We Manufacture Those, By The Way

If there's one thing the movies of the late seventies through early nineties taught us - especially sci fi and horror movies - it's that we know exactly where humanity's enemies live.

No, not this one.

"But John," I hear you cry. I hear you because we're in space, and everyone can hear you scream. "But John. The bad guy in this movie is the aliens! Or the people that made the aliens! Or Ian Holm! Or humanity itself!"

A likely story.

So a little background. This is stuff that, if you like the Alien movies but you don't like Prometheus, you might have missed - but it quite cleverly frames how the entire universe came to be the way it did, and why things are done the way they are done.

This is Peter Weyland.

Yes, I am using his old-man picture, rather than the dashing flashbacks we are treated to in the TedTalk spinoff video and in the beginning of Alien Covenant.

So - we all remember the beginning of Alien, when the crew all wake up in those sleeping pods, blinking sleep out of their eyes, finding out where they are, how long they have been out. We remember Aliens, wherein Ripley's pod is discovered drifting in space, and she is all safe and secure inside.

Those sleepers exist because of Peter Weyland, because Peter Weyland had two wishes: 1) to live forever and 2) to meet the beings that made mankind. Literally, the technology was developed for him, and in part by him, to allow him to survive long enough to make this happen. This is because Peter Weyland - founder of Weyland Corporation - has a god complex, further shored up by him being obscenely wealthy.

He made his OWN life, obviously. The Weyland line of android synthetics, beginning with David. Why wouldn't a man believe he was god if he could create his very own servant underclass that was expected to be superior in skill and capability but inferior in power and importance?

And in part, Weyland's quest for those creators - that he fully believed existed - led to a colonisation program that spread mankind across the stars.

Of course we are perhaps more familiar with the merged company, Weyland-Yutani.

While the first AvP film features one of Peter Weyland's predecessors, the second (vastly inferior) AvP film features one Ms. Yutani, of Yutani Corporation - who takes possession of a piece of Predator technology. While the Alien vs Predator movies are of questionable quality, they do actually thread reasonably well into the canon of the rest of the movies (with the potential exception of Predator from 2018, which I haven't actually seen yet - perhaps I ought to change that tonight).

It can be inferred from the actions of the company during the movies that it is aware of both the Yautja (Predators) and the Xenomorphs by the time of the events of Alien. So it almost certainly knows just how dangerous interfering with beings like them can really be.

The company, of course, doesn't care.

In a world wherein you have multiple classes of people - and the Alien universe is one such universe, just look at how the shares are divided between the crew (half shares for the engineers, full shares for the people wearing uniform) - then one of the dynamics that comes about is risks taken being pushed downwards. It's why, when the stock market crashes, regular people suffer quite a lot. It's why, when a business goes under, the workers all get laid off and their pensions get raided, but the owner got to leave two weeks ago with a nice golden handshake.

If there's a catastrophic failure somewhere, it is always someone else putting in the work and taking the actual risk, so it will always be someone else that takes the fall.

So of course, Weyland-Yutani wants the creature. It wants everything it can get. Corporate culture has bred several layers of corporate individual who will do just about anything to gain a promotion or favour within the ranks, has been doing so since the mid-1980s. There's no end of individuals that will overlook the regulations, morals, laws, anything, in order to get a bigger cut of a pie - or a whole pie of their own.

There's always a Carter Burke.

Weyland-Yutani are the real bad guys. Without the immense hubris of Peter Weyland, none of this would have happened. Without a culture that we have cultivated as a society for almost forty years, shored up at every angle by individuals sympathetic to it and people defending it because it might one day profit them.

One of humanity's greatest enemies wears a suit, has an office, and talks about people dying as "collateral" and "PR".

Art imitates life.

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Best Of The Bad Bunch

Having just come back from Nine Worlds - and there will probably be a blog about that - I am absolutely shattered, having socialled myself into a coma. What this means is that the blog will not be some kind of epic sojourn into perfected academic understanding of any particular topic.

So I am, instead, going with a suggestion provided by my lovely significant other, inspired by a brilliant panel featuring several brilliant authors:

Who are your seven favourite villains?

Well, alright then. Hold onto your britches. In no particular order.

Carter Burke

YOU KNEW IT WAS COMING.

Okay so Carter Burke, right? If you haven't seen the 1986 action science fiction horror movie Aliens, you haven't lived - especially the special edition, look for the sentry guns and the scenes in the colony before the marines show up. It is my literal favourite movie ever made, if the last blog didn't clue you in on that fact. If you haven't read it, it's about Bishop, go read it. Now. Yeah, now. Then come back here.

You back? Good. Okay.

Carter Burke. The man who made the xenomorph look reasonably honourable. The greasiest rat-fuck son of a bitch to ever become dogmeat. When he bites the dust, you feel the most deep sense of "yeah fuck you" satisfaction, because you hate him. You hate his slick smarmy attitude, you hate his duplicity, you hate his lying fucking face, you hate the way he makes these empty hand gestures and gapes like a dying fish. You hate him. You hate him so thoroughly and so completely.

And then he gets his head fucking eaten.

Delicious.

-

Rick Deckard

TW-TW-TWIIIIIST

You see, Blade Runner is a noir flick; this means that the morality is all higgledy-piggledy. So you need to look deeper than the surface when you look for who is right and who is wrong, and in a previous blog, I talked all about why Roy Batty wasn't wrong.

So we have Rick Deckard. He used to be a Blade Runner - he still is one - and a Blade Runner is a person who, in this setting at least, hunts down Replicants and retires them. Given that Replicants need a very specific test to even tell them apart from humans, what that basically means is that Deckard hunts down people and kills them. The only crime those people commit is to not do what the company that makes them tells them to, such as wanting to live for more than four years.

Rachel doesn't know she's a Replicant. Roy does, and wants to live. Deckard wonders at one point if he might be. (He isn't, by the way. I will die on that hill.) Both the original and 2049 really serve to erase the difference between Replicants and people. So - yeah, Deckard's a professional murderer cleaning up corporate messes, who would retire himself if they told him to. He forces himself on vulnerable girl, and gets piss drunk because he can't deal with his job but keeps doing it anyway.

Sure, the greater villains of the piece are Tyrell and Bryant - the corporate overlord and the demanding police chief - but Deckard, being presented as the protagonist while actually being an assassin for hire, surely takes the cake there.

-

Megatron

"I would have waited an eternity for this. It's over, Prime."

Sure, there are a great many different Megatrons in different Transformers timelines - but all of them are awesome, let's face it.

I am particularly fond of the gladiatorial pit-fighter of Kaon presented in Transformers Prime. He just oozes hostility and nastiness. When presented with perhaps certain death, at the mercy of a human controlling an industrial drill, Megatron tells him simply:

"Kill me now, boy. Or you will never get another chance."

Jack doesn't, obviously.

In another episode he has to fight a super-powered Insecticon bare-handed, does so, wins, then turns on the Autobots and dares them to have a crack at him too.

He then falls the fuck over, because he's near death himself.

Bad. Ass.

-

The Tessier-Ashpool Family

You know what Cyberpunk is - I already talked about Blade Runner - now meet the real villains of the novel that pretty much started it all, Neuromancer.

The Neuromancer in the title is an AI. As is Wintermute, who gave their name to my Starfinder character. They are both created as a way for an insanely wealthy family to keep maintaining their fortune and their legacy, a family that hated the earth enough to build a literal space arcology - the Villa Straylight - and that hated being in space so much that they just stayed there, in their baroque nightmare, being frothing mad and wealthy beyond understanding.

We encounter this place in the third act of the novel, a novel which begins in the murky underworld of Chiba City in Japan. Chiba is a place profoundly ruled by poverty and crime. Case - the main character - rents a plastic gun early on, just in case something bad happens. He rents a plastic gun. That's just a thing he does. Imagine the kind of world that creates that demand. Now imagine the kind of people who have more money than ACTUAL sense, like literally, who hang in orbit up above that world.

If you need more evidence as to their literal evil, one of them - the patriarch - has sex with and consequently murders a clone of his own daughter.

So fuck these people and everything they stand for.

-

Carnage

In terms of Marvel villains, there's few I like more than Carnage.

I mean... he's pretty great, isn't he? When you think about it. Like Venom is cool, but Carnage is like cool but injected with maniac juice. Venom is a dangerous foe to Spider-Man, who defeats his spider-sense and can catch him totally unaware. Carnage is all that, plus, if he wants to, he can turn his hand into an axe and eviscerate you with it. Something he is very willing to do, because he loves eviscerating people.

There's just something so much more dangerous about the Carnage symbiote than most other bad guys in the Marvel universe. He sits between the huge deific threats (Apocalypse, Galactus, Thanos) and the powerful-but -mortal bad guys (Omega Red, Doctor Octopus, The Mandarin). It took one of the literal most powerful heroes in the Marvel universe to actually put him down, via flying him up into orbit and ripping him in half.

See?

He's scary. He's violent. He's hard to defeat in a way that is morally sound. You can slap around a mugger, you can web up a thug, but Carnage? Carnage demands that you run, or fight. Just to survive, let alone to win.

And when you consider that the symbiote can infect other people... like, say, Wolverine... or Juggernaut...

...or Multiple Man...

Yeah, just thinking about that makes me sweaty.

-

Donnie Darko

I'm gonna have to explain this one...but also I kind of don't want to.

See, the entire trick to the movie Donnie Darko involves watching it, understanding it, and then interpreting it properly. If you do all these things, then I daresay you will agree with me insofar as that, in terms of the bad guy - Donnie is that guy.

Sure, there are worse people.

I mean, Kitty. Kitty is the most horrible, awful individual I can imagine. She's like that pink flowery shithole woman from Harry Potter but actually real. We all know someone like Kitty.

And Patrick Swayze... like, (SPOILERS) when you find out some wealthy pseudo-Christian self-help guru has a bunch of child porn stashed in his closet, you're probably not surprised. He's still an asshole, and he still needs punishing.

I am not going to go into the core of the plot. What I am going to do is tell you to go and watch this movie, and then understand this:

Donnie looked at what Donnie had done, and decided that what Donnie had done was the wrong thing to do.

Villains often think they are heroes of their own story. It's rare that they can witness evidence to the contrary and realise the fact.

He does.

-

The last villain is one that may surprise you, and herein I will present all the choices I went through before settling on one:

The Human Race
SPACE!
Stalin
War
Yourself
Film Production Companies
Internalised Homophobia
Religious Extremism
That Guy On The Bus That Always Wants To Talk To You Before 8am
My Grandmother
George Lucas
Whoever Threw Out The Whedon Script For Alien 4
Nazis
Whoever Didn't Throw Out The Script For AvP Requiem
Rocky Balboa
Stalin
Impressionist Painters
Lists
Wasps
Buzzfeed
Calorific Content
Empty Carbs
That Weird Feeling You Get When You Drink A Cold Beverage Too Quickly Like Not Brain Freeze But Like A Chill In Your Throat That Is Just Super Uncomfortable
Superman
Yourself
Batman
Magneto
Professor Xavier
Nazis
Yoko Ono
Tyler Durden
Scott Pilgrim
Toxic Masculinity
When They Change The Recipe Of That Thing You Like And It Just Tastes Kind Of Wrong Now Like Not Super Different But Different Enough That You Don't Like It Much Any More And You Can't Explain Why
That d20 You Used The Last Time You Failed A Save
Lists
Yourself

No, really. Yourself. From Enter The Gungeon.

So to clarify.

Enter The Gungeon is a super-fun twin-stick bullet hell game with an amazing soundtrack, superb pacing, graphics to die for, replayability out the ass - it's just great, I can't recommend it enough. If you don't believe me, go watch a review or LP. Try Dunkey, his one is pretty much on point.

You see those crosshairs?

You, as the player, are entering the Gungeon in order to take - from its depths - a gun that shoots into the past, to kill your own mistakes. That is your end goal, the reason why you decide to enter this mad labyrinth filled with bullets that shoot you with smaller bullets, and enemies that are puns on firearm terms. This is why you bullet hell. This is why you have to live.

And when you lose all your health, where in most games you would be killed by the thing that killed you - in Enter The Gungeon, you get shot by the time gun.

You are literally shooting yourself from the future.

The thing is, THAT is what kills you. That is the thing that stops you. Not the bullet that the cute little shotgun shell just shot at you. It's the bullet YOU shoot.

One of our greatest enemies is ourselves. Our doubt, our internalised hatreds and fears, our damage, our dissonance. Of course, we have a lot more enemies than that - systems that are rigged against us, people that hate us for being us, people that casually harvest their fortunes while damning the rest of us to a forever up-hill climb. One of the things we can definitely work on changing is ourselves.

And a thing we should definitely stop doing is shooting ourselves before we have a chance to fail.

...huh.

Well done, John.

So yeah. There you go. My seven favourite villains.

Normal service resumes on Sunday.

I May Be Synthetic, But I'm Not Stupid

I'd like to open with Asimov's three laws of robotics.

1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Get it? Got it? Good.

Aliens is my favourite movie, something I have established before - and it is my not very humble opinion that it is a far more clever movie than it lets on. There's several world-class performances in this movie, and not just from the principle main cast too - perhaps one of the best performances in this movie is put in by the legendary Lance Henriksen, in his portrayal of the (spoilers) android, Bishop.

Let's talk about the first time we really meet Bishop - no, not when he walks past out of Cryo.

No no no, when we MEET him. In THIS scene, in the mess hall, right here.

See, this scene establishes character and setting, and it does so with great subtlety. It does so without you even realising it is happening, because these people are just playing out their roles, right? They're just being the people you know they are.

So let's review.

In this scene, we have all the non-commissioned Marines dining together, while the Lieutenant decides to eat on a separate table with the two civilian contractors - a fact that is noted, and interpreted as aloofness. This is an assumption that carries through until it's revealed that he's not really aloof - he's just inexperienced, and has no idea how his soldiery would perceive him doing the very basic thing of eating with Burke and Ripley. After all, none of the Marines want to eat with the civvies - and they'd just have to sit there by themselves. So it's the right thing to do to keep them company, right?

As much of an asshole as Hudson can be, he still respects Sergeant Apone, referring to him as "Top" when he enquires about the mission - but Apone doesn't know, so he spins a joke about colonists and their virginity. A further divide between the soldiery and Ripley in particular. This is a hyper-macho social environment, and it remains to be seen whether or not these Marines are all talk or not; an impression further portrayed by Frost and Hudson slapping hands over "Arcturan Poontang". Spunkmeyer has a smart mouth, but Hicks replies to his derision regarding the food with fatherly advice, humorous or not: "It's good for you, boy, eat it."

As this happens, in the picture above, we can see Bishop offering people food.

This is easily seen as his job - we don't know who or what he is yet, but he's been established as not a soldier (he's not sat with them) but not quite a distant civilian (not sat with them either) - and also, he's interacting with the troops directly, quietly, socially, positively - but in a subservient role. Everyone else has gone to retrieve their own main meal, but here he is, handing out cornbread to people and not, himself, eating.

And then this happens.

"Bishop, do the knife thing, man."

Further character establishment. Specifically we establish that Hudson is a clown, and that the Marines know Bishop, and have known him for longer than their new Lieutenant - no shared experience with them, but this is an event that has happened with Bishop and the Marines before. Hence the cheers and jeers from the others, until he caves in and...

Obeys.

Later - when the scene has played out as we all know it does - Bishop explains to Ripley that he cannot "harm, or by omission of action allow to be harmed, a human being", which is almost word-for-word a repeat of the First Law of Robotics. He states it is part of his behaviour inhibitors, which Ash - from Alien - simply wouldn't have. Perhaps due to what happened in Alien, even if the events of the movie are officially denied by Weyland-Yutani, or perhaps due to other events wherein the "twitchy" Hyperdyne 120-A/2s have hurt people.

Now if Bishop just outright said "I can't hurt you, I'm not allowed," then this would be a throwaway line - but he phrases it in almost exactly the same way as the First Law is written; and if he is encoded with the First Law, then it isn't a huge assumption to believe he is encoded with the Second and Third laws, as well.

So what happens in this moment is the Second Law is invoked - Bishop must obey the instruction given to him by a human, even if he initially resists - despite the fact that it can cause him physical harm, because the Third Law implicitly gives way to the Second Law. So of course he will relent, and of course they know he will.

As this goes on, Drake and Vasquez, in left of shot, exchange a look - she slaps his arm and he gets up, wandering back behind Bishop casually and up to Hudson's left hand side. I like this look, because it's clear throughout the movie that Drake and Vasquez are very close, having a bond over and above that which is shared by anyone else in this unit, and one that appears to also be entirely platonic.

Then he does this.

For one thing I love the fact that Hudson grumbles at Drake for what he is doing - clearly indicating that as the class clown he doesn't appreciate being shown up by the far more confident and capable Drake - but his real surprise is shown by Bishop going along with it.

Another thing - see those brackets mounted into the table? All of the Marines are eating out of standardised lunch trays that fit into those brackets. Clearly this is a design nod to the fact that there might be a sudden shift in momentum or similar, or that artificial gravity may fail. Just a nice touch.

Here, though, could have been a moralistic dilemma for Bishop.

He's not allowed to hurt Hudson, directly or by omission of action, even if Drake tells him to - the Second Law can't subvert the First Law.

He could have refused the order, but that would also involve refusing Hudson's own order, which was made without any perceived risk to Hudson. Which he isn't allowed to do.

So he does the next best thing.

He puts his own hand directly over Hudson's, overlapping somewhat as Lance Henriksen actually has larger hands than Bill Paxton. Which is a good thing.

In this circumstance, he is obeying the First Law by placing himself in harm's way, so that the knife will harm him before it ever harms a human. In doing so, he is obeying the instructions given to him by both humans involved in this scenario - and he is invested in not harming himself as per the Third Law, which gives him further motivation to not miss.

We all know what happens next.

Look at their faces.

Vasquez and Apone are loving it - she knew exactly what Drake was planning. Drake is satisfied, amused by Hudson's constant terrified scream. Bishop is so focused on what he is doing that he doesn't have a facial expression. He's too busy not hurting himself (Third Law) OR Hudson (First Law).

It bears mention, as an aside, that this scene was shot as-is and sped up - and that while Bishop's knife trick was part of the script, Hudson's hand being involved was not. The entire cast and crew involved discussed the scene, how to do it, and agreed that Mark Rolston should be the one to force Bill Paxton's hand under Lance Henriksen's. EVERYONE knew it was going to happen...aside from Bill Paxton. So that look of terror is real. Even if the production knife is blunt, Henriksen stood a good chance of hurting both of them during the shoot. Of course Henriksen wasn't worried. He'd practiced this a lot.

Bishop gives Hudson his knife back, thanks him, and walks away. Drake puts the tray back, slaps Hudson's shoulder amiably and tells him to enjoy his meal. We're left with Hudson looking visibly shaken at his own uninjured hand.

Brilliance.

Bishop walks back to the civilian table, offers the remains of the cornbread to those at the table, and then notices that he's nicked his finger in the showboating. Something it was entirely possible for him to do without actually hurting Hudson, given that his hands were bigger.

"I thought you never miss, Bishop," quips Burke. Which is interesting. It indicates he knows Bishop, or at least has heard anecdotal evidence of the already-established prior behaviour of the Marines and their accompanying artificial person. Arguably, he wouldn't have missed if he didn't have Hudson's hand trapped underneath his own - the necessity for protecting the person leading to a lapse of care in terms of protecting himself.

Ripley's following reaction is understandable - and Bishop's alarm at her fear of him, given that he knows he can't hurt anyone. Of course, she wouldn't know. She's been out of the loop for almost sixty years. Sigourney Weaver's acting in that moment is stellar, by the way - she glances, she realises what she is seeing, she turns to face the threat and leans back, head tilting back so far she is almost looking at him with sanpaku, her words of recrimination toward Burke coming out in a rush. It's a brilliant moment which is sold so well by Weaver that you can't help but feel her alarm yourself.

It's when he explains that he is bound by behavioural inhibitors to never hurt a human, and then rather tactlessly offers her some cornbread, that she loudly makes her feelings on the matter clear. Her precise words to him:

"Just stay away from me, Bishop. You got that straight?"

This scene alone is a goldmine for Henriksen's portrayal of Bishop. The hints all the way throughout this scene as to his nature, before the reveal of the white blood, should tell you what he is - and sets you up for the revelation, leaving you to just accept it. Of course he's an android. He's acted like one, he's been treated like one. Subconsciously the character has been set up for us to be the thing he is.

Further down the rabbit hole.

Ripley orders Bishop to stay away from her. It is done out of anger, out of fear, and out of alarm - she has an understandable suspicion of the behaviour of any android, let alone a company plant as she must suspect Bishop to be, given that he is canonically the spitting image of the man who runs Weyland Yutani in the events of Alien 3 (and presumably this movie, as the two are separated by almost no time whatsoever, perhaps a month maximum).

It is 55 minutes and 34 seconds before Bishop actually speaks to her again, almost an hour. Not to a group that she is a part of - directly to her. In that time the Marines have landed, they've made their initial investigation, found Newt, cleaned her up, entered the atmosphere processor, been ambushed, been almost wiped out, lost their Cheyenne dropship, lost their APC, witnessed Hudson's first breakdown, salvaged what they can from the wreckage of the APC, found out that they can expect rescue in two and a half weeks and witnessed Hudson's second breakdown.

He only speaks to her when the group are in a resource-restricted emergency situation. The group knowing what he is doing and where he is going is important, so there are no breaches of security, and so that his time can be efficiently used in treating a member of the group who is seriously injured and also trying to discover a way to defend themselves against the xenomorphs. Ripley's order to "stay away from me" (Second Law) is countermanded by her requirement to know what he is doing for the safety and security of the group as a whole (First Law), seeing as she has established herself as a competent leadership figure in the absence of the incompetent Lieutenant Gorman.

Likewise in a scene later, in which he is presenting his findings to the group - Ripley primary among them - he does so knowing that Ripley has shown discomfort and displeasure at his presence, but knowing that conveying the information he has is likewise important survival. It's at the end of this scene, wherein Ripley orders him to destroy the samples, that he lets slip an important bit of information.

"Mister Burke gave instructions that they were to be kept alive in stasis for return to the company labs...he was very specific about it."

This instruction he was given only gets brought up when Ripley gives him a conflicting instruction. That the samples could do harm to people isn't a metric that comes into it - fourth, fifth and sixth degrees of separation from harm done is a sticky area to get into in terms of absolute laws - but as he states later: he may be synthetic, but he's not stupid. So when Ripley states he wants them destroyed, he doesn't quibble. He immediately informs her of the vaguely potentially dangerous situation that Burke had ordered him to instate, and in doing so, forces her to resolve the discrepancy between the two instructions. He can't tell Burke no; that would break the Second Law, unless his action would directly cause harm. He CAN engineer a situation in which Burke can be forced by another person to rescind his instruction, and thus, he can conflict-free follow Ripley's instruction, which I daresay he is happy to do.

When it comes to the realisation that the atmosphere processor is set to explode, and the only way to get off the planet is to manually re-align a satellite dish at the far end of the complex, Bishop volunteers.

There's several reasons to do so. For one thing, as he says, he's the only person qualified to remote fly the second dropship from the Sulaco. He conversationally adds, after that statement:

"Believe me, I'd prefer not to. I'm synthetic, but I'm not stupid."

The balance of this is easy.

In the scenario presented, perhaps one of the marines would stand a greater chance of making it through the tunnel unmolested, reaching the satellite dish and doing the requisite technical work - Hudson has demonstrated significant electronic competency multiple times in the movie, further proven by him being one of the qualified motion detector operators.

As Bishop establishes, though - Bishop is a better choice to remote-pilot the vehicle, increasing the chance that it will land without incident and be capable of conveying the marines off-world. Also, if Bishop is ambushed and killed during his trip through the tunnel or while aligning the dish, then it is him who has died in the line of duty - rather than one of the humans.

He isn't qualified to fight. He literally rejects the firearm that Vasquez hands him, in a cinematic moment that I adore - she gives it to him without a second thought, as she is a Marine, and having a weapon to defend yourself with is second nature. He gives it back to Ripley, knowing that if it came down to pulling the trigger, he'd be dead already. The look on his face.

That's why he never volunteers for any combat operations - he would be more of a hindrance to his human team-mates than an asset, and would thus put their lives at risk more by his presence than his absence. In this scenario, though - the lives of all the humans are best served by him doing the job, a metric that balances the primacy of the First Law perfectly over his Third Law programming to protect himself.

The last thing he says before they close and seal the conduit behind him is to tell Ripley to watch her fingers, before he starts to shuffle down the crawlspace; Vasquez murmuring "Vaya con dios, man," as she welds the plate back.

He may be crawling down a two-hundred-meter choke-space tunnel toward certain death, but the last social interaction he has with the people who didn't even ask him to do this is to look out for the safety and well-being of the woman that previously ordered him to stay away from her.

In the scene earlier in the movie when Spunkmeyer brings some supplies to Bishop - who turns and looks at him in a vaguely creepy way, but Spunkmeyer's response is more akin to dealing with someone who is spacing out than an inhuman machine - wherein Lance Henriksen had suggested he wear special contact lenses to make his eyes creepy, to give him the appearance of inhumanity. James Cameron did a screen test for the scene and found that the way Henriksen played the scene out, from his coldness and distance to Spunkmeyer to his only really seeming to engage when he is studying the xenomorph under his microscope, was creepy enough.

That's the two ends of this character - a nuanced, textured individual who is a stand-out personality in a unit full of alpha gung-ho soldiers. A stellar job of character acting from a stellar actor. Both Henriksen in Aliens and Ian Holm in Alien put in simply breathtaking performances, for two different reasons - and of course, Holm's performance informs Henriksen's in terms of trying to make Bishop a counterpoint to Ash. No pretence of humanity, here - in fact, the only reason Ripley didn't know was because Burke should have told her but didn't. The Marines all know who Bishop is, and they like and respect him. He does his job, and they tolerate his personality quirks, and they trust his competencies as he trusts theirs.

Just another example of fantastic character from my favourite movie. Part of my reasons why it IS my favourite movie.

Saturday Morning Villainry

If you were born when I was born, and watched as many cartoons as I did, then you are probably well acquainted with villainry of a specific sort.

Cast your eyes over this little bevvy of bastards (original artwork here: http://batkong40.deviantart.com/art/80-s-Animated-Villians-557990209 )

We all know who THESE folks are, surely.

The maniacal Megatron, leader of the Decepticons. Mumm-Ra the Ever Living, sworn enemy of the Thundercats. Skeletor, perpetual thorn in Eternia's side. Cobra Commander, GI Joe's constant nemesis. Shredder, leader of the Foot Clan, whom the Turtles battle at every turn.

All indisputable bad guys of the most epic quality. All, as Don John from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing would put it, "Plain Dealing Villains". You know what they are about the moment you clap eyes on them.

They were so ridiculous, weren't they?

I mean as we all grow up and become adults we know that no villain looks like this. Nobody deliberately bedecks themselves with the trappings of mwahaha evil and does what these people do. I mean some of their truly most incredible plans include erecting a pyramid of blackness around the earth to block out the sun, unleashing a mostly uncontrollable iron titan to raze Eternia to the ground, and Megatron's biggest and weirdest plans are just erratic in the extreme. Hypnotising twenty-somethings in nightclubs for unknown reasons, convincing the world that the Autobots are evil by very dubious means (THIS ACTUALLY WORKED), and drilling to the core of the planet are all means by which the gladiator from Kaon thought he could secure victory.

They aren't the only crooks, obviously. I mean just name a cartoon. Captain Planet fought a whole host of bad guys who randomly polluted things as if that would benefit them in any way. I mean some of them weren't even making any money. They were just deliberately fucking up the rainforest for no apparent reason. Doc Terror and Hacker from Centurions were similar - they just acted douchey as if that would get them more likes on Instagram.

But then we all grew up. We started looking for nuanced antagonists. Sometimes, we found them. If we look at Alien we find a dual antagonist - the instinct-driven inhuman xenomorph, incapable of good or bad, simply doing that which it does, and the faceless corporation so determined to exploit aforementioned xenomorph that it is willing to give up the lives of its employees to secure the dangerous creature for profitable ends.

We started seeing bad guys in the regular world, with motives that were understandable that we could almost sympathise with (and in a few places, actually could sympathise with totally). We found Roy Batty and his quest for more life; we found the competing forces of nature and industry; we found antagonists of every stripe, some more like us than we liked, some more like those four-colour bad guys that we had grown up with. A whole spectrum of supervillains.

We start seeing them in real life, too. We see the faces of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ed Gein, Charles Manson. We realise that evil still lives, still exists in the world beyond the cartoons that we watched with our cereal on a Saturday morning. We realise that the antics of Megatron - a huge, mighty, despicable tyrant - are still more bearable and tolerable than those of, say, Luis Garavito. (If you don't know who he is - look him up - his nickname is La Bestia.)

...and then we have the current leaders of the United Kingdom and the United States.

Now every time I see the Cheeto holding up a piece of paper, another executive order, another bill, I get nervous. Because the first few made you think - well sure, it can't keep up this pace the entire time he's in power, can it? He can't keep signing these bills, which are clearly pretty shit for most of the population. Like every single thing this guy does seems to be something that Cobra Commander would do if he was in charge. Every single thing.

A selection of those bills that have been signed include trashing the Affordable Care Act (yes, he literally got rid of affordable healthcare, it means what it sounds like), promising to build the big fucking wall that won't stop drugs or people entering the US, making women's lives harder the entire world over, send federal authorities into every city that don't do what he says, fuck with the lives of immigrants from the Middle East (but not those countries he has business or military deals with), and force through pipelines that are mostly (if not universally) considered a bad idea.

Meanwhile, the Wicked Witch of Westminster is engaging in similar shennanigans, promising a trashing of trade deals and making vague threats of engineering better ones (usually with people like the Cheeto), cutting funds to objectively good things (The NHS and renewable energy), promising to spend billions on nuclear weapons that don't work, and indicating a willingness to deploy troops we can't afford to properly equip into countries we won't accept innocent refugees from.

...see, that's not evil like real world evil. That's not subtle. That's not the kind of thing a taut drama is written about, like Frost/Nixon or like the extra-judiciary murders conducted by Mossad in Munich.

This is Saturday Morning Evil.

How do we fight this? We aren't Optimus Prime, we aren't Lion-O or He-Man or G.I. Joe or the Turtles. If we show up and just kick people's asses, we are the ones who go to jail - or worse, get shouted down by well-meaning people on our side (just look at the response to the neo-Nazi chappy getting punched or how people felt about Shia LeBoeuf not turning the other cheek to another alt-right Nazi prick).

It's had to believe that people actually voted for this.

...well most people didn't, it does bear mention. Just less than 20% of the population of the United States voted for the Cheeto. Just over 17% of the population of the UK voted for the Tory party, who then changed out their leader for the Wicked Witch of Westminster without public consultation or similar.

I don't think that one in five counts as a mandate.

So what do we do about it? As Theoden says in The Two Towers: "What can men do against such reckless hate?"

...well I have to be honest, I am not strictly sure. But we have to make sure this shit doesn't happen again. I've often spoken out about resisting these bastards. Now it seems those words have come home to roost. Enough people have started to realise that this right-wing fuck-em-all approach is just going to get innocent people hurt and killed. If they haven't realised this, then they haven't been paying attention.

I've been experiencing fatigue in this department. There is only so often you can preach what you think is common sense, that you can tie the facts together to come up with a course of action or a method of resistance, and have little to show for it. Almost all the people who read my blog either agree with my particular line of thinking or just don't care very much - and I have no idea how to get my ideas TO the people that matter, TO the people who can be convinced by argument. Because I have faith that there are people that vote Tory, there are people that vote Republican, who are at their heart good people that are making a bad choice.

Everyone makes a bad decision, sometimes - none of us can look back at our lives and claim a golden streak - but some of those decisions only result in personal misery. Some of them compound with a great many other bad decisions.

And those decisions sometimes lead to these two cartoon villains being in charge of previously proud nations.

This sounds like a generalisation. It probably comes across as one. I know, love, value and respect people who don't vote like me, and don't think like me. We can still get on if we don't see eye to eye on this topic. And I don't think that everyone that wears a Labour badge is a saint, or that every Democrat is in it to help the world. It just so happens that the current antagonists of this season of Human Life are, well...jesus. They're like poster children for the worst of the worst.

But what can I do?

I can keep talking. I can keep up the facts and the thinking. Because giving up doesn't help anyone. And if there's any one thing that being ill for this long has taught me, it is that victory isn't always something that happens in a single action. Sometimes, victory takes weeks, months and years. Sometimes it isn't about knowing what to do in this moment...Sometimes it is about doing the right thing for as long as it takes, and staying standing until you can't - or until you win.

That's the lesson to take from Saturday morning. The fight always continues, but the good guys can't afford to give up. So they just don't. They fight, until the fight is over.

So let's do that.

The Gold Road

The way you think about money is wrong.

Okay, that statement is purely there to pique the interest, I'm sorry. I think I can state with confidence, more accurately, that the way most people think about money colours how they perceive other monetary interactions.

We've all had money, haven't we? We have got it, and we have spent it. We have spent years earning it and working out how to earn more, saving it, exchanging it for goods and experiences. We probably have some with us now. Our lives are pretty much devoted to its acquisition, if only because it is our shortest, simplest way to comfort and security - which can often lead to big problems, but I digress.

The way we handle our funds, and their physical existence in our perception of the world, implants a quintessential untruth about how it works and how it circulates. The difference between budgeting and economics is that economics looks at the whole, while budgeting looks at the individual case. People don't study economics - they budget, and thus they have a great understanding of budgeting...

...but not necessarily of economics.

I am not formally educated on the topic. I have done a lot of reading, I have debated it with a great number of people that know a fair amount on the subject. All of this is opinion backed with some research, not given as evidenced fact - so please, utilise a pinch of salt during your reading.

Why do folks hate people on benefits so much?

Because the way they see it, these individuals are being rewarded for something. They are being given something, and they don't apparently deserve it (not as much as the complainant at least). We all know someone who thinks that those who don't work shouldn't get anything, because they've worked hard their whole lives, etc, etc, repeat ad nauseam.

We probably know more people that believe refugees and immigrants shouldn't be given anything at all. They will often use terms like "charity begins at home", despite giving very little to charity themselves, or "why should we", or "where is it going to come from". I don't think that everyone who believes this is racist. I think that there are people who are racist that use those terms to mask their less socially acceptable thoughts, but I think the majority of people who wish to withhold support for expatriates (as I will be referring to them from now on) are doing so because they think we can't afford it.

And who is to blame them. We are seeing public services get cut because we "can't afford them". This is a line that has been touted so often that people repeat it without even questioning it. Even in the face of actual displays of where money is being spent, and how much of it can be reallocated to those in need. As I often say: It is never about not having enough, only about misallocation.

The mistake we make is assuming that, when someone on Jobseekers receives the kings ransom of £72.40 to last them for two weeks, the money simply vanishes.

Which is absurd, when you think about it.

So let us assume that there is an individual who has no other source of income. They receive housing benefit that pays for 100% of their rent and jobseekers allowance that pays them the aforementioned £72.40 a fortnight.

(If you aren't in the UK, these two things are means-tested benefits given to you by the government for various reasons, which are paid for out of public taxes. The circumstances in which you are allowed either housing benefit or jobseekers allowance are regularly reshuffled and usually made tighter. The welfare of poor people is not in the interest of our current government.)

To begin with - housing benefit is paid directly to the landlord. (Edit: it was, for a time. Now it is paid to the recipient of the benefit - but it is probably paid on in rent, seeing as there's not a huge rash of people claiming housing that immediately become homeless. Thanks for the correction, Nick.) That landlord is more than likely some kind of housing group or business, which has lucrative contracts with the local council; or the landlord is a private individual who owns the property and is kind enough to rent to those being assisted by the state. Trust me: many don't.

So the housing benefit only benefits the person receiving it insofar as it gives them somewhere to live. Meanwhile it guarantees the landlord a return on their initial investment, after removing the costs of maintaining the property. Either the private individual has any net profit to spend on their own day to day lives, their own house, their groveries, their luxuries - or the group or business receives a net profit, which it uses to keep running and pay its employees, who again go out to pay their rent and buy their groceries and purchase their luxuries.

The jobseeker's allowance, £36.20 a week of it, gets spent - because people in poverty don't actually have the option to save. The margins of affording to eat and not are too small. Where does it get spent? Shops usually - local small concerns and chain stores.

The money spent there, after covering costs, pays the employees (and in the case of bigger stores the shareholders). They then spend that money in other shops and on other things. Once more, that money is allocated and spent. And over and over it goes.

What happens every time someone spends money?

Tax.

While the UK doesn't have sales tax like the US does, the vast majority of products bought and sold have a rate of Value Added Tax (VAT). It is invisible to us because it is included in the price on the box. If you've ever been to the US from the UK and been stung by the sales tax - like you went to buy a dollar soda and it turns out to be a dollar and five cents, but the label says nothing about it - then what occurs with VAT is the reverse.

Standard VAT rate is 20%. Some goods - goods for children, electricity and utilities - are charged at 5%. Some goods, like basic food and apparent "necessities", are totally exempt. (Apparently condoms are considered a necessity and tampons aren't, which is absolutely fucking ridiculous, but that is an outrage for another blog.) Some goods and services even have special taxes in and of themselves - fuel pays an extra 10-50 pence per litre on top of the 20% VAT, 6% on insurance, 20% on travel insurance, significant additional taxes on tobacco and alcohol above and beyond the 20% VAT rate.

Almost every time someone spends money, they pay tax back to the government, back to the public purse. £20 of the benefit recipient's money gets spent in a local shop - £2-4 of that goes to the government, the rest goes to the shop. Out of the rest, a portion goes on costs, and the rest goes into the pocket of the people that work in the shop, which gets spent elsewhere. Every time the money moves from point to point, an amount ends up in the same purse that is paying for the benefit recipient in question. Even if they can't afford a car, they take the bus - and the money they spend on the bus not only funds the driver's purchases that week, but also pays a significant amount of fuel tax right back to the government.

Then there's savings and investment. Now, the average recipient of benefits doesn't get enough to save anything - it's just not possible, as previously mentioned. Margins are too small. However - those who benefit from the money of those recipients (see what I did there) invest. They put money away for a rainy day. That money goes into banks, who - since the dissolution of the division between investment banks and savings banks - use it to invest and make money. Those banks don't pay taxes, but they do provide loans to people who do - and those loans are spent on things, which again attracts tax.

Always, always, it finds a way back. It leaves the public purse and flows through wallets and pockets and by inches and yards makes its way back.

"But John," I hear you cry, desperately pushing aside the crowding lobster pots filled with pokemon miniatures. "Doesn't this prove that trickle-down economics works?"

To you I say... nay nay.

See, as I have pointed out - those below a certain level of income can't invest. The money is needed for survival. It can't be squirrelled away in savings accounts, or used in share trading, or utilised in other financial instruments used to make large amounts of money. That requires a significant initial investment.

The money spent by those with a lot of it tends to stay within a certain circle of expenditure. I've blogged before about class and about those with high income. We can probably infer that high-value goods and luxuries are more their purview than anything you would buy in Pound Land. Likewise, the reason why "millenials aren't buying diamonds" is because they can't. They can't afford it. We can maybe squirrel away something in an ISA or a holiday fund. Cost of living has risen so much faster than wages.

But those big companies who sell a lot of products to those with lower income - I am loath to actually name any, as that is stereotyping, but I am sure you can think of your own - have wealthy shareholders who are not people who use those products. The inverse is not possible. DeBeers doesn't pay dividends to a bunch of minimum-wage folks; hell, it barely pays minimum wage to its own employees, but I digress.

Rich money may trickle down a little; but it trickles up far more. It's the money of everyday people that keeps the companies aloft, and lines the pockets of the shareholders and executives that are invested in them, and the politicos that they lobby. If it isn't money that they poured into the system, it is the product of their labour - every factory needs workers. It also bears consideration that those who are wealthy try and find ways to not pay taxes, while those who aren't, can't. Not really.

If the wealthy are made more wealthy by the money in the pockets of those who are not - and if the government is made more wealthy by the same - then...

...why aren't we giving more money to those that don't have much?

If we bring expatriates here, and if we look after them; if we fund the poor, and those on limited income; then not only will the government fund be further refurbished, but so will the companies that pay us our wages. If foreigners show up and they need houses, then build them. Sell them. Make money. Pay tax. Help the government. Help yourselves.

If I am to put my left-wing tendencies aside and speak in right-wing monetary terms: the poor and disenfranchised are an investment opportunity. Stop seeing them as scroungers and start seeing them as debt you can sell that WILL repay to you, sooner or later, in some way. The gold road will run and run, all the way through. Every step it takes, it feeds back into public funds. Sooner or later, it will have paid for itself in entirety - and paid some other people's way besides.

And hey - maybe if you put enough money in an expatriate's pocket, they might have something to save. Wouldn't that be nice for the banks?

I mean the only way you'd think this is a bad idea is if you were some kind of bigot.

4 of 7 - The Faith And The Flag

(This is the middle of the 7-day blog challenge! Can we make the full run? YEE!)

So...apparently one of the worst things going on right now is that Colin Kaepernick didn't stand for the national anthem.

...so what?

Okay so, here's the thing. If you are part of a NATIONAL sports team, if you are representing your entire COUNTRY, then the national anthem being played at the beginning of a match is perhaps a little more important. You, like that anthem, are representing your nation. It's good form to at least look like you know the words. Even in those circumstances, there are witch hunts put out against people that don't sing along. Which is madness. Because if you can't sing, then don't deface a good song, right? But anyway...

...Colin Kaepernick plays for the Niners. That's not a national team. That's San Francisco's state team. Which begs the question, why the Star-Spangled Banner is broken out at every single gathering wherein more than ten people are sat down watching the same event. It's a very alien thing to an Englishman like me. We don't tend to play God Save The Queen before each Cricket match. It's not necessary.

That aside.

The Star-Spangled Banner was written about the bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. The British beat the everloving shit out of the fort but still those inside didn't budge. For 27 hours they sustained heavy bombardment, while the flag flapped merrily away as a sign of their resistance.

Now, the reason why the US got involved in the first place was to do with the Napoleonic Wars. Trade restrictions due to the war were hampering US trade; there were territorial squabbles too, and also the British were lending a fair amount of support to local Natives to resist the expansion of the new nation.

It could be seen as an extension of the War of Independence, which ended some 31 years previously. To the British it was just another front in the war against Napoleon; to the US, once more, they were standing against an ancestral oppressor. They wanted to make the land theirs, to own it, to be free of the shackles of royalty and tyranny.

The song celebrates the land of the free. It is an anthem of liberty, freedom, a rejection of autocracy.

So obviously, if someone doesn't stand for it, then they aren't doing what they are told and they must be punished for it. Right?

Let's look at context here: the flag represents a system that is objectively oppressive towards minorities. Like it's such a fact lodged in statistics that it is impossible to ignore, and to claim otherwise is either naive or mischievous. It is a nation - much like ours - that was made very wealthy exploiting people of colour. The history of oppression is a long and thoroughly documented one.

I can understand not wanting to kowtow to that. When we are children we are forced to pay respect to people that we don't respect and that don't DESERVE respect; as adults, we are grown enough to make that decision ourselves. Sure, we may catch some social flak for it - but in the end I'd rather people think I am some kind of aloof prick than an asskisser who hits the knees for anyone that thinks they are somebody.

Speaking as a person who, as a child, was forced to get on with people that bullied me every day - forced to pretend to be their friends, forced to APOLOGISE to my bullies for something I had done in retalation - I can tell you that paying respects to those that don't respect you is a hollow thing, like ashes in your mouth. It sits wrong. It rankles.

The only difference between me choosing to not stand up for God Save The Queen and Colin Kaepernick not standing up for the Star-Spangled Banner is that he is in the public eye - and if you stop being yourself and doing what you believe to be right because people can see you, then that's surely worse than not engaging in patriotic rituals.

And perhaps, people who think otherwise... people who insist that if you don't participate in patriotism means there is something inherently wrong with you... are hiding something a little deeper than that. Perhaps there's a crack deep inside that shell of patriotism. A mote of doubt. A fear that, just maybe, the image of the nation that is communally built up in the minds of its citizens isn't the actual truth.

Got news for you, folks. America hasn't been what you've thought it's been for a very, very long time.

But hey. Why would you listen to me?

I don't stand up for the national anthem either.

3 of 7 - Strong In The Real Way

(The third of seven blogs this week! This isn't so bad! Famous last words!)

WARNING: Below this point, there will be a LOT of spoilers, if you aren't caught up with Steven Universe - at the very least to the episode Mindful Education, Season 4, Episode 4.

Here's a nice picture of Garnet to provide some space between warning and spoilers.

Okay so. I REALLY like Steven Universe. To the point that Steven was my first (albeit lazy) cosplay ever, which I wore at this year's Nine Worlds.

I even had the cheeseburger backpack.

I love this show for a lot of reasons. It is smart. It is sharp. It is funny, without being cruel. It is understated in the epic scope of the overarching plot. You don't even know there really IS one until late in Season 1.

The music is wonderful - both the incidentals and the songs the characters themselves break into with just enough infrequency that it feels like a treat every time. As I understand it most of the cast were chosen in part due to their singing ability, and Estelle - voice of Garnet - does a killer job at bringing life to her as a character, both verbally and chorally.

I love the characters; I love the parts of me that I see in some of them. I love that they are whole. Even if someone seems like a stereotype at first, you get to know them in the ten-minute snippets of life in Beach City. Even characters that seem throwaway and background gain a life of their own, which teaches you a valuable lesson - even people in the background have a story and a history.

Which brings me onto what I love the most about Steven Universe: the lessons.

It teaches us things. It teaches us important, valuable things, that I think everyone should know. It teaches us about love, of all sorts. It teaches us about insecurity and how it is okay to feel it, but to not let it hold us back. It teaches us about strength, and weakness, and moments of each. It teaches us about consent, and about respect, and about devotion and obsession - and the fine line between the two.

I don't know a lot of people who have watched the show who haven't felt their heart break at least once while watching it. In order to do so, you'd have to be a robot with no capacity for empathy.

Listen to Pearl singing about Rose - about how she can't believe that Rose would pick the human over her, and now she's gone, and why can't she just...move on? Who hasn't been there? Who hasn't met someone that turned their entire world upside down, like Ruby and Sapphire? Who hasn't seen someone going the wrong way about something and silently pleaded for them to realise, like Pearl in the song this blog is titled after? Who hasn't fucked up so monumentally that you would do literally ANYTHING to make it better, like Amethyst?

The songs add so much to the show. They sum it up in so many ways. Even the seemingly throwaway songs - Connie and Steven's jam song, or the snippets of the song Rose Quartz sings at the end of each episodes - gain meaning, gain traction.

It is the most recent song, however, that I find myself thinking about the most; a song about thoughts, about being hung up on them, about being afraid of even thinking them because they hurt. It's a song that poignantly, pointedly and accurately deals with anxiety - with things we have done wrong in the past and how we deal with them.

It's called Here Comes A Thought, and unsurprisingly, Garnet is singing it to Stevonnie. Because of course their relationship / fusion is a scary thing, and of course Garnet has been through the same thing more than any of the others. It makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

Steven Universe. A comforting cartoon for people living in a flawed world. But that's okay - if every pork chop was perfect...

...we wouldn't have hot dogs.

Fear And Its Fallout

Technically speaking, phobias are anxiety disorders, and I suffer from two quite common examples.

The first (and worst) is arachnophobia. If a spider is over a certain size I can't deal with it rationally. I do my best, but I'm left with my heart in my mouth and sweating like a carrot stick in a raw food clinic. If the thing is big enough then I can't sleep until after it is dealt with, and even then, it will take hours before I can normalise again.

A recent and infamous example was a year or so ago, when a creature henceforth known as the Cataclysm Spider descended from the chimney and brutally attacked four of us while we were watching Pulp Fiction. Everyone in the room saw it before I did, and reacted with understandable alarm; but when I caught sight of it, my body put me in the kitchen before my brain could actually inform me of what was going on. Housemates braver than I had to execute the beast, and probably levelled up a couple times in doing so. We watched the rest of Pulp Fiction to calm down after.

My arachnophobia is entirely informed by my mother. I never had an experience that made me afraid of spiders - I've been afraid of them all my life, probably due to her reactions to them when I was young. Which is a shame, because I find them absolutely fascinating and (horribly) beautiful creatures.

The second is coulrophobia - which is a phobia of clowns, and I react to them in a similar (if less neurotic) fashion to spiders: exterminate. Spiders don't get to live if they come into the house. Neither do clowns. I can't deal with them. Hate them. It's less severe - if I had to pick five minutes in a room with a tarantula or six hours with a clown I'd pick the clown - but fuck don't ever make me choose. I hate clowns. Hate them.

The hatred of clowns is one that onset later in life - probably thanks to endless horror movies, Stephen King's It (the book), and depression that makes any false happiness sinister and not to be trusted. It's a phobia I can control a lot easier, as a result. It's less firmly embedded in my psyche. Relatively superficial in comparison.

Where am I going with this? Well...

Everyone knows a homophobe. Everyone knows a transphobe. Everyone knows an islamophobe. Either they are just a bit ignorant and chat shit without thinking, or they are properly, like truly, in hate with their chosen demographic.

Morgan Freeman didn't actually say this:

...but I'm sure everyone has seen a picture of him with these words attached to it, circulated around facebook or similar.

Fear is a keyed response. It is something that can be tempered, trained and reduced, but it exists beyond the conscious mind. It is very hard to control true fear. It's te bit of us that kept us safe from predators and hazards back before we had the capacity to actually think about why they were a threat.

Our instincts, however, are not our best selves.

Irrational thoughts and attitudes inform poor decisions. Going off one's gut, without giving a moment's pause to the correctness of our action, or whether or not the deep intrinsic insecurities and anxieties that make us human have influenced our decision - well, that's how really dumb mistakes are made.

We are afraid of things we don't understand. That is human. That is part of the basic insecurity that is indelibly part of our mental heritage. That which we understand is safe. People stay in situations that are objectively toxic because - well, it's the devil we know.

Let's be real though. Even the devil we know is still the devil.

When I moved off the island for the first time, I moved to Bradford to study Law in college. I went from a place that was, let's face it, a little insular...to a place chock full of interesting new cultures, languages, races and faces. For the first week I was totally knocked off my perch. I had no idea.

You know what though? I adapted, because I refused to let my fear of that which was unknown to me inform the rest of my life. I stopped being intimidated by people talking languages I didn't understand and religious practices I didn't share, but the first few times I encountered them, that fear was real - because it was unknown to me.

I often hold that it isn't how we feel that defines us; it is what we do with that feeling, how we react to it, and how we deal with it.

Thus I contend that a homophobe is someone that feels an initial urge of anxiety when encountering homosexuality. That's sometimes hard to control. That in itself is fear. What you do with that fear... well, that is the difference between being a person and being an asshole.

This is the difference. If you run into a guy and he introduces you to his husband - you can't stop your initial response. What you CAN do is realise that your response is an anxiety trigger and you aren't obliged to act on it, and that the proper way to deal with the situation is to remember that this couple that scares you are still human beings that haven't actually done anything wrong.

When I see a clown my initial response is fight-or-flight, with an 80% fight bias. I get angry. What do I do? I don't punch the poor bastard in the facepaint, because underneath the facepaint, the poor bastard is a person just like me. Whatever my initial instictive response to that facepaint, it doesn't justify me being an asshole.

In my opinion, we use the words homophobe, transphobe, islamophobe - we use them to indicate something more than just the phobia. That person has felt an instinct and acted on it with hatred or ignorance or a mixture of both. The fear isn't a choice, but their response of abuse and vitriol is.

I think we need to stop using -phobia to describe someone who is a bigot. A phobia is a fear, an anxiety disorder. Choosing to be an asshole is choosing to be an asshole. Phobics suffer - assholes decide to make other people suffer. The language has to change. They're not victims. They are agressors.

As time goes on and the populace as a whole becomes less and less insular and more and more educated, those who practice hate will dig in. They have to, because the general human drift is to defeat hatred - mostly by the hard work of the few. Attitudes do change, over time, as new generations are raised in environments that make the old attitudes of the past unacceptable.


To the assholes in question, I say this:

I understand your fear. I understand why things scare you. I understand that these things are different to that which you know and are comfortable with. I know full well how hard it is to leave that comfort zone.

Try it though. Just for once. Stop giving into that toxic hostility you are so used to. Just for a little while. You'd be amazed how easy life can be, if you just stop being such a prick.

It's so easy to hate. I should know - I hate a lot of things. It's very very easy; but then the easy way isn't always the best way. Everything can be better for everyone, if haters cease hating. Or at least fucking hate something that NEEDS hating - like if you're gonna look down on people who claim benefits, then at least have an equivalent disdain for the six British companies that didn't pay any tax in 2014. They made £30 billion for fuck's sake.

Just think for a while. Just think. Feel - Think - Act. In that order.

You never know. You might even like it.

I Am Sometimes Someone Else

"You wouldn't like me when I'm angry," said Bruce Banner, and he was right.

Note: Bruce Banner said that. Not the Hulk. Not the raging alter-ego, the Hyde to his Jeckyll. The separation is distinct, one put there deliberately and constantly.

Those who know me, know I suffer from a variety of health issues. Pain, discomfort, a lot of frustrating bullshit. It's not ideal but I try and keep my shit together most of the time - and I like to think that, most of the time, I succeed.

There are times, though...

My dad had a hell of a temper. When he got angry he was truly a sight to behold. It didn't happen often - I mean he had his moments of frustration, but the true meltdowns of epic rage, those were once-a-decade visions of disasterous glory. He never hit me or my mother, never threatened to - but by god, did he have the potential to get angry.

His anger scared me as a kid. Like, it gave me an aversion to conflict that caused me trouble throughout the entirety of my childhood, way into my teenage years, until the age of 16 when I finally realised that - every now and then, a line needs to be drawn.

Even so. Anger, frustration, drama, overt hostility - I am still averse to it. It's why soap operas bother me, and reality television - half of the content is just people being shit to each other. That bothers me, because they're not doing it for any good reason. They're not standing up for anyone's rights, or putting anyone in their right place, or correcting a wrong. They're just being assholes.

I don't like who I am when I don't have my shit together.

One of the reasons I like music is that it lets me feel all the stuff that one needs to feel, without becoming a slave to it. Like you put on the album and you feel it all. It runs through your entire body and you are a slave to it...and then it stops and you put it away and you can get on with your day.

Personally speaking, I hate the feeling of being angry for a wide cornucopia of reasons.

For one thing I hold myself to quite a high standard of being in control of myself and my things. Knowing where my stuff is, when my appointments are, where I am meant to be and when, what I should be doing at any time. I absolutely detest when I lose something or when I forget something. Being angry makes it easy to lose hold of this kind of stuff.

I also dislike how easy it is for me to get really, really hostile and hurtful when I am angry. Like engaging in a bit of banter is okay, it's like a witty sparring match. When my blood gets hot though - the banter goes. The claws come out. I do not like myself, at all, when I am in that mood - because anyone is a fair target for me.

A third thing I dislike is how angry I get at myself for being angry, which is, yes, a very dumb thing to feel but - hey, anger is irrational. I also feel guilt. Like immediately afterwards, guilt. Sometimes enough that I feel nauseous. I know I am doing something that I am not cool with, and I am not cool with that. Not one bit.

Unfortunately...being ill makes the anger thing happen a lot more than if I wasn't. And for that, I believe I owe pretty much everyone an apology.

I try not to be an asshole unless someone deserves it, but I am painfully aware of the fact that, sometimes, the asshole comes out anyway. I overthink these things for days after the fact, and wonder if I could have just been a little less tired and a little more serene, shit would have been okay.

So I am going on record here:

If I am an asshole to you, I am sorry. I'm not going to make excuses. They are reasons, not excuses. I am sorry for losing my temper, for getting snide, for not wanting to participate or for not getting into the spirit of things.

I try to be cool. I swear. It just doesn't always work.

But that isn't the real me. That's my Hulk, my Wolfman.That's the side of me that is altered, changed.

The real me is actually kinda cool, sometimes.

Promise.

The Big Red Button

Why do we need Trident?

It has been thrown back into my consciousness primarily due to Conservative leadership hopeful Theresa "Darth" May, who states it would be "sheer madness" to not renew it. She argues in much the same vein as all the other proponents of Trident - that we may need it because other people have (or may acquire) nuclear weapons.

I present to you two dictionary definitions taken from Collins.

MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION - noun. Mutual deterrence between countries possessing nuclear weapons, based on the capacity of each to inflict major damage on the other in response to a first strike.

TERRORISM - noun. 1. Systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve some goal. 2. The act of terrorizing. 3. The state of being terrorized.

Compare and contrast.

Nuclear armaments do not prevent terrorism. This is widely known and widely documented. The list of countries known to be nuclear-armed is as follows:

• United States (3,281)
• Russia (1,841)
• United Kingdom (455)
• France (190)
• China (248)
• India (1,629)
• Pakistan (2,468)
• North Korea (Unknown)
• Israel (363)

The number that follows each nation is the number of individuals documented as casualties of acts of terrorism since that country developed nuclear weaponry. North Korea is, understandably, difficult to acquire statistics for. These figures are in and of themselves very conservative - I only drew the data from a tight definition which could easily be broadened.

Thus it seems that the threat of violence does not prevent terrorism (which in itself is meant to be a threat). How effective is it at preventing actual nuclear strikes? Arguably, very - as since more than one nation developed a usable nuclear weapon (or similar), there have been no recorded nuclear attacks - though is that because the target has the same weapon, or because the weapon itself is too terrible to consider using when a legion of drones / platoon of Spetznaz / wave of air strikes will do?

And as we all know that the weapon in itself is terrible...wouldn't it be distinctly moralistic to get shot of it? And thus amoral to keep it? I mean seriously, not a single one of us believes that using a nuke is anything but monstrous.

So are we really keeping Trident because we believe it will stop another nation using a nuclear weapon against us? Because...well, that's kind of terroristy (if we go with the definitions previously listed), and also, farcical.

Comparable scenarios include training legions of suicide bombers and keeping them in warehouses to prevent terrorist attacks, a bank having a bunch of filled out share-purchase documents to prevent other banks buying THEM out, and keeping an ice cream in your fridge so the ice cream van doesn't come to your neighbourhood.

Because, you see, it is not a preventative. It is a threat - and if a country is merciless enough to consider dropping a nuke, then it is probably not going to care too much if you drop one back.

So instead - why don't we have an ACTUAL preventative? Like a system of stopping nuclear weaponry from being able to target us? Like I know we can only stop a nuclear suitcase with boots on the ground but if we can stop ICBMs and aircraft then we are 90% of the way there, surely.

Rather than replacing this (as previously stated) monstrous weapon system, which in and of itself is a ten-figure stab of megaton vengeance rather than an actual protective measure, let's spend all that money on research into other means of detecting and thwarting nuclear assault. Laser tech, solid munitions, advanced sensory and targeting hardware. Think of how the research and development in those areas can also be used in other fields, too. Instead of dropping however many billions of pounds it requires to refit and rearm four dusty spite-submarines in a show of economic vindictiveness that would make Nicolo Machiavelli giggle with glee, we can actually sink money into something that will not only help us in other ways, but render nuclear weaponry irrelevant.

So we won't have to care if the next cultural boogieman acquires a briefcase of high-grade glowy. We won't have to further aggravate the already thinly-stretched bonds of friendship between ourselves and - let's say for sake of argument - Iran, by insisting we poke around in their nice new reactor. We won't have to slave ourselves to this same arms race which threatened all of us with total armageddon for so many years. The amount of resources that would be freed up by the world not needing nuclear weaponry any more...can you even imagine?

Earlier this year the US was slated to spend one trillion dollars on renewing its nuclear system. ONE TRILLION DOLLARS. To indicate how much money that is, you need to understand that the federal budget of 2015 spent 3.7 trillion dollars. It will cost the United States of America over a quarter of how much it spent last year to renew weapons it only keeps around to make sure nobody else uses theirs.

Screw our multi-billions. Try imagining how much hard science and technical development you could do with a trillion dollars. I bet you can't even imagine what a trillion dollars can buy you. (I actually did a blog about it.)

So, Theresa May...is it really sheer madness? Or are you just afraid that we won't be part of the "big boys club" of nations that would rather their people starve than be unable to kill hundreds of thousands of people at the push of a button?

I think that's what this is really about. We want to look like we're still a player. We want to pretend we can ruck up with the best of them, try and punch above our weight. Try to be somebody more than our creaking infrastructure allows us to be.

It's just insecurity, pure and simple. Rocket envy.