Skew Toward the Story

I frequently worry that I am not providing myself with a sufficient diversity of inputs. Only consuming ideas and opinions that already align with your own leads to intellectual stagnation, bigotry, and arrogance, and since I so dearly love to be right and, on the whole, would like to be liked, I try to keep feeding myself writing and commentary from sources opposed to my own current positions.

Feminism, one of my primary areas of interest, tends to skew in a certain direction, as all movements do. For example, if you follow many feminists you will hear frequent discussion of “rape culture”, which you may not feel certain exists, even if you understand the term. Or, to cite the impetus for this particular post, you may hear many feminists and feminism-inclined women tell stories of the times they’ve experienced sexual harassment, sexist behavior from colleagues or supervisors, unwanted physical contact, sexual violence, or rape. You may start to wonder whether these stories actually represent the norm, suspecting that you may have skewed your input volume too far toward the voices of angry or activist women, who have now convinced you that women are more disenfranchised and oppressed than reality reflects.

I have certainly asked myself this question from time to time, just to keep myself honest, and I have tried to give due credence to the voices in my life suggesting that everything isn’t really so bad for women—that men are, on the whole, supportive and “nice”, and that while sexual harassment and sexual violence persist in our culture, they do not constitue the pervasive, systemic problem feminists would have us believe. These voices argue, somewhat persuasively, that people mostly act with kindness and in good faith, and that the many examples to the contrary represent only the most egregious acts of violence and bigotry.

But. These voices are making an argument—reasoning from a dearth of evidence in their own experience. On the other hand, the stories of women who have been hurt and abused are actual stories, not abstractions, and while they also represent a limited and skewed sample, I doubt not at all that the events described did actually take place. Let us leave aside for a moment the question of whether abused or disenfranchised women under-report their own negative experiences, thus resulting in the aforementioned dearth of evidence in the everyday lives of the majority. Instead, let us reduce the extent and ubiquity of sexual harassment and violence to something we can’t deny: many, many women, particularly at times when some nationally-noteworthy and horrendous act of violence has occurred as the result of ingrained misogyny, report feeling constantly fearful, objectified, harassed, and de-humanized because of their gender, and this is not to be borne. It is not to be borne, I say, even if it is only happening to one woman, and I have received direct evidence in only the past two days that it is happening to hundreds of women.

If my own Twitter feed can tell me that hundreds of women report these experiences, can we doubt that our society has a problem that we must correct? Are you, my reader, content to know that even the relatively few women within the reach of myself and the 205 people I follow on Twitter suffer from frequent harassment, abuse, and violence? Then how much more should you feel outraged to know that an even greater number—whatever number your process of extrapolation might suggest—also feel compelled to structure their lives around these threats of oppression?

Given the choice between listening to a persuasive voice contending that sexual harassment and sexual oppression cannot be as bad as all these feminists make it out to be, and believing the stories of hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of actual women, which will you choose? Personally, I find concrete stories much more compelling than argument, and I am willing to risk making a few good and caring men feel uncomfortable or affronted by suggesting that they and I participate in an institutionalized misogyny that keeps many women—even if only hundreds—fearful and at risk.

Even if it’s not All Women, it is more than I am willing to bear.

Inspired by the #YesAllWomen hashtag.

You can’t live without the fire\ It’s the heat that makes you strong\ ‘Cause you’re born to live\ And fight it all the way\ You can’t hide what lies inside you\ It’s the only thing you know\ You’re embracing that, never walk away\ — Within Temptation, “Iron”\

The United States Just Finished 46th in a Press-Freedom Study

Here are the top 10: Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Iceland, New Zealand, and Sweden.

Raise your hand if you’re afraid to visit any of those countries.

Romania finished ahead of us. Think about that, anyone who remembers The Iron Curtain.

(via Carbonite frozen Aurora by pushfighter on deviantART)

(via Jedi Ariel by pushfighter on deviantART)

Star Wars ‘99: The Star Wars Prequels: Some Things are Better Left Unsaid

starwars1999:

A brief examination of George Lucas’s prequels and the purpose of Star Wars ‘99

There’s no shortage of explanations as to why George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels are considered a failure, but I personally believe the usual culprits (execution, screenwriting) are symptoms of a more fundamental…

You guys. You Guys. YOU GUYS. Aaron Diaz is finally going to reveal more of his Star Wars 1999 project.

There will be more than one woman and more than two black people.

You had my curiosity; now you have my attention.

From a philosophical perspective, libertarians generally believe the appropriate role of government is to protect life, liberty, and property. The question is, is forbidding abortion a way of protecting life, or should it be viewed as a restriction of liberty? There’s a plausible libertarian case on both sides. People who are consciously libertarian are more respectful of the other position on abortion, in my experience, than most pro-lifers and pro-choicers. I do not think there is an official position. — David Boaz, interviewed in the The Atlantic by Molly Ball

amymebberson:

Wonder Tink!

Highlight of the morning.

This Is Why Apple Rebooted FCP

I don’t know how this works in FCP X, because you don’t change to a new NLE in the middle of a huge project, but the Boris FX 3D Text plugin Apple licensed to do titles with fine-tuned controls and effects, such as drop shadows, drives me totally bonkers. It’s a tyrant that doesn’t play well with others and forces me into hacky workarounds to perform what should be relatively simple tasks.

Example: I want to cross-dissolve between two screens worth of credits¹, so I should be able to just drop in a cross-dissolve transition from FCP’s extensive library of effects. But because I have credits for two different characters on the screen, I used two different instances of the Boris plugin, and when I drop in the dissolve, only one of them dissolves. The other vanishes immediately when the transition starts, while its counterpart on the next screen remains absent until the transition has finished.

Positing that this might be due to a bug in the alpha channel implementation, I tried cropping each slide to exclude the expanse of empty space surrounding each title, but to no avail. Instead, I just now finished keyframing every clip individually to change the opacity from 0 to 100 (or vice-versa) over the course of 24 frames, which took far longer.

Also, I’m pretty sure the render time increases over using FCP’s software-optimized transitions. So I’m writing this during the 25-minute wait it takes to render out 2 minutes worth of still images with text over them.