Emma Stone screaming “I’m sorry” during Sandra Oh’s monologue shows that at any given moment, without a hint of irony, White women will insert themselves into a woman of color’s spotlight. She HAD to say something, despite the years and years of silence on the issue, right then and there as a half laugh for…what? To turn the real issue of white washing into a joke? To reinsert herself into the conversation when her decisions hurt Asian actors like Sandra? It’s all liberal posturing disgusing white fragility because she most definitely felt embarrassed to be indirectly called out for her complicity in white washing.
Why else yell an apology after four years of her just never really addressing it? It’s white guilt taken to a literal extreme to pander to the audience for cheap woke laughs. “Look at her, she’s aware of the issues! And she’s sorry!!! XD total self own!” White women can’t bare to sit in their uncomfortability when they are confronted with their complicity and try to detract from it in any way possible. Sure, it’s just a throw away comment but really think about the ideology that fueled her need to say that in the first place, at the time she said it, and the reaction of her saying it from a most white crowd. By dismissing the comment as a jokey, self depreciating nod, we dismiss how white people can constantly do some self flaggration, usually publically, years after the damage has already been done. We see it over and over again.
Yes I know Sandra and Andy’s joint monologue was to supposed to be light hearted and fun, poking satirical fun at topics etc etc but it’s something to chew on. The whole interaction was brief (Emma’s comment wasn’t planned and she literally injected it into the monologue) but is pretty illuminating.
January 7th, 2019 - The RCMP forcibly break down the Gidimt’en checkpoint in UNCEDED Wet'suwet'en territory in Northern B.C., and arrest unarmed land defenders who are protesting against a LNG pipeline fuelled by fracking.
The RCMP is under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government (i.e. Justin Trudeau).
The RCMP are setting up exclusion zones and closed roads to the public and media as officers get set to dismantle two camps on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.
“During the police enforcement operation, temporary exclusion zones and road closures will be established for police and public safety reasons,” said the news release sent out Monday morning that confirmed the RCMP will enforce a court order requested by a pipeline company trying to build a pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory.
“Those areas will be clearly marked and media/public are welcome to stand at the perimeter, but no one will be allowed to enter the exclusion zones. These zones will only be maintained as long as necessary.”
The raids have been highly anticipated after a B.C. judge granted an interim injunction in December against two check points leading to the construction site for the LNG Coastal GasLink pipeline.
you know, that whole thing when a colonist militaristic police force storms a indigenous encampment, removes it’s people who live there, all for corporate interest, so we can pump more oil out, and accelerate the death of the planet.
Then once the Cops storm the place, they declare an “exclusion zone” deploy a wifi and cell blockage, AND exclude media. All so no news of it gets out.
You all need to be fucking outraged. We live in a police state, and the moment your life gets in the way of making money, you cease to matter.
Hey Americans, you know how we Canadians all shared information about Standing Rock as it was happening?
We’re having a very similar situation in Canada right now.
Now would be a good time to reciprocate.
This is happening RIGHT NOW.
Nobody on this site besides me and a few other bloggers are talking about this.
Like there are only 2 or 3 blogs in total in the #Wet’suwet’en or #Unist’ot’en or Unist’ot’en Camp hashtags from the past week.
this is happening January 7, 2019
If you’re on twitter, track these hashtags:
#Unistoten
#wetsuwetenstrong
#undrip
#thetimeisnow
Some people to follow who are sharing news about this live:
a thought: teal’c going to the theatre to see the force awakens b/c of course! star wars is his favourite.
he’s sitting in this theatre—reserved as ever, but if you know him he’s projecting all kinds of delight—the lights go down, title card, DAH!! DAH DAH DAH! DUN DUN DAH DUN DUN DUN DUN DAH etc etc, the film starts.
he’s sees the battle in the jakku village. one stormtrooper is killed + one (FN-2187) kneels to help, is marked by their blood, and FN-2187 stumbles back, overwhelmed. teal’c sees the stormtroopers being lined up like good soldiers in front of the villagers and force-wielding kylo ren. teal’c thinks of his jaffa brethren.
then brazen human poe (!) desperately charges in against this ‘false god’…but is instantly subdued by an outstretched hand + this action screams of a kara kesh/ribbon device.
and poe is pushed to his knees, but is ever cheeky in the face of this looming evil + teal’c suddenly sees o’neill. truthfully, he sees many people, but ‘so who talks first? you talk first?’ and ‘it’s just very hard to understand you with all the…apparatus.’ is nothing but jack.
poe is dragged away, a familiar sight.
captain phasma asks about the villagers. kylo ren responds ‘kill them all’ but teal’c hears a deep and echoing voice: ‘kill the rest’.
blasters tear down the villagers. FN-2187 holds his weapon. it’s fully charged, but he cannot fire.
later: FN-2187 and poe sit back to back. their TIE fighter hovers in the hangar over faces of the first order. FN-2187 opens fire. he is defiant.
they break out into the openness of space + together they cheer. they liberated themselves.
FINN is free.
teal’c grips the armrests, stares and stares at the theatre screen.
I was going through useless facts and trivia to fill my brain with shit and I learned in feudal Japan the term for a bisexual man was something along ”wields swords in both hands”
Georges Rochegrosse (1859–1938), Le Chevalier aux Fleurs (The Knight of the Flowers) (detail) (1894), oil on canvas, 235.5 x 374 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
There was a paper recently where a research team trained a machine learning algorithm (a GAN they called AttnGAN) to generate pictures based on written descriptions. It’s like Visual Chatbot in reverse. When it was just trained to generate pictures of birds, it did pretty well, actually.
(Although the description didn’t specify a beak and so it just… left it out.)
But when they trained the same algorithm on a huge and highly varied dataset, it had a lot more trouble generating a picture to go with that caption. Below, I give the same caption to a version of their algorithm that has been trained to generate everything from sheep to shopping centers. Cris Valenzuela wrapped their trained model in an entertaining demo that attempts to generate a picture for any caption.
This bird is less, um, recognizable. When the GAN has to draw *anything* I ask for, there’s just too much to keep track of - the problem’s too broad, and the algorithm spreads itself too thin. It doesn’t just have trouble with birds. A GAN that’s been trained just on celebrity faces will tend to produce photorealistic portraits. But this one, however…
In fact, it does a horrifying job with humans because it can never quite seem to get the number of orifices correct.
It’s fun to ask it to draw animals though. It knows the texture of giraffes, but not quite exactly their shape. And it knows that boats are on the water, but not necessarily that they are boats.
It also (like many other image recognition algorithms) gets a bit confused about the difference between sheep and the landscapes they’re found on. Other algorithms recognize sheep in pictures of empty green fields. And this one, when asked to draw sheep…
That’s different, though, from asking it to draw *a* sheep. In that case, it knows exactly what to do. It draws the sheep, and then just to be safe it fills the entire planet with wool too.
It really likes drawing stop signs and clocks. Give it the slightest opportunity to draw one, and it will chuck those things all over the place.
Other than its horrifying humans, this algorithm can actually be pretty delightful.
I had way too much fun generating these and ended up with way more than would fit in this one blog post. I’ve compiled a few more of my favorites. Enter your email and I’ll send you them (and if you want, you can get bonus material each time I post).
Don’t assume malice. Assume ignorance. Life is easier, the world is kinder, and you can educate. Actual malice is pretty rare, I find.
Always remember Hanlon’s Razor–”Never assume malice when incompetence will suffice as an explanation.”
That’s said, never forget Fred Clark’s Law, either: “Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” There’s a certain point at which ignorance becomes malice–at which there is simply no way to become that ignorant except deliberately and maliciously.
