The Invisible Counterpoint

The film is ostensibly about how a bad environment can be forced onto you -- an overcrowded planet, an economy that makes it dangerous to take financial risks -- but is more centrally interested in whether one is in full command of making the best decision for yourself, regardless of how existing exigencies of environment could work for or against leverage to one's choice. Paul Safranek makes the decision to forgo his part-way-done surgeon's education because his mother is ill and without anybody else to care for her. Caring for her fate, he agrees to forgo the career he most wanted to pursue for one he rightly understands he'll still take considerable pleasure from -- being a physiotherapist. His decision is moved by true decency, an ostensible strength, impervious to qualification, but it seems dubious until later in the film whether or not what it actually is is a liability, a character flaw, if accompanied by a lack of broad knowledge, by ignorance -- of...

"Star Wars: the Last Jedi" is full of demotions, humiliating take-downs of those with pretension. Commander Poe knows he needn't listen to authorities because his sense of things is best. But his fate isn't -- in his own "Skywalker" look-within-yourself moment, as he faces his momentous task against a great battle behemoth, solo -- to know that trusting yourself and abating authority/regulations isn't not right, but that he's all narcissism and ego (which becomes agreeable when he accepts that he's not "the best pilot in the resistance," period, but "the best pilot in the resistance" but also an irrepressible, loveable goof -- a mamma's boy, a boy who never grew up): he can't allow that someone else in his same position might as well know what they're doing. Specifically, when Vice Admiral Holdo rebuts all seemingly justified restrictions on her own behaviour, all Poe can do is consider mutiny. Luke Skywalker h...

You have to feel sorry for the bad guys at the beginning. The deal the universe gave to them is this: the good: you're way more powerful than your opponent; the bad: you have to keep coming across as if you've just met your opponent for the first time, so all your power seems ill-designed for the opponent currently facing you -- and therefore not power at all -- and as if previously someone had on a whim just executed all your teachers so it's perpetually battle 101 for you (why with all our fire-power can we not destroy a single ship? too small sir. okay, why with all our fire-power can we not destroy a fleet of ships? they're too small a fleet of ships, sir. Grrrrr). General Hux falling for the old, if you let your opponent telephone you and you're on broadcast, you'd actually have to have shown him up as a total fool -- and thereby have him in self-recriminating mode -- as Snook and the Emperor before him knew how to do, before letting him spea...

Reading a bit of Daniel Shaw's work (his book), there seems to be confusion as to why exactly he would believe Trump must be understood as swaying a whole nation into becoming sadists. He is arguing that children come to agree with their unloved parents' (he can reference the existence of monstrous mothers -- on his facebook page, he insists on there being "many" of them for instance -- but through what portions of the book I was able to read, it has to be drawn out of him... not his preference) perception of them as bad when they don't fulfill their emotional requirements of them, that they develop inner persecutors and inner protectors that lord over their psyche, watching over their "sinning" in this direction, but doesn't conceive that this "badness" associated with attending to one's own needs, one's own growth, could eventually lead to them USING "leaders" like Trump to execute punishment against people unders...

me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change ) Another case of it's-not-actually-trauma, inflicted trauma by Al Franken .   The former staffer said she mostly kept the encounter to herself, not even telling her boss at the time. But she started to talk more openly about it to close friends after the “Access Hollywood” video was aired in October 2016. In the now infamous tape, Donald Trump is recorded saying his fame gives him carte blanche to grab women’s genitals. “When it really started impacting me in more of a ‘I’m really angry about about this’ way was last fall when the Trump tape came out,” the former aide said. “Hearing Donald Trump say essentially the same thing that Al Franken said to me, which was ‘It’s my right as an entertainer,’ that was a real trigger,” she continued. The former staffer says she was particularly shaken after seeing Franken on TV responding to the Trump tape last year. Franken dismissed Trump’s excuse that he was just engaging in “l...