Thursday roundup

We've been hearing a lot about tragedy and desparation at sea, but the desert hosts its own humanitarian crisis. 

I don't agree with this--as much as I believe that animal cruelty is awful. I think we can say--and that it's important to say--animal cruelty is awful, and it doesn't have to be compared to genocide, slavery, etc., for us to decry it.

I've also read a take-down of Max Fisher an I don't disagree that his career has risen through clever maps and listicles, rather than actual journalism. But I'm with him with regard to Sy Hersch.

Law enforcement shouldn't be able to confiscate people's savings just because they feel like it.

This almost makes me want to shop at Costco, and although I wouldn't shop at Walmart for the converse reason, I appreciate that Allen West thought he got Sharia'd there.

Income is not always an indicator of social class, and it's not clear what is.

On sloppy talk of chemicals, from glyphosate to sarin.

On women and girls (in the military).

I've not (yet?) seen the "Avengers," but I've been enjoying the commentary. Here's a forgiving take and a scathing one, from which I'd like to excerpt generously:

Don’t let anyone tell you that silly popcorn movies don’t matter, or that they can’t be smart or beautiful or profound. A silly popcorn movie can change your life. All it has to do is create characters with identifiable, human problems, and let them work out those problems over the course of the story. Stories are about change, and about people, because ultimately, they are about you, the person sitting in a dark theater, working out your baggage by projecting it onto CGI cartoons of overly handsome actors.

Here’s another way to put it: The extent to which a movie invests in character-based, character-driven storytelling is the extent to which it recognizes, appreciates, and honors the humanity of its audience.

and

However, because Kaufman and Whedon are good writers, who understand why stories work, when they sit down to write a story, they feel the obligation to make all of the characters identifiably human, including the women. This is, sadly, so rare that their female characters are often more well-rounded and interesting than almost any other characters out there, including a lot of characters written by people with better sexual politics.

But when the character-based screenwriting breaks down, so does the feminism. Black Widow is just as ill-served as every other character in that story, but because she’s a woman, it’s politically offensive as well as aesthetically offensive.

and--we'll come back to this one,

If you want to deepen your female character past being a sexual object, in a movie that has no time or patience for anything resembling “depth,” what conflicts do you give her? Well, women have babies, right? Women want babies. Okay. She can’t have babies. She’s sad because she can’t have babies. There you go! Depth established!

and, finally,

I never thought I’d be the kind of person who believed that a crime against feminism was less important than a crime against storytelling, but in this case, they’re so interconnected that it’s hard to tell the difference. When you can’t write, you can’t write women.

But let's get back to the previous excerpt, because of the contrast with the other women-in-film issue sparking discussion across the internet: the rise of the woman-child.

Resolution comes from building a sense of self through a community of people rather than just one man. Look at Hannah’s trajectory on “Girls.” She navigates a series of (often dysfunctional) relationships in this path to discovering herself. Her on-again, off-again boyfriend Adam is just one part of that journey. “Hannah isn’t becoming complete through a single man,” Brougher said. “She’s encountering a series of men and it’s rounding out her education. It’s not about one man, it’s about a journey through womanhood becoming complete.”

Which brings us to the other double-standard (finally) sparking discussion: the dad bod. No, Jon Hamm does not have one (please).