echo into the present and have resulted in massive levels of inequality for African-Americans (not to mention that basically every problem in Africa can be traced back to the evils of colonialism).

If you don’t take anything else from this post, then at least take this message to heart: next time you hear someone railing about some form of injustice, listen to what they have to say. You don’t necessarily have to agree with them, but give them some respect. Then, instead of passing off the responsibility to someone else, ask how you can help and come to common ground.

*And it’s not like the Protestant Churches are all that united anyway. If they wanted to continue shifting blame they could say “Oh, well it was just the Catholics, Anglicans, United Church, Congressionalists, Presbyterians and Methodists. It wasn’t the Pentacostals though so why should we take the blame?”, or “Those were Methodists, were are Free Methodists so it doesn’t count!”

Prime Ministorial Deathmatch: Part Two

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Again, because I can see some people taking this piece about politicians battling each other to the death way too seriously, I’m going to reiterate that this is intended to be a cheeky satirical piece.

So, in order to run the actual battle-to-the-death part of this article, I unfortunately couldn’t get ahold of the real life contenders so I had to turn to the deathmatch simulator, Super Smash Bros, using the game’s Mii Fighter feature to create the combatants and letting them duke it out as 3 CPU fighters. I’ll be using the Punch Out!! stage for the match to minimize the environmental effects and to represent them duking it out in the political arena. For match rules, I’m going with a 3 stock limit to scale back the randomness a little bit. I had intended to put in Items, but I think I accidentally turned them off during the fight.

Smash Bros has three archetypes to choose your fighter from. Stephen Harper is a gunner for a couple obvious reasons. First of all, as a Conservative he has helped repeal some national gun control laws, so it seems like a natural fit. Secondly, if he is truly a robot, then having weapons built into his limbs is a reasonable extrapolation. I also gave him some high-power weaponry, such as a grenade launcher and rockets since he’s more willing to exercise military might on an international scale than his rivals. As for his outfit, I outfitted him in the cowboy gear, of course. He’s a good all-round fighter, but I emphasized his defence over attack slightly. Since he’s clearly the most dangerous fighter of the lot, I gave him a CPU level of 8.

For Mulcair, I chose the brawler archetype of course. His attacks are basically all short-ranged, head-on attacks, meaning he has to get in your face and tear you apart with his bare hands. I emphasized his attack power at the expense of his defence and made his attacks slow in general. This represents his duality – he’s patient, but a pit bull. If he can land an attack, then he’ll do severe damage to whoever ends up on the other end of it. If he closes the gap and times his attacks right then Muclair can be a force to be reckoned with. Mulcair has potential but isn’t quite at the level of Harper himself yet, so I’m setting his CPU level to 7.

Since Trudeau is A New Hope for the Liberals, I made him a sword fighter. Fitting with this theme, I gave him Jedi-like attacks, such as an attack called “hero’s strike” and a reversal slash which launches projectiles back at his opponents (like Trudeau turning his opponents’ attacks into platform features). Due to his youthful vitality and swift rise to prominence, I made him a very fast attacker, although his lack of experience and less-than-imposing posture make his attack power pretty low. I think he’s definitely the dark horse of this battle, and so I have set his CPU level to 5 accordingly – he can still pull off a win, but it’s going to be tough and he’s going to have to make use of his speed and be opportunistic to emerge victorious.

If you want to watch the fight in its entirely, you can do so here (sorry for the low quality, I wish you could save replays to Youtube on 3DS). If not, here’s a quick highlights reel:

Harper and Muclair go at it with each other almost exclusively in the first couple minutes. Trudeau, true to life, basically refuses to join with Muclair, and as a result he and Harper damage each other quite severely while taking a few pot shots at Trudeau every once in a while. In fact, Trudeau barely gets any hits in in the first couple minutes, and spends most of this time dancing around the others while getting nailed every once in a while. Without any support and with his emphasis on attack over defence, Mulcair takes heavy damage early on, losing his first life long before his rivals to a well-placed shot from Harper. With the first blood drawn, Mulcair and Trudeau both go after Harper, but the embattled champion fights them both off effortlessly as they come at him one at a time. Mulcair then gets a cheeky upper cut in on Trudeau, sending him flying into the air and taking Trudeau’s first life in the process. Soon after, all three candidates get into a chaotic tussle, which sees Harper finding an opening on Muclair and sending him off the map for Muclair’s second lost life. Muclair then misses a huge opportunity to take out Harper, who just stands in front of him for a split second. Harper takes advantage of this opening and punishes Mulcair for his laxity. The three then scrap with each other for a good thirty seconds before a heavily-damaged Harper knocks out Trudeau for a second time. Muclair and Trudeau, realizing their mortal peril, both gang up on Harper, but he gets some really good hits in on Muclair before the NDP leader finally lands a heavy smash attack, taking Harper’s first life. Unfortunately, at this point Muclair is too badly damaged and doesn’t stand a chance against the comparatively fresh Harper. Muclair goes down first, and Trudeau quickly finds himself completely outmatched, going down to Harper very quickly.

The winner: reigning champion Steven Harper!

Thanks for reading! Hopefully you’re following the real election and discerning who deserves your vote come this October. And if not… then for the love of God don’t vote!

Prime Ministorial Deathmatch: Part One

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Note: I would hope that it goes without saying, but just in case, everything in this post is meant to be taken as satire.

As I mentioned in my last post, it’s election period here in Canada. If you live here, then by now you have no doubt been bombarded with campaign rhetoric, attack ads and are no doubt sick of it already. However, I am well aware of what the real question on all of your minds is: which of these potential prime ministers would emerge victorious in a no-holds-barred death match? Luckily you have me, a self-accredited expert on theoretical gladiator showdowns, to help solve this question! So without further ado, let’s check up on our candidates…

Name: Stephen “Dream Crusher” Harper
Age: 56
Party: Conservatives
Fighting Style: Patient, Dirty
Notes: Current national champion, possibly a robot

First up is the current reigning champion, Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Notorious for being a bit of a boring and unemotional prime minister, Stephen Harper is simply hyper-aware of his image and branding. As a result, he has displayed basically no weakness through his career as a prime-minister-by-day, death-battler-by-night. However, the same cannot be said for his support staff, which have plagued Harper’s reign with scandal after scandal. Thus far, Harper himself has always come through with clean hands, but this shows a few aspects of his personality in battle: he has poor choice in friends and so is basically going to be fighting solo and he is devious enough to set up fall guys to make himself appear flawless.

Harper’s career has demonstrated that, no matter how bad the situation looks for him, he should never be counted out. In 2008, when it appeared that the Conservatives would be defeated by a Liberal-NDP coalition government, Harper managed to prorogue parliament to prevent this from happening. This also shows that he likes to play the long game: as a result of the prorogation, the Liberals and NDP began to squabble and the opposition was soon fractured, putting Harper into an even stronger position. He has also destroyed opponent after opponent from the Liberal party, annihilating Paul Martin, Stephan Dion and Michael Ignatief with little effort, which goes so way to showing how dangerous a death battler Harper is. Oh, and all of this in spite of his support staff’s scandals which were occurring at the time.

Of the three combatants, Harper is the only with any experience as a champion, and he knows exactly what it takes to stay on top. Despite one of his opponents being both a politician AND a lawyer, Harper is definitely the dirtiest fighter of our three combatants, hurling verbal attacks at his opponents long before the campaign even started and retaining power through underhanded means. As we’ve seen though, this is his way of prodding his opponents to seek out weakness. Harper is more of a turtling combatant who usually waits until his opponents destroy each other before going on the offensive. As soon as he sniffs out a weakness he’ll attack mercilessly. However, he also is a solo fighter: he can’t rely on his support staff at all because they constantly undermine him, so expect no help from this quarter. Oh and also, if those accusations about him being a robot are true, then that will no doubt be a boon in the arena.

Name: Thomas “Raging Bull” Mulcair
Age: 60
Party: New Democratic Party
Fighting Style: Aggressive
Notes: Epic beard powers

Secondly, we have the official opposition leader, Thomas Mulcair. With his barrel chest, epic beard and “explosive, spittle-specked rages”, Thomas Mulcair comes across as the most physically imposing deathmatch candidate – and this is also in spite of being the oldest as well. From what I have found, he also seems to have the most “humble” origin of the three candidates, being born into a huge middle-class family and having to work construction to pay his way through law school. While there’s some conjecture involved to figure out how the other candidates will overcome their opponents, Mulcair’s clear physical superiority should mean that he can always just overpower them. He has also been described as a “pit bull” in politics – a descriptor which I can only assume also applies to his jaw strength (or perhaps they think he’s a very lovely family companion who would never hurt anyone).

Mulcair was the spearpoint in the current NDP take-over of Quebec, which was the main reason why the NDP has managed to become the official opposition in the last few years. More impressively, Mulcair managed to do so by usurping a riding which was considered a Liberal party stronghold. This descriptor of him taking down a Liberal stronghold against all odds suggests to me that Muclair is basically Solid Snake. However, Mulcair happens to be a bit of a wildcard. While he is the leader of the NDP, he achieved this position after the death of Jack Layton shortly following the last election. He has had quite a successful political career thus far and has demonstrated confident leadership in his short time in the federal spotlight, which sets him up as a far better bet than Justin Trudeau, but still has yet to prove himself in the more competitive arena against Stephen Harper. On the other hand, the death of Jack Layton means that Muclair will want to avenge his mentor, giving him some powerful motivation.

Despite his temperament and being relatively untested at such a high level, Muclair’s leadership over the last few years has assuaged some doubt about whether he can truly make it to the top. He is poised to be a real challenger to the current reigning champion, and there’s little he’d love more than to slay his opponents with his bare hands. If there’s one thing that Mulcair has demonstrated, it’s that if you punch a brick wall and it hasn’t broken, then you just haven’t punched it enough yet.

Name: Justin Trudeau
Age: 43
Party: Liberals
Fighting Style: Unpredictable
Notes: Youthful enthusiasm, not beyond using performance enhancers

Lastly, we have the political rock star, Justin Trudeau. After nearly a decade of being destroyed by Stephen Harper and the Conservatives, the Liberals looked for a chosen one. Sooth-sayers whispered of a prophecy of a young man who would lead their party to glory once again. They thought back to the “good old days”, when they were political gods led by the divisive Pierre Trudeau. But then, lo and behold! A man came to them and soon people were promising a Second Coming. Party leadership bowed down to advance the one they had decided was their prophesied hero, the Son of Trudeau.

The Liberals have a lot riding on Justin Trudeau. While he is their most popular leader in the court of public opinion in quite some time, he is still a major darkhorse in the political arena… and not to mention the deathmatch arena. His primary competitor during the Liberal leadership race was Marc Garneau – a freaking astronaut who would very likely defeat both Stephen Harper and Tom Mulcair in a deathmatch by himself. However, Justin Trudeau is more of a wildcard. At 43, he is the youngest candidate by a very wide margin, which gives him a slight advantage for vitality, but also hurts him in terms of his limited experience. He is also a teacher by profession and an art student, which unfortunately doesn’t really help when you’re battling for your life in a blood-stained pit (unless he picked up some great survival tips from The Hunger Games).

Despite his seemingly weak credentials though, Justin Trudeau has proven that he can take a blow. Stephen Harper has been slinging accusations of incompetence at Justin Trudeau since before the election campaign began, and Trudeau has shrugged them off with class. This suggests that Trudeau is level-headed and more intelligent than we give him credit for. It also demonstrates that our current reigning champion is most afraid of Trudeau, which is an interesting power assessment. Harper has also tried to bring him down by letting the public know that Trudeau smoked pot in the past, but Trudeau shrugged this one off with ease. In fact, his public opinion actually went up after this came to light. This shows that Trudeau is the realistic “people’s fighter”, who doesn’t concern himself with the dirty world of political battles. Plus it also demonstrates to me that Trudeau isn’t beyond using performance enhancing drugs to his advantage, like a super-powered Tony Montana.

If nothing else, Trudeau is an unpredictable element which will shake up the deathmatch significantly. He could be a dark horse victory, or he could fizzle out very quickly. Harper seems to be gunning for him most of all, which puts his chances in jeopardy, but Trudeau has also gone on record saying that he won’t cooperate with Mulcair, which makes things even more difficult for him. Furthermore, he is also likely going to focus his attention on bringing down Mulcair, which could give Harper the chance to take them both out. Trudeau is definitely the unpredictable element in this battle – the Brad Wong or Dampierre of the match, if you will.

So now that you’re familiar with the combatants, be sure to tune in for Part 2 early next week when I pit them against one another in a no-holds-barred fight to the death! Who will claim the real prize this election period, the elusive title of deathmatch champion of Canada? Only one can claim the crown!

Voter Ignorance

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Election period is coming around in Canada once again, and I’m not sure which irritates me more: the shady politicking or the whining of the uninformed. Recently, I was analyzing Stephen Harper’s campaigning speech in Vancouver, when the lady sitting next to me helpfully informed us all that “they never keep any of their promises, so why bother?” Ah, the old standby of the uninformed and uninterested person who chooses not to vote, and yet has to throw their opinion in anyway because they feel like they need to justify their ignorance (and using “prevailing wisdom” no less)!

Of course, studies have shown that politicians actually do keep the majority of their promises (typically 65-85% of them, depending on their term length, partisanship, etc), so it goes further towards damning their opinion. I mean, this should be pretty obvious – if a politician gets a reputation for lying through their teeth, then they aren’t likely to get reelected.

Unfortunately, it is the uninformed, like my co-worker, who are just the sort of person that politicians need to game the democratic system. Politicians are aware that those who are already politically engaged have made up their minds on who to vote for long before the election ever comes, so they have to find other sources to swing the election in their favour. The undecided and uninformed voters are the people that politicians are campaigning towards… and that’s pretty damn frightening to me. I mean, I can respect the undecided (and I think that we should all keep our voting options open and not fall into the habit of voting for the same party every time simply because we always vote for them), but the amount of uninformed voters who vote is scary. Think about it – every time there’s an election, the fate of our country is potentially hinging on the whims of people who don’t really understand what they’re doing. Perhaps they felt pressured into voting by someone else (there are always big “VOTE NOW!!!” campaigns come election time and people always whine about 40% voter turnout, but I’d rather that than 60% of voters not knowing what the hell they’re doing), or their neighbour has convinced them that a particular party is the way to go because all the others are liars, or maybe the politicians’ own extremely deceptive tactics managed to sway them (this is why we have attack ads galore and why everyone is dog-piling on Harper for “causing a recession” – it doesn’t have to be true, you just have to get people to think it is). For example, my youngest brother has a learning disability and doesn’t understand politics in the slightest. However, he votes for the Conservative party consistently, simply because that is who my parents vote for and they have basically prodded him into voting with them.

Is there a good solution to prevent the whims of the uninformed from affecting elections? Or is this just how democracy should work? While I’m sure there are a diversity of opinions on the matter, I personally see this as one of the failings of our democratic system, which allows the “gaming of the system” which politicians are so notorious for. My own proposed solution is one that I have waffled on for a while. It is the idea of a voter compitency test, where voters actually have to know what the hell they’re doing to gain the right to vote. This might actually make more people interested in being politically active, because people are always most interested in the rights that they don’t get without earning them. This would shift things more towards an oligarchy of the educated, but this also opens up additional concerns. Foremost amongst these is how the test could be conducted without opening up a bias towards a political party, and to prevent it from being gamed in the future (which is how dictatorships are created). Also, I’m aware this whole idea of an educated oligarchy might just be a political bias of my own – while studies are inconclusive on the idea, there is another bit of “prevailing wisdom” which claims that educated people tend to be more liberal. If this prevailing wisdom was actually true, and only the educated were allowed to vote, then this could effectively wipe out conservatism (or at least make it significantly more liberal than it currently is). Even if this wouldn’t happen, I still can’t shake the sense that I lean towards this solution just because it fits into my political leanings well.

In any case, this election is shaping up to be one of the more interesting ones in quite a long time. The Conservative pary hasn’t had any real competition since the early 2000s, so with a shockingly competitive-looking NDP and a young maverick leading the Liberals, the election is looking like it will be very tense. However, I implore you this: if you don’t know or care about politics, and don’t want to get educated on it, then for the sake of our country don’t feel compelled to vote. PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT FEEL COMPELLED.

5 Objective Examples of Sexism in Hollywood

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Whatculture recently published an article by Jack Pooley purporting to cover 12 sexist movie scenes which prove that Hollywood hates women. Clickbait title aside, I found this article to be extremely inadequate. Its examples tended to be either extremely weak (The Wicker Man) or missed the point entirely (Gigli, Jurassic World, Transformers, Sex and the City 2), which made it very easy to dismiss. He also fails to explain why some of these issues are sexist, which is pretty key if you’re trying to convince uninitiated people that sexism is real (unfortunately, I have noticed that us SJWs tend to take it for granted that everyone knows what they’re talking about). Unfortunately, there is a kernel of a good idea within this article, but it focuses too much on its examples and not enough on the broader picture to be effective. With that in mind, consider this a broader response to Pooley’s article, going beyond specific, unconnected examples and focusing instead on the common trends which actually do go some way to showing the existence of sexism within Hollywood, and society at large.

5) Objectification/Sexualization
This is arguably the most obvious form of sexism out there, but as a result it also seems to be becoming less frequent and/or more subtle (well… outside of the comics and video game industries anyway, because holy shit guys). In case you’re somehow unaware of what I’m referring to here, it is when women are portrayed as little more than sexy background objects, when personality is stripped away in favour of highlighting their sexuality. Pooley’s example of Alice Eve’s stripping scene in Star Trek Into Darkness was a pretty gratuitous example of this, and most of the older James Bond movies revel in having background beauties for people to oogle at. If you watch HBO shows, then this will also be an extremely familiar concept. Game of Thrones features a ridiculous amount of gratuitous nudity from nameless background characters, often with no real justification for it beyond the sake of getting more boobs on the TV.

So why is this a problem, you might ask? What about all the male objectification out there in stuff like Magic Mike or Twilight you might also ask? Well I think that the main issue is not so much that objectification is completely unacceptable, but rather that female objectification outweighs male objectification significantly. Furthermore, works that feature objectified women often don’t feature any strong female leads either, so there isn’t any proper counter-balancing in place to keep things fair. If female objectification was less prevalent and if strong female characters were more plentiful, then I think this would be less of a concern for feminists.

4) Hollywood “Conventional Wisdom”
Studios are very adverse to taking risks, so their film scripts are often changed to follow trends and to give them more “mainstream appeal”. This is a major reason why so many movies seem to be the same these days, and not because they’ve run out of ideas.

This risk aversion leads to a variety of major issues for women – for one thing, many studio heads follow the “conventional wisdom” that audiences don’t like female leads, so they make most of their big blockbusters led by a male hero (eg, sure we can have an ass-kicking woman in Guardians of the Galaxy, but she has to be anchored by a loveable male hero). This is a main reason why there hasn’t been a female-led superhero film since 2005’s Elektra, and why Marvel is too scared to make a Black Widow film, despite fans asking for one since Iron Man 2 came out. I don’t care whether you’re a feminist or not, can you not admit that there’s something ridiculously messed up about that fact which seems to hint at some real issues in Hollywood?

3) Lazy Writing and Regressive Tropes
Lazy writing of female characters is a consequence of Hollywood’s “risk adversion strategy” which seems to have gotten a lot more attention this past summer, with Mad Max: Fury Road being praised for subverting it, while Jurassic World was called out for falling into it. Since many films are more concerned with the actions of the male characters, female characters are typically superfluous to the plot, or are written (or rewritten) in such a way that the male character is the one who gets the control. It can also happen when scripts are written and/or shaped by a male perspective, in which case it’s common for women to be written very stereotypically, as an idealized version for wish fulfillment (see A Million Ways to Die in the West for a particularly egregious example), or for them to just not even think to put in a female perspective.

Once you become aware of this issue, it’s hard to watch any blockbuster without seeing this lazy writing everywhere. For example, I was watching The Hobbit movies the other day and it occurred to me that there are maybe 4 female characters in the entire trilogy. 2 of them are Bard’s daughters, which are little more than objects in peril for the entire trilogy (even his weak son got to participate in the action a little bit). 1 is Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, who gets about 3 seconds of screen time and is a (rather funny) harpy of a woman. The only woman in the trilogy who can actually be considered a “character” is Tauriel, but she’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, she kicks ass and is fairly cool. On the other hand though, she does nothing of consequence in the movies and her entire character is defined by the two men who are fighting over her. This is especially egregious because the love angle was added during rewrites when the franchise was expanded into a trilogy, and basically everyone agrees that this ruined her character.

2) Pay Gaps
Patricia Arquette famously brought this issue up in her 2015 Oscar speech. You may be tempted to say “oh boo hoo, I wish that I was only raking in a million dollars!”, but please put aside that knee-jerk reaction and hear this one out. If a woman stars in a movie, has just as much (or more) star power than her male co-stars and puts in just as much screen time, then she should make at least a comparable wage as they do, right? Not so much in Hollywood. For example, Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence were both paid significantly less for their work in American Hustle, despite having comparable screen time and being just as high profile as their male co-stars. Women’s pay also starts to drop off significantly after they hit their mid-30s, whereas men remain pretty steady into their 50s. Since men tend to get more focus from studios, women end up getting less good roles to compensate, have a harder time affording turning down offers and also get lower pay as a result. Of course, they can always get their pay to go up… by agreeing to do nude scenes (like Halle Berry in Swordfish).

It has been said that the justification for this gap is because womens’ agents don’t negotiate good enough deals for them, which is probably true… however, it is also disingenuous. If the trends show that women consistently make considerably less than their male peers, there’s clearly something wrong there systemically which is forcing their agents to low ball them in order for them to even get exposure. I don’t have all the answers for this issue, but it is something to be aware of which shows how Hollywood seems quite sexist, even at an organizational level.

1) Women Aren’t Respected as “Characters”
This is largely related to the lazy writing issue, but it’s worth digging into this deeper because it’s probably the most sexist element of modern Hollywood. After all, as I have said before, why should the inclusion of a female character who is as strong as the male character have critics crying “feminism!” to the heavens like it’s some sort of big revelation? This isn’t feminism, it’s gender neutrality, but it’s sadly under-represented in Hollywood. If you analyse films then you’ll see that the sad fact of the matter is that most films don’t give a shit about the women who are in them.

Often, women are thrown into movies as little more than an “object”. Whether they’re something for the (male) protagonist to fall in love with, or need to be rescued by them, these women “characters” almost always have no real agency within the plot. They contribute basically nothing of their own to the plot beyond what they can do for the male character. This is because, at its core, the screenwriters are not writing about a “person”, they’re just writing plot points and plot conveniences which revolve around the actual focus of the story. This is how we end up with the essentially worthless women in basically every superfluous love subplot which has ever plagued a movie, and is also why so many films fail the Bechdel test. Or what about season 1 of True Detective, which is supposed to be concerned with the exploitation of women… but these women aren’t the focus at all, they’re just background images and plot points (and the “actual” women characters are even more transparent plot points which are meant to define the protagonists more, rather than actual characters in their own right).

This issue reminds me of Chinua Achebe’s essay “An Image of Africa”, which was about how Heart of Darkness is a racist text. At the time that I read it, I did not understand his point at all, and thought that he was being extremely unfair to Joseph Conrad. However, as I have matured, the point he has been making has become quite clear to me. Heart of Darkness is not a story about a man going up a river in the Congo, and it does not care about the Africans depicted within it. All that it really is focused on is a pair of white Europeans and everything around them bends itself to defining these people. The Africans depicted within are not “characters”, they are background objects. Similarly, women are often so ancillary to the plot that they could be excised or replaced by an object with little consequence. This is actually why I’m not as concerned with sexualization – as long as you go some way towards giving agency and developing a personality for the female character so that she isn’t just a background object, sexualization can actually serve some purpose.* By the way, this does not necessarily make sexist movies “bad”, much like how the presence of racism in Heart of Darkness does not disqualify it from being a classic novella.

Oh, and in case further evidence of this point was needed, the sequel will almost certainly dump the female character, oftentimes to start a whole new love subplot all over again (whereas the male characters are usually retained, such as in the Mission Impossible franchise). This just highlights how little the plot is concerned with the female characters to begin with, since they apparently think that they’re totally exchangeable, whereas the male lead was the real interest for everyone. However, it must be said that The Mummy franchise was a very unexpected and refreshing subversion of this trend, which almost makes its many other faults excusable.

Hopefully these five points will go some way to getting those who may not have understood what feminists are going on about to reassess their views. Just a couple years ago, I wouldn’t have considered myself a feminist at all. However, looking at pop culture with a critical eye really made me aware of how poorly the deck is stacked against women. In fact, it’s a recent enough change for me that if you go back to the first posts on this blog, you can chart my progress from egalitarian to full-on self-identifying feminist.

*I have actually been debating writing an article on this very subject since starting this blog back up, but have been having some trouble getting it off the ground.

Quick Fix: The Times They Are a Changin’

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

All the fuss about the Confederate flag seems to have been getting peoples’ noses out of joint. Even some people who agree the Confederate flag is a negative symbol and supported that it should be taken down are getting annoyed as the story progresses, with people now getting pressured to stop displaying the Confederate flag in public settings. While there has been some overreaction in regards to the flag on both sides (banning iPhone games that depict it, repainting the General Lee, etc), I would hope that most level-headed people would realize that the flag carries some really negative connotations. In general, people just hate being told what they can and cannot do, especially if those things were absolutely fine a few years earlier (this is a key reason why there is often such a huge disconnect between the younger and older generations).

The obvious issue that this way of thinking ignores is that all of human society has been changing in this way and will continue to do so inevitably. Think about it for just a moment – your sense of what a “normal” society and belief system is would have been completely foreign to your grandparents. At some point we’re all going to find ourselves becoming the angry, racist grandparent* at the family Christmas who no one wants to talk to… unless we keep an open mind and are open to change.

There are two ways to react when you find yourself getting left behind by society. One: you let it pass you by, complaining bitterly the entire time, annoying everyone around you, and isolating yourself to avoid the changes. Or, two: keep and open mind, be willing to continue to interact with the world and be open to the possibility of change. I have said in the past that I have changed my views on many things quite significantly over the past few years for the better (politically, philosophically, socially, religiously, etc), and hope to continue to be open to such adaptation in the future.

Just remember, when you see something like the current distaste for the Confederate flag occurring, you’re seeing history begin to unfold. All of humanity’s biggest social accomplishments have been met with resistance from the status quo, but through chipping away at little things like this ultimately will make society a better place in the future.

For another current example, just look at the current attitude towards Iran. It’s totally reasonable to be cautious about the current deal with them, but I think that they have ultimately made the right decision. If we don’t establish communication and dependence, then Iran will continue to be seen as our enemy and will have no reason to listen to us. Furthermore, increasing their peoples’ prosperity is a good thing – a contented people are a passive people. It’s easy to pull people into extremism when they are in a seemingly unjust situation and have little to hold them back… but if they suddenly find themselves with something to lose, then they’re going to be far more reserved. It’s going to take a willingness from both sides to change though if this is going to all work out, but we might soon be back to the point where we consider Iran an ally in the Middle East again.

Ultimately, what this refusal to change comes down to is a lack of understanding. People didn’t want to abolish slavery because they didn’t understand that black people were equally human in God’s eyes. People didn’t understand that women had the same mental capacity as men. People don’t understand how awful we have made life for LGBTQ people, that Palestinians are real people and not just some Calvinistic, savage mass spurred on by divine purpose, that racism still is a reality for minorities… but they seem to be coming around to it finally. Keep your beliefs in humility and be willing to at least consider seemingly outlandish views.

*Or, in a modern extrapolation, you will probably be the homophobic, sexist, Islamophobic grandparent embarrassing everyone with your ignorant outbursts.

Translating Ideology

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

So the other day I had the horrifying idea of checking out what The Blaze thought about the gay marriage ruling a couple weeks ago in the United States. This was partially due to some unresolved thoughts that cropped up in my previous encounter with The Blaze, when one of their contributors claimed (extremely poorly) that Christians were obligated to support the death penalty. At the time, I had never head of The Blaze, but I was left under the impression from their “About Us” page that they were supposed to be non-partisan news source which was only concerned with “the truth”… which just so happens to be ultra-conservative American traditions. Uh oh.

Well, even with that in mind, my search ended up being even worse than I had expected. Page after page of outright hatred and doomsaying over something that isn’t going to affect the vast majority of the readership in the slightest… it’s like they don’t even realize that most other Western nations have allowed gay marriage for quite some time now without society breaking down into anarchy, or religious freedoms being adversely affected.

However, the worst article of them all, titled “Gay Marriage Still Doesn’t Exist, No Matter What the Supreme Court Says” by Matt Walsh, just left me absolutely dumbfounded. Here’s the link if you’re interested, but I’m not going to break it down point by point like I normally would, because that would give it too much credit. After reading this, I actually felt quite troubled for a long time, trying to process what I had read. Normally I would put out an impassioned rebuttal, refuting the idiocy on display. However, this time it was different. There is no nuance to this rant. It is either extreme ignorance at best, or pure, unadulterated, blind hatred. As a result, I can’t really address the content of the message, but rather the frameworks which make something this vile and pants-on-head-stupid possible.

First of all, this message is endorsed and given a voice on a freaking news site. Sure, the disclaimer at the bottom of the article claims that “TheBlaze contributor channel supports an open discourse on a range of views. The opinions expressed in this channel are solely those of each individual author”, but c’mon – an article does not make its way onto a news source without getting approved through the editorial process, which effectively endorses the content whether they want to make it official or not. When they post up the article I’m going to write up about how 90% of Christians say they enjoyed gay sex when they tried it, then maybe I’ll start giving that disclaimer the benefit of the doubt.

Also, The Blaze hardly counts as “journalism”, but it has an audience and the pretenses of being a news source, so it gives this article way more legitimacy than it would have on the shit-slinging blog it would normally appear on. As of the time of this writing, Walsh’s article has gotten almost 100,000 shares, which is incredibly distressing. I imagine that a good portion of those are probably people making fun of the authour, but those shares are still exposing more people to this awful perspective and drawing more people to The Blaze.

Just as intended.

The most important factor in the creation of Walsh’s article though is ideology. This is actually why I can’t respond to the article directly, and why you either didn’t need me to break it down for you to understand why it was insane, or have no idea what I’m going on about right now. Walsh is so far ingrained into his own ideological framework (which seems to consist of ultra-conservatism, evangelicalism and/or fundamentalism, American nationalism and apparently the divine inspiration of the US constitution, among other things), that it becomes basically impossible to reason with him unless you share the same ideology. Obviously this can be applied to any ideology, including my own, but I would at least like to think that my own is based in rationality and logic, making it accessible to the majority of society to understand, and I try to hold my beliefs in some humility (rather than harping them as the concrete “TRUTH” as Walsh and The Blaze do).

With websites like The Blaze and Fox News catering to, and spreading, this sort of extreme ideology, the existence of articles such as this leaves me rather disturbed. I like to believe that my arguments can at least get through to someone, whether they agree with them or not (and that is ultimately up to them to decide of course). However, when faced with someone whose ideology is so different from my own that our respective thought processes and realities are basically night and day, I don’t know how to even respond. It’s like we speak entirely different languages, or aren’t even the same species.

For the sake of this argument, let’s say that this is what Matt Walsh looks like.

You probably encounter this conundrum all the time. For example, look at the conservative church’s ideology regarding Israel. They believe that the modern nation of Israel is God’s chosen people still and give them their support no matter the circumstances (which they generally don’t look into anyway). Furthermore, they view all Arabic states as Israel’s enemies, who mindlessly are drawn into attempting to destroy the nation in a battle of good vs evil. However, this ideological framework is incredibly dehumanizing towards the innocent Palestinians who get caught up in the conflict. It ignores all the flagrant human rights violations that Israel is committing (and in fact, our unwavering support for Israel empowers their ability to get away with it). It also makes it seem like conflict is inevitable, part of a conflict that has been going on endlessly for a thousand years, but this completely misses the modern roots of the conflict which stretch back to the era of colonialism and can be potentially defused in time. The extremely bitter sides of the abortion “debate” also can be boiled down into a conflict of ideology – one side views it as a human being at conception, others as a fetus.

As long as we stubbornly hold onto our ideologies and refuse to even consider anyone else’s perspectives, we’re going to continue to run into situations like these where we can’t engage in any meaningful dialogue. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this issue: it takes time for people to change, so the only real solutions are to work on them with compassion, or ignore them. I’m hoping that, through education, we can someday see an end to hateful ideologies, such as those held by Matt Walsh and The Blaze… until then though, we’re going to have to bust out Google translate and try to get through to those whose thought processes are so radically divergent from our own.

Deliberate Inequality

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

So I was recently reading this article on Polygon about unequal racial representations in gaming, and it got my mind jogging. Oftentimes, when someone calls out a system or representation for being racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever, people less versed in the subject are quick to come out and ask what the big deal is, that the person is looking too far into things, claim that it’s a part of the “creative vision” or that SJWs are trying to censor art (that they agree with, of course), etc. In any case, I believe that some of these responses stem from a misunderstanding of some of the basics of social justice analysis.

I think that many people believe that racism et al are only actually worthy of being pointed out if examples of them were done deliberately with malicious intent. For example, my father complains about how the media seems to always be complaining about racism in regards to police activity or their representation in Hollywood, and yet would quite likely stand up for someone if somebody was slinging racial slurs at them in public and discriminating against them in an obvious manner. People like him probably find these “smaller issue” social justice concerns to be extremely frivilous, get burnt out from hearing them all the time and definitely do not consider themselves racist. Unfortunately, due to a lack of interest or education on the subject, they are missing the underlying, unconscious issues in society which are contributing to the lingering of racism/sexism/etc. This often means that people concerned with social equality need to be concerned not so much with the less-common and clearly unacceptable examples of deliberate racism, but moreso with the unintentional examples.

Honestly, I find that deliberate examples of inequality are potentially less offensive than the unintentional, ingrained ones where people don’t even realize that they’re being potentially offensive. To link back to the start of the article, think about how big budget video games and movies rarely feature a hero who is a white, a male and a power fantasy of some sort. Think of how Assassin’s Creed: Unity ditched the option to play as a female assassin, claiming that they didn’t have the development time or budget to do it (which was promptly revealed to be a bullshit excuse, they just didn’t prioritize the female audience). Another good example is in Warhammer 40,000. Every couple months, someone comes onto the Dakka Dakka forums and asks where all the non-whites are in 40k. The simple answer is that there ARE other races in the Warhammer universe, and there are a handful of examples of them in 40k art, but it has literally not even occurred to the painters to paint any of their soldiers non-white. Honestly, I fell into the same trap with my 40k armies. When I was growing up, it never even occurred to me to paint any of my Space Wolves anything other than white. When I started an Imperial Guard army years later, I still didn’t think to paint them anything other than white for quite some time, until one of those Dakka Dakka topics pointed out the issue. We all have our own blind spots where we don’t even realize that we’re missing out on a chance at equality, or at least to make a conscious artistic decision one way or the other.

This is why the Bechdel test is so crazy – women rarely speak to one another about something other than a man because of the way that the screenplay is written. When 2 women speak, they have to advance the plot in some way by the very nature of the narrative. However, the fact that most movies fail the Bechdel test really shows how marginalized women are in movies, and that they aren’t generally the ones who the movie really cares for. It shows that women are not prioritized in the scripts, nor are they generally the focus, and generally serve as little more than plot convenience, especially when they speak to one another (because rarely do they bother to have 2 real women characters with any agency). My friend and I were watching the 1998 Godzilla, which isn’t an overtly sexist film by any means. However, we were commenting on it the whole time, when halfway through I was suddenly struck by the realization that the film had bombed the Bechdel test. There were only a couple scenes in the whole movie which featured two women talking to one another, and they spent all of them talking about a guy as the focal point to set up the love story subplot. It really illustrates where the film’s real focus is, and the fact that it’s so common is distressing (and let’s not even mention the 2014 Godzilla, which doesn’t even feature a single scene with more than one woman in it with a speaking role… this is a frighteningly common reality in movies).

What about deliberate examples of inequality though? The Witcher 3 is getting taken to task for apparent sexism in the game (although I’ll admit, Feminist Frequency does not have the best track record of picking good, clear examples). I haven’t played The Witcher 3 unfortunately, so I can’t comment, but one complaint that sounds valid is that the game features a lot of gendered insults when you play as a female character (or when they’re around at least… again, haven’t played it). Moral judgments about it aside, can we at least agree that having such marked differences in the insults directed at male and female characters is sexist? How odd would it be if enemies taunted your male game hero by saying they were weak, had a small dick, couldn’t pleasure their partner, or threatened to sexually assault them if they fail? Unfortunately, this is a strangely common trope for women in video games: quite a long time ago I wrote about Lollipop Chainsaw, a game I actually rather enjoyed, but lamented how the enemies will frequently call the protagonist a “bitch”, “slut” and threaten to violently sexually assault her. This also apparently happens all the time when you play as Catwoman in Batman: Arkham City – there’s a 6 minute video on Youtube of nothing but the instances where enemies hurl gendered insults at her, which is kind of insane. On the more positive end of the scale, I recently replayed the Tomb Raider reboot on PS4 and, despite the island being inhabited by violent, insane, foul-mouthed sailors, I didn’t find the game any less “realistic” for not having them sling gendered insults at Lara all the time. Rather, they simply act as if she was any other badass running around kicking their asses, and shout out her actions (“she’s flanking us!”) rather than taunts.

While gendered insults are undeniably sexist just by definition (male characters get generic taunts, female characters are taunted based on their gender), that isn’t to say that this is something that needs to be eliminated necessarily. I’m wondering if the point that Sarkseesan is trying to make (and the one she tries to make whenever she picks a really questionable example) is simply pointing this out to bring awareness to this potential issue in gaming, rather than saying “This is bad and needs to be eliminated from gaming RIGHT NOW.” If anything, it is more likely stopping devs from taking this sort of thing for granted and trying to get them to be more deliberate when they utilize gendered insults and female characters – is being beaten down and shamed for their gender key to the experience that the devs want to give the player when playing as a female character?

One common mistake that inexperienced writers make is when they try to make their story “mature”, they tend to overcompensate and just saturate it in misery, rape and constant violence. This causes the plot to be completely forgotten or overshadowed, and the acts themselves to feel meaningless. The fix, of course, is for the writer to be more deliberate with the use of mature themes, so that they have the impact that they SHOULD have. Rape, sexism and the like can be used in fiction effectively, but artists should be very deliberate when doing so and do it with the expectation of some potential backlash.

Like, in Season 6 can we finally get to a storyline other than “Who is going to try to rape Sansa this year?”

For example, I hardly want to call myself a great writer, but this deliberate inequality is something I have tried to take into account with my own sci-fi novel I have been working on. It takes place around a thousand years after humanity undergoes a biological revolution and colonizes the galaxy. Racism and sexism aren’t totally dead, but they are significantly diminished because the fearful have turned their attention towards bio-engineered organisms. As a result, women and men (of various races) hold equally prominent positions within the civilian and military structures without people having to comment on it. Homo/trans-phobia is also considered a non-issue in the universe of the story. One major character is bisexual and hated by basically everyone, but no one even thinks to belittle him for his “queerness”. When deliberate inequality is brought up, it is done to show characterization, not just because I decreed that this story featuring six foot spiders and space magic has to be “realistic”. This is not pressuring me to conform to diversity, this is making my story far more interesting and opening up more avenues for creativity than if I stuck to my own narrow “vision”.

People seem to assume that criticism is an attempt at censorship (a misunderstanding which helped kickstart the whole GamerGate movement…). They claim that criticizing media for just fitting with the status quo and featuring “realistic” examples of sexism/racism/etc is an attack on the creative rights of the artist. However, I think that criticism should be seen more as an attempt at artistic improvement. By pointing out examples of inequality, critics are effectively saying “this art would be improved if the female characters weren’t such a flat plot device, consider making them more interesting in the future, because it will enrich the narrative”, or “I would enjoy this more if they weren’t calling the female protagonist a ‘slut’ or ‘whore’ all the time, this is grating for me because I hear these sorts of insults get hurled at my sex all the time”. The artist is free to accept or dismiss that criticism however they wish, but if they dismiss it then they shouldn’t expect not to be criticized for it.