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Some time ago, I visited this particular topic, and how I felt that rather than “rape culture”, America more has a problem with “fear culture”, rather than normalizing rape and violence against women, we simply don’t want to face it and address it, indirectly allowing it to happen rather than actively supporting it.

While I don’t want to say I was “wrong” (because I do think that a large part of the problem is simply normal people not wanting to face how real and prevalent the problem is), I clearly under valued that there certainly is a very powerful element of our society that actively seeks to diminish women and what they face.

Enter Brock Turner.

I don’t want to get into a blow by blow of the events (mostly because I don’t want to have to hold myself back from punching a wall), but the general synopsis is, potential collegiate swimming athlete rapes an unconscious woman outside a party, is stopped in the process by two others, and despite the witness testimony and evidence… his sentence is a whopping six months of jail time.

In the fallout, we have seen the head of what feminist thought calls “rape culture” rear its head and bear it’s fangs.

Starting with the judge who administered the slap on the wrist declaring in sentencing that, “A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him…I think he will not be a danger to others.”  Or the father who declared that he shouldn’t lose twenty years of his life over twenty minutes of bad behavior.  Or the friend who blamed “political correctness” for the outrage following the trial and sentencing.

But this is all stuff we have heard before, many times, isn’t it?  This idea that rape is a temporary thing, and that if there are any lasting effects, it’s the failing of the victim.  That this should be a “teaching moment”, not a crime that deserves severe punishment.

But this is the first time that I can remember the victim in question actually taking the advice of MRA twats, having the courage to face her assailant, describe what happened to her, the humiliating process she underwent just to get to this point… and then still be ignored by the justice system in lieu of not ruining a promising young man’s life.

Damn it.  Where’s that fucking wall?

Bah, I’d have to get in line anyway.  Half the country is stuck slamming their heads against it.

Despite having been a webcomic writer for two years, and directly working with one of the most prominent webcomic creators in the medium’s history, I’ve never exactly been a comic or manga enthusiast.

First is a limit of only so many hours in a day.  Between balancing a day job and creating my own stuff, I don’t exactly have all that much free time to pick up and follow comics, especially American comics, which are known for endless reboots, redesigns, remakes, parallel stories, etc…

Which leads to the second reason.  While I see tremendous potential in comics and manga as a storytelling medium, it only very rarely reaches its potential.  Mostly because artists and writers are thrown onto a project with very little understanding of what makes those established characters compelling to the audience… or if they do, they just don’t care.

We saw an example of this with the nigh unmitigated disaster that was DC’s “New 52” reboot.  We saw an example of this when some nitwit at Marvel decided that a married Spiderman just wasn’t cool enough in the “One More Day” storyline.

And we’re seeing it again with the latest “shocking”, “compelling”, “earth-shaking” twist with the original Captain America.

Now, Captain America going through some weird phases is hardly a new phenomenon.  The guy was turned into a werewolf and a zombie depending on the continuity involved.

But this one is one where Ol’ Cap has crossed a line that probably shouldn’t have ever been crossed.  Not only is Steve Rogers a member of Hydra (the Nazi analogue that by its own admission is supposed to be the bridge to the Fourth Reich), he supposedly always has been.

This is, unequivocally, a terrible idea.  And whoever thought of that should have been slapped repeatedly until the stupid stopped.

The problem isn’t that a renown hero has really been playing a long game.  It’s specifically Captain America, the production of two Jewish creators specifically during the World War II era and the rise of Nazi Germany and the deplorable crimes against humanity that the Nazis caused.  While America was waffling in a passive-aggressive isolationism with business leaders that openly supported the Third Reich (let’s just say you might want to read about the history of the Ford family, those who insist on buying domestic), Simon and Kirby were calling out their country to act in a climate that was wary of the Jewish presence in America at best, and openly hostile at worst.

An iconic character created specifically as an ideological counter to the Nazi menace should have never been considered to have been a member of the MCU’s Nazi analogue.  It spits in the face of the people who created it and trivializes history for the sake of a “shocking development.”

It’s bad, and Nick Spencer should feel bad for being so bad.

More sportyball topic today.  I’m sorry, but bear with me.  It’s really only tangentially related.

Long story shorter, there is a basketball player named Nick Young, who is (presumably still present tense as of this writing) engaged to Iggy Azalea.  He decided to (allegedly) cheat on his fiancee because hey, NBA player and all, and then brag about it to his teammate D’Angelo Russell, who in turn was recording the whole thing and it somehow magically went public.

Now, Young is all pissed off (demonstrating the value of a USC education in the process), and the entire narrative that I have read so far centers on how Russell betrayed his teammates’ trust, and how it’s going to cripple his ability to be anyone’s teammate in the future.

It’s not that this sentiment is wrong inherently.  I can promise you Russell didn’t record and leak that video confession to be a valiant defender of the social contract of engaged people.  He did it to be a dick, and on that score… well… mission accomplish buddy!  I hope “getting over” on Young was worth being a pariah in your chosen profession for the rest of your career.

But I want to talk about Young, and more specifically the “boys will be boys” mentality that allows our talking heads to completely gloss over or outright ignore Young’s stupidity in their rush to eviscerate Russell.

Those that do address Young’s idiocy effectively couch it in the idea that “he shouldn’t have been engaged as a young athlete” and not “he shouldn’t have been cheating on his fiancee.”  The idea is that athletes are surrounded by women throwing themselves at them at every opportunity, and the temptation is simply too great to ignore.

Sure, there is a sizable amount of women who are perfectly fine with one night stands and the desire to be bedded by someone “famous.”  I’m not going to demean them.  You girls do you (or whatever star studded man or woman decides you’re a good one-night stand).

But this idea that there’s just so many of those girls out there that no man could possibly resist the temptation basically reduces men into hormonal balls of instinct, and that lets people like Nick Young off the hook.

Once you “put a ring on it”, to borrow the vernacular, the “game” changes.  Nick Young wasn’t helpless.  He knew exactly what he was doing, and decided that his fiancee didn’t matter in the pursuit of short term pleasure.

He then had the unmitigated gall to brag about his sexual conquests to his teammates, which would be a fairly stupid thing to do even if he trusted them implicitly.  It again demonstrates a man who knows exactly what he is doing, knowing exactly who he is hurting, and simply doesn’t care.

Nick Young isn’t a victim.  This isn’t “boys will be boys.”  This is a shitty human being doing shitty things, and getting those secrets exposed by an equally shitty teammate.

It is more than possible to hate the player and hate the game.  And it’s due time our society starts doing so.

Reddit’s r/shitpost should just redirect straight to reddit.com.

That is all.

I’ve got a real big problem with the Doomsday Clock.

In case any of you don’t know what it is, it was first unveiled in 1947 as the nuclear race was gearing up, and well meaning scientists and leaders wanted to put how close we were to nuclear annihilation into terms that the general public could understand.

Theory goes, if the utter destruction of the human race was 12:00am, people would see us at 11:55pm, and be stirred to action, demanding leaders to take their fingers off their respective buttons, and return to their senses.

Whether or not it is effective (let’s be honest, it’s not), it sounds like a perfectly noble cause.  So why do I have a problem with it?

It’s because of news like this: http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/26/us/doomsday-clock-feat/

No, it’s not inherently because the clock is currently three minutes to midnight, barely one minute behind a period where the U.S. and the Soviet Union were actively testing ever larger thermonuclear weapons and the Cuban Missile Crisis (although it is fairly silly).  It’s not that the doomsday clock is now factoring in things like climate change (because climate change is a very big deal, even though the original designers of the doomsday clock wouldn’t even shift the minute hand one angstrom over a calamity approximately 100 years off).

The problem is that in the entire time of its inception, the Doomsday Clock has never been dialed back to any point earlier than 11:43pm.  They created a mechanism that by the very advancement of humanity and the clock’s own precedent cannot possibly use anything other than a narrow window that insinuates dire omens.

Okay… so why is that a problem?

Let me put it this way; Americans may remember the ill fated Homeland Security Advisory System, the color coded “threat level” of terrorist attack brought forward in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.  It was five step scale, ostensibly going from “Low” (green), “Guarded” (blue), “Elevated” (yellow), “High” (orange), to “Severe” (red), but it quickly became clear that the system wasn’t ever going to fall below the yellow, “Elevated” level.

As a result, the HSAS quickly became a joke, and summarily dismissed and ignored before finally meeting a ignoble end in 2011.  The problem that the HSAS had is the same problem that the Doomsday Clock has, and what any such ‘weighted scale’ eventually has… when everything is a problem, eventually nothing is a problem.

But why even do something like that in the first place?  Well, kinda for the same reason why your usual video game review magazine will have a 1 to 10 scale, but you’ll rarely (if ever) see something fall below a 6.

It’s to manipulate public opinion.  But unlike video game mags using a weighted scale to hopefully convince you Aliens: Colonial Marines isn’t total puke garbage, the presenters of the Doomsday Clock and the Department of Homeland Security try to use the rhetoric of fear.

The goal is to scare you into doing what they want; whatever goal that might be.  Because a scared society doesn’t question.  A society that doesn’t question lets its leaders do whatever it wants so that its citizens can feel safe.

And it’s a horrible way to influence opinion… because eventually fear fails.  Eventually you cry wolf too many times over less pressing dangers, to the point where you have a people that simply aren’t listening by the time immediate dangers that need an immediate response come around.

To the operators of the Doomsday Clock; we are not three minutes to our destruction.  Stop pretending we are.

Thanks.

There is this ideal in American society that can be pretty easily summed up as this:

Your success, and your failure, is determined nigh exclusively by the amount of effort you put into your chosen task.

If you are not successful, it’s simply because you didn’t work hard enough.  If you’re poor, it’s because you don’t work hard enough to make money.  If you have a shitty job, it’s because you’re not working hard enough to find a better one.  Basically, there is near infinite room for advancement if you’re willing to apply yourself to that advancement and are willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

It’s a neat ideal, and the idea is a comforting one.  Too bad next to none of it is true.  This is “The Great American Lie.”

It’s tied to the concept of American exceptionalism, and in many ways is the centerpiece to the collective delusion that the United States is just, like, the greatest country in the world in every way, ya know?

That’s not to say that the amount of effort you apply isn’t significant.  But it’s but one factor in many, and possibly not even the most important next to the simple reality of knowing the right people.  It can very easily be argued that having the right people going to bat for you is the biggest factor in you getting that well-paying job rather than someone else (who might even be more qualified)… or even knowing that well-paying job has an opening at all.

Americans even know this.  We bandy about buzzwords like “crony capitalism” and complain our leaders are in bed with special interests.  We gripe when shamed political or business leaders deploy their golden parachutes and land in better situations then they were before.

Then we turn around, and spit on the homeless person on the street and tell them they just need to work harder (usually while denying them jobs or assistance because they’re homeless and obviously a junkie that can’t be trusted or some other excuse), willfully ignorant to the fact that perhaps if one or two things that had nothing to do with our talents was different, the roles would be reversed.

We perpetuate the lie while we boo and hiss when that lie is exposed.  Why?  Because it’s convenient, and if there’s anything Americans love more than anything, it’s convenience.  It’s easy to blame those underneath us for simply not putting forth the effort.  Because to think otherwise would complicate our lives, forcing us to take stock in our good fortune and even (gasp!) having sympathy for our fellow man… compelling us to (GASP!) maybe even… help those less fortunate than us.

It’s also silly.  There’s nothing wrong in accepting our good fortune.  You don’t need to give your every spare dollar or every free moment helping the needy and the poor among us.  But the very least we can do is regard them without scorn, and try not to actively obstruct their own paths upward.

It’s only by facing and confronting The Great American Lie that we can even begin to make it The Great American Truth.