The Antisocial Socialist

This may come as a surprise to you, but I am a highly anxious person. Which is to say that I am a diagnosed, mentally unwell, clinical depression-and-GAD with a cherry of PTSD on top person. Not just "I feel a little anxious sometimes" but "I'm under supervision by a medical professional about it" kind of thing.

I suffer from it. It's not great. I hate it, in fact. I wake up at 4 am on a regular basis, often from nightmares, heart racing, consumed by intense and specific worries. My heart races. In the past, though thankfully not for awhile, I've had panic attacks that are so bad I thought I was having a heart attack. 0/10, strongly do not recommend.

And hence this post is going to sound a little weird. 

If I had to define what anxiety is for me on a personal level, it's the ability to picture future or potential scenarios that feel as if they are currently happening or are inevitably going to happen. For example, thinking about the potential death of a loved one results in a physical and emotional reaction similar to if that death had actually happened. Extremely vivid nightmares that feel real. The sense—as I've written before—that you are leaning back in a chair and have leaned so far back that righting yourself is impossible, but the full tip over to the hard floor hasn't happened yet.

I can neither, at this point in my life, disentangle this from either my personality or my ability to write fiction, where conjuring the specific emotion resulting from a potential scenario is a slightly useful skill. Trust me, though, I've tried a lot. The best I can do is mute it with meds, which cause other problems, or create workarounds where I redirect the pathway of my future-thinking towards how I might deal with those scenarios. Yes, I've tried yoga. Yes, I've tried mindfulness. The latter is contraindicated for someone like me.

Conversely, I am very often around people who do not suffer from anxiety. They may feel anxious about a given situation—a job interview, an illness, even climate change in general when they think about it—but they're not constantly doing this. These people are generally assured that things will work out as they should, or that worrying won't help. "It is what it is," they'll say, or "it'll be fine." 

I don't really know what causes someone to have one personality type versus the other. Certainly, I have lived experience where things have expressly not worked out for the best. But I've met folks who live on the street who've had much worse lives than I do, for whom things are still not working out at all, and they're more optimistic than I am. It isn't just trauma, or even primarily trauma. I'm sure there's a genetic or familial component too—Jews are neurotic, and all the women in my family are like this, really. 

Anxiety is, in many ways, a motivator for me. I mentioned the depression as well. If anxiety is living too much in the future, depression is dwelling in the past. Depression brain tells you to sleep all day and eat chips; anxiety brain reminds you that if you do that, you'll be out of a job. And if you don't perform at 110% at that job, you'll be out of a job. Your employers have already started planning as to how they're going to fire you, in fact, so get on that now. You shouldn't have made this post public because if they find out you have a mental illness, it's over for you.

A disproportionate number of teachers suffer from anxiety. A disproportionate number of administrators do not. A surprising number of students don't (you hear that they're all anxious these days, but I promise it's not all of them). This makes for a lot of clashes, as you can imagine. It's frustrating for someone who does not have the reassurance that things will work out for the best to have to interact with someone who does. Especially when we're in a global pandemic. I'm a person who reads that there's somewhere between a 1 in 5 and a 1 in 20 chance of getting long covid, and so I assume I'll be that one. But I'm surrounded by people who either don't think it's a possibility at all, or don't think it'll be anyone they know.

But while anxiety is devalued, and sucks, on a personal level, it honestly has its benefits on a broader societal level. A common theory for humans evolving this tendency is that while you need people who are bold and confident to lead a community, said little community gets wiped out pretty quickly without the person who can't sleep because they're watching the grass for tigers. We spend a lot of time talking about wellness and self-care and living in the moment, but we are right now living the consequences of having all lived in the moment, without worrying one bit about the future. It's pretty obvious with the pandemic that we'd all probably do a lot better if we'd heeded the many experts who warned about the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic, or even if we behaved more like the people who think they'll contract long covid if they catch it than the people who don't believe it will happen to them.

Soft climate change denial is another great example of this. It's not outright Fox News MAGA denial of the climate crisis. It's the sense that you might have (that I sometimes even have) that while obviously man-made climate change exists, and is a problem, but...someone will have to work it out, right? Governments will have to cut emissions because this is untenable. And hey, there's probably some genius working on a solution right now. Tech will save us! 900 million people in China and 33 million people in Pakistan probably have very different ideas about how well that will work out. Each successive government kicks the can down the road, waiting for some better future where it'll get fixed.

And of course, I've been thinking about Barbara Ehrenreich, who wasn't a perfect person but in many ways was a brilliant person who changed my life. She died last Thursday, at the age of 81. Her book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, covers the pitfalls of optimism and magical thinking, from her own breast cancer diagnosis to capitalism itself. By subscribing to the belief that if we're just positive enough, everything will be okay, we risk substituting those happy thoughts for tangible action. Cynical cancer patients are have a better prognosis; nations that plan for disaster mitigation do better when extreme weather strikes, and so on.

I recently learned about chronic wasting disease, and hoo-boy my life would have been better if I hadn't. It's a prion disease, similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, that affects deer. We caused it by trying to domesticate deer in the 60s, and now it's escaped into the wild. It's transmitted through soil. It hasn't jumped to humans, but there's a good chance that it will. So far, the same eggheads sounding the alarm over coronaviruses are also sounding the alarm over this, but nothing is happening on a policy level. Everyone is just...kinda hoping it works out.

Politics is a career that, alas, tends to attract people who are confident and not anxious. And thus we have leaders who live in the moment, who plan for four years at a time maximum, who don't wake up at 4 am with nightmare scenarios of zombie deer and agricultural workers dying of heatstroke. Our society is structured, in fact, around the present, the eternal now during which we can never learn from the past nor contemplate the future.

And that's why anxiety is a gift that causes me a great deal of misery, but which I dearly wish sometimes that I could pass on to others.

Everything will not be okay. The sooner we wake up to this, the better.

There’s this glurgy poem about the Earth being a few feet in diameter. It’s an incredibly cheesy poem (and will you check out the cheesy website I found when I went searching for it to write this post), but I’m kind of partial to it for what it reveals about human psychology. It ends as follows:

“People would love it, and defend it with their lives because they would somehow know that their lives could be nothing without it.

If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter.”

This gap, between real things and representations of things, is at the heart of something I’ve been struggling to get my head around in recent months. The passion I see for stories, be they movies, games, or—gasp—sometimes novels, is something that I share, and yet it boggles me that as much as they affect culture in a broad sense, they seem to often have little impact on the individuals most devoted to them.
( long and with pictures )

I'm going to talk about the photo of the dead Syrian toddler. You've been warned. I won't show the picture itself, or the other ones like it, because you've all probably seen it by now and I want people who have chosen to not see it to read this entry.

But I'm going to start with a story that I've probably told before, and probably even told on this blog, about images. The year is 1990. My country, among other countries, goes to war with Iraq. Like a good peacenik child of peacenik parents, I am opposed, and am as outspoken about the issue as a precocious 11-year-old can be, which is to say that everyone in school thinks I'm weird. I have lived my entire life in the shadow of the atom bomb, with Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes ringing in my ears. I know what war does.

And yet I didn't. The images in the newspaper, on the television, were of sanitized battle, red dots and green night-vision like a video game, with nothing like the photos of the My Lai massacre to drive it home. One could be forgiven, watching the news, for thinking that smart bombs were so smart that they managed not to kill anyone at all.

As a teenager, I saw the images the news hadn't shown. Banned in Canada, the photo was of the charred corpse of an Iraqi soldier. You can Google that too. He was the enemy, a bad guy, the guys our brave soldiers had fought, and he spent last moments trying to escape a burning car, screaming in agony. This was why I'd opposed the war. I wondered, had those around me seen it, would they have opposed the war too? It's so easy to erase the identity of the enemy, of the Other, when you don't see his suffering.

As a country, we went to war meekly, unquestioningly, like we typically do. Today, I see kids watch those sanitized video game images, dream of going to war themselves. They play Call of Duty and watch drone footage of bombing and relish in the carnage. The victims, real and virtual, are not human to them.

Which brings me to Aylan Kurdi, age three.

Social media does what social media does. The leftists post about the crisis in Syria, washing up on Europe's shores. They cry out for someone to do something. Along comes a shocking photo that jolts everyone. Those previously uninvolved and unaware share it. Facebook bans the images. The discussion shifts from the tragedy to the image of the tragedy. The tone shifts. Everyone becomes a monster.

Sorry, I'll need to talk more about the image of the tragedy than about the tragedy itself. In this post, anyway. If you want to talk about ways to help, that's what the comment section is for, and I'll post any useful information I glean.

The first disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not anyone on either side of the debate.

The second disclaimer: Despite how ugly the tone has gotten online, we're all actually on the same side. Unless you voted Tory or UKIP or are secretly Donald Trump, you probably are pro-migrant justice. If you're not, please do the world a favour and DIAF.

The first strawman: No one on the pro-sharing-the-photo side is saying that anyone is a bad activist or too much of a sensitive special snowflake to look away.

The second strawman: No one actually wants to look at pictures of dead kids on their FB newsfeed, okay? No one wants to see this image. No one wants kids to die.

I managed to find the post with all of the dead kid pictures, remove the thumbnail, and share. It took me about ten minutes to decide whether I should and then figure out how to remove a thumbnail on FB's newest redesign. I personally believe these photos should be seen. I am also aware that they're horrible to look at, and I don't want to see them, and they make me cry. I don't want to trigger anyone.

I posted a second article from the photographer that included a thumbnail with a less graphic photo. That was all last night.

This morning several of my friends posted that they would unfriend anyone who posted the dead kid pictures. Okay. Several other of my friends posted the dead kid pictures. Statistically, if you're interested, 100% of the people I saw write against posting were white Canadians. All of them were parents. Many of the people who posted the photos were people I knew from migrant justice activism and a few of them are Syrian. One of the latter commented on the irony of white Westerners ignoring all the Syrian toddlers butchered by Assad, which is a fair point. Some were parents, some were not. All of the people in this discussion, on both sides, are people that I respect and whose opinions I respect.

(By this afternoon, everyone had moved on to talking about Canada's culpability; the children and their mother would be alive if the Tory government hadn't refused their application for refugee status. The social media cycle is short like that.)

For years, involved in Palestine solidarity and anti-war activism, I posted dead kid pictures, thinking that they would shock the apathetic into action. Then I stopped, because I felt it was disrespectful to the dead and their families, and because I think we get desensitized to pictures of dead bodies. I think the global reaction to the pictures of little Aylan Kurdi illustrates the importance of these images, no matter how horrible it is to look.

A few points of discussion:

Consent of the family: This is the single most important question. Until this afternoon, we didn't know whether Aylan's family wanted the photo of his corpse to be shown. Now we know. The father, who has suffered the worst a person can suffer, wants his child to be a symbol of the refugees' plight. He wants this to be seen.

The feelings of the community: How do these images represent the lives of people in the broader community? I'm not Syrian; when I posted the pictures, I was taking the lead from people more directly involved than I am.

On that note: A friend pointed out, rightly so, that we never see the bodies of dead white children. (I'm not sure if that's entirely true; we certainly did in the Sandy Hook massacre and the Oklahoma City bombing.) It's only black and brown bodies that are reduced to the moments of their deaths rather than to their lives.

The feelings of victims of trauma: The parent who's lost a child, for example, or the survivor of a war zone. That's why I don't think these photos should be forced on anyone (other than Tories, who deserved to have it shoved in their faces). LJ and Tumblr have mechanisms built in to prevent people from being triggered; FB is of course terrible at it. But this deserves consideration, of course.

Bottom line is that these images getting out has already had an impact. The atrocity stares you right in the face. It makes the Conservative politicians responsible duck for cover, at least for a few minutes. It shakes up the apathetic. Which is why I think they need to be seen. Otherwise, little Aylan is just another statistic; after all, don't brown kids always die in large numbers?

Images have power. I can't say why one has more than another—my Syrian friends have been posting horrific images of dead children for years, with little noise generated outside their community—why this one has the potential to topple governments and maybe even save lives.

This is why, personally, I can't look away.

This link, brought to my attention via ed_rex, is worth a read. It's a comparison between the spending patterns of ostensibly "conservative" versus "liberal"* governments that gives lie to the popular conception of thrifty conservatives and tax-and-spend liberals.

Check out those bar graphs being essentially the same. Now, granted, there is not much difference between the Liberal Party and the CCRAP Party. We're not talking about a vast, insurmountable canyon between left and right. Stephen Harper consumes more kittens and Justin Trudeau had better hair until he cut it off, but those are social differences, not economic ones. Their economic policy was more or less the same last time I checked. If your average Canadian understood the slightest thing about economics** we could stay warm during polar vortex season with the sheer heat of all the collective anger that it would generate. But. Math is hard, let's go shopping, only we can't go shopping because the minimum wage hasn't kept up with the cost of living and the only jobs available now are minimum wage retail and food service that you were told you need to go to university if you didn't want to do all your life, and if you want them, prepare to stand in line to apply along with everyone else with a Masters degree.

Anyway.

So-called moderate Canadians love to think of themselves as socially liberal and fiscally conservative, with absolutely no clue as to why they want to be fiscally conservative. (Hint: It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding about economics wherein the model of a private family that must budget and avoid falling into debt is expanded to somehow apply to a city, or a province, or a country, or even an entire planet. But it does not actually work that way. While no one likes the idea of wasting money, thriftiness is not necessarily a virtue when one is trying to, say, maintain highway infrastructure.)

The great lie at the heart of the austerity agenda is that it works. Tighten your belt, don't buy that big screen TV, and later on you can afford to buy a nice car. It might be tolerable to cause suffering, to siphon wealth from the poorest people to the richest, if in the end everyone benefited. (Just kidding. It wouldn't. Bear with me for a second, though.) If slashing environmental regulations and corporate tax actually created jobs, though, would we not have full employment by now? Because governments have been pursuing these policies for practically my entire lifetime, and yet the unemployment rate keeps increasing. We've "recovered" from the Great Recession but the vast majority of people I know—who are among the most privileged people—are still economically precarious. And, surprise surprise, after all that, all of the wealth has still ended up at the top. It's like someone planned it this way.

Which is basically why I want to scream every time someone promotes the myth of fiscal conservatism, because it's just not true. It's just that conservative governments waste money on different things, things that don't actually benefit anyone other than their cronies. Fiscal conservatives like to think of themselves as high-minded, tough but fair, without any sort of understanding or comprehension of the violence brought about by a cut-cut-cut mentality (or the fact that, in the end, absolutely no money is saved, and wealth is just transferred along to the elites).

One of my FB friends loves mayoral candidate John Tory. Like, loves him. Makes borderline homoerotic posts about him every day. It's weird. I see nothing in John Tory to inspire any sort of passion—he's run-of-the-mill fiscal conservative who comes off as more sensible than Ford, but that doesn't say much. You can at least get passionate about Ford, even if, as in my case, it's passionate hatred. Tory's milquetoast, but the harm that such a man can do when given power, when it comes to vital social services relied upon by the most vulnerable populations, is immeasurable. And yet he appeals to moderates because moderates have never thought about why they're moderates.

When you take the food out of the mouths of poor people, you create a cycle of poverty that, as class stratification increases, becomes impossible to escape. When you cut transit, you kill cities. When you drain the lifeblood from schools and libraries, you condemn generations to ignorance. When you gut environmental, labour, and safety regulation, you trash the earth and destroy lives. This is not a moderate position, nor is it "tough but fair." It's extremist. Brutal. Today, I woke up to a story about a fire in a seniors' home in Quebec that killed 32 people. There were no sprinklers in the home, but it still passed provincial safety inspections. They were comparing this tragedy to the train derailment in Lac-Mégantic, which killed 47 people and is still under investigation. Again, cutbacks and lax regulation may have been a factor. There is actually a reason we pay taxes and have governments.

And that is the triumph of conservatism, as it's convinced most of the world (at least the bit that votes) that this constant squeeze, for no payoff for you or anyone you know, is normal. You shouldn't think about it. Be grateful if you save a few pennies in taxes, even as you earn less and spend more for everything else. There Is No Alternative.

* Scare quotes because the economic policies of every mainstream party in North America (I can't speak for other regions) is what we might have, in previous generations, considered conservative. Even the NDP's leadership, if not its rank-and-file, has swallowed the Washington Consensus Kool-Aid with the enthusiasm of a porn star in a bukkake video, despite its myriad observable failures.

** Disclaimer: Beyond having a dilettante's interest in these matters and having slogged through Volume 1 of Das Kapital, I have no background in economics.

The internets, and my little corner of it, are full of big-hearted liberals professing concern for the health and welfare of our Honourable Wife-Beating, Crack-Smoking, I-Did-It-In-A-Drunken-Stupor Mayor. Yes, there's a fair amount of schadenfreude among my friends and to some degree among the media, but the heartfelt pleas for him to "get the help he needs" and all the bleeding-heart sympathy for his addiction problems actually do seem to predominate. Maybe that's why he's had a bump in the polls (as opposed to his usual bumps of coke); people feel sorry for his teary addict routine. At the heart of this loud-mouthed, sexist, racist, homophobic, austerity-pushing pig-rapist is a broken man. Pity him.

I don't.

And let me be clear: I believe that drug addiction is a health issue, not a criminal issue. I believe in the decriminalization of all drugs, including crack. I do not believe that addiction is a choice per se.

However, I also believe that the addict has agency, and that addiction can spiral well beyond the life of the individual afflicted and destroy the lives of others, and to that extent, an addict must be responsible for him or herself. Addiction isn't an excuse. Plenty of addicts live lives of quiet desperation, damaging only themselves; the ones who use their sickness as a bludgeon against others, against their consent, bear some responsibility.

Amidst all the public concern for the Laughable Bumblefuck on the part of the chattering class, I hear little concern for his wife and kids, and their physical and emotional safety. We know he's assaulted his wife. I can't imagine that his kids will grow up undamaged. Where's the sympathy for them?

Amidst all the wishes that he would get the help he needs, where are those volunteering to help addicts who are less white, less rich, less famous? The ones that Ford blocked harm-reduction initiatives for, the ones he suggested dry out in a jail cell, the ones he wanted to run out of town? When are they going to get the help they need?

What about the city? The kids in Scarborough who, because he's run the city for the past three years in a drunken stupor, are still cut off from educational, work, and recreational possibilities because he blocked the expansion of a functional transit system? The working poor who need affordable housing, the destitute who need shelters? Where's the sympathy for all the ordinary people he's fucked over?

Addiction's a tough ride no matter who you are, but Ford is a man who's had literally every possible privilege handed to him and every chance to get clean. He's insanely rich, politically connected, white, male, and heterosexual. If a guy like that can't get his shit together and check into a rehab, fuck him. Even if he did, fuck him anyway. Sobering up is unlikely to make him less of a jizzbag. I work with people who came to this country with nothing, who've had to scramble up to barely surviving and get shat on by the SUN for doing so, and the most out-of-control violent gangbangers I've ever met have destroyed fewer lives than this piece of shit.

At the risk of getting personal, I've been at the receiving end of someone else's drug addiction. Multiple times, actually. It's not pretty. It's not a victimless crime. I see my own experience writ large and ugly and all the guilty mushy liberals praying for his recovery.

All of Toronto is Ford's battered spouse, begging him to get help when we should be booting him in the ass. Let him dry out in a jail cell. Let him beg for change in a cardboard box. We owe every single junkie and dealer and petty thug in Toronto our sympathy and aid before we throw one iota of it in Ford's direction.

Let him destroy himself. The world will be a better place.

Interesting discussion on FB that started from me posting that link to Alex Jones losing his shit (watch it if you haven't already; it's hilarious) and suddenly became about something else. It's old meme in anarchism to declare oneself off the left/right spectrum (no; anarchists are at the extreme of one end or the other), and of course that gets picked up by other Folks With Opinions, most notably many of the Occupy-related groups.

And it is this idea, that one is somehow above the old divisions, that allows whackjobs like Jones and the Truthers to slip into the discourse, muddying the waters with a toxic mixture of paranoia, anti-Semitism, and general asshaberdashery. They proclaim themselves part of the 99%, the champions of the proverbial little guy, even anti-corporate, while the vision they present is some sort of Mad Max libertarian dystopia with every man for himself (women are out of sight; probably making babies because you need a certain amount of civilization to make birth control happen).

Now, I happen to find said whackjobs highly entertaining, but I take umbrage at the suggestion that because they, perhaps, have some opinions regarding Palestine, war in the Middle East, or corporate hegemony that coincide with my own, I should therefore consider them allies and make common cause. They aren't allies; not where Jews, racialized people, women, disabled people, and queer people are concerned. I have to point this out every so often when someone on one of my mailing lists or FB feed posts InfoWars articles—even if the article itself is good, we do our own causes a great deal of harm when we promote the opinions of nasty-ass douchebags. And I find the suggestion that I should overlook the poisonous beliefs of someone like Jones because he's Speaking Truth to Power Against Our Elite Corporate Overlords.

No, sorry. The beliefs he represent are just as harmful to me personally (if not more harmful) and to people more marginalized than I am than those of the dominant right-wing. It's always straight white men who insist that he's worth hearing out, too; people more likely to survive said Mad Max scenario than I would be.

The answer, I'm afraid, is a certain level of ideological rigour and purity. Not, of course, to the point of sectarianism—I am friends with, and do political work with, a number of people with incorrect political lines—but to the point where we at least exclude the voices of people who are fucking idiots and make us look bad. And it means declaring for yourself a position on the left-right spectrum. You are not above it, you are not beyond it, you can certainly explore its nuances and flaws, but you must engage with it.

At any rate, I hope that Jones' latest outburst will help the less discriminating among us on the left to be, well, a bit more discriminating in our choice of information sources.

Though it was written awhile ago, this article on non-survivor privilege is making the rounds on FB today. It horrifies me to think that there are families and supposed friends who pull this kind of shit, but yes, it happens, and I understand that it happens quite a bit. I've seen it happen in communities that I've been a part of, where cohesion and harmony became more important than the wellbeing of survivors.

Not to disability-jack an article on an entirely different sort of privilege, but it really did remind me of living with a disability/chronic/terminal illness. The first duty of the invalid is not to look after her own health, but to ensure that no one around her is inconvenienced by her condition or made to feel uncomfortable by being reminded that not everyone is in perfect health, that bodies fail, and that eventually we all die.

"You're exaggerating, you bitter crip! No one is actually making these demands; you're just imagining it!"

I can't count the number of times these demands have been made on me. It's everything from the "oh God, I don't want to hear about this" face when I'm too tired to lie about how I'm feeling, to the times people have explicitly told me that they don't want to hear about it, to the constant efforts of everyone around me to minimize what I'm going through. It's the bike activists who cheerfully tell me that I should take up cycling because it's soooo good for me and the environment and then look aghast when I tell them that my spine is brittle and if I fall, I die. It's the people at work who, when I quite bluntly say that there is no guarantee whatsoever that I'll recover or ever lead a normal life, reassure me that this is impossible. But it's not reassurance. It's silencing, an attack on my lived experience as a person inhabiting a failing body.

You can't turn disability off, any more than you can turn trauma off, or gender, or skin colour, or sexual orientation. It colours every aspect of your interaction with internal and external realities. It's an added burden to have to lie about it for the sake of other people's comfort, to not greet every, "How are you this fine morning?" with, "well, I'm still tired and I'm still in pain and I'm still terrified about the future." I get it. It's not the nicest thing to be in close proximity to a negative person. You want to shine a bright light on his negativity to make those bad-feelings cockroaches scuttle the fuck back under the rug. But it doesn't work like that.

Part of why I'm so bitter is knowing that in all certainty, I will never have the feeling of a pain-free body, never ride a bicycle, never skateboard, ever again, that there's a good chance that I won't live out my natural lifespan, that even if the tumor is removed, there will always, until I die, be a strong chance of a recurrence. But I'm also bitter because it's exhausting to be around people who demand that I lie to them and tell them that everything will be okay even when I know it won't be. Our entire culture buys into the myth that anything is possible with a can-do attitude with no acknowledgment that certain groups of people are automatically excluded from this truism, and that they are in fact tangibly hurt by its existence.

So got that, non-survivors? Don't ask survivors to lie to you. Able-bodied people? Don't ask disabled people to lie to you. It's not rocket science, but it can sure as fuck make the world a better place.

So there have been not one, but two Nice Guy posts on The Face. This is rare for me, because my Face list is pretty small. I don't have a lot of relatives and old friends from high school—you know, the people who normally post right-wing shit and racist forwards—so I get in comparatively few flamewars. Generally speaking, my feed is 40% far-left politics, 20% nerd shit, 10% cute animal pictures, 10% reposts from George Takei (I guess that's nerd shit, but it requires a whole other category owing to its frequency), and 20% pictures of people's kids. (I'm at that age where friends are sprogging, so right now it's like a nursery on there. Don't worry, I'm still not going to reproduce.)

Accordingly, it's surprising to see something irritating enough that I need to say something that I know is going to offend the person who said it, but I'm compelled to do so anyway because they were being Wrong on the Internet. And should know better. Lately, that something has been the revival of Nice Guy Talk.

( a tired rant, but apparently it needs to be hauled out again )

Via fengi: New Tomb Raider prequel gives us Lara Croft's backstory, and surprise! It's rape!

Because there was clearly a shortage of Strong Female Characters^TM whose backstory involves rape.

I've never played Tomb Raider, but I do appreciate the character a bit. Yes, she's fanservice, but she's also fun. She gets to run around and do stuff, and, sad to say, there are still very few female characters in mass culture who get to run around and do stuff in a traditionally male dominated field simply because it's fun. I don't even see why she needs a backstory, any more than the backstory we get for Indiana Jones (difficult relationship with father, snake trauma, moving on to the adventures now). Lara Croft is basically Indiana Jones with boobs, and that's just fine, really.

But enough with that. On to the justifications!

Rosenberg brings up Die Hard, another movie where we begin a relationship with a human, vulnerable character and through an intense experience he emerges as a hero. It was important to show her as an innocent, vulnerable character at the beginning of the game. “People really identify with that,” Rosenberg said.

Right. I forgot the bit where John McClane gets raped, despite having seen Die Hard more times than I can count. Maybe because John McClane doesn't need a rapey backstory to be seen as a hero or for the audience to identify with him.

“I would say that the outcome is closer to something like Batman Begins or Casino Royale, where the character at the end is certainly Batman or James Bond, but not necessarily the one from before,” he said.

You know what else I missed? The part where Bruce Wayne gets raped. James Bond got some electrodes to the balls if I remember correctly, but I don't think he got raped either. And somehow they both managed to become kickass without a rapey backstory. In fact, I can't think of a single male pop culture character whose backstory involves rape. But pick a Strong Female Character^TM, any Strong Female Character^TM, and someone's gotten rapey with her somewhere. Because obviously no woman can be Strong without trauma in her background, and there is no trauma but rape.

I didn't read the comments but I bet they're full of neckbeards defending this, er, creative decision. Am I right?

ETA: A couple of you raised a good point, which is that most women experience some form of sexual violence in their lifetimes, and why should SFC be exceptions? My objection to this line of reasoning:

1) My problem is not with saying that rape happens (otherwise I wouldn't be hugely obsessed with Game of Thrones right now), it's with rape as a motivating factor. I spent a miserably large percentage of my early adolescence being groped by horny boys on the playground. This did not make me into a superhero. It made me self-conscious about my developing body.

2) As a motivation, rape is incredibly cliché. Want to create a heroine? Can't she be motivated by, I don't know, concern for poor people being forced out of their homes because of gentrification? Or maybe she's a fangirl who wants desperately to be a superhero, so she deliberately alters her body until she has incredible abilities (okay, this idea was already used in The Authority, but I still think it's fantastic). Or, like, anything other than rape. Male heroes have all kinds of motivations, from the death of their parents by violent crime, to getting bitten by a radioactive spider, to girlfriends getting fridged, to loyalty to queen and country, to coming from a family in the hero business, to rationally thinking about it and deciding that it would be a good idea. Why can female heroes be only motivated by one thing?

3) If we're going for realism, why is it always violent stranger-rape? Most rape victims know their attacker. It's usually a family member, friend, or lover. If you want a rape story because it's realistic, maybe make the rape a bit more like what most women experience.

4) But I don't want realism because this is a videogame. Videogames are for escapism and wish fulfillment. Just like I don't want to see a movie where John McClane gets shot in the face by Hans Gruber in the first 10 minutes because that's what would happen in real life, I don't want to see the character I'm pretending to be get raped.

5) So if videogames are about wish fulfillment, then why include rape? I can only conclude that those playing aren't identifying with Lara Croft; they're identifying with her attackers and getting off on it. And that's frightening and disgusting.

Things sabotabby is already sick of hearing:

"Violence!"
Which is very seldom the actual violence of the cops cracking in heads or Barrick Gold literally and figuratively raping the Third World. No, it's always, "some Black Bloc moron smashed a Starbucks, boo-hoo, violence is WRONG." I don't have a high opinion of the Black Bloc, but it's slightly higher than my opinion of people who go on about the Black Bloc as if they're the only non-electoral political force worth mentioning.

"Anarchists did/plotted/thought [insert bad thing here]"
One of these days it's actually going to be anarchists doing it. I'm pretty sure this time it was meth heads, though.

"Occupy is unfocused and has no leaders or demands."
Stop trying to make me be an anarchist again.

"Occupy is the most important political movement in the history of ever."
STFU hippie.

"Cops are people too!"
Yes, they are. Some people are assholes.

Drum circles.
Can we stop with the drum circles? I swear to God yesterday I saw a drum circle entirely composed of 18-year-old girls dressed like they were from the 60s, and I couldn't suppress a rant about how they probably were not in any way politically active before six months ago and did they go out and buy all that stuff, or was it in their closets already? And if so, how did it get there? Anyway, if the Left really wants to get anywhere it must abandon drum circles. Damn kids get off my lawn.

"911 was an inside job/Obama is a Nazi Illuminati Muslim Communist NWO dupe/whatever conspiracy theory is in these days"
Thanks to Jon Ronson, I'm now more affectionately amused than irrationally irritated by conspiracy nuts. We still need to purge them though.

"Street protests don't do anything!"
Yeah, you're right. You know what's a lot more effective? Sitting on your ass, eating Cheetos, and posting to Facebook about how street protests don't do anything.

Okay, that's it for the rant. Here's how Toronto's May Day looked.



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Shorter sabotabby: May Day was awesome but haters gonna hate.