Results tagged “evil” from Uncivil Society
One of the constants of human experience is that when something bad happens in the economy, we tend to ascribe the cause to irrationality--most notably, greed and crime.
As if on cue . . .
It really was an odd year in NYC last Christmas, with reports of huge losses at investment banks being mirrored by reports of record bonuses. ABC has the numbers:
In 2007, Wall Street's five biggest firms-- Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley - paid a record $39 billion in bonuses to themselves.
That's $10 billion more than the $29 billion loan taxpayers are making to J.P. Morgan to save Bear Stearns.
Those 2007 bonuses were paid even though the shareholders in those firms last year collectively lost about $74 billion in stock declines --their worst year since 2002.
Before we simply brand this as unchecked greed, it's worth remembering that many professionals in the City saw--and still see--a symbiotic relationship between their businesses and bonuses in the financial sector. Real estate brokers especially.
At the time, giving a lot of money as bonuses could be rationalized in part as a way of maintaining the City's financial ecosystem, not to mention stabilizing investor confidence by affirming leadership's faith in the firms' financial state.
I'm not justifying it; just offering a little reminder that the motivations leading to unfortunate acts can often be complex.
The Renaissance lawyer & art theorist Leon Battista Alberti liked linear perspective to a civic assembly. The analogy is apt--politics, like the visual arts, transforms separate elements into a greater whole.
Nowhere is this more evident than in civic art. The Library of Congress offers this retrospective of comic art responding to the September 11 attacks.
As a youngster I went to see the Clint Eastwood "Every Which Way" films--not because of the plot, of course, but because of co-star Clyde the Orangutan. Here's what I didn't know about them until today:
According to "Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People" by famed primatologist Jane Goodall and Dale Peterson, the original "Clyde" was trained with a can of mace and a pipe wrapped in newspaper. He was viciously beaten the day before filming started to make him more docile. Near the end of filming the sequel "Any Which Way You Can," the orangutan was caught stealing doughnuts on the set, brought back to the training facility and beaten for 20 minutes with a 3 1/2 -foot ax handle. He died soon after of a cerebral hemorrhage.
An application to Speed Racer follows in this Defamer post.
Sigh.
Can a German body-modder reclaim an ancient spiritual symbol from its Nazi appropriators, or does this tattoo Superman & swastika cross the line? The debate ensues in the comments on this BMEZine pic.
Steve Duin's Matt Baker Monday is a great way to start the week, and this one--well, it's pretty @#$! near perfect. The inversion of Rid Riding Hood, the styles (including the woman in the background), the hair color dynamics, and even the setting of the airport provide an exemplary mise-en-scene.
The setting in the airport has a particular relevance for my own work. One of the things we'll be exploring this year is why a change in environment can lead people to abandon otherwise normative ethical commitments--in other words, why folks screw around on trips, at parties, online, when a partner is sick or away, you name it.
I was looking at the catalog entry for a book I'm using in my research when I noticed one of the subject headings: Good and evil - Comic books, strips, etc.
Huh.
So I clicked the link. The numbers are tantalizing and reflect what I was discussing in my previous post.
Flobots' Handlebars captures the spirit of the age in three minutes, thirty-one seconds.
An instant classic:
20-30 henchmen needed for moderately-sized supervillain organisation with large expansion potential (fortresses built into geological structures, corruption of government officials, possible genesis of 'nemesis' vigilante). Electrical theme.
Applicants must be willing to learn new skills, including but not limited to operation of specialised 'lightning guns'. Applicants will also be required to wear specialised uniform when at work (functional rubber suits with my logo on front), except in cases where deception is required (posing as hostages in order to ambush vigilantes, etc).
Desired (but not necessarily required) in applicants:
-interesting deformations/obsessions/powers(?) giving rise to interesting nicknames (e.g. Claws, Pyro, Buzzsaw, and similar)
-unwavering loyalty
-being a corruptible government official
-ability to work as part of a close-knit team (unless interesting obsession is of the 'lone wolf' variety)
-grudge against any well-known vigilante
-flexible moral code
Equal opportunies employer. Both henchmen and femmes fatales absolutely welcome.
Great promotion opportunities - right-hand-man position constantly being unexpectedly opened. Would look good on any future supervillain resume/CV.
Send an email with details of any prior henchman work, or details of what is driving you to join the ranks of a supervillain organisation. Will reply to all serious applicants. Hope to hear from you, and with luck, welcome you into a rewarding and promising career!
- Jacque (The Zapper) Zerapi
A less shocking charitable crime than the last one, but while we're on the theme here's the latest on how the economic downturn has made even the Hamptons a bit declasse--and, like the Depression before it, is giving rise to a new generation of vigilante heroes:
We heard this from someone working at Super Saturday in the Hamptons this weekend - for the uninitiated, that's the giant designer sample sale with $1,000 tickets and all proceeds going to ovarian cancer research - and this is what they said:
"I was at [a designer jean]'s booth, and at the end of the sale, you bring whatever you haven't sold to the charity drop-off and it's given away. So we had about twenty pairs of jeans left - we sold, like, three hundred - and we packed them up and got ready to walk them over to the charity drop-off, on the other side of the field, and this guy with a SUPER SATURDAY VOLUNTEER t-shirt comes up and he's like, "You don't have to do that, I'll take care of it."
Our intern got a little suspicious, so she followed the guy - and he stuck the 20 pairs of jeans in his own car and drove off! She didn't say anything - I guess she should have - but we're gonna be scouring eBay, and if those jean styles come up next week in bulk, we're gonna try and bust him."
This weekend five women from the Netherlands endured a horrific experience while participating in a charity event:
Five young Dutch women between the ages of 17 and 25 were raped by a group of Kenyan men last Thursday during a working holiday organised by the Amersfoort based charity Livingstone.
A spokeswoman for Livingstone on Monday confirmed the report which was published in the Reformatorisch Dagblad newspaper, reports ANP news service.
The attacks took place while a group of 12 Dutch volunteers were working on rebuilding a school. Despite security measures, around 10 men forced their way onto the terrain using a neighbour as hostage, reports ANP.
The intruders, who were armed with a gun and other weapons, demanded all those present, including local people and children, to surrender their valuables. Five of the Dutch women were taken to another room where they were raped.
‘They also tried to rape a number of local women but they were eventually left alone because they had babies with them,’ the spokeswoman for Livingstone told ANP.
Staff at the organisation are ‘extremely shocked’ by the attacks and have immediately suspended the Kenyan project, she said.
Maybe explosm.net should send the women a few commemorative t-shirts.
Blah.
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Pictured above is a new t-shirt by gone green, "an independent tiny group of peaceful people representing peace, love and happy times."
And, apparently, the unlicensed appropriation of someone else' copyrighted graphic. The giveaway that it's not just a coincidence: the inclusion of the original's distinct design flaws.
This sort of thing happens more than the charitable community openly admits. In fact, I was recently at a do-gooder colloquium in which one of the participants raised a concern about how common it is for folks in these meetings to publish ideas discussed there as their own, thereby undercutting the research of the person who originally raised them in what was understood to be an academic discussion. A prominent academic's response: if you really want to change the world, you should be glad that I publish your ideas--even if I'm the one getting all the credit, the most important thing is that your useful knowledge is helping society.
To which I replied then, as now, bullshit. The academy has norms of attribution; the commercial world has moral rights and commercial licensing. You don't play by those rules, you're a self-seeking opportunist, even if you excuse your theft of someone else's creative insight on the grounds that it's saving the world.
Talk about the end of innocence:
A jury convicted a man Tuesday of killing Alan Shalleck, who collaborated with the co-creator of "Curious George" to bring the mischievous monkey to TV and a series of book sequels.
Shalleck was the writer and director of more than 100 episodes of "Curious George" for the Disney Channel.
The jury deliberated for about 90 minutes before convicting Vincent Puglisi of first-degree murder and robbery with a deadly weapon. He is scheduled to be sentenced in July.
Puglisi's co-defendant, Rex Ditto, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and robbery with a weapon in 2007. He was sentenced to life in prison.
A message left for Assistant State Attorney Andy Slater was not immediately returned Tuesday evening. The phone at Assistant Public Defender Shari Vrod's office rang unanswered.
Shalleck had 83 blunt force injuries and more than three dozen stab wounds, including to the abdomen, neck and groin, an autopsy revealed.
Ditto and Puglisi went to Shalleck's Boynton Beach home on Super Bowl Sunday in February 2006 intending to rob him. After the killing, Ditto and Puglisi stole jewelry from Shalleck and pilfered funds from his checking account, authorities said.
A story of how weaving baskets is helping to re-weave Rwanda's social fabric--a truly profound story of faith, design and commerce. Says one woman who now crafts with the wife of her husband's killer:
"We knew how to weave baskets," Mukantabana explained. "It helped unite Rwandans in this area because they accepted me as the master weaver, and I could not say, 'I am not taking your basket' or 'I am not helping you because you did something bad to me.' "
Don't watch the above video. Really. It's the infamous banned Pokemon scene that gave hundreds of people seizures when first broadcast in Japan. The problem: for some people, the blinking colors acted as a trigger for a neurological disruption known as photosensitive epilepsy.
Why would I post this? Because the effect is in the news again, and this time it involves a nonprofit. Via Wired, there's news that the FBI has begun investigating the infamous (in tech circles, anyway) sabotage on the Epilepsy Foundation online forum, in which hackers used flashing light images to induce seizures in epileptics visiting the site.
The Wired update raises an interesting legal point:
[A]ssuming the Bureau is able to find some of the culprits, it could lead to the first federal prosecution under an anti-cyber terrorism provision passed in 1996 as part of the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act.
The law created a new crime of attacking a computer to cause "physical injury to any person." Some of us laughed at that provision at the time, and as far as I know it's never been used. But in this case it just might fit.
io9 has more from the AP report, including the observation that these hackers were apparently motivated not by money, but malice. In other words, they were nonprofit too.
Mother Jones has a photo essay on a woman who makes robes for the KKK. Proceeds go to the care of her quadriplegic daughter.
"Ms. Ruth blesses each robe before sending them off. Here, she is holding a new, red satin robe against her chest as she blesses it."
From today's LA Times, old news to al Qaeda watchers but an instructive reminder nevertheless:
Like newly arrived fighters in Iraq today, recruits in the 1990s filled out applications that were kept in meticulous rosters. The shaggy, battle-scarred holy warriors of Afghanistan were micromanagers. They scrupulously documented logistical details -- one memo accounts for a mislaid Kalashnikov rifle and 125 rounds of ammunition.
"I was very upset by what you did," Atef wrote. "I obtained 75,000 rupees for you and your family's trip to Egypt. I learned that you did not submit the voucher to the accountant, and that you made reservations for 40,000 rupees and kept the remainder claiming you have a right to do so. . . . Also with respect to the air-conditioning unit, . . . furniture used by brothers in Al Qaeda is not considered private property. . . . I would like to remind you and myself of the punishment for any violation."
A stern Egyptian bean-counter set the austere policies. Mustafa Ahmed Al Yahzid, a 52-year-old trained as an accountant, ran the network's finance committee between 1995 and 2007, said Rohan Gunaratna, author of "Inside Al Qaeda."
Although Al Qaeda has endured thanks to a loose and flexible structure, its internal culture has nonetheless been surprisingly bureaucratic . . .
The documents . . . depict an organization obsessed with paperwork and penny-pinching . . .
"He is known as being a very stringent administrator, who keeps tight control of Al Qaeda's finances," Gunaratna said.
Accountability, metrics, efficient mission-centered budgeting--hey, what's not to like?
From an interview with writer Marv Wolfman, who gets it:
My belief is a fairly common one; villains can’t believe they are villains. They should be as carefully created and as subtle as your best hero can be. They need concerns, worries, problems, etc. They just see the world differently. The worst villains chortle, but the best villains simply can’t understand why others don’t see the world as clearly as they do. Sometimes the better villains are ones who want to help, or believe things are going to hell. Still others can feel they have a destiny that demands certain actions be taken. They should be motivated by the exact same things the heroes are, but the results of their actions cause greater problems.
Here's a rarity: a pin-up calendar from 1957 lampooning the popular crusade against comics as a corrupter of the youth, chronicled most recently in David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America.
The poem:
They're searching for a cause behind
Our kids' delinquent capers;
But whatever do they hope to find
Behind the funny papers?
Via Today's Inspiration, whose Flickr archive of comic strip advertising is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of commercial rhetoric. TI also offers this wonderful 1932 quote from a copywriter about the people who read comic strips:
Sterrett [a popular cartoonist] is frequently asked where he met Polly and her family, where they lived and so on. Such credulousness is only found among the sub-morons among his readers. But, Sterrett believes that that quality of realism which fools the cretins is what delights the morons as well.
