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Lock and load... Bruce Willis in Death Wish. Photograph: MGM

There is a long and fine tradition of pointing out that Eli Roths new films dont look very good. The cocksure writer, director, producer and sometime actor has spent the last 15 years serving up reliably polarising product from the gloomy, insidious torture-porn of Hostel to the garish sexpot thriller Knock Knock. Roths latest and most high-profile project a long-in-the-works resurrection of the Death Wish franchise with Bruce Willis as the trigger-happy lead has attracted even sharper criticism than usual. The launch trailer has sustained heavy fire on social media, called out for being nakedly fascist and being compared to alt-right fan fiction.

To mix animal metaphors, the trailer does make the rebooted Death Wish look like a depressing frog chorus of alt-right dog whistles. The setting has been shifted from New York to Chicago, a city currently struggling in real life to cope with a resurgent murder rate while being attacked by Donald Trump on a weekly basis. The alt-right like to paint the USs third largest city as an urban hellscape overrun by predominantly black gangs fighting for turf. Purists might point to the fact that the new films location is paying tribute to Michael Winners 1974 original, which ends with Charles Bronson arriving at Chicagos Union Station to continue his vigilante campaign. By fully setting their remake in Chicago, however, Roth and his producers are wading into real-life racial tensions (while filming mostly in Montreal).

The remake appears to stick to the man-on-the-edge premise of the original. Willis plays an affluent, middle-aged surgeon whose wife and daughter are victims of a savage home invasion. With the cops and courts seemingly incapable of punishing the perpetrators, Willis swaps scrubs for a hoodie to enforce his own brand of guerrilla justice, torturing low-life criminals in pursuit of information, gunning down a black drug dealer in broad daylight and, it is implied, becoming a folk hero in the process.

You might suppose that a film about a medical professional so psychologically upended by anger and grief that they become a murderer could be the basis for a thought-provoking meditation on how we construct our own morality in a volatile world. Roths film, judging by its trailer, chooses to go in a rather different direction, with Willis quipping his way through a montage of violent kills over an AC/DC soundtrack. The strutting Back in Black is prominent on the soundtrack of Iron Man, and the suggestion seems to be that, like libertarian billionaire Tony Stark, Willis Paul Kersey is a maverick hero with no time for liberal hand-wringers. Roth initially seemed happy to stoke the flames, promoting the trailer with some macho lock and load talk and the social justice warrior baiting #triggerwarning hashtag.

Could Roth deliberately be courting the alt-right dollar? His 2015 jungle cannibal movie The Green Inferno received some unexpectedly admiring notices from pro-Trump publisher Breitbart, who seemed tickled that the gnawed-on victims were students whose conservation activism was a pose. But despite his crass creative impulses and glib comments, Roth is an unlikely cheerleader for the alt-right. He makes a searing screen appearance in Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds as Donny Donowitz, a second world war soldier who goes a little further than just punching Nazis. The formidable Bear Jew specialises in clubbing them to death with a baseball bat.

In truth, Roth seems more of an equal opportunities controversialist who views himself as a gonzo cinematic provocateur rather than propagandist. When recently confronted about the Death Wish reaction, he claimed to be proud of the final product. When people see the movie in context I think this [controversy] is all going to evaporate, he said. Like the Rambo franchise, the original Death Wish series began with downbeat, thorny, unsettling films before rapidly becoming exaggerated cartoons. Judging by the way Willis jokes and smirks in the trailer, Roth seems to have internalised the spirit of the 1980s sequels, citing Death Wish 3 as a key inspiration. That was the one where lethal architect Charles Bronson returned to New York City which looked suspiciously like London and ended up taking out punks with silly Home Alone-style booby traps.

Irrespective of Roths intentions, Death Wish still seems likely to be embraced by right-wing activists in the run-up to its November release, if only because it has already enraged so many liberal commentators. In the alt-rights culture war, opportunistic points-scoring is more useful than cogent debate, and anything that draws fire from snowflakes is seen as good. That this latest ammunition has come from Hollywood itself traditionally a liberal stronghold will make it all the more appealing to dudes who fantasise about white men taking charge through violence.

Still, at least Roth can claim to have honoured the original Death Wish in his own weird way. The Michael Winner original was also greeted as dangerously right-wing agitprop in 1974, which the New York Times called a bird-brained movie to cheer the hearts of the far-right wing.

Link:
Death Wish: is the Bruce Willis remake an alt-right fantasy? | Film ... - The Guardian (blog)

The Weekly Standardwhich though conservative is largely a #NeverTrump publicationhas a nice overview Monday of the right-wing/alt-right campaign against national security adviser H.R. McMaster. (McMasterhas earned the ire of the internet's hard-line Trump enthusiasts by firing the conspiracy theorists and cranks who were inserted at the National Security Council by Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn before McMaster took over. To wit, see last month's dismissal of a "strategic planning" official named Rich Higgins who wrote in an internal memo that "Islamists" have formed an alliance with American "cultural Marxists" to create a "Maoist insurgency" and "counter-state" within the U.S. via the deployment of "coordinated synchronized interactive narratives." Interesting stuff, Rich!) One bit in particular is worth examining in more detail: Breitbart's promotion of a hot scoop that connects McMaster to George Soros.

The takeaway of this attack post is that McMaster was once affiliated with a mainstream national security think tank called the International Institute for Strategic Studies, which received some nonsecret funding from the Ploughshares Fund. In turn, the Ploughshares Fund's donors include George Soros. Now, in Reality World, Soros is a billionaire who donates in transparent ways to groups that, while left-leaning, are not particularly radical: Other donors to the Ploughshares Fund include such stalwarts of establishment philanthropy as the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, and Soros' connection to Ploughshares is not a secret. In Alt-Right Conspiracy World, though, Soros is the sinister manifestation of scheming international "globalism" who personally pays every Trump protester on behalf of ISIS, and his tenuous link to McMaster thus renders the national security adviser immediately suspect.

McMaster's nemesis Steve Bannon, of course, used to be Breitbart's chairman, and the site has long been a key cog in the Soros-hysteria machine. After Bannon joined the Trump campaign, he supervised the release of an ad in which Soros was pictured prominently alongside two other Jewish finance figures (Janet Yellen and Lloyd Blankfein) as a narrator spoke ominouslyabout the "global special interests" who have "robbed our working class" and "stripped our country of its wealth." Bannon has also helped Trump cultivate the support ofthe kinds of white supremacists and neo-Nazis who complain about the "Jewish influence," illustrate meme images with swastikas, and highlight the names of Jewish individuals such as Soros by putting brackets around them. On a personal level, Bannon allegedly once told his now-ex-wife that he didn't want his daughters attending a school with significant Jewish enrollment. So it makes sense that Breitbart, in an attempt to do a solid for its man in the White House, would think that the worst thing it could possibly reveal about H.R. McMaster is that he has a thirdhand connection to a Jewish guy. Devastating!

More here:
Alt-right links H.R. McMaster to George Soros. - Slate Magazine (blog)

Avoiding politics online is nearly impossible. But what happens when your quest to remain neutral draws you deep into a firestorm between two of the most aggressive political factions of the Trump era?

Late last month, fundraising platform Patreon found out.

Patreon markets itself as the prime way for independent creators to come get paid, as its website reads. Its users span the full gamut of disciplines, from video makers to educators to podcasters and everyone in between. If you like a certain writer, for example, Patreon enables you to kick her a few bucks for her efforts. For some successful Patreon users, the platform provides a substantial income.

The concept of Patreon is noncontroversial in the era of crowdfunding. But that all changes when you mix money and take-no-prisoners politics.

The company found itself in the middle of a hyperpartisan showdown between warring entities in thealt-right and the far left anti-fascist movement known as Antifa. However, it wasPatreons efforts to remain outside the fray of politics that brought the fighting to a head.

The events that followed serve as either a warning to any company that attempts to navigate the murky, shark-filled waters of internet politicsor a model for how to use transparency as a weapon.

On July 20, without explanation, the company banned conservative provocateur Lauren Southern from the platform, cutting off valuable monthly donations from supporters and sparking a fierce backlash from mainly right-wing circles and alternative media outlets.

Hundreds of patrons and several creators abandoned the platform as a result, including scientist and podcaster Sam Harris, one of the most popular creators on the service.

One week later, on July 28, the company abruptly shut down the account offar-left news website Its Going Down (IGD). The outlet, which has become loosely associated with the re-emergent Antifa movement since PresidentDonald Trumps inauguration, had publishedarticlescovering Southerns activities amid its usual content, which is regularly re-posted anonymously from a range of anarchist and anti-capitalist groups.

In a 10-minute long video, published just hours after IGD was notified of its ban, Patreons chief executive defended Southerns account shutdownover which there had already been considerable falloutand explained the companys evaluation method called manifest observable behavior.

The purpose of using manifest observable behavior is to remove personal values and beliefs when the team is reviewing content. Its a review method thats based entirely on observable facts, Jack Conte, Patreons CEO, said.

Southerns ban, Conte said, came through her involvement with right-wing youth organization Gnration Identitaires Defend Europe project. Defend Europe was a crowdfunded mission to intercept boats filled with migrants journeying across the Mediterranean to Europe and to transport migrants back to their home countries in North Africa.

We removed [Southern and Defend Europes] pages because they directly obstructed a search-and-rescue ship in the Mediterranean, and they made a variety of statements and outlined plans to obstruct similar rescue ships in the future, Conte said, reasoning that this could endanger the lives.

Following the ban, Southern denied she was personally involved in the mission. In his response video above, Conte listed the observable facts that his evaluation team had cited. These included using some of Southerns own footage, in which she can be heard directing the Defend Europe boat operator to block the NGO rescue ship, and quoted statements Southern made in which she appears to speak and identify as part of the Defend Europe team.

None of these details were apparent in Southerns original response to Patreon banning her. Conte, in other words, decided to call her out.

You cant use manifest observable behavior to say who someone is you can use manifest observable behavior to say what someone did or didnt do and whether or not those things are or are not against your content policy, Conte concluded, reiterating that it was Southerns observable actions, not her politics, that had landed her in trouble with the platform.

Conte then broke the news that, hours earlier, Patreon had taken the same action against IGD, an organization at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Southernone that has also been actively critical of her work and politics.

Again, Conte pointed to observable and available content as violations of the companys content policy. The evidence against IGD consisted of two articles that were reposted on the leftist website, which unapologetically states its mission is the promotion of both revolutionary theory and action. One article featured an instance of doxxingthe publishing of an individuals personally identifiable informationand another instructed readers on how to sabotage a railway line.

Likely anticipating accusations of cutting off IGD as a way to appear politically neutral, Conte said the website had been flagged for review before Patreon banned Southern.

We dont batch pages together and take down opposing pages at exactly the same time to proactively seem like were being fair, Conte said. He added: When we removed Southerns page, IGDs page had already come to our attention from a number of inbound reports and was already in our queue.

Contes attempts to pull Patreon out of the snake pit of politics failed. After IGDs ban, some on the far left, who cheered at Southerns banning, accused Patreon of pandering to and working with the alt-right.

IGD was banned as an act of appeasement to the alt-right, IGDs editors asserted in a comprehensive post, which points to a sustained and coordinated call by alt-right media outlets and personalities to have its funding cut off. Behind the gimmicks and wonky terms about manifest observable behavior, the entirety of Contes video is an attempt to pacify the trolls.

On the right, disgruntled Southern supporters had taken to calling out Patreon on social media and blogs for what they believed to be a politically biased judgment.

To Southerns supporters, Patreon had stifled free speech in the name of the left; to IGD supporters, the company had sought to placate angry alt-right trolls in banning their outlet.

Although motivated by transparency over its decisions and ethical boundaries, the company had become a villain to both the extreme left and right. In fact, parties on both sides made Patreon a political battleground for its attempts to remain politically neutral.

Both Southern and IGD came to Patreons attention because of a number of inbound reports, according to Conte, which activists on both left and right utilized as a way of attacking one another. While left-wing activists ran a#DefundDefendEuropecampaign targeting Southern, alt-right activists were pushing a #DefundAntifa campaign aimed at IGD.

Self-described Antifa organization Hope Not Hate celebrated the closure of Southerns account as its own victory. In ablog articleonits websitedated July 21, theorganization states that it lobbied forSoutherns account to be removed from the platform.

The banning, it said, came after several weeks of lobbying by Hope Not Hate, which contacted Patreon to raise concerns about far-right activists making money via the service. Hope Not Hate also claimed that the sustained and effective#DefundDefendEuropecampaign resulted in the shutdown of Defend Europes bank and PayPal accounts.

Southerna 22-year-old Canadian who regularlycovers or discusses issues like the nightmare of mass immigration and condemns liberal versions of feminismseems an obvious target for her political opponents on the left.When Conte was asked on a recent episode of theRubin Reportabout Hope Not Hate taking creditfor Southern beingkicked out, however, heexplained that the only lobbying process was via the reporting system.

We dont actively policethecommunity, Conte said. The reason that a page gets taken down is becausewe get reports through an official reporting system If they sent in a report, then we evaluated that report.

Hate Not Hope did not respond to the Daily Dots request to clarify whether it used this reporting process tobring Southern to Patreons attention.

Just as Hate Not Hope was gunning for Southern, however, an undergroundalt-rightcampaign to have IGDs account shutdown began in earnest.

The anti-IGD effort appears to have started back in June, onemonth afterthe outletjoined the platform.

Alt-right activists on social aggregator Voat, a Reddit alternative offering no moderation and unbridled free speech, were called upon to bombard Patreonin a coordinated mass reporting of the IGD profile page.

Amysterious Voat user, a87d7sasa97h9, laid out in detail the plan in Voats Antifa subverse.

Explain that Its Going Down is an Antifa website, the instigating userwrote at the time. Include evidence of Antifas violent crimes to convince Patreon that Antifa is a terrorist organization. If enough people report this page, Patreon may shut it down and cut off some of Antifas funding. Every bit helps.

An email template that would-be participants could simply copy and submit to Patreon pitsIGD content against specific creator obligations stipulated in the Patreon content policy. Their most substantial weapon against IGD wasFox News negative coverage of IGD, which it said calls for violence against Trump supporters.

Fox News has exposed Its Going Down, a87d7sasa97h9 wrote in an update, use this as your primary evidence when reporting the Patreon page.

The account behind the effort, which was used exclusively to push other users to participate, has since fallen inactive. Its impossible to tell who was behind the seemingly random string of letters and numbers, whose mostimpassioned and lengthy postis suitably on the topic of maintaining online anonymity and security.

As the narrative consolidated in the Voat post was parroted byalt-right media outlets, alt-right activists were hard at work stacking up complaints and reports against IGD with Patreon when Contes video went live on July 28.

On discovery of the campaign, the Daily Dot contacted Patreon to request data relating to how and when the company was made aware of the IGD content, but a spokesperson refused to share the information.

The team at Patreon strongly believes in building a platform that prioritizes free speech and celebrates diverse viewpoints, a spokesperson told the Daily Dot. We do not take the possibility of removing creators lightly. We have a thorough content policy and evaluation process, and removing a creator is something we only consider after very careful review.

In the end, Patreon stands by its assessment in both cases, judging that the content of each creator had clearly fallen outside its boundary of mainstream acceptability. So, while its unclear just how much impact the spamming had, the subversive tactics employed by each group to quell the other ended in both being banished back to the fringes.

More:
How Patreon stepped into a war between Antifa and the alt-right - The Daily Dot

The St. Louis Cardinals are a proud franchise, and for good reason. According to Wikipedia, the Cardinals are [o]ne of the most successful franchises in baseball history, the Cardinals have won 11 World Series championships, the second-most in Major League Baseball and most in the National League. This is accurate. The Cardinals won championships in 1926, 1931, 1934, 1942, 1944, 1946, 1964, 1967, 1982, 2006, and 2011. Yes, most of their championships were when there were just 16 teams in baseball and no playoffs, but that is still an impressive accomplishment.

But there is one championship that still haunts Cardinals fans, the one that escaped them in 1985. They held a 3-1 series lead on the cross-state rival Royals, only to drop Game 5. They appeared to have Game 6 in the bag, but allowed a controversial safe call by umpire Don Denkinger rattle them, as Jack Clark dropped an easy foul pop up, Darrell Porter allowed a passed ball, and Todd Worrell allowed a single to light-hitting Dane Iorg to win the game. The Cardinals were still fuming in Game 7, losing their focus in an 11-0 blowout to give Kansas City its first championship.

The 1985 championship trophy sits in the Royals Hall of Fame at Kauffman Stadium. But one Cardinals fan wanted to imagine that his team won it that year. Royals fan Michael Smith noticed this on Cardinals Wikipedia page a few weeks ago, which I have screenshotted for posterity.

Okay.

Haha, no.

It looks like the Wikipedia page has already been edited to erase the fictitious St. Louis championship, but give the fan an A for bitterness.

Was it an honest mistake? Perhaps. Although if you look at the Internet Archive, earlier in July, the championships were reflected correctly. So someone proactively edited the page to add the 1985 championship since then, and it looks like it was this edit on July 21, from an IP address in East Alton, Illinois, just outside of St. Louis. Nice try, but Jorge Orta was safe.

If you dont want to believe fake news, here is what really happened:

Excerpt from:
Cardinals fan tries to reclaim 1985 championship on Wikipedia - Royals Review

Embed from Getty Images White male privilege is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days.

Whenever any bit of injustice show up, we get the opportunity to trot out the tried and true WMP.

While it is fun and convenient to push every slight into this category, we all choose to overlook ways that people who are not white or male benefit from all sorts of opportunities.

White Male Privilege is very real.

What no one will willingly take a look at is all of the other privileges that get created and are intertwined with WMP.

The machine that is patriarchy and white supremacy offer us opportunities to control and lord power over others.

Whatever group you belong to and the fact that you are human provides the impetus for dominating.

While I dont believe that is natural for folks to dominate one another, there is a tendency to lean in this direction as a result of all the gifts that are offered.

The machine must be fed and we are all invited to partake of the system that offers fake promises and severely limiting rewards.

I am a black gay man and am afforded privilege in each identity depending on who Im with and the context of all of my relationships.

Regardless of what any one will say there are certain privileges that are assigned to me simply because of the darkness of my skin.

Music, culture, fashion sense and the ability to thrive on scarps and look good while doing it all part of gay, black male privilege.

Gay privilege affords me the luxury of not having to consider reproducing.

Regardless of what any one will say there are certain privileges that are assigned to me simply because of the darkness of my skin.

Gay privilege affords me the option of not having to think long term about much of anything. It also allows me to indulge in a certain type of social isolation and a big fuck you to society if that is what I desire.

There are many gays and lesbians I know who have no interest in mainstream anything and yet are looked to when it is time to shake things up and make things interesting or cutting edge.

While these are exaggerations the point is that no one is exempt form gaining certain rewards when and if they suit them.

Much like the privileges that get bestowed upon blacks and gays, being male is another opportunity to examine what goodies get offered to us and when.

People grow to know and accept you as gay.

Nobody needs adjusting and reschooling in terms of what being male means.

Upon the birth of a male child, everyone immediately begins to decide that all of the worlds resources and treasures are his to indulge and command.

No one ever thinks : I hope my son is kind, gentle and compassionate towards others.

Instead, we immediately begin contemplating and thinking of all the ways he will rule the world.

There is no thought given to the problematic stance that because of this persons gender there might be wishes offered and granted simply because of his maleness.

When we examine all the ways that people have access to resources, it is clear that we are all very unclear as to how privilege works, how it gets assigned and what it does to all of us on a cellular and spiritually stunted level.

I like to take the definition of Tim Wise when examining the seductive and radical thinking reduction that this most dangerous process continues to engender.

According to Tim Wise, Privilege in its most basic form allows us the luxury of not having to think about certain things.

When we are allowed the freedom (or so we think) of not having to think about certain things we are then allowed the freedom(or so we think) to not have to change our behavior or invest in any real hard core action.

We can allow things to happen to those people.

We can allow brutalization to occur because folks dont look like or think like or act like us.

It is very easy to dismiss a group if including them would require a clear and radical self analysis.

When 911 occurred, we as a country were provided a clear picture of what the world thought of us and our relentless commitment to staying asleep and pursuing our interests no matter the consequences.

Being able to selfishly pursue everything we desire without any thought to whether others are safe, nurtured and have access to resources make us vile and clueless in ways that have devastating effects on the planet and our communities.

We can turn this around by questioning why certain individuals are granted certain access and demand that those in power cast a wider net when the focus is on who gets what and why.

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This article originally appeared on Anthony Carters Blog

Photo credit: Getty Images

Anthony Carter combines his love of theatre, writing, storytelling, and black queer feminist theory to create projects that inspire all to greatness, including having been a semifinalist in the Strawberry One Act Festival 2007 with his play Breakfast for Dinner. His book Unfettered Mind: The Importance of Black Male Mental Health, released in 2012, offers several winning strategies for remaining mentally healthy and emotionally resilient in a rapidly changing world.

Mr. Carters second book, Strong Stuff: Tips on Surviving Unemployment, offers insight on maintaining self-esteem and personal friendships while one searches for work. Based on personal experiences (2.5 years of unemployment and some homelessness), this latest book is full of exercises and quick easy to read and apply tips for thriving despite being jobless. In February 2016, he is publishing his first collection of Sci-Fi/ - speculative fiction short stories entitled Rules of Reality.

Anthony Carter and his husband are joyfully co-raising nine grandchildren while relentlessly devising techniques for the worlds evolution. You can visit him onlinehere.

Go here to read the rest:
How We All Benefit from Privilege - The Good Men Project (blog)