Can We Please Have a Break from All This

I don't usually plan my topics for this blog in advance. Sometimes I find myself chewing over an idea for a while, which I then commit to paper here, but usually I get to 7.55pm on a Sunday night and have to think up a topic to write about. Some part of my brain was thinking, say on Wednesday evening, that this week's post could be a rundown of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney Plus.

But of course there's more important things to talk about, since Friday.

I don't know if there's any call for me to weigh in on the overall topic of abortion, because it's honestly not a thing that's touched my life (as far as I know). That said, I don't take it lightly: I even consider it meaningless for me to say that I support a woman's right to choose, because I believe that such rights are so intrinsic as to render meaningless the idea of government "giving" them or "taking them away", to say nothing of some jerk (me) supporting those rights. Same as if I say I'm "against slavery" - that's great, but in the conception of Enlightenment ideals, nobody can even be a slave.

(And don't come at me about the Founding Fathers owning slaves; the fact that we've moved away from their flawed understanding doesn't invalidate the idea that all people are created equal and deserve the same rights)

Another thought I've been coming back to recently, even before the Supreme Court's ruling, was listening to a couple of coworkers talking in the office, back around 2006 or 2007, when I was living in London. Both were gay men, and they were talking about the prospect of the Conservatives winning the next general election.

What struck me, even back then, was how they didn't (outwardly, at least) regard a Tory government as an existential threat, whereas in my lifetime the Republican Party has always been about taking rights away from people it deems undesirable. Beyond the horror of imagining losing your right to marry the person you love, or become the person you are inside, it has to be exhausting for the people most threatened by the far right to make the calculation every 2-4 years of what rights they'll continue to have, or not, after the elections in November. What I would like for America - for my friends who are LGBTQ or whatever other minority or protected group, and for all my friends who aren't - is to not worry about some party of assholes coming along and denying rights to people.

Sadly, this dream seems out of reach, since there's almost certainly some asshole out there planning to execute on Clarence Thomas's wishlist of banning contraception, same-sex marriage and consensual sex between adults regardless of their gender. Someone's probably also targeting interracial marriage, which one hopes would finally get a no-vote from Thomas, since his traitor wife is white.

The other thing that makes my dream seem out of reach is the gigantic dropping of the ball by the Democrats. As John Oliver pointed out a few weeks ago, Barack Obama campaigned on the promise to codify Roe v Wade into law, but once in office put that on the back burner. Now we've got the unedifying sight of people like Susan Collins and Joe Manchin claiming that they "feel deceived" by the three Trump justices' assurances that they wouldn't touch Roe. We've also got Joe Biden giving addresses on abortion, but seeming to take any radical actions like nuking the filibuster or expanding the court off the table.

And I do see why Democrats are reluctant to take those nuclear options: once those norms are exploded, the Republicans won't hesitate to take advantage of them once they're back in power. But when 50 years of settled law is being overturned with a stroke of a pen, from no fewer than five justices appointed by two presidents who both lost the popular vote in their first elections, and when the party they represent is gunning for even more control, then I can't think of a better time to press as many big red buttons as they can.

It doesn't even need to be those two specific options. It could even be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's suggestion to open abortion clinics on federal land in states that are banning abortion, which describes as the babiest of the babiest of baby steps. But Biden needs to do something to show that he's president, with control of both houses of Congress, and that Trump isn't the one actually still calling the shots in America.

Because from where I'm sitting, it's clear which party's really in charge right now.

Streaming War Update

Back in late 2019 (the Before Time, as I like to call it) I wrote a blog about Disney Plus and how I didn't think it was going to kill Netflix. My thesis was that with Disney entering the fray (HBO Max and Peacock hadn't launched yet), it was going to be more a case of various services coexisting, but that I didn't see myself cancelling Netflix anytime soon.

Fast forward nearly three years, and now that I'm on pretty much all of those streaming services, my perspective has changed. At the time I said that I didn't care too much about the exclusives, but now I'm not so sure. I'm still not quite ready to cancel Netflix, but I've spent very little time on it, apart from a couple of exceptions.

So what am I watching instead? I've mentioned that I'm spending a lot of time each month checking out what's about to leave from HBO Max. I'm also keeping pace with Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney Plus, while also finishing up the second season of Luke Cage, after it transferred over from Netflix. Once a week or so, I watch an episode of Star Trek: Voyager on Paramount Plus, after having finished the latest seasons of Lower Decks and Picard; I keep wanting to check out Strange New Worlds, but I'm reluctant to do it now because I don't want to have too many series that I'm watching at a time.

The one thing that got me back onto Netflix was season 4 of Stranger Things, though even there, now that I've finished these first few episodes I'm back to Obi-Wan and Luke Cage as my primary shows. I do have things I want to get to, including the long-awaited fourth season of Borgen, but apart from that last one none of them seems particularly urgent. I did binge season 2 of Jessica Jones before it left in March, in part because it wasn't clear that the Marvel/Netflix shows would end up on Disney Plus.

If I had to choose a streaming service to rank above all the others, it's probably HBO Max at this point in time. It's grown beyond just having HBO content, which was good but a little limited, to having a really good selection of movies and a pretty good selection of TV shows from other sources. A lot of the movies I've been watching before they disappear are from the Turner Classic Movies hub, though in a slightly more adventurous mood last night I watched Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which sits in the Studio Ghibli hub. Thanks to its tie-up with Warner, HBO Max also has a DC Hub, which is now the home of all the DC Universe shows that I mentioned in my previous post; the best thing is that now, barring a wholesale purge of DC content, I can be pretty confident that the DCAU shows I love are also pretty safe here.

That's also an advantage of Disney Plus. Although it was nice a few years ago to have the MCU movies show up on Netflix or HBO Go from time to time, it's even nicer to have almost all of them here, in one place, along with the original shows. It also helps that these Phase 4 shows have maintained a pretty high level of quality throughout: though none has been quite as good as WandaVision, they've all had some decent parts to them, even Falcon & Winter Soldier, which was my least favorite (the story was fine, it just suffered a bit in comparison with WandaVision and Loki).

The Star Wars shows have been a little more variable in quality, though even the Book of Boba Fett has had some points to recommend it, even beyond it being a backdoor third season for The Mandalorian. Obi-Wan has divided fandom, even without the racist knuckle draggers complaining about Third Sister, but unlike Boba Fett has provided a good bridge between movies, specifically showing what life has been like in the years between Episodes III and IV. I may not whip myself up into a blood frenzy for new Star Wars like I did around the Force Awakens and Rogue One, but I'm cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Andor series.

Peacock is the one I watch least, even less than Netflix, though the presence of Premier League football on that helps it stay kind of near the others. Like my list on Netflix, there are things I want to watch (like the Office or Parks & Rec) but nothing super high-priority. I'm tempted, against my better judgement, by Yellowstone, but it might be back on Paramount by the time I get to it.

Paramount Plus is my go-to for Star Trek, though a friend has recommended the Offer, about the making of The Godfather. It's probably the most frivolous, but since there's enough Trek to keep me busy for a while to come, I'm not in a hurry to cancel it.

And finally, there's Apple TV Plus, which wasn't even on the horizon when I wrote the previous post. I avoided it for a long time, because it didn't seem to have anything, but when I received it for free after buying some Apple gear, some of the shows, mainly Ted Lasso, grew on me. I cancelled it again a few months ago, because I was focusing on other streamers, but it seems to get better every month or two, so I'm expecting to get back on it soon to check out Foundation, For All Mankind and possibly Severance.

With all this stuff to watch, my main misgiving from back then remains, which is finding time to watch it. This is one of the ways in which the streaming wars have shaken out to be a repeat of the situation when you had to have cable to keep up with everything. If you want to be up on the shows that everyone's talking about (or creating memes for, which is kinda the same thing now), you have to be on all these services, plus probably Hulu and Amazon Prime. It does seem that streaming services have consolidated into these bigger ones that have a lot of different content, rather than the hyper-focused ones of a few years ago, which is good for keeping interest (at least, mine).

The upshot, though, is that I'm a little less confident of Netflix's ability to fight off the likes of Disney and HBO. It'll be interesting to see how well it holds people's interest after the final season of Stranger Things comes out.

Tired of All This Chaos

It's been a rough few weeks for people who are sensible and moderate in words and deeds (though I'm not referring to political moderates here). The shootings in Buffalo, NY, and Uvalde, TX, have started a bunch of discussions on social media - though crucially not in the US Senate - that have become increasingly acerbic and have led to people further entrenching themselves into their own beliefs, even when those beliefs are clearly misguided.

At the same time, far-right agitators are being galvanized by laws like Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill to disrupt LGBTQ people's lives. They claim they're protecting children from pedophiles (i.e. grooming), but as usual with the right, it's a bad-faith effort to tar their opponent with the most outrageous claim they can find. The latest one was a storybook reading at a library near here in San Lorenzo, which a bunch of Proud Boys disrupted because it involved a book about a drag show.

Leaving aside whether you think it's okay to expose kids to stuff like drag shows (and to be clear, it's nowhere near as bad as all the violence they see constantly in cartoons, comics, TV and the news), it's definitely not okay to have a bunch of adult men in vaguely military get-ups coming into their space and causing a scene. I'm heartened that the San Lorenzo Police put a quick stop to the invasion and said in unequivocal terms that such things wouldn't be tolerated. But I'm also concerned that far-right accounts like "Libs of Tik Tok" are directing extremists toward events like this (that POS who runs it shared it on her account, in the hopes that exactly this would happen).

But do you know what I'm really concerned by? The way certain elements that portray themselves as left or progressive are also enabling this kind of hate against LGBTQ people. I've been following this on UK media for a while, ever since JK Rowling mounted her increasingly ludicrous defenses of so-called "gender critical" ideology. Rowling herself is pretty progressive on other topics, and so are a number of other high-profile TERFs in UK media, but it's becoming clear that giant parts of the media there subscribe to similar ideas.

For example, I was really grossed out by a column in the Guardian from Sonia Sodha, who used to be an advisor to former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband. In the column, Sodha took up the cause of a lesbian barrister who'd been asked to delete tweets saying she didn't want to have relationships with trans women. Sodha is outraged, OUTRAGED I say, at the idea that lesbians are being forced to have sex with men - her own terminology, and it's not happening - and that... er, I guess at the idea that maybe it's not something a barrister should be tweeting about? 

There are a number of offensive things about Sodha's column: one is the way she keeps referring to trans women as "men". Another is her clear concern-trolling, given that she herself is straight. Yet another is the TERF's classic tactic of not actually backing up their statements with concrete evidence: she provides a link to a statement that "women report being banned from dating apps" for saying they want to date cisgender women, but the link actually leads to a blog post by Helen Joyce (who's recently suggested trans people should be put in camps) about this exact case. You have to scroll down about 12 paragraphs to actually find an example, and Joyce provides... one.

I normally love the Guardian, but Sodha's joined in her TERFdom by Hadley Freeman, among probably several others. In the end, they can hold their ideas, even if said ideas are wrong-headed and destructive, but it worries me when someone supposedly progressive graduates beyond just distaste for a group to following someone who advocates for their destruction. At the very least, she and Freeman could probably go write for the Daily Mail or something? They'll get a warm reception there.

(Also, yes, I use the term Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist to describe this ideology. because Judith Butler put it best: excluding trans women from feminist spaces is a radical ideology. Why is this controversial? Also, while you're at it, read Butler here as well)

To tie this into the above: the far-right is being emboldened by people on the supposedly progressive side who are using chilling language to advocate against trans people. We're already on the brink (or past the brink) of political violence becoming a part of our daily lives, and we don't need our supposed allies to open a new front and provide aid and comfort to our enemies.

Do better, Guardian.