Sketch Mod Blog

A lot of the complaints about Kylo Ren as a villain is that he lacks Vader’s larger than life evil, he’s too common, too human to be evil. Traits that are used by his stans to argue why he will/must be redeemed.

I would like to point out that both camps, those who hate Kylo Ren for his humaness and those who use it for his defense, has missed the point JJ and Lawrence were trying to make.

When Christians think of Evil, not the smaller, everyday evil but the one that commits genocide and other atrocities they tend think of people like this:

Or if we stick to the Star Wars universe, this:

or this:

But from a Jewish standpoint neither Hitler, Vader or the Emperor is the true face of evil. Evil isn’t some epic, outside force, or some larger than life villain.

Instead it looks something like this:

These are private photos of the social life of the secretary staff, the SS officers and guards of Auschwitz, taken between May and December 1944. These are the people who while singing, laughing, sunning themselves and celebrating as we see in the pictures, oversaw and carried out the genocide of the Jewish people and other assorted atrocities committed in the camp.

Complete ordinary looking people. People, men and women, born to good families and proper bloodlines (in the Aryan sense anyway), with good Christian raising, believing in good Christian values. Well mannered, well educated, usually erudite. And the direct committers of genocide.

To Jewish people there are no difference between Evil and evil, they are one and the same. A Jewish woman, Hannah Arendt, coined the phrase “the banality of evil” and I have yet to see a single goy use it properly, because this is what it means.

This is why JJ and Lawrence made the First Order an obvious, punch in the face parallel to the Nazis, in every single conceivable way that one can in a fantasy universe with no actual Germany. That is why they made Hux such on open and overt parallel to Hitler, and then went and made him a secondary, one note villain. Neither Hux nor Hitler symbolizes the true face of evil, or the banality of it.

Kylo Ren does. 

Which is why Kylo looks like this:

He’s a young man, from a good family, with (from the First Order’s or at least Snoke’s pov) “proper” bloodline. And he’s evil. Not in the epic, over the top, Christian variety like Vader or the Emperor, but the kind of evil that oversaw Auschwitz and ordered and carried out the atrocities there.

No Kylo isn’t cool, or awesome, or epic in his evil, he’s human. But because people are either incapable or unwilling to follow the Jewish understanding of evil many take that humanity Kylo Ren as a sign of goodness and the guarantee of his redemption, instead of as the source of his evil.

Just remember, these are elected officials and our tax dollars are being used for this.

here have some more nonsense.

So the Spoon Theory is a fundamental metaphor used often in the chronic pain/chronic illness communities to explain to non-spoonies why life is harder for them. It’s super useful and we use that all the time. But it has a corollary.  You know the phrase, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” right? Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens.  A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one “you poked my trigger on purpose because you think it’s fun to see me melt down” pitchfork.

“The scene takes no more than five minutes of the movie, and the tension between colonial history and race only escalates from that point on. However, we as museum professionals need to talk about the inclusion of this scene, especially regarding its function in a film that was cut from nearly four hours long in its first iteration to a solid two, a film that so many young people will see and one that is poised to become a cultural touchstone. The museum is presented as an illegal mechanism of colonialism, and along with that, a space which does not even welcome those whose culture it displays.

And is there anything incorrect about that?

If you’ve ever spent time in a history/culture museum, you may have noticed that the rooms with Native or African artifacts tend to be very dimly lit compared to other parts of the museum. You probably thought (as I did) that it’s because the artifacts are old and light sensitive. Sometimes that’s the case. Lots of times, though, it’s not.

Museums often display *contemporary* African and Native artifacts in rooms with dim lighting because they’re trying to construct a mythology around these artifacts. The lighting subconciously suggests to us these are relics from the past, from “dead” cultures, even when they’re not.

Furniture and silverware from 1750s Europe? Bright lighting, placed on a lower museum floor that gets lots of foot traffic. Shields made by members of an African tribe in the *1930s*? Dim lighting, placed on a quiet upper level of the museum that feels like a mausoleum.

This is completely intentional. Museums play into our Western notions of whose culture is “alive” and whose is “dead.” They give us what they think we want to see. They’re also doing real political harm, because if they can convince us that African and Native cultures are relics of the past, that means we don’t have to think about what we’re doing to the (very much still alive) peoples that they represent.

I learned about Native cultures in school.  I was fascinated and admiring, I read all kinds of books and went to museums; if you’d asked I’d say I loved and respected these beautiful people and their varied beliefs.  But the way I was taught about Native Americans wasn’t the way I was taught about US history, or about Europeans.  The curricula taught about Native cultures and beliefs the same way they taught about Sumerians and ancient Egyptians, and so I learned the implied lesson: Native cultures were past, they were gone, they were dead.  None of the museums I went to challenged that, just as the writer above explains.  (Moreover, nobody taught us kids about modern Native people, their sociopolitical issues, or their cultures- as far as we knew, Native people were quaint historical footnotes, and any of their descendants still alive had the same lives and concerns as us white suburbanites.)

When I first went to NMAI I was confused, because it felt different than I expected and I couldn’t figure out why.  Eventually I realized it was because I went expecting a temple to sadly dead mythologies and ways of life, and what I saw instead was a cultural history lovingly curated and cared for by its inheritors, just as any other modern ethnicity or nationality remembers and teaches its history.  I recognize it’s not exactly the same as say, remembering Italian-American history, because of the weight of the genocide committed against Native people, and the sometimes all-too-successful attempts to wipe out their cultures.  But my point is that in NMAI, I learned that Native cultures are alive, and it made me realize just how badly wrong my thought process had been to that point.

I am certainly not an expert in museums or in anything related to NMAI, but I can’t help thinking that the difference is in large part because Native people are so deeply involved in creating the exhibits and maintaining the collections.  The exhibits feature Native voices and commentary, and they talk about Native life and culture today, making it clear that these communities haven’t simply vanished into the past.  Just another example of how critically important representation is- it may be that ALL museums that handle Native or African objects/art need to have staff of African or Native descent, or it may be that they simply need to consult and take advice from modern representatives of the culture in question.  I’m sure this would lead to the usual cries of “political correctness run amok” that always arise from certain quarters; but really, it’s the idea that white people alone get to decide how best to select and display artifacts from other culture (cultures which still exist, and have plenty of living representatives) that’s exceptionally weird. 

While not an exhibit, when I was in grad school for museum studies we had a really funny lesson involving repatriation attempts within a museum’s collection. The tribe wanted most of the stuff back, naturally, but the thing the museum had a big collection for that they didn’t want were baskets. Why? Outside of maybe studying a few for possibly-lost weaving techniques, to the tribe the baskets were disposable things you got rid of when they were past their lifetime. So it’s sort of like:

Curator: So you don’t want these baskets? We have hundreds.

Tribe Spokeswoman: No, they’re not really useful and will probably just fall apart within a month or so outside of storage.

Curator: Yes, that is a problem.

Tribe Spokeswoman: That’s why we don’t really try to preserve these long term. They’re just not made for it. But you’re a museum and have to?

Curator: It’s in our collection policy.

Tribe Spokeswoman: Well, good luck then.

guess what

you’re so close to surviving 2018

you can make it

i’m so proud that you’re still here

keep going buddy

Titty Speakeasies

Americans:

NAFTA is just one example of that shift in policy, his tax policy is another.

Clinton and the New Democrats (now called Blue Dogs or Problem Solvers) shifting of Party resulted in helping hasten the deterioration of labor and unions in this country right when they needed a Left (or even centrist) party to help them.

On top of that, mail carriers:  -have wages that top out at over $30 an hour (and their wages go up in predictable steps based on how long they’ve been with the USPS) -have excellent benefits, including a shit-ton of vacation time, plus a pension, and they can retire after thirty years

But they also have one of the oldest, biggest, strongest unions in the country. That must piss off Republicans so much. 

Also, side note: they take zero taxpayer dollars. They’re entirely funded by postage.