hmmm

nah, you’re exactly the right amount of woke with this take because you’re on the money. part of what makes racists and xenophobes feel “justified” in their disdain and dehumanization of indians is by sweeping a broad brush over us and saying all scam callers are nefarious indians when scam calling is a global issue and people are often tricked/trafficked into it with no way to leave, some people are even beaten for not earning money in the scams or not wanting to take part. india has one of the largest populations so, statistically, we tend to be very visible in some industries and people will stupidly think we are the only ones doing it or we all do it when realistically other populations do it in the same, or even higher, rates in proportion with their population.

the op linked the study in the replies & i’ve been skimming it & it’s actually rlly rlly interesting to think abt

in the appendix (which you can find by scrolling down) CA:TWS is listed as having one torture scene, which immediately made me wonder because there are two that I can think of.

further on in the appendix when the authors are discussing the criteria for including torture, they give the vault scene in CA:TWS as an example of a scene that isn't torture, with the justification that Bucky seems to comply with his captors, and given the information shown on screen we can't conclude whether or not Bucky is a willing participant in the "wipe." Willing participants cannot be tortured, therefore the vault scene is not counted as torture

That is a WILD take on that scene. "doesn't fight back" does not equal "not being tortured" come on now

now, I could see disqualifying the vault scene as being a torture scene on the basis that the purpose of the "wipe" is not to inflict pain, it just happens to be an extremely painful process.

That's an interesting take. Is doing something incredibly painful or distressing to a person torture when there is ostensibly a secondary purpose to the painful thing, even though it also clearly doubles as a way of inflicting suffering and asserting power? This is a really important question to answer, since a lot of instances of torture and mistreatment in prisons and military situations etc. seem to fall under this. e.g. a strip search is nominally for "security" purposes, but it is also forced nudity which is a common form of sexual violence inflicted as part of torture.

But disqualifying the scene because there is not enough evidence that Bucky is being coerced to do it is nuts, since immediately prior Bucky gets slapped in the face for not answering a question and doesn't retaliate, and immediately before that Bucky gets a bunch of guns pointed at him when he acts up

That's another important question. Does being forced to comply with or participate in your own torture disqualify it from being torture?

The answer is, to me, obviously no, and in fact this seems like a relatively common feature of torture: e.g. forcing prisoners to dig their own graves requires a good amount of compliance from the victim and that's a major reason why it's so distressing

[Image ID: tags that read "#i can understand them choosing an conservative threshold for deciding what torture is #it's so hard to be objective with these kinds of things #like the last comment said the data is likely a sever undercount #but that they found an effect still should emphasize the point that much more"]

So I really want to focus on prev’s tags here because I disagree that this is a case of “the paper researching torturing in media excusing torture in media.” Jazzafrazz is completely right, the threshold is stated by the paper to be conservative.

[Image ID: excerpt from the linked paper with two lines highlighted: "we erred on the conservative side in an effort to understate our case" and "excluded any incidents where it was unclear whether or not the actions amounted to torture"]

“In an effort to understate our case” and “unclear” are important words to note here. Brainwashing, while absolutely a human rights abuse, causes the scene to have a layer of nuance to it. Yes, any average viewer would perceive what Bucky is put through as torture (that’s largely the point, since it’s a scene setting up how evil the antagonists are), but someone critiquing the paper could argue that the scene is an extension of the brainwashing rather than torture done punitively, or for the purpose of gaining information. At the same time the average viewer might not clock the scene where the protagonists dangle a man off the side of a building to get information out of him as torture, despite it more firmly fitting into the paper’s threshold.

Because people are intellectually dishonest this is not saying Black Americans are a singular class with internally equal experiences of oppression. There are class divisions within every community and minorities within those communities who possess most of the wealth and power compared to their toiling brethren. Obviously you unite the most deeply oppressed of any group with one another.

But a few Black millionaires and petty property owners does not make Black Americans a majority petite and big bourgeois community, quite the opposite. The deepest poverty outside of reservations in the United States is experienced in the ghettoized and increasingly gentrified de facto segregated Black neighborhoods. Black Americans have had the most revolutionary organizations in America’s history, from slave revolts to what WEB Du Bois referred to as the “general strike of the slaves” during the Civil War to spontaneous insurgencies to radical labor unions to outright Marxist vanguard parties.

Of course there are members who are ideologically or economically tied to imperialism and do not wish to cease receiving the benefits. But there are also the deepest of the poor who have repeatedly tied the violence of the American streets to the violence of American imperialism. This is increasingly a common analysis again with a mass movement building.