chunchomunos:

the writers of rawhide never acknowledged that favor deffo owned slaves because they wanted him to be likable but I think there’s interesting potential in how that could have shaped his perpective on the his relationship with his employes and sexual/romantic parters and tbh women in general, since he sees women and his workers as inferier and he’s got a already set template on how he template on how to treat perceived inferiers. probably especally people working for him because ya know, white women existed when he had slaves but his drovers might be the first time he’s using labour that isn’t from slaves

like in one episode he puts rowdy in jail for trying to leave him that’s A Very Fucked Up Thing To Do! (especally considering rowdy was a pow!) but he never really shows remose for employing that kind of punishment

also he’s violently lashed out at his workers to keep them in line

like, i know most bosses at the time where even worse but they could have been impacted by slavery to

this is rambling and all but its just something I’ve been thinking about!

I’m not sure about Favor being a plantation (and slave) owner. His language is, more often than not, non-standard English, and in one episode he says he started droving at the age of 17 or so. He also responds with indignation when he and Pete come across a real slave owner (whose slaves, however, seem to be all white).

That said, I almost totally agree with your unfavourable view of Favor’s attitude to (1) industrial relations and (2) women. The whole industrial relations aspect could be discussed at length. The argument put forward by Favor fans is “but that’s the way things were in the 1870s”, which, however, the scriptwriters implicitly refute in Season 8, where Rowdy is a much less authoritarian trail boss. But Season 8 is a sort of Don’t Go There topic: hardly anyone likes it apart from me. Re. women, very occasionally he meets one he respects as a person, although I can only think of the Blue Spy, the nurse in the anthrax ep, the doctor in A Woman’s Place, and his old trail boss’s wife in Dry Drive.

I also think that Rawhide as a whole was fairly timid about black/white relations. In “Incident of the Buffalo Soldier” the eponymous character is noble and brave, and dies nobly and bravely. Poor Woody Strode, who was so good in John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge (was that film made before or after Rawhide?) was cast as an ultra-stereotypical Australian Aboriginal “companion” in Incident of the Boomerang. I can’t think of any other significant black characters until Season 8, when the drovers included one black drover (interesting, if under-developed, character) and a British drover (unexplained and underdeveloped!)

This is long-winded. I would have put a cut if I had seen the options (the little wheel in the top-R-hand corner did not give me any cut options)

what is the best way to explain to someone why all cops are bastards and not just “bad cops” or “American cops”

kropotkhristian:

Okay, this is going to be a longer explanation.

If I’m going to be honest here, I think that anarchists often oversell this notion, mostly due to a totally legitimate emotional response to oppression that people endure at the hands of the state. This is why you’ll often find really frustrating arguments between anarchists and other people that look something like this:

Person: “Well my uncle is a cop, and he’s a nice guy, and he puts his life on the line every day so stop generalizing a whole group of people due to the few bad ones”

Anarchist: “Fuck your uncle, it’s not my fault he decided to be a pig”

Person: “Well, I never! *huffs away*”

And nobody ever gets anywhere. The problem here is that when anarchists say “All cops are bastards,” what anarchists actually mean is “the role of a cop is systemically and inherently immoral, since they violently enforce the power of the ruling class at the severe disadvantage to the poor and marginalized, sometimes including murdering the poor and marginalized with zero repercussions.” And I suppose anarchists could just say that every single time, but it is easier to just say “all cops are bastards.”

But let’s examine that second sentence for a bit. Due to a lot of popular media presentations (like Law & Order), cops are often presented as these heroic figures that do mostly good things like protect people from murderers and stop child predators. But the reality is, the vast majority of things a cop does is not like that at all. You could probably even ask a cop and they would agree with the notion that most of their job is not like that. In fact, the vast majority of things a cop does is enforcing pointless bureaucracy that only serves the ruling classes and oppresses the poor for no reason. You could even say that all a cop really is is a bureaucrat with access to military grade weaponry, and you would be pretty on the nose.

For an example, lets talk about the disparate response to two actually common occurrences that cops often are called in to help with. In one case, we have domestic violence, and in another case, we have someone who is driving a car without a license plate. Okay.

So, if somebody calls the police to help with a domestic abuse situation, often times the cops don’t show up until the domestic abuse has already gotten way out of hand. The person being abused has already been harmed to some serious degree. So the police didn’t do anything to actually prevent the abuse. Once the police do show up, sometimes the person who is being abused is disbelieved, or the police decide that both sides are to blame. Sometimes the abused person isn’t even taken out of harms way of the abuser. If the abused person is believed, then they have to file a bunch of paper work, find a shelter, occasionally pay for a hotel or some other place to go, and generally go through tons of hoops of bureaucracy in order to actually leave harms way. And the police officer is there the entire time ensuring that the proper bureaucratic steps are followed. That’s really their job. That’s their actual role in the case of a domestic abuse. They have to make sure that all of the proper paperwork is correctly filed and the steps are taken just so. This is why I said in a previous post that 24-hr women’s shelters and other forms of help against domestic abuse do far more to actually combat domestic abuse than any cop has ever done. Because they are just helping for the sake of helping rather than being the bureaucrat.

Compare this to driving without a license plate. If you drove around town in a car without a license plate, there would be a cop on your tail probably within 15-30 minutes maximum. And if you refused to do what he said, you would probably be handcuffed and whisked off to jail and you would probably be charged with multiple crimes, including possibly resisting arrest, which is a felony. All of that for just not having a license plate on your vehicle and then not doing what the cop asked. None of those things have anything to do with helping anybody. They are just bureaucratic rules put in place by the ruling class. But cops are way more likely to be found enforcing rules like that then actually helping anybody. Because that is their actual job. They are the violent arm of the bureaucratic state.

And all of this without even bringing up the fact that they also have access to military grade weaponry that they can basically use at their own discretion, for any reason, with no real risk of repercussion. And the laws and regulations of the state change all of the time – and cops are basically just told to enforce those rules, no matter what they are. So in a neoliberal capitalist state, they are bureaucrats with access to military grade weapons. But in a fascist state, they easily become concentration camp operators or SS officers. And their role never really changes. They are just the violent enforcers of the state bureaucracy.

So when you have somebody who has an uncle who is a cop, or a cousin, or a parent, or whatever – that is really neither here nor there. Your uncle might be a nice guy who wanted to be a cop to help people. I’m not saying that isn’t true. I have no way of knowing if that is true. All I’m saying is he isn’t actually helping people. That isn’t his job. His job is to enforce a bureaucracy that disproportionately benefits the ruling class and oppresses the poor and marginalized.

Poem

[…] Could one seize and move / the stubborn words to yield and sing, / then one would write as one makes love / and poems and revelations spring / like children from the mind’s desire, / original and light as fire

(Gwen Harwood, “O could one write as one makes love”)

Memorable quote

A friend mentioned watching King Lear. I said to her that of all the memorable quotes in the play, this one strikes me as amazingly modern. The context is a husband who has a letter with evidence of his wife’s treachery; she tries to  flatter him, and he replies: “Shut your mouth, dame,/ Or with this paper shall I stop it.” WOW.

I just peeked into AO3 and found hundreds of Call Me By Your Name stories. Wish RL did not intrude and I could spend hours sifting them out. Envying those (few) people who can write in Aciman’s style without the result sounding like pastiche.

blowmyblues:

Yul Brynner & Steve McQueen – The Magnificent Seven – 1960

This is the single scene I love most in all the films I have ever seen in my life. Don Quixote and D’Artagnan side by side on a hearse, both competent at what they do, both self-contained and ironic, both willing to risk their lives in a gratuitous anti-racist deed. Each vaguely intrigued by the other. Each complementing the other.

Source: blowmyblues