The Invisible Counterpoint

Arthur Chu at Salon.com wrote this: A lot has already been written about “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens” and its meteoric ascent into the pop-culture canon after the mixed reaction to the prequels. One of the takes I liked best was how the very idea of doing a sequel to “Return of the Jedi” and its splashy happy ending turns the Star Wars saga from fairy tale to something bleaker and more realistic, facing the hard truth that war never really ends and evil is never really defeated. “One Death Star is a horror; two Death Stars and one Starkiller Base… is something more like the inexorable logic of history, grinding us all to dust.” There are many reasons Episode VII feels like a bleaker world than Episode IV–one of them being that the backstory to Episode VII consists of movies we’ve actually seen and characters we already love. It’s one thing to kill off an old man we met in Act I as the climax to Act II; it’s another thing entirely to kill off an old man we...

Original Article: The “Star Wars” kids aren’t alright: The movie gets millennials right — our fight isn’t with “The Man,” but with each other SATURDAY, JANUARY 30, 2016 12:46 AM Meandering of thoughts from this interesting article:  From their (young racists') perspective, they're not interested in dominating weaklings but rather saving their weakened "people" from a callous establishment intent on obliterating them. Potentially, racists and leftists, both, can imagine themselves as the "rebels"...they can both work well with this "Jungian" archetype. Rey's way of living--scrounging for scraps to please an asshole food-dispensing boss--is more familiar to children who end up racist than children who become liberal and informed. The current child of affluent liberal parents is more likely to be groomed to fit the establishment, and will in life more closely resemble the assured position of the villains. When you're hating on G...

Article: The big micro aggression lie: The real story behind the right's phone war on political correctness --Salon.com Victim talk is back. According to two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, our moral culture  recently underwent a seismic shift . Rather than upholding appropriate standards of honor and dignity, we now inflate trifling slights into allegations of victimization. Minor grievances of all sorts are showcased in cyberspace in an effort to garner sympathy and support. This “new species of social control,” they maintain, threatens an America where weakness suddenly rules. Their and similar allegations about this novel insidious “victimhood culture” are being applauded and proselytized in major newspapers, journals and talk shows – from the  New York Times  and the  Washington Post  to the  Leonard Lopate Show  and  Time  magazine. Even President Obama entered the fray by speaking out against the reported...