Monday, March 6, 2017

Selected Articles

Hello everyone, just reminding you that I'm still alive. I thought the following articles were pretty interesting & relevant to the kind of stuff I write about, and I figured you might enjoy them too.

"Face It, We Loved Watching Torture" - Matthew Gault, War is Boring
     - "Repeat After Me - Torture Doesn't Work"

"Dragnets, Dirty Harry and Dying Hard" - Alyssa Rosenberg, Washington Post
     - "In Pop Culture, There Are No Bad Police Shootings"
     - "How Police Censorship Shaped Hollywood"

"The Cheery, Ordinary World of Fascism", Annibale, War Nerd

"The Challenge For Anti-Racists Looking For Solutions In Trump’s America" - German Lopez, Vox

"Bolivia Files Formal Complaint Over Its Representation In Ghost Recon Wildlands" - IGN

"Television Is Trying To Kill Us" - TVTropes

Also, please check out my older reading list as well.

Finally, here are some of my own favorite (read: most-polished, still relevant) articles:

Analysis: 300
Authorship, Blame & Neutrality
Analysis: The Birth of a Nation
Dehumanization
Realism

I think if you read all of those you've got a pretty good handle on what I want to tell you.

But just in case, here's an even simpler summary:

1: Everyone learns unconsciously through fiction (even important people, and on every ideological spectrum), which should scare you because fiction is written by unreliable writers who shave down the complexities of life to make exciting stories (at best) or biased propaganda (at worst). Please do not learn from fiction if you can help it. Please refer to real data when making decisions, formulating views, and crafting arguments.

2: Because you can't avoid learning from fiction, writers should have at least some responsibility to minimize the damage caused by their material. At the very least they shouldn't propagate overtly false information, especially for cheap entertainment.

Thanks for reading!

J.Shea

2 comments:

  1. Hello. Just mainly here to let you know that there are still people out on the net who read your work as it has seemed pretty vacant in here as of late. Other than that, I'd like to thank you for what you have done as it has changed how I handle what I write for the better.

    I have yet to read all of your posts on here but I intend finish doing that someday. I'll get the word out as much as I possibly can. In the meantime, I hope you are still continuing your research on here as I doubt we, your viewers, simply read this just for something to do in-between lunch breaks.

    Oh, and I plan to get a hold of your book on world cultures. It would help a lot on one of my works I plan on creating... One day.

    Again, thank you for what you have done and I ope for the best for you!

    (If you are recieving multiple messages at once, I apologize. Blogspot is either very buggy for me or it is because I am rather new to how it functions as I had to remake this comment multiple times...)

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  2. Hey Shea, just gotta say a recent conversation I had actually had me reference back to your blog, specifically on your articles about how fiction's tendency to portray a cleaned-up or sanitised version (from a marketing standpoint, it's to keep things "family-friendly" so as to be able to sell to a broader audience) of violence promotes a problematic subtext of romanticising/glamourising bloodshed. Which made me raise the question of "does family-friendly necessarily equate to wholesome?"

    Which of course, based on what you have written thus far it's safe to say your answer is a resounding no. Which I suppose makes the current thing about geek culture all the more insidious; I.e. the average layperson is raised on today's media to believe that family-friendly is generally to be associated with wholesomeness. So yeah, just saying.

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