The Agitator 1892

 

From The Agitator (L'Agitateur) an Anarchist newspaper published in Marseille on the 13th of March 1892. Merci beaucoup to Constance Bantman for sharing this fragment.

 MANIFESTE AN-ARCHISTE 

AN-ARCHIE ne signifie pas « DESORDRE» Le mot « ANARCHIE»  vient de deaux mots grees: «A» Privatif, dont 1e sans est «Absence de» et «Arke» qui vent dire — AUTORITE.
Done, contrairement a Ia definition que se plaisent a downer tous nos adversaires, ANARCHIE est synonyme de -- ABSENCE D'AUTORITE-- et non «chaos, bouleversement, desordre».

Anarchist Manifesto 

AN-ARCHY does not mean "Chaos", the word "Anarchy" comes from the two Greek words "An" the meaning of which is "Absence of" an "Archy" which means AUTHORITY.

Well, contrary to the definition that all our adversaries like to use, ANARCHY us a synonym for - ABSENCE OF AUTHORITY, and not "Chaos, upheaval, disorder".

My French is very limited and tre rusty, so I appreciated the opportunity to exercise a little and combine it with my knowledge of Esperanto. It's said that for over a hundred years, the old communication problem remains. Usually propaganda is the answer to why do so many people equate Anarchy, Anarchism etc, to acts of random and violence. It certainly plays a part, though I am of the opinion the success of this propaganda is down largely to so many people equating freedom to violence and vulnerability. Personally I don't have an issue with equating Anarchy to chaos, but that is because for me chaos is random, change, experience, it can mean danger but so does authority and obedience. But, for many that word means violence, danger, threat exclusively, so I won't argue with the people who ran L'Agitateur. 

Literal Wargaming notes on War of Heroes

A truck bombing mission

 So, there's a game on the app store that lets you actively support a side in a conflict, literal wargaming.

  Myanmar (still commonly called Burma) is a nation with a very long history of violent conflict, within its borders there are dozens of wars that date back to 1948 if not earlier. Despite that February 2021 is still considered a low point for Myanmar's political stability, this was when the military Junta (Tatmadaw) that has ruled the country for most of its history as an independent nation abandoned its strategy of limited reform and collaboration with civilian politicians and launched a coup to overthrow Aung Saan Su Kyi, since that time opposition spread across the country and due to the open use of military force many opponents started arming themselves, now in 2024 seemingly the entirety of the nation is in the grip of a civil war.

The ethnic minority and regional groups that were already in conflict with the Junta gained new recruits and multiple new factions sprung up, it's a very confusing conflict to keep track of. Just have a look at this map.

 

Every shade of colour represents territory under the control of a different group and that does not include every force participating, some are operating in areas too remote to be independently verified or are working as part of an umbrella alliance of other groups.

Tatmadaw has been a brutal force in Myanmar for decades, enforced conscription, racketeering, rape, murder, ethnic cleansing, bombing of civilians, slavery, human trafficking, alliances with organised crime, drug trafficking, deals with international conglomerates, and that was before it was faced with this massive wave of resistance. Its response has more bombings, more enforced conscriptions, more murder, more airstrikes on villages and townships. 

The opposition has been forced to get creative, in the early days I saw brief videos of small groups using 3D printed guns to drive-by small police check points, and plant homemade bombs on remote trails to ambush patrols. There's also been an explosion in cultural resistance, Anarchist punk music has exploded in popularity in the country, Rebel Riot is a personal favourite.

And there is also now an official mobile game created by a supporter of the People's Defence Forces (PDFs). It's called War of Heroes (WOH) its available now on IOS and Android. The PDF is an umbrella grouping of resistance to the Tatmadaw it varies in strength, capabilities and tactics throughout much of the nation. The mobile game has the player join the PDF and work their way up the ranks, carrying more and more effective attacks on the Tatmadaw's forces through a series of missions.

It was built out of unity store assets, is available in English and a Myanmar language (my limited knowledge of the country is showing here, I have no idea which language, I just know they have many) the game is free and supported by advertising, it's developed by one individual Ko Toot (not his real name) and playing this game in Myanmar will get you in serious trouble with the Tatmadaw.

Ko Toot was motivated to join the resistance and use his IT skills to develop this game after the army detained several people he knew arbitrarily.

"They had never done a single criminal thing in their lives," said Ko Toot of the couple, who were detained for supporting the pro-democracy movement.

He didn't know what had happened to them. The BBC only recently established the woman was released within a day, but the man was held for about a year and a half.

After their arrest, Ko Toot then heard the military had detained the wife and infant daughter of a pro-democracy activist it had been unable to locate.

"Imagine you are a young child and you grow up inside a dirty, stressful and sadistic prison, and you have no idea what's going on. It made my blood boil."

BBC  

In addition to being a propaganda boost for the resistance by letting players get revenge on their oppressors, the game raises funds for them as well. I have a low opinion of mobile games that use advertising to make money, but I was surprised how restrained WOH was, you watch adverts to get ammunition one ad=30 bullets, these are mostly needed for the battle missions which eat up quite a few rounds on later missions as the number of soldiers explodes.

You and eventually some AI support take on the army in the woods

Apart from battle missions there are also drive-bys, mine ambushes, assassination missions and later (around mission 45) there are some stealth and tank destruction missions. The game gets into a loop of battle mission then another mission then another battle mission for a while. It started to wear thin at mission 33, but then something strange happened, there was a cutscene, and then there were Zombies, zombie soldiers to be exact, so now there were two variations on the battle missions added to the mix. There's also an upgrade system, a login gives a coin (one per day) which can be spent on an attribute like health, reload speed etc.

I don't think this game will win awards for design, though development by one person in an active conflict who is targeted by the ruling government deserves some respect. I first downloaded the game several months ago, and it's been updated and improved regularly. When I first played the game, all light sources had opaque cones of purple, now they're using more natural light effects. There was also an auto aim system for the battle missions that didn't work, that has now been removed. 

And yes this a literal propaganda game raising funds for a side in a conflict, knowing that worries me, in this particular case I don't have any sympathy for the Tatmadaw they've had their reckoning coming for a long time, but it's not a good omen for the future. We've been slowly heading in this direction for some years, militaries around the world have been incorporating games into their outreach and training programs for years, America's Army is an obvious example, a game created to raise the profile of the United States Army and encourage enlistment, I'm not optimistic about the future. WOH seems to be a success, it's managed to stay on the App and Google Play Store in some version or other for a while and according to Ko Toot has raised thousands of dollars for the real PDFs. The Tatmadaw is also losing ground by the day, I discovered WOH by reading the BBC article written in August 2023, since then every week there's been another Tatmadaw defeat, often quite a serious one, in October three powerful armies ended their ceasefire, united in the Three Brothers Alliance, and launched an offensive that within weeks defeated the Myanmar and captured half of Shan state including the border crossings with China and most humiliatingly ceased a city controlled by organised crime families closely aligned with the Junta and freed thousands of slaves and repatriated many of them to their home countries.

Currently, observers claim that the Junta has lost control of 60% of the country, and they keep losing important border crossings and townships. WOH's part in this conflict is small, but it is playing a part. I'm sure others will be paying attention to its success.

 

Solidarity on International Day for Palestinian Journalists

Feb 25, 2024

The Industrial Workers of the World Freelance Journalists Union stands in solidarity with our colleagues in Israeli-occupied Palestine. In the 140 days since October 7, nearly 120 journalists have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank — almost one per day. The increasingly scant resources available to Palestinians has exacerbated the conditions on the ground, making Gaza the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist.

To celebrate the bravery and critical work being done to cover atrocities by the Israeli military, the IWW FJU is joining the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate and the International Federation of Journalists for an International Day for Palestinian Journalists on Monday, February 26. (Please see below for the original call from the PJS.)

In response to declining financial support for Palestinian journalists and coverage of the ongoing genocide, we advocate that journalists everywhere pitch at least one story about Gaza on February 26, and that our members and supporters continue to contribute to the PJS via the IFJ We echo the call to mobilize your union, newsroom or workplace to join a rally and speak out for the freedom of the press and the rights of all Palestinians.

Solidarity forever!

INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR PALESTINIAN JOURNALISTS

On February 26, everywhere in the world, let's mobilize!

Ramallah, 21 February 2024,

Dear colleagues, Four months after the start of the war in Gaza, the PJS highly appreciate the mobilization and support received by free people, represented in different bodies, all around the world, which has a clear impact in supporting Palestinian journalists knowing that they are not alone and started to mobilize international community in taking actions towards the genocide taking place in Gaza.

Unfortunately, although the number of killed journalists and media workers, which has reached almost 120, is increasing and reaching an unprecedented level, donations through IFJ International Security Fund and other partners to PJS are less regular and much lower than during the first weeks of the conflict.

We know that each of you is mobilized elsewhere, in your representation bodies, but we encourage you to continue your efforts because the needs of journalists have become vital. In the middle of winter, our sisters and brothers and their families lack everything and especially the essentials: clothes, blankets, tents, food, water… The scarcity of these necessities in this small territory 40 km long and 5 km wide results in a surge in prices. And they can no longer afford them. We are also alarmed by the poor international coverage of the conflict, linked to the fact that international media are not authorized by Israel to enter the enclave and report on the reality there. It is the right of citizens to know the reality of the conflict in Gaza which is being violated, both in the region and in the rest of the world.

This is why the PJS in full cooperation with IFJ, the largest global network of journalists across more than 146 countries, invites you to mobilize the members of your union, journalists in editorial offices and media outlets, but also national organizations of workers on Monday, February 26, for what will be the International Day for Palestinian Journalists. Rallies, speeches, public meetings, all opportunities are necessary to remind all citizens that the freedom to inform has a price, in Gaza more than elsewhere. Let us never forget that for four months, it has been journalists from Gaza who have been informing the world because this area of a few square kilometres has been completely closed. From an open-air prison, Gaza has today become a mass grave with tens of thousands of dead, missing and injured.

Finally, around the world at noon, this February 26, 2024, we will all observe a minute of silence for the journalists killed since October 7.

Send your photos, videos, documents published during the day to the communication department at PJS - we will share them through our website. Tag us on the social media so we can relay your actions:

• https://x.com/InfoPJS?t=Wp0L68RaBZW07TwgxntwOA&s=09
• https://www.instagram.com/p.j.s_ps?igsh=Z3k2b2hhbm9kdGNs
• www.facebook.com/PALESTINIANJOURNALISTSSYNDICATE?mibextid=LQQJ4d

Thank you again for your support. Today, more than ever, it is essential.

Regards,
Nasser Abu Baker
President of Palestinian Journalists Syndicate

Anarchy TV

 

Turns out the Revolution will in fact be televised

90s era Anarchists seize control of a public access TV station from its corrupt Televangelist owner and strip naked live on air to protest social conformity and get some ratings for their revolution. Jonathan Blank's independently funded 1998 film was a challenge to find, I discovered its existence looking up the filmography of George Wendt who briefly appears alongside Alan Thicke, Jessica Hecht and the Zappa clan. After finding out about the film and its premise, "Anarchists take control of a public access TV channel to protest a Televangelist and get naked to get viewers" I tried looking it up and could only find a VHS rip.  

From the premise, I was worried I'd be wasting my time with another edgy comedy that littered the 90s indie scene. The kind of film that used shocking behaviour, nudity, sex and swearing as crutches for clever humour and plots that mean things and make consistent sense. I was expecting to waste 90 minutes watching some grainy not quite porn mixed with cheap sets and running joke skits. Luckily, Anarchy TV for all its limitations in budget does not disappoint. It does include nudity, sexuality, swearing and edgy satire, but they all have a point to make and serve the film and are not ploys to get audiences. The VHS rip is quite good considering the age, and I found the film noise and artifacting added to the movie's grungy aesthetics and public access television setting. 

The cast is a bit rough but likeable, I was sympathetic to their plight, and they were refreshingly odd in ways that felt authentic. They're caricatures of 90s American activists, the conspiracy obsessive, the militant sex negative feminist, the free speech crusader who uses jokes and satire as weapons, the survivor of the New Left and civil rights movement who hasn't found their place in the new ideology free 90s. But unlike most caricatures of these types in media, they aren't the objects of scorn and were written and acted by people who were familiar with the real life examples. "Anarchists" and "Anarchy" appear a lot in media, it's just that usually those terms are synonyms for random violence and scary bad things. I was expecting Anarchy TV to be equally sloppy, but again I was proven wrong, these Anarchists might fail the Anarchist tests, they don't quote Bakunin or Emma Goldman, but they're close to the Anarchists that were around in the anti-globalisation fights of the period. They are openly hostile to capitalist society, its values and its power structures, and while they use the common Anarchist dressings and slogans they also make use of more obscure ones, and in ways that are appropriate to the satirical vibes.

Televangelism and business orientated religion is cruel, callous, hypocritical, corrupting, bigoted and reactionary. Anarchy TV makes this point through jokes, but the message is loud and clear. The police are also scum and active participants in repressing non-conformist voices. The TV studio group are arrested after a non-violent protest picket*, the police are openly racist and work with the Televangelist, both because he's in the legal right, and they're being paid by him for some extra muscle. The people that American society treats like trash, the odd balls who find self-expression and meaning through obscure art and performances on TV channels few people watch, sex workers and other criminalised poor people, ethnic minorities etc, can come together, share their depth and talent and value and cause enough disruption to force the proud and powerful to suffer a defeat.

Now for what you've all come for, full-frontal nudity. Yes, there is indeed open and non-simulated nudity in this film. And to this film's credit, it does not fall into that double standard where female nudity is okay and male nudity is taboo, both men and women get naked, and we see everything. Also, the nudity is not actively fetishised, it's quite upfront and honest in how it handles nudity. And as an extra layer, while the nudity is a tactic to get people to tune in and pay attention to their hijacking of the station it is treated as a political act and is shown to have important effects on self-esteem and coming to terms with your own body. Nowadays, nudity is split off into a shocking action of perverts and maladjusted people or gated off in a small cluster of approved and regulated zones like nudist beaches. There was a time when behavioural non-conformity including nudity was considered quite a revolutionary break with societal norms that stifle self-expression and identity. Emile Armand, the French Individualist Anarchist, was an advocate of this tendency "Liberation from one of the main notions on which the ideas of “permitted” and forbidden, of “good” and “evil” are based. Liberation from coquetry, from the conformism to an artificial standard of appearance that maintains the differentiation of classes**." Anarchy TV has the discussion about this tendency and whether it can be a valid form of protest.

The film is not perfect, its jokes hit for me more often than they missed, but I didn't find many of them hilarious, more funny as in clever less funny as in "ha,ha". And there are some 90s context that hasn't aged well. Tamayo Otsuki plays my favourite character Tiffany. She's a sex worker who bounds with the TV crowd and overcomes some of their snobbery over her life, it's her act of solidarity, posting bail that gives the crew their chance to strike back at the man, and it's her openness towards nudity that kicks off the nudity stunt that succeeds in bringing and audience and rallying the community to foil the bad guys. She is depicted as a bit rough compared to Anarchy TV crew and their activist sensibilities, but she isn't stupid nor is she a dupe, she watched their show and is a willing and conscious participant. Unfortunately, as an Asian woman in a 90s comedy, she has one of those joke exaggerated Asian immigrant accents. 

But overall I enjoy the film and believe it deserved a bigger audience. I think the nudity is what cost the film a wider release. As far as I can tell, it never received a DVD release and isn't on any streaming service I can find. The film's distributors were Asylum, yes, that Asylum, the company whose business model is tricking people into buying low effort rip-offs of popular franchises. Qualms about the quality of the final product can't have been the reason for the film's lack of support and distribution, it's far superior to the typical Asylum production. I think this is a rare case of an edgy satire that genuinely went too far for mainstream societies standards and got buried. Nudity, especially male nudity, is still very taboo with few examples outside open pornography.

 *Well, there is actually plenty of violence at the picket line, just that it's the studio staff fighting each other.

** https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emile-armand-revolutionary-nudism

We live in Pottersville; thoughts on It's a Wonderful Life

 

Last Christmas, I scratched It's a Wonderful Life off my to watch list. It took me awhile, I suppose it was a combination of never being on TV when I was free at Christmastime and a case of absorbing much of the film via cultural osmosis due to the staggering number of other media spoofing, parodying and tributing the film. I learnt about the key plot twists as a child thanks to the Simpsons and an episode of Johnny Bravo. I was surprised to learn that the bits everyone knows about are only a fraction of the film, and that I still really enjoyed it despite popular culture spoiling nearly every key scene. Initially Jimmy Stewart's performance stunned me since I had been under the impression that his aww shucks and golly gee dialogue and put upon but dogged demeanour combined with that semi-warble line delivery was a product of exaggerated spoofs and not the performance of a Hollywood leading man.

It's a great film, has a good moral, the cast plays their roles excellently, I didn't feel its length and this is nothing new to anyone whose seen the film. All I'll say on that is that if you were like me and were in no rush to see it, give it a go, it'll be a pleasant evening. 

So, with that out of the way, the reason I'm talking about this movie is politics. The film was controversial on release wayback in 1946, the FBI in an early move in the second Red Scare investigated the film on suspicion of it being Communist propaganda. 

There is submitted herewith the running memorandum concerning Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry which has been brought up to date as of May 26, 1947....

With regard to the picture "It's a Wonderful Life", [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a "scrooge-type" so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists.

  [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters. [redacted] related that if he made this picture portraying the banker, he would have shown this individual to have been following the rules as laid down by the State Bank Examiner in connection with making loans. Further, [redacted] stated that the scene wouldn't have "suffered at all" in portraying the banker as a man who was protecting funds put in his care by private individuals and adhering to the rules governing the loan of that money rather than portraying the part as it was shown. In summary, [redacted] stated that it was not necessary to make the banker such a mean character and "I would never have done it that way."

https://web.archive.org/web/20111229215857/http://www.wisebread.com/fbi-considered-its-a-wonderful-life-communist-propaganda#memo1 

 Which is of course total nonsense. Yes, Mr Potter as portrayed by Lionel Barrymore is an absolute scumbag who you're supposed to hate with vehemence, but Jimmy Stewart's character is also a banker. The film isn't Communist at all, Capra the director of the film is throwing his weight behind small scale community oriented capitalism. Bailey Brothers Building and Loans is a bank and its importance as an institution in the town and the hope it provides to the residence of Bedford Falls is salvation through capital investment, the homes they're building and enabling the community to buy come from those investments. 

Potter and Bailey are opposed ideologically, but it's an ideological divide within, the logic of capitalism. Potter represents old monopoly capitalism, he spends the film trying to destroy the Bailey Brothers because they are the one sole form of competition in the area, so he as the big established capitalist uses every advantage he has to break the rival bank, and when that fails he just steals from them to try and deal the killing blow. I think what really got the FBI and its informant [REDACTED] ornery was that Potter, the villain, is representative of the American system, he's the typical capitalist and so criticism of how he acts and behaves is criticism of officially sanctioned America. He also doesn't face any punishment for his many morally and ethically dubious but often legal actions. I don't know if Frank Capra was consciously aware of just how damning that is a judgement of American society. The film shows us that the established powers in America can use that power to crush the good in society out of personal spite or paranoia over a potential competition, and they can do that with impunity. 

The real tragedy is that in the real world, the Potters won.  Credit Unions, community and co-operative banks still exist in the present and some have grown to some size, but compared to the banks' ala Potter? Pebbles next to mountains. The successful stakeholder initiatives increasingly morph into or sell to the big banks, which are now so big and concentrate so much capital that they can plunge the whole global economy into recessions when they screw up. And closer to home, the Potters won the battle for the film. 

It's a Wonderful Life didn't just annoy the FBI, it did poorly with the critics and was a box office disappointment. It languished in obscurity and was such a low priority that when the copyright was up for renewal in 1974 it was botched, pushing the film into the public domain.  Thanks to that clerical error that led to the film's eventual rise to classic status and beloved fixture of American holidays. TV stations could air the film in exchange for royalties to the owner of the copyright of The Greatest Gift, the 24-page source material, which still made it much cheaper to show than most alternative films. This also probably played a role in why the film is so widely referenced, parody is protected under the doctrine of Fair Use, copyright can still provide grounds for offended rights holders to make it not worth the trouble.

Republic Pictures used its ownership of the copyright to the source material to clamp down further on the distribution of the film, effectively forcing it back into copyright. Republic Pictures had closed down in the 1960s and was revived in the 80s due to business restructuring, shortly after reclaiming It's a Wonderful Life they were folded up into Viacom. No one who worked on the story or the film is connected with the royalties and fees that are accrued by the film today. The cinematic community has been robbed of the film thanks to the power of large corporations to influence the legal system of the United States with their large law firms and lobbying agents. 

I suppose It's a Wonderful Life has some solace for us, in the film Potters triumph as bleak as it is not the end of the struggle, George Bailey doesn't give into despair despite the many trying obstacles, he earns his happy ending and we can too.

Watching Tank Police in a post-2016 World

 

That's right, horrified at the way things are going I've embraced a period of escapism and watched a horrifying speculative future 2010s where the police have the firepower of militaries, the world is heavily polluted, the politicians only care about re-election and corporations believe employment contracts give them the right to control their employees own bodies. In hindsight, that wasn't the best plan I've authored.

It's the holiday period, and I've caught several winter bugs over the past two months. So in addition to having time off, an erratic sleep pattern and semiregular periods of imposed isolation has led to quite a bit more time on my hands than I had planned for. And I filled part of the hiatus catching up on a backlog of films and television. I finally scratched a few things off my list, including It's a Wonderful Life, and also today's topic for discussion Dominion Tank Police, and its sequel (kinda) New Dominion Tank Police. The Tank Police OVAs have been on my list for some time, why the long wait? Well, a combination of them being in limited availability in my markets and a reputation for not being great pieces of entertainment. What fanbase they do have is largely thanks to being early action Sci-Fi anime that were licensed internationally, and being based on Manga by Shirow Masmune, the creator of Ghost in the Shell didn't hurt either. They also benefited by the existence of Anna and Uni Puma who are androids, sisters and Cat girls. 

Apart from that, both shows have their issues, the first series from the late 1980s is quite cheap, the animation can be choppy and reuse of assets is obvious, the dubbing itself is also a bit spotty, some of the voice acting feels weak, and the dialogue sounds weird. It also struggles with tone, it's a rather cynical take on cyber punk futures and cop dramas with very crude humour and extremely hard to like protagonists. Only to drop most of the jokes and refocus attention on a comedic fool villain (Buaku) and his tragic past at the end. Oh, and it ends on a cliffhanger that is not followed up on in New Tank Police.

New Tank Police on paper has a lot more going for it. Released in the mid 90s, it looks more professionally made, the characters have more detail, the animation is smoother, and I didn't notice much reusing and recycling of previous footage. The dialogue sounds a lot more like things people would actually say, and the cast who are the same voice actors who worked on Tank Police either gained more experience and confidence in the years between releases, or they received a lot more support direction wise. And the action set pieces have more going on too, most of the action in the first series were basic chases with some gag stunts thrown in. In New Tank Police, there are clever escalations and use of vertical space. 

And yet, and yet, I found myself having stronger feelings for the choppier and cheaper series. Which is a little odd since that show's four episode run goes from stealing jars of piss and anti-tank mines that are dick jokes - yes I am serious- to a sad look at the life of a hairy android crook for hire whose stealing a piece of fine art and risking his life, not for the massive pay-off, but because he was the subject of that painting, and it depicts his early life in a lab where he was physically and mentally tortured since creation by uncaring scientists who used him as raw material for experiments. So, as far as he (Buaku) is concerned it's his by right, oh, and it also contains hidden data that can prove the existence of that experiment and the existence of his fellow lab mates who did not survive and escape the lab. It's extremely sad, and it makes it perfectly crystal clear just how crooked, horrible and miserable this world is. 

New Tank Police, well Lenoa Ozaki the female cop on the top image and the protagonist of the franchise has to investigate the murder of an old friend on the motorcycle police, and there's some corporate scheming going on with cyborg henchmen. It's perfectly fine sci-fi with a cynical edge where the protagonists are cops. It's perfectly fine, didn't get very engaged with it, wasn't put off by it. I did find it slightly amusing to learn that New Tank Police took place in 2016, well, I found it funny at first, now I'm a little sad.

Speaking of sad, I was surprised to see how different the Cat Women were to what I had been primed to expect from the marketing. The Puma sisters were the breakout characters of this franchise, most marketing material I've found about these two series heavily pushes them, sometimes to the exclusion of tanks and police. I suspect quite a few people who watched these two miniseries were quite disappointed. Yes the Puma sisters appear frequently, yes they wear costumes that are usually revealing, and they do a striptease. Just the one though, and it's depicted as very goofy if many cutaways to reaction shots of SWAT police behaving like the Wolf from those Tex Avery cartoons. 

No, they don't wear anything like that in the show. And not to get into a slap fight with TV Guide, but the word sometimes is doing the heavy lifting in that quote.

 

There are raunchy anime OVAs, but the Tank Police ones are not in that number. The sister's main contributions were comedy and then some tear-jerking because as androids they are treated very poorly by society. They're in Buaku's gang because that's the only prospect of regular money that they can get that isn't stripping. And in New Tank Police where Buaku is completely absent, they sleep in an underground car park and have nothing going for them except more crime. Even when they move over into sort of doing the right thing territory, they get hassled and harassed by the Tank Police anyway.

Having watched both, I now understand why it's largely been relegated as an artefact of the 90s-early 2000s. Though watching in 2023 I think it may have aged pretty well. It's a cynical franchise where the label hero doesn't fit anyone comfortably, and the protagonists would be denounced and avoided if they were real people, but here the violence and cruelty is softened with crude humour and a strong distrust of everyone and everything. Like how the Home Alone movies use slapstick sensibilities and heart string tugging to take the sting out of scenes of Kevin McCallister throwing bricks at Daniel Stern's head. 

Grenade torture, Dominion Tank Police's first running joke

Despite this, unfortunately, the march of time has shown that its depictions of cops as a bunch of self obsessed jerks and violent thugs barely qualifies as satire. The first four minutes of the first episode of Tank Police is a back and forth shouting match between two characters, the mayor and the Chief of Police, the Mayor is furious that the Tank Police are causing so much damage to the city while the Chief couldn't care less about that and is demanding even more dangerous and powerful weapons. Since the 1980s, police forces across the world have been showered with military grade weapon systems, including armoured vehicles, so Main Battle Tanks aren't so farfetched. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/05/why-are-some-us-police-forces-equipped-like-military-units

How about the attitude? Well, the Tank Police are depicted as selfish arseholes who only bother to fight crime because they view the activities of criminals as a direct challenge to them personally. In the first Tank Police episode, the captain of the force is lecturing Lenoa and another rookie on how the most important thing is to preserve their Tanks. There's a violent incident every 36 seconds on average in that city, and if they were too active in responding, they'd soon be worn down. He even overrules the rookies who which to answer a call for back up from the SWAT police, since he views his fellow police officers with contempt. He only bothers to try and stop Buaku's gang when they rear end his Tank and thus insult him personally.

Lenoa is no better, unlike the Captain she doesn't subscribe to How to Kill magazine, but once her Tank gets scratched in yet another grenade "Interrogation" scene which she set up she tries to gun down an unarmed prisoner who is suspended from a game show spin wheel. She sort of sees Buaku as a person by the end of Tank Police thanks to how that plot line goes, but she's more than willing to kill and torture anyone who runs afoul of her. Many cop centred media products deal with abuse of power and usually covers for it with some appeal to pragmatism or threatening potential outcome, if the detective doesn't murder the child murderer the bill of rights and lawyers will set them free, or there's a ticking time bomb and people's lives are at stake so they had to beat the suspect until they can't walk any more, or show that the bad things made the police feel bad about doing them.

Tank Police throws all of that out of the window. The criminals who get the grenade treatment are bad people who admit to horrible actions, but it's crystal clear that the "interrogations" were excuses for the Tank Police to torture people for fun. One of them confesses to multiple murders, which they didn't ask him about because they didn't know anything about them. When they deploy they frequently level the City, they in fact do much more damage to than the criminals do, and they are fully aware of this and do not care about it. They don't even like supporting fellow police officers, Lenoa's dramatic climax is using her damaged Tank to shut a civilian jet out of the air, killing everyone on board. The passengers are shady corporate criminals, but she's avenging a friend and has no real interest in whatever their scheme was. Make the Tank Police into a rival gang with better connections to international arms markets and nothing much changes in how they operate. You could even keep the paperwork jokes and change them to being compensation payments that are deducted from their protection racket income. Which is functionally what taxes to pay for the police are.

So, surely this level of callous self interest must be a product of cynical imagination, right? Well, in the United States of America the doctrine of Qualified Immunity protects police officers in what are blatent examples of brutality. 

To push Brooks to step out of her car, one of the officers pulled out a Taser and asked her if she knew what it was. She didn’t, but told the officer she was seven months pregnant. The officers chatted in front of her, casually discussing which part of her body they would tase: “Well, don’t do it in her stomach,” one of them said, “do it in her thigh.” The officers twisted Brooks’s arm behind her back and tased her three separate times—first on her thigh, then in the arm, and then in the neck—before dragging her into the street, laying her face down, and cuffing her.Brooks sued the officers to hold them accountable for their conduct. Six federal judges agreed that the officers’ use of severe force absent any threat to their safety violated the U.S. Constitution. But those same judges dismissed her case, relying on a legal doctrine called “qualified immunity.” Qualified Immunity Explained

 And said actions of brutality are not uncommon. Furthermore, funding these police forces is draining multiple city budgets.

https://www.statista.com/chart/10593/how-much-do-us-cities-spend-on-policing/

And as for giving a damn about other people, well they haven't done that for a long time if they ever did. Currently as I'm writing this in the United Kingdom every month there's another reveleation that police forces especially the Metropolitan have been harbouring and covering for murderers and rapists within there ranks. And Uvalde Texas showed the world that over 400 police officers from multiple forces including special tactical response units with military grade equipment will just stay in cover listening to gunfire and calls for help from schoolchildren for over an hour before deciding they had enough strength assembled to intervene. The shooter entered the school at 11:30 am and wasn't confronted and eliminated untill 12:50. At the start of the attack there were 19 officers inside the school building the majority of the back up stayed outside for the duration.

Practically the only thing that still science fiction about the Tank Police franchise is that we don't have fully sapient Cat Women gynoids and anti-tank mines that humoursly flip the tank over like a Chef's spatula only more phallic. We're stuck with weird walking dog leg robots and anti-tank mines that explode and maim or kill everyone in the vicinity. Once again reality has ruined a joke.

Some Comments on Plagiarism

 

Found the image on this page, the credits for the image are as follows "Paper Trident / iStock / Getty Images Plus"

Big news on YouTube (YT), drama has ocurred that has effected several channels that I've watched on occasion. The main actors are Hbomberguy (Hbomb), with an important follow-up video by Todd in the Shadows (Todd), the main topic is misinformation and plagiarism and the main target of the criticism is another YT I've watched headed by James Somerton, the channel has the same name as its owner. I haven't James's video because the channel has taken down every video. 

If you spend a lot of time on YT then chances are good you'll know the gist of this already, but if not I'll briefly explain. Todd has a channel on YouTube that reviews music, while James Somerton and Hbomberguy are what's called video essayists, which is just what it sounds like, essays in video format. 

Both videos are quite long Hbomb's is just under four hours, though James becomes the focus in the back half, the first part is a collection of other YT channels that muddy the information waters. I previously saw a rough draft of the first part some months ago, so I skipped that part in the finished video. They are both thorough and there isn't much in the way of padding, there is some minor griping in both videos, but they mostly document serious acts of foul play, and it's clear that the minor complaints are brought up out of personal frustration and anger and not out of malice for malice’s sake. I do recommend watching them not just for context on this blog but for general viewing. 

Since both do such a good job of documenting James's many misdeeds I'm not writing this to add to them, the case is pretty well solved, I am writing this for a couple of reasons that are somewhat related. I'm a little saddened to learn about James actions, I watched his videos and was a bit of a fan. I'm openly Queer and have been looking for more queer information and content, Queer stuff isn't exactly obscure, but it is niche, gay media that isn't pornography isn't banned exactly, but it often gets stuck in a grey area where it is accessible if you put in some work to find it and can pay more, and books tend to be harder to find online, and you have to resort to out of print second or third hand copies or blogs that quote heavily from them or upload scanned pages. There's been more progress in giving queer material more mainstream exposure, but it can still be quite tricky. 

I've turned to podcasts and blogs and YT video creators. James was a big fish in a small pond, his channel was doing very well with 200,000+ subscribers and videos often in the 100,000s to a million views range. You could avoid him, but you'd have to use a plugin that lets you block certain channels. The videos had a slick look to them, they came out regularly and in large quantities, and often related to topics I had at least some interest in. I wasn't a hardcore fanatic, though I was paying just enough attention to his channel that I can confirm that parts of Hbomb's video about James deliberately trying to fire up his fan base to side with him in his feuds with others was a thing. I saw the comments and community posts where he claimed he was being attacked, didn't know the context of them at the time, I just thought it was another example of toxic interactions with others that online platforms encourage. Which, with hindsight, was correct, just not in the way I thought at the time. Another thing that James used to do that was overlooked by the two big videos is that James wasn't shy of emotional statements of vulnerability that may or may not have been true, I have no grounds or place to comment on his personal life, but, in the aftermath of the revelations I suspect were used to further manipulate his audience. I certainly felt sorry for the guy.

I can also confirm that James was very sloppy at citing sources, his videos gave the strong impression that everything he was saying in them were his own ideas or the results of his own investigations, or of someone he was collaborating with. And I can tell you first hand that he was effective at spreading misinformation, I found Todd's video harder to watch of the two because there are several points where he fact checks bits of the videos that I believed from watching those videos. I did not believe James's Gay Nazi comments which shocked me when I saw them in Todd's video because I'm already quite knowledgable on that subject, and because I was intimately familiar with the source for that video, Richard Plant's The Pink Triangle. I transcribed the damn thing as a way to help more people find out about as at the time I could only get a second hand book and the web was full of Christian right wing sites promoting the Pink Swastika, a tract of propaganda that tries to paint the Nazis as a homosexual movement. Furthermore, I can't be certain, but the part where James says the SS was full of homosexuals probably comes from the Pink Swastika, I know the Pink Swastika makes that claim and Pink Triangle does not, and I can't think of a creditable source that also makes that claim. 

I said I wouldn't join in the pile on, but that did, well, provoked some feelings. If you're curious why I didn't pick up on it at the time, I watched that video once and when I tried to watch it again to pay attention it had been removed.

Anyway, I'm going to borrow Hbomb's trick and now pivot entirely to a different subject, and that is plagiarism and the Situationist International.

 

 

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

The above text is thesis 207 of the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord and the Situationists.  It was plagiarised from Isidore Ducasse, according to the English translator of this Situationist text. Debord has committed plagiarism, and it's sort of amusing that he plagiarised a thought on plagiarism. But, to me, the interesting part is that neither Debord nor Ducasse are talking about plagiarism. It's a statement about building off of the work of others and a rejection of the auteur and the belief that ideas are the property of one individual alone. If the thesis an advocacy of anything, it's the necessity of copyright infringement and a damning criticism of intellectual property as an obstacle to human expression and progress. 

I'm going to take that thesis again and bold the parts that point to my interpretation.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

This is the act of adaptation and experimentation, by changing it and removing falsehoods and substituting a new "right" idea you have added your own work and altered it. Technically, plagiarism could still be present if you took credit for the whole thing including the original idea, but that isn't represented in the thesis. Going back to James Somerton and applying this thesis, we see that James does embrace many an author's phrase and makes use of their expressions, but I don't think he erases false ideas and replaces them with better ones. As Todd and Hbomb have shown, the opposite is usually true when he makes changes and inserts his own ideas. So, oddly, I think we've discovered a definition of plagiarism that James Somerton's work doesn't fall under. Perhaps a rebranding to 1950s French inspired anti-art is in store for James Somerton's future?

Generally speaking Debord and the Situationists were guilty of actual plagiarism on occasion, the thesis itself is an obvious example though there is a brief and opaque acknowledgement of where Debord got the idea within the User's Guide. As a group, they were openly contemptuous of art as a concept within capitalist society.

It is in fact necessary to eliminate all remnants of the notion of personal property in this area. The appearance of new necessities outmodes previous “inspired” works. They become obstacles, dangerous habits. The point is not whether we like them or not. We have to go beyond them.

A User's guide to Detournement 

 

But, most of the criticism and evaluations of this that I've seen associate the concept of detournement. Detournement is not just a pain to spell (I find saying it out loud helps) it's the official name for the Situationists most famous activity. The films, paintings and photographs that they altered are all examples of this. It's arguably the Situationists lasting contribution, there are still small groups and individual artists experimenting with the style and there are faint echoes of it in current internet meme culture. Yes, most examples of Detournement I am familiar with take pre-existing imagery and then change them to alter the meaning of the image. But they aren't passing themselves off as the owners of the original works, and I'm of the opinion that many of them don't work unless you are somewhat familiar with the original work and so not likely to think that Debord et al. were the original photographers. If you're not familiar with the original work, or it's one of the materials made by Situationists that were mostly or entirely original, then they often just come across as weird imagery.

Plagiarism is taking others work and passing it off as your own, that's largely not what the Situationists were doing, and when they did that it reads to me as a part of their attempt to reject art and its conventions in totality, a task in which they failed, "Situationist art" and the "Situ style" is quite recognisable, the production of the User guide itself helped codify Situationist art styles and conventions. 

For example

As soon as I saw this on an image search I knew it was an original work by one of the British Situationists, and the link took me to the John McCready archive, which is a collection of British Situationist material. You can definitely plagiarise the Situationists, I wouldn't recommend it as you'd be caught pretty quickly, but it is definitely something that can be ripped off. And they are often parodied and given homage in mainstream works that aren't remotely interested in breaking the depoliticised working class out of their prisons of everyday life. Oh, and you may have noticed that this image has watermarks on it, in addition the search engine warned me that this image may be copyrighted. 

To add to the misery, detournement have also become commodities. The Situationists were a deeply flawed bunch, they were very astute in criticising much of the apparently revolutionary microgroups and reformist tendencies, but they reflected much of what they criticised and while extremely knowledge about art and its conventions often fell into the same traps, if you look up the Situationist International now many of the admirers view them as a clever curiosity, what revolutionary potential they had is just gone.

Going back to that thesis for the third and final time.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

I disagree that this is plaigarism, but I fully agree with its intent. Progress does demand working with ideas that are not your own and allowing others to work with those that are. Copyright and the treatment of art and information as property that can be withheld dictated and traded is not only a personal failing of individual bad actors, its a direct attack on human interaction and intellectual and cultural development. This is what I get from thesis 207, Society of the Spectacle and much of the Situationist legacy is difficult to pin down into unambiguous statements of intent so I wan't say that my reading is the reading of it. I have read many of the works of the Situationists, mostly the French and British ones, but I have not digested everything they put out so these statements on the Debord and his small circle of friends are not to be taken as set in stone, they're what I think based on my experiences.

To tie these two threads Situationism and James Somerton together I will finish up with this thought. Plagairism and copyright infringement are not the same thing, but they are related. James Somerton wasn't just ripping off other writers for giggles, he was monetising them as well, the work of others became "his" and so he was entitled to exploit it for money and influence. So, yes, capitalism should be abolished and while we're at it let's through social hierarchies in the bin too, and create a perfect and harmonious communal society were labours are shared, and we'll never have to worry about the scourge of plagiraism again.