Intended as a final act, to be witnessed, to be a spectacle

My Sunday movie was actually a few short films. These are from a list I had accumulated. In a Moment is a German film. Max is new to the high school. He meets Leon who is openly gay and accepted as that by the other students. His father is wrapped up in soccer matches and thinks gay kids have it hard. At a school open mike program Max sings a song he wrote about busting out of his fortress. All that in 17 minutes. It won a few awards. In Louder than Words Ansel is looking for a place to practice his guitar and encounters a dance lesson featuring Niall, who is pretty good. Ansel discovers Niall is deaf and keeps time by feeling the musical beats. He’s also good at lip reading so he understands what Ansel is saying, though Ansel doesn’t get the signs. It takes a moment for Ansel to admit the attraction. Under 17 minutes. There were several scenes I wished were a bit more brightly lit and in Niall’s opening dance perhaps the camera could have backed up a bit to include more of the dancer. Tyler is a super smart white nine year old who goes to lunch with his older half brother black Daniel. Tyler admits to having a boyfriend. Can someone so young come out? Some gay men say they always knew. Under 16 minutes. Out, a Pixar short. Greg and Manuel are packing up to move. Greg’s parents show up to help pack. One problem – Greg hasn’t told his parents he’s gay and there is evidence of his love to Manuel around the house. A couple gay spirits help to set things right. There is a minute long intro by the director and producer at Pixar and the actual movie is about 10 minutes. I’m pleased this is on YouTube rather than hidden within Disney+. I see a problem – how does one find out if a gay short film is any good? Many movie sites don’t rate them. Do I face the problem the film might be shorter than the time it takes to find out about it? IMDB showed me a link to a list of 113 gay themed movies. Most of these are feature length. Many appear to be of the type where A with this background meets B with that background and they fall in love or, because of their backgrounds, have a hard time dealing with their attraction. How many of this type can I watch before their sameness all runs together? It’s one thing to watch a gay love story once a year, another to watch one every week. Also, while they have viewer ratings not all have an outside rating by Metacritic. So for many it is hard to tell whether they are worth watching. Even so, I found a few to add to my movie wish list. I have already seen several of them – Love Simon, Edge of Seventeen, Call Me By Your Name, Giant Little Ones, Were the World Mine, Young Royals, C.R.A.Z.Y., The Way He Looks, The Strong Ones, Swan Song, Proud, and Pride. I’m sure I wrote about many of these. So there is my own list of recommendations. Leila Fadel of NPR spoke to James Densley, a professor at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota. He and Jillian Peterson created the Violence Project. They researched nearly 200 mass shooters to figure out what they had in common. Their reason for doing it is to hopefully prevent the next one. Some of the things they found: Very often a mass shooter is not living a fulfilled life (this sounds like an understatement). They reach a crisis point where they no longer care if they live or die – a suicide crisis. The shooting is intended as a final act and intended to be witnessed, to be a spectacle. A hatred of self becomes a hatred of others. Once they decide their life crisis needs to be resolved through a bloody spectacle the next step is getting access to a gun. They are inspired by other shooters. They study what others did. They try to use the same weapons. They cite other shooters in the manifestos they leave behind. Prevention has three parts. There is the individual level – are guns in the home securely stored? There is the institutional level – school or workplace crisis intervention teams attuned to the warning signs of someone on the path to violence. There is the societal level – universal background checks, red flag laws, and other straightforward measures. In the Violence Project book and in discussions like this one Densley never mentions the names of shooters. He won’t give them any notoriety. He also wants to focus on the solutions, not the shooters. SemDem of the Daily Kos community discussed why conservatives are much more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. First, yes, it is conservatives. Do fake news with liberals and the claim is debunked rather promptly and everyone moves on. Conservatives register a greater response to negative stimuli. They tend to view the world as a dangerous place. That’s why fearmongering is used so much and works so well. Liberals tend to be more hopeful. They look at the benefits and drawbacks of actual policy.

Democrats push legislation to expand rights, create programs, or build infrastructure. Conservatives, however, tend to promote bills to address perceived dangers-–even if the dangers are fake.

A Republican Congressman noted that up to 2015 90% of discussions were about policy and 10% about perceived threats. Since then those numbers have flipped. Both the left and right tend to believe claims that support their views (it’s called confirmation bias). However, conservatives are more likely to believe outright lies – and the right’s media machine is happy and eager to oblige. Recent research showed those most likely to spread misinformation were low-conscientiousness conservatives who also had an appetite for chaos. That second trait is defined, SemDem wrote, quoting the study, as “a motivation to take down the social and political institutions to ‘assert dominance and superiority of one’s own group.’ ” Yup, all about their high position in the social hierarchy by oppressing those they want below them. The right’s media machine is also conditioning their audience to mistrust fact providers. They are told all other sources are biased (well, yeah, because facts have a liberal bias). So if the poor viewer can’t trust anyone it is easier to trust those pushing conspiracy theories. The right had built a gigantic information bubble, an echo chamber. Negative info about one of “their” officials is treated as a partisan attack. Negative info of an opposition official is treated as a major scandal. But that bubble can work two ways. Putin has been injecting misinformation into American politics – the top Facebook posts changed drastically when Russia couldn’t post. Yet, a bubble around Putin prevented him from knowing the likely outcome of his invasion of Ukraine. Researchers paid some Fox News viewers to watch CNN instead. I think the experiment ran for a month. They changed their minds on many issues. There was a 5% switch in believing long Covid is real to 13% less likely to agree that if Biden were elected there would be more Black Lives Matter activists shooting police. It is possible, though not easy, to pull someone out of the bubble. It is hard because they have been trapped by fear.