Bronze & Celluloid

A lot can happen in a week.

Black Lives Matter. The protests continue until real, actual change happens. So it should be. For a sense of scale - George Floyd was killed on 25th May, 20 days ago at time of writing.

For comparison, the Freedom Riders protest lasted for 7 months, between May and December of 1961, to protest the enforced segregation of public transport under Jim Crow laws. (If you don't know what that means - go take a read.) Pictured is what the white supremacists in Anniston AL did to the bus, for the apparent crime of deliberately not segregating passengers.

I don't know if anyone reading this blog is the kind of person that thinks the Civil Rights movement was in the wrong... but if you are, kindly, don't read my blog any more.

As mentioned. A lot can happen in a week.

An autonomous area of Capitol Hill in Seattle seems to be doing okay, despite Fox News (who haven't actually been there, according to those actually present) painting it as a remake of Red Dawn or Escape From New York. (Escape From Chaz sounds like a game that most people I know played in college.)

Protests are ongoing, continue to draw in large crowds, are usually pretty peaceful. Police in the US are starting to take out reprisals on people that have been marked as being at protests.

A bunch of media companies have decided that the racism inherent in their properties is, all of a sudden, not something they want people streaming, so it's been pulled down. This is apparently literally the fault of the protesters, depending on who you ask. As if five guys in bandannas walked into HBO's head office and refused to release the hostages until it was taken down.

And a statue of someone that most people had never heard of went for a swim in Bristol harbour.

There's him being pulled out by the lifeguards.

Let's be clear, here. There's been multiple petitions and attempts to get the statue removed by more legitimate and less upset-the-neighbours means. This was just the moment when people decided that the red tape wasn't necessary any more; that Edward Colston didn't deserve that statue any more, and that it was time to do something about it.

Edward Colston - a slave trader and merchant, a Tory MP, who lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, dying in 1721. He was heavily involved in the Royal Africa Company, who enslaved at least 84,000 human beings for profit, and shipped them across the ocean. Nearly 20,000 of them died en route, and would have been unceremoniously dumped overboard, potentially even into the harbour that his statue took a dip in.

Yes. That statue. See, it wasn't put up during his lifetime. Despite it allegedly being for his philanthropy and all the good work he apparently did - small change for a man made fat and wealthy from the blood of innocents - nobody really seemed to care enough about him to put up a statue until 1895. Long enough that he and everyone he knew was definitely dead and gone; long enough to paint a rosy picture of the man. That way, none of those nice Victorian folk would have to think too hard about a bunch of their wealth coming from selling human beings like beads and cloth.

The thing about a statue - the real thing about it, rather than a plaque, or an entry in a historical society or museum - is that it is meant to imply a certain amount of reverence, or respect. Certainly the Colston one was. This wasn't the shameful display of a man made rich off the literal backs of human beings. This was a man who was being displayed as a pride of the community, a charitable philanthropist whose former crimes are wiped away because a small percentage of his fortune was spent on local causes, for whatever reason. That's what the statue was for.

Talk about virtue signalling.

So when Boris Johnson says that taking down statues "lies about our history", you'll forgive me for maybe thinking that he is talking directly out of his arse. His statement - just like the statue itself - is just a cover-up. Just like all the shows currently being pulled from streaming services. Just a sleight of hand, a smokescreen.

See... this stuff that has been pulled - the old episode of Fawlty Towers with the racial slurs, the blackface episodes of various and sundry comedies (I use that term loosely in the case of Little Britain) - these things were racist when they came out. These things weren't cool when they came out. It can be said about Gone With The Wind that it was "of its time", and yeah it was, but people in the late 30s still knew what racism was, and still knew that when they were doing something racist, they were doing racist shit. And that doesn't excuse Little Britain. I mean come on.

(To cover the basics now. Yes, blackface is racist. No, "White Chicks" isn't just as bad, and even if it is, that's one movie in the face of thousands of examples of blackface being used to denigrate and disrespect people. Here's a video that will do a better job of explaining why than I can.)

These shows, these movies, knew what they were doing when they did it. They have remained in place and unchanged for decades. It is now, and only now, that their rights holders and distributors have made the decision to pull their availability on streaming services. Not because they have suddenly realised that they were in the wrong - not because they turned on the news and saw the protests and had a sudden change of heart - but because they're afraid of looking bad.

That isn't change. That's nervousness. That's squeamishness. That's hand-wringing, and it's the same hand-wringing that people do when they see the statue of a slave trader torn down. It's discomfort.

But it also means they don't have to have the actual conversation. They don't have to take a look at themselves, as corporate entities and as people, and address the real problem. And that's what's important, right? Anything to avoid having The Conversation.

This will probably prompt eye-rolling and dismissal, but whatever. The truth is the truth. Racism isn't just yelling slurs at people. It's deeper than that, it runs very deep indeed. It is systemic, and it has very real repercussions.

It's because the government, and the media that is supporting it, has described the Black Lives Matter protests as riots - and the reactionary far-right riots yesterday as protests.

So I will leave you with this picture from Reuters photographer Dylan Martinez, of a Black Lives Matter protester carrying one of the aforementioned far-right individuals away from a rather tense looking struggle.

Imagine that this mob of angry white men is stood there, in the street. They hate you. They despise you. They want to beat you, hurt you, maybe kill you. They think you are subhuman scum. They want you out of their country, despite the fact that you were almost certainly born here.

And then one of them goes down in the street scuffle, and is hurt.

So you carry him out of harm's way.

And you're still the bad guy.

Just... imagine that.

I'm not going to plug my Patreon right now. Instead I'm going to ask if you'd consider making a small donation to the UK BLM GoFundMe. It's a better cause than I am.

If you know what's at stake, stay strong. If you don't, do the reading and find out.

Justice for Breonna Taylor. Justice for Tony McDade. Black Lives Matter.

They've Got Skulls On Them

I am sure that all of us know at least one person that, observing the Black Lives Matter protests, expressed confusion. Not outright opposition, not mealy-mouthed "but think of the bricks", no; just confusion. There might, likewise, be confusion as to why people might be protesting against the actions of government - not just in the UK or the US, either.

Well. Let's take a look at a comedy sketch by Mitchell & Webb.

Though a lot of people I know won't have to click the play button. They'll just have to look at thumbnail and they will remember the entire thing.

I've probably used this before, but this is for a different purpose today.

Yesterday, 6th June, was the 76th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Now, we talk about that a lot, as part of our history. It's become emblematic, and we forget a lot of things surrounding it, bring in a lot of details that are only obvious in hindsight. Example: we weren't fighting the Nazis to put an end to the death camps. Sorry. We just weren't. The Soviets wouldn't come across Majdanek until a month and a half later, and when they told the rest of the Allies what they found, they were mostly ignored.

Nonetheless, World War 2 informed our media - and imagery used in our media - for generations. Not just the actual stylistic choices of the German army, the SS, etc, but also the propaganda used by all sides. It informed swathes of media as to what was menacing, what certain colours and fashions could imply.

This meant that every single person reading this was probably raised on a whole lot of media that broadcast to you who the bad guy was.

Like this.

I mean it's obvious, right? I know you know who these people are, you have outside context, but at the same time. Like. Homie on the far left is clearly the bad guy advisor, big shoots with the helmet is some kind of overboss, and despite the fact that she's wearing the same shade as everyone else, it's kind of heavily implied that bun-lass isn't on the same side as the dudes in identical total-concealment skull helmets.

They're called Stormtroopers.

And there's just one example. An obvious symbol of oppressive authority. There's no doubt who the good guys or the bad guys are in this.

Back in high school I thought I was oh so clever because I'd say stuff about the Empire having done nothing wrong. I cringe at that, now. Of course it's done shit wrong. It's an empire, and its enforcement and military is a totally unaccountable force of heavily armed faceless bastards named Stormtroopers. (I mean yes it is also run by an evil dark wizard but you know)

Here's the Peacekeepers from Hunger Games.

Right?

I know that the entire point in a movie, a comic book or a TV show is to have an immediate distinct visual that tells you something about who these individuals are. There has to be an element of telegraphing that happens. You can't just have the bad guys look like the good guys, or you won't be able to build a sense of distrust and fear between the faceless army and the handsome protagonists.

That's the mythology we are sold; the notion that we will always be able to see the bad guys coming - and that our friends will always agree who the bad guys are, because they are injurious to ALL of us, not just in an overarching "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" sense but in a "with my death ray I will end your world" sense.

That's the world that people have been raised in for three generations, the fictional shorthand of our modern mythology that repeats itself over and over - in science fiction, in fantasy, in the pale white milky world of the magical school which we won't discuss further.

So you're raised to believe that you will always know your enemy when you see them - and you are raised without being educated as to actions that our nations and our governments have undertaken in the past, which would show you that, sometimes, the bad guys can just take their hats off and pretend they weren't bad guys at all. Or they'll pick up a kiddy and pretend that they're doing the right thing.

Ooooh you bastard.

And then it turns out that your friend has identified a set of bad guys. That you were either unaware of or don't necessarily agree with, because they don't look like bad guys, and they've never been mean to you, so - surely...?

Because we have been told, for a long time, that the enemy will be signposted. That they will kick the puppy, they will show up to the tune of ominous music, they will be constantly threatening. Whereas, the law enforcement of the real world are clearly nice people, because yet more generations of media and society has told us so.

I myself have never experienced any harassment by law enforcement, and whenever I have had to deal with them, they have always been respectful and courteous. Aside from whenever I have passed through customs, wherein I have been treated like a criminal, probably because I have a beard and an Arabic surname, but I digress. I recognise that me being treated by that way is a privilege, and that me never having to fear a police officer actually harming me is likewise.

I have had the privilege of learning at a distance, rather than having to adapt to a situation I am forced to be in.

Which is why, I think, so many people balk at general anti-police sentiment. Because the police, to them, isn't some faceless oppressive force, it's that bloke that gave them a bottle of water that time they were drunk in Uni.

Which means they don't have a great way to square this in their head.

The Lincoln Memorial, earlier this week.

Admittedly I believe these folks are National Guard - I could be wrong. The fact is that a military force has been called in to manage what was a civil process, which began with a peaceful socially-distanced protest against a police murder, is not lost on me.

Sometimes your enemy will be an entire process. It won't be eight dudes wearing masks and toting guns - though sometimes it will be. Sometimes your enemy will be a system that allows those that are a part of it to kill and harm people with little threat of punishment or oversight, and the system already includes a swathe of people who are more than willing to do that to you. Sometimes because of the colour of your skin, your gender, your sexuality, your religion. Sometimes just because they're fucking mean.

A system with a large PR budget, centuries of racism to buoy public opinion on its side, and a large supply of tear gas and rubber bullets.

It doesn't look the way most people have been taught it will look - but it's the reality of the situation. It is what is happening, right now.

That's why it is important, at the bare minimum, to not look away. Even if you don't march, even if you don't help, even if you don't donate, even if you don't combat misinformation, even if you don't amplify voices or causes - the bare minimum you can do, is not look away.

Rather than ask you to look up my Patreon or similar I would ask my readers to consider donating to one of the orgs listed below. These are all provided by @malikthesudani on Twitter - it seems like a good list. If anyone you know wants to help, please, share this information. These are primarily US based but then that is where the people are being hit the hardest.

ActBlue (Community Bail Funds)

National Bail Fund Network

Black Visions Collective

Reclaim The Block

A further list of Mutual Aid Funds collected by @thegirlwithfood can be found here.

This Teen Vogue article is useful too.

I urge you to also do your own research. Don't just believe me. Do the research. Listen to people. Look up what happened to George Floyd, to Breonna Taylor. Remember them.

Don't look away.

Peace Is War

This is a CS gas grenade cannister.

2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile - also known as CS gas, a kind of tear gas - is utilised as a crowd control agent. It reacts very painfully with moisture on the body, most prominently the eyes, hence the name, tear gas. It also attacks the respiratory system, and can lead to burns on the skin if one is sweaty or sunburned.

It is an irritant.

It is marketed as non-lethal though this is disputed, given its actual function. Assuming a fully healthy human being that is under no duress and is in a well-ventilated space when they are hit with the stuff, sure, non-lethal. It doesn't often get used under those circumstances.

CS gas was developed in Porton Down research facility in Wiltshire.

Yes, Porton Down, wherein we have studied other chemical and biological weaponry in the past - such as sarin, anthrax, botulinum, so on. All the kind of stuff that is banned from use in warfare by the Geneva Convention.

Oh yes. Tear gas is banned by the Geneva Convention. You can't use it against the enemy in warfare. You can, however, use it on peaceful civilians.

You can use it on people who have gathered together to protest against a man's murder, and that is totally fine, and allowed. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. And then, when the people you are using the tear gas on get upset, or annoyed, you get to claim they are the problem.

That way, you - the state - get to be right.

That's fantastic, because for as long as there has been a man in a house on a hill, there's been people that don't get to live on that hill, who have wanted to not drown every rainy season. The proverbial crowd with pitchforks. So it's important - if you are that man on that hill - to make sure that you can make people think that they might get what they want, if they never pick up the pitchforks.

You can't get what you want through violence, the apologists say. The state agrees, from behind several layers of accountability shifting, after its agents kill yet another black person, using the excuse of upholding the law.

A list of things that only came into existence after extensive physical protests:

- Some equal rights for non-cishet people, and by extension, Pride as a movement.
- Accessibility measures in the United States of America.
- Modern Germany, and the end of the Soviet Union.
- The United States of America.
- Modern France.
- Modern Algeria.
- The end of Apartheid.
- Worker's rights.

So don't tell the people in the cities of the United States that they have to do it peacefully. They tried it peacefully. They got murdered, and they got tear gassed. Don't quote Martin Luther King Jr - he mostly pledged peace, but stated sympathy for the rioters, and he, too, got murdered.

In the end you have to wonder if it wouldn't just be easier to stop killing minorities; perhaps not for a president who likes to parrot the words of segregationists, whose grandfather was in the Klan, but maybe for enough of the rest of America that a change can be made.

Justice for George Floyd.

I won't be asking you to hit my Patreon this week. Instead I would ask you to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, to pay bail for protesters arrested in Minneapolis and beyond.

Thank you for your time.

The Last Shite

Oh god, it's Bayformers time again.

If one forgets, I posted a fairly lengthy shredding of Age of Extinction three years ago, way back here. You might wish to glance at for your delectation if you share my opinion that the only good Transformers movie was released in the 80s.

Let's just say that this one doesn't exactly offer any redemption.

There will be spoilers. But that won't make much difference because the story is, frankly, a garbled fucking mess at the best of times and a desecration of cinematic process at the worst. Here is one of the spoilers: Mark Wahlberg's racist hero man is apparently a good guy because he gets given Excalibur.

Oh yeah, here we go.

As before, I will list the things that were actually positive.

• The score was quite good.
• There's approximately thirty seconds of bot-on-bot combat that doesn't look like garbage.
• One scene was actually better and more entertaining than the rest of the movie.

...we good? Okay, we good.

Don't watch this movie.

It reeks. It reeks to high heaven. Almost every aspect of it is a drudgery, a sham of a film, an ill-conceived thousand-monkey thousand-typewriter farce that didn't deserve to break even at the box office.

Where do I even begin to pick it apart? Well - let's begin at the beginning.

We are treated to a laddish sham of an introduction, involving the so-called Knights of the Round Table - yes, King Arthur and all. Puerile comedy, demonstrating Merlin as a charlatan, the Saxons as being mindless savages intent on razing England to the ground, and a three-headed Cybertronian dragon summoned by a staff given to Merlin by Transformers that were totally hear in 400AD, yo.

That's the intro. I hated myself for sitting through it, let alone for the rest of this agonising 149-minute debacle.

The entire Arthurian aspect of the plot is tacky and badly done, as you might expect. Honestly, most of it could be cut out and would leave the film just as coherent and competent as before. It's an excuse to make Mark Wahlberg into something more than what he is - grumpy mechanic. A walking Bud Light product placement. (There's an actually horribly tasteless Bud Light product placement in the movie, too, but eh.)

Speaking of plot aspects. This plot is beyond shaky. It requires multiple maguffins, most of which are delivered from seemingly nowhere via confusing and ill-defined means, in order to facilitate a standard destroy-the-earth-in-ten-minutes storyline. It would probably, realistically speaking, only require an hour-long TV special to actually convey the story were it not for the amount of junk filler that is put in for no apparent reason. That would even be if it made any damn sense. I even invented a term for this film: maguffinception. We need to get the maguffin to get another maguffin!

So Quintessa was some kind of bad woman who was apparently Prime's "creator", and apparently the "creator" of all the Cybertronians. She is all hanging out on the ruin of Cybertron - torn apart in the events of the third shitheap movie - waiting for a staff that was taken from her by a dozen Cybertronians at least sixteen hundred years ago (probably more) to be brought back to her. And how lucky she is that Optimus Prime shows up, here and now!

We have no idea if any of that is true, who she is, what she is, what actually happened to Cybertron, what powers she has shy of doing a number on Optimus Prime's personality (more on that later), or why the Knights of Iacon took her staff in the first place. Short of the fact that she is some kind of betrayer and not to be trusted. All of the action seems to kick off now because - coinciding with Optimus Prime's crash-landing in the ruins of Cybertron - Male Hero is given a mystical maguffin by a crashed ancient knight, presumably having landed not so long ago and been shot down by Earth's Transformer Reaction Force.

The TRF. Let's focus on them for a minute. Yet again there is an elite anti-Transformer military/police/surveillance force kicking about, and this one has literal skulls on its iconography. You aren't the good guys if your symbol is a skull. That's not about defending. That's the film-maker being lazy in trying to advertise these folks as bad guys. In truth, that's not hard to do - they're pretty fucking unbearable.

In fairness. Every character in this movie is fucking unbearable. The two that you hate the least, in the end, are Bumblebee (can't talk) and Barricade (despite problematic imagery, just doing his job). They're all just unpleasant to everyone else, and needlessly so, too. Two thirds of the characters are written as walking punchlines and they just deliver that punchline over and over and over again. It wasn't funny the first time around, let alone the thirty-first. The rest? Just awful in general. Horrible to watch interact with each other. The kind of people that you'd avoid in real life.

There's a bit of The Room in this, because whoever wrote this script - like Tommy Wiseau - knows very little about how people actually talk to each other or interact. Mark Wahlberg's character is a hideous parody of your average American. Laura Haddock is treated as you might expect any woman to be treated in a Michael Bay movie: pretty fucking poorly. I feel as much pity for her as I do frustration at the shit script she got handed. She literally gets abducted at one point, for no fucking reason at all.

A significant proportion of the characters are pretty unnecessary, too. John Turturro's neurotic, borderline pedophilic, distinctly deranged conspiracy theorist is a primary example. He is in it to deliver a second maguffin. He could have been replaced by Anthony Hopkins' character merely owning a copy of a book. That could have saved a lot of screen time. It would make sense for him, too - being that he is very wealthy, possesses a significant amount of historical material relating to the Transformers, and is actually part of the Order of Witwicca who dealt with keeping the secret throughout history.

Oh yeah. Here's a new bit of Transformers history. They love fucking with it, and now, we have the apparent involvement of this order having helped conceal and also involve Transformers in the history of the world ever since Arthurian legend. One of the apparent members of the Order of Witwicca is Harriet Tubman. That's right. One of the most racist movie franchises in history decided to co-opt Harriet Tubman.

It's unfortunate that the one, single good scene in this entire film is set in the middle of this big revelation - which is a fifteen-minute exposition exercise, framed on both sides by half an hour of Human Beings Running Away, a staple of Transformers. It is also very controversial.

Turns out that Bumblebee has been on earth for a fair while. He was involved in the Second World War - helped the Allied war effort. He joined in with an attack on one of Hitler's strongholds, and the scene in which it happens is pretty visually stunning. It's like there could have been a World War 2 Transformers movie, and it could have been so much better - but I think the scene was made better because hardly anyone talks, no sympathy is forced upon us, and Bumblebee is just being Bumblebee. Helping out his friends.

It's a shame that in order to shoot that, they had to drape massive Nazi party banners with swastikas all over Winston Churchill's family home. But then, that is one shining glorious moment in this movie where the awful distasteful crassness is kept behind the camera - which I suppose, in a sick way, is praise. Though I fail to see how you could fuck something like that up. I mean did nobody think to check? ...I suppose they probably actually didn't.

I mentioned that Bumblebee was being Bumblebee.

Every single Autobot in this film is just super-aggressive for no apparent reason. Perhaps because they are being cast as the leading support characters in a big macho movie for big macho men, with toxicity running through its veins like blood and steroids. They can't be smart or safe. They have to be reckless and willing to shoot each other and angry and always ALWAYS ready to kill. The Autobots are the good guys, remember. I've commented on this before - even Optimus Prime seems to become a bloodthirsty asshole in the Bayverse. His first instinct the moment he sees his creator is to try and murder her. He charges her with a sword - and she hasn't even done anything yet, outside of confirming her identity. Later, he single-handedly attacks a six-part combiner (who is actually pretty fucking cool and doesn't get anywhere near enough attention) and kills every last one of the consistent 'bots, declaring "Don't you know who I am? I AM OPTIMUS PRIME."

Turning Prime into someone willing to murder innocents in order to get what he wants wasn't that difficult for Quintessa, surely. Bay's Prime seems to become a righteous killer with very little justification or prompting, and takes more and more pride in his ability to maim and mangle his opponents with apparent ease. His opposite number, Megatron, gets even less screen time than the standard Bayformer restriction - anyone that isn't a mascot robot gets minimal. It's not exactly revealed how Megs survived, but he's apparently gone kind of mad, taking to setting light to the floor when angry and becoming a complete coward.

The Decepticons aren't immune to the bullshit spraypaint, it bears mention. Megatron negotiates with "the humans" - yes, the almighty maniacal Megatron, negotiating for the location of Mark Wahlberg Hero Man - to have several of his people released to get the maguffin back from aforementioned Hero Man. Each of these ridiculously named and zero-developed Decepticons is given a little intro splash ripped straight out of Suicide Squad, and just like Suicide Squad, every last one of them are terrible. Onslaught, Mohawk, Dreadbot and Nitro Zeus - and the Berzerker but apparently he isn't fit for release - all get this little splash, and every last one of them was locked up despite both the TRF and Cemetery Wind in the last film being kill-everything task forces rather than take-prisoners task forces.

We can't care about any of these people. We're prodded and forced to have a degree of empathy for characters that the film itself can't make us give a shit about, because they're inherently unlikable. As I said before - Barricade and Bumblebee are the only two that don't suck.

Also present is the standard casual racism you'd expect from Michael Bay films - people of colour chronically under-represented and given pretty shitty roles. Hero Man's assistant at his junkyard is black, and has a constant refrain of "I can't go to jail", cracks about not paying taxes, and is literally described by Mark Wahlberg as "My Little Crimey". Yes, really. Wahlberg also constantly calls the local law enforcement Chief, because guess what - he's Native American. This guy actually calls Wahlberg out on it, too. Too late though. We're meant to like him, so it's okay.

In fact we are forced to recognise him as being the protagonist because the movie literally straps Excalibur to him and makes him the Last Knight of the Round Table. We're told this is because he displays knightly qualities, which must apparently happen off-screen, and we're also told that the scriptwriters don't understand what chaste means. I've seen Wahlberg actually act in movies, he's pretty good, so I can only assume that Cade Yeager (THAT'S HIS NAME OH FUCK) is actually written to be this dumpster fire of a person. In the end, he helps save the day in zero-gravity by grabbing British-lady's hand and LITERALLY shooting a gun at nothing at all. Propelling them across the space in between. Cade Yeager, drinks bud light, threatens to punch kids in the head (he does that), doesn't understand sarcasm, saves the world via celebratory gunfire.

I will repeat for emphasis, before I continue with random bullshit:

Mark Wahlberg's character is given Excalibur, and is made the Last Knight of the Round Table.

There's the puzzle that is Hot Rod. Hot Rod, who has a ridiculous French accent, and apparently hates it, despite Anthony Hopkins insisting that he likes it and puts it on. This is a cause for chortling and tee-heeing. Silly robot with an accent. Fucking come on, really? Earlier in the film, another Autobot mocks Drift for having a Japanese accent. I know I have rallied pretty hard against Drift being turned from potentially interesting concept character into a lol-samurai Japanese caricature, but come on, really? Picking on accents? I guess it's just in line with the expectations of a series of movies wherein cheap laughs are gained from a giant combiner having big swinging metal testicles. The effects are expensive, but the comedy is cheap. Desperately cheap.

Whoever planned this has total disdain for geography, claiming that the Horns of Unicron - yes, apparently Earth is Unicron, that storyline is stolen from the vastly superior Transformers Prime animated series - were once a perfect circle, back when Pangaea was a thing. And in the middle of this circle was apparently Stonehenge. This has to be basic ignorance, just hoping that nobody will look it up, or realise that the centre of Pangaea actually formed the African continent. Which it did. Meaning Stonehenge should be somewhere in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Once every twenty minutes I found myself asking, where the fuck are they now? There's a chase through London which is embarrassingly inconsistent as to where in London it is actually taking place. Following this chase the characters take a submarine down the Thames, but don't actually come out of the Thames Estuary - we're not actually fucking sure where that submarine was coming out of, but it's about as close to the Thames Valley as it is to Addis Ababa.

The film makers also show as much respect for physics as one of the members of the White House staff show to a physicist in the movie, too. We have a large mass, very large, the ruin of Cybertron, approaching Earth at 10% of lightspeed. It was guided, by Quintessa, somehow - and when it shows up, it's impact time. It collides with part of the moon, destroying one of our lunar landers and the ship that Sentinel Prime arrived on the moon in. Apparently the moon's surface is okay, despite the obviously huge amount of force enacted on it in direct impact. Then, Cybertron just...fucking...squats over Stonehenge. Yes, something with about the third of the mass of a metal planet parks directly over Somerset.

I don't need to tell you just how badly fucked we would be if that happened. If the moon was fifty miles closer, we'd be pretty boned. Cybertron? Dragging fucking dredges of itself across the surface of the planet, presumably killing tens of millions? Tidal waves the likes of which you can't imagine. Our magnetosphere fucked to death, long before the evil plan can be carried out. Continents disrupted. Land masses shifted. The devastation would be incredible, not to mention the subsequent nuclear winter - Krakatoa erupted in 1883 and caused record snowfalls for four years, how much shit would be kicked into the atmosphere if a planet just rocked up into our own?

I have no idea what the folks who made this were really thinking as they went about their business. Like it is clear to me that at least one of them watched The Abyss sometime during production, as there's an extended and unnecessary undersea scene. There's three baby Dinobots, and nobody can explain how they happened, unless Slag and Grimlock are a mating pair. There's Izabella, whose random teenage rebelliousness is required in a Bay movie - and there's her love for these baby Dinobots, and her own little pet robot, Squeaks. Squeaks is essentially just a shit BB-8. These things are all taken straight from the Lucas school of CGI Gopher. There's your standard "omg the military is so hawt" selection of shots, which in most things I find interesting, but in this seems crowbarred in to put a couple minutes between shots of the main characters being awful to each other. Every Transformers movie features a huge amount of military porn, if only because I know every movie features at least one military vehicle, and probably the creators of such wouldn't allow this unless they were shown in a good light. The cinematography was at times embarrassingly basic, with shaky-cam shots thrown in because rendering things accurately is apparently bad times, and getting a good clean look at anyone but the Mascotbots is asking for trouble.

I can't cover absolutely everything wrong with this tripe. So what follows is a series of notes I jotted down as I watched it, which you may find fun without any context.

- Mark Wahlberg Is Terrible
- Every Transformer Is Terrible
- LOL ENGLAND
- BUD LIGHT PRODUCT PLACEMENT
- More Racism
- Everyone Is Terrible
- Wahldaughter's primary concern is her dad's lovelife
- Megatron???
- EXPLOSIONSSSSOMGOMGOMG
- What Even Is Physics
- "Over The Pond Right Now"
- NOT TURTURRO NOT AGAIN FUCK OFF
- Every Plot Element Delivered Via WhoKnows
- English Ladies Aren't Like That
- "JE M'APELLE 'OTROD"
- Cool Reformat Cut Out Because Probably Too Cool
- "FNYAHAHA THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER"
- WELCOME TO EXPOSITION MANOR
- ANTHONY HOPKINS IS...FUCKING...MAD
- Everyone Is Fucking Terrible
- They Are Made To Hate Each Other Obviously
- "That's the watch that killed Hitler, don't screw with it."
- TRANSFORMERS THROUGH TIIIIIIIME
- Of course the sarcy English professor is Merlin's descendant.
- More Humans Running
- Oooh Yay A Sex Joke
- UGH GEOGRAPHY
- We Couldn't Wiki Pangaea
- "Move Bitch Get Out Of My Way"
- THAT ISN'T HOW LONDON WORKS
- HMS Alliance Is A Transformer?????
- I Hate Myself
- WHY IS ANY OF THIS HAPPENING
- ISS just goes away just like that
- THAT ISN'T HOW PLANETARY MASSES WORK
- Yep, they're all unbearable again
- "SHE PUT YOU UNDER A SPELL"
- Oh God No Why Fucking No UGH
- Casual Slaughter Of Millions
- No, Soldiers Aren't Arthurian Knights
- Xenophobia Is Only Cool If They're Not Optimus Prime
- "Are we the bad guys!?"
- PHYSICS
- WHY SQUEAKS
- NO NUKES AREN'T A GOOD CHOICE
- Now We Must Believe In Myth
- "DID YOU FORGET WHO I AM" - apparently you did
- "I AM OPTIMUS PRIME" we know you say it every movie
- Planetary Mass Crash Landing Is Fine Apparently

It is setting up for a sequel. I don't know what they want out of it. I don't care. All I know is that the sooner Bay gets his hands off this, the sooner they get some better scriptwriters in, the sooner they start making this about the bots rather than Hero Man and Lol-People, the sooner we'll get the Transformers movie that we really want.

Even if, just maybe, humanity is such a junkyard that this is the Transformers we deserve.

Don't watch this. If you do watch this, please, please feel better. Talk to someone. Don't suffer in silence.

And for fuck's sake, people. Stop doing this to the franchise I love.

No, Really, Not The Same

There is a very common ailment that affects the logical process of many human beings on a daily basis. It is a form of logical fallacy, and it is known as False Equivalence.

I'm sure we've all heard this kind of argument. Dogs have tails, cats have tails, therefore, cats are the same as dogs. Absurd, isn't it? And yet, people genuinely engage in such things daily. Their worldview is coloured distinctly by all sorts of logical fallacy.

Let us take, for example, the assumption that - if one person does a job badly, and someone else does the same job, then they will both do that job badly. A lot of people have this with doctors. It's a form of anecdotal fallacy - I had a bad experience and so I don't trust doctors, or I heard that so-and-so had to wait for three hours and so the entire medial profession is corrupt. Regardless of evidence to indicate that most people receive fair-to-good treatment regularly.

In terms of politics, the "They're All The Same" line gets trotted out a lot. One can sometimes see why - back in the mid-90s, as the Conservative party under John Major faced the threat of New Labour's more right-wing leaning, there was a distinct race to the middle ground. Everyone tried to look like the moderate, and tried to paint everyone else who disagreed with them as a shade of extremist. That's probably where a lot of the rhetoric originated from - politicians desperate to get to the most middling position before their competitors.

It is a statement that can be challenged, though. It is objectively possible to measure if a politician is good or not. We can measure this by attendance, by claims of expenses, by all sorts of yardsticks. Even if we discard this particular means of judgement, however, the fact that you can look at all their voting records right here should tell you that they don't all vote the same. Regardless of the words that come out of them, regardless of whether or not they say aloud what they believe - voting records don't lie.

And yet still, their "all being the same" is a line widely touted - a false equivalence. Mhairi Black, a highly morally sound and upstanding young woman, is a politician; so is Boris Johnson, whose clown persona has more in common with Pennywise than Bonzo. But they are both politicians, and thus are both the same - right?

Often a false equivalency is generated out of a lack of more in-depth knowledge. Where money is being spent, what people actually get up to, what the law actually says, what statistics are actually reliable. It's easy to not pay attention to this kind of thing - but if you don't have a base of knowledge to work from, then you should be honest about that before you start making sweeping statements.

There's a current state of false equivalence highly prevalent right now, and that is that both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald John Trump are as bad as each other.

Let's pare this down to the basics.

Even IF Clinton had engaged in the kind of behaviour that Trump has made synonimous with his name - such as calling for the actual physical harm of protesters, mocking disabled people, making several veiled insinuations calling for the harm or arrest of his competition...

...even IF Clinton had outright said that she pays no tax (and is smart because of it) and that the majority of immigrants from Mexico are bringing a "lot of problems" with them...

...even IF Clinton had been recorded talking about sexually assaulting people being okay because she's wealthy...

...then you know what? She'd STILL be a better choice to run the country.

Even if in terms of character they were EXACTLY the same - which they objectively are not - then we still have to concede the difference of career. Clinton has spent nearly two decades in politics. She has lived the life and played the game. People find her objectionable for all sorts of reasons, but the majority of them are things she has done in the political arena. (And are things that they don't necessarily hold the right people accountable for, either - but that is, again, an entirely different blog.)

While Trump's political acumen is...well...

...yeah, there isn't any, is there?

Hillary Clinton receives flak for being "untrustworthy", while Donald Trump collects kudos for "telling it how it is". Now if I am living in a world of ideals, then I want all of our politicians to be 100% honest all the time - but we do not live in this world. We live in a world where diplomacy relies on humility, decency and tact. Look at each of those words, imagine each candidate, and tell me how far each apple falls from the tree.

I am not a huge fan of Clinton. She strikes me as a little more Hawkish than she wants to be perceived, a little more right-wing than my taste - but then, that is how you get to be president. It's no secret that I am a Bernie fan.

But there isn't any hope in hell that I could even conceive of her being worse at the job of the President than that man. She isn't even in the same ballpark. She outstrips him by such a degree that it is embarassing to even think they could be considered "just as bad as each other".

But some people do still think this.

Which is, let's face it, literally False Equivalency.

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.