Midrange Weekly April 12
Your Weekly Round Up On What’s Got The Midrange Staff’s Attention
Midrange Staff @midrangeyvr
Welcome back to Midrange Weekly. Another week has gone by without going into total lockdown and that’s just going to have to be the metric by which we judge the passage of time from now on, so way to go everyone. As America nears a quarter of its entire population vaccinated, we here in BC are just hoping to go a few days without having to hear from Premier Horgan. How the tables have turned! Hopefully this will be a lesson for us in Canada to remember the next time we wish to poke fun at America’s cultural and institutional idosyncriases. Of course such restraint can only last so long when Matt Gaetz continues to exist and open his mouth. Let’s take a look at what’s got the team all riled up this week.
Six Days In Fallujah Is Incapable Of Telling The Story It Claims To Be Interested In. It Shouldn’t Be Released
Video Games, and their attendant industry that seems enraptured by the perpetual throes of adolescence, are no stranger to controversy. Be it the garden-variety conservative push back ranging from the ubiquity of Mortal Kombat, to weirder niche peculiarities like the Hot Coffee hack that obliquely presaged meme culture, to more consequential and pervasive problems like Gamer Gate and crunch culture. Those sceptical of the medium’s value as a whole or ardent defenders that have been cynically dispirited by repeated scandal may agree that it is an industry that cannot seem to escape from its worst egotistical and exploitive instincts. These issues at times manifest in the granular and opaque ecosystem of the culture on a macro level, thusly making it harder to define and determine where specifically things went wrong. In the case of Six Days In Fallujah however, the inherent vices and problematic behaviour are crystallized into a single product, and one that thus far has resoundingly failed to justify its existence.
Six Days in Fallujah is a First Person Shooter soon to be released by publisher Victura; while ostensibly yet another Call Of Duty clone, set in the dusty marzipan hue of a Middle Eastern setting, the game endeavours to more precisely document a very recent and very painful moment in modern history. As the title suggests, the game will be a telling of the second battle of Fallujah, widely considered to be the bloodiest engagement of the ongoing Iraq war. 800 Iraqis were killed during the siege, countless others were injured and displaced, and a litany of shameful war crimes were committed by occupying forces, lead by the United States Military. America’s appetite for exporting freedom, fighting them there so we didn’t have to fight them here- all crude obfuscations for what was nothing more that neo conservative colonial adventurism- waned considerably when it became more and more apparent that collation forces had become far removed from the original mission of engaging Al Qaeda post 9/11 and were instead sweeping through a land that merely had passing resemblance or adjacency to the one that been vilified. Like the down ward spiral of moral depravity that suffocated the narrative of Vietnam, so too has the Iraq occupation become a dark and irremovable stain on America’s legacy to the world.
Based on what’s been presented of the game so far by Victura, Six Days In Fallujah doesn’t seem interested in interrogating or exploring any of that context. The hype machine has described it as an experience that will provide depth, nuances and multiple perspectives into the sacking of the city, but so far it seems like little more than manipulative military propaganda- Victura themselves have alleged ties to the US military after all. Despite assurances of a morally complex and diverse perspective of the event, the game shows you only playing as American soldiers, and ones that will be bestowed sympathetic backstories and narratives. The ‘enemy’ is depicted as a typical brown person dressed in our idea of typical terrorist garb apoplectically yelling typical phrases in a language many of us likely don’t understand. The game alleges to tell its story specific to how life in the city was affected by the occupation, but instead it seems like the opposite. Little of Fallujah is depicted beyond it being a burned out obstacle course in which to survey for tactical cover opportunities, to say nothing of the people that lived here. Victura had an opportunity to depict those on the other side of the rifle as people that lived in the city, and how it was their home and cultural anchor; instead they are just another round of faceless terrorists to shoot.
It’s possible the game has tricks up its sleeve that its not revealing but for a game that wants to take a more holistic approach to what happened in Fallujah, it sparks a fair bit of incredulity that you can’t play as a person that actually lived their in the game. It’s admittedly too much of a stretch to put you in the role of a person with a gun pointed at US soldiers sure. But what about citizens that were forced to flea the city, or that couldn’t due the chaos, or wouldn’t because doing so would split up their family due to the occupation forces denying exit from the battlefield to any male over the age of 15. They are barely represented in this game beyond non-interactive snippets of them running and cowering. In a sequence where US soldiers clear a house with a family hiding in it, it’s unclear if the scenario has switched to a cinematic or if the player will actually have the option to open fire on civilians. These gameplay vectors are emblematic of FPS games; there usually isn’t much interaction to be had with the world beyond shooting at it in this genre, making it wholly unequipped to examine the moral ambiguity and human suffering that tells the real story of Fallujah. For Victura to attempt to do so through this extremely narrow lens seems irredeemably irresponsible. So many other genres of video games exist that are far more capable of attempting to translate Fallujah in to an interactive and objective experience. That they went with the one prescribed almost solely by guns speaks volumes about their real priorities.
Those priorities proved further suspect during a recent gameplay reveal in which the experience was narrated by real marines brought on to the project to provide authenticity to the game. But it is only the authenticity of squad tactics, the kick back of a rifle, the sound an IED makes; the authenticity of violence. How many experts were brought on to help them vividly depict the arts and commerce of a city square or the cultural dialects of the different neighbourhoods, or the leisurely trends of Fallujah’s inhabitants prior to the invasion? Victura interviewed over a 100 marines and only 26 Iraqis. That’s not good enough. One of the marines, while narrating a portion of the game said, “the person who goes first is always right, they have the most to fear”. That is a fiendishly audacious claim and a tacit defense to the numerous atrocities committed by coalition forces in Iraq and elsewhere. Such a statement is roughly analogous to saying a cop was in his rights to shoot an unarmed black kid because he was briefly scared. Such rhetoric is deeply propagandistic and further resigns Victura to a moral position from where they have no such right or perspective to create an honest telling of what happened in Fallujah.
The Council on America-Islamic Relations have called on Sony, Microsoft, and Valve to deplatform the game prior to its release, citing its reliance on racist clichés will only further enshrine the explicit vilification of Muslims in western society. Games are allowed to be controversial, or defined largely by how much stuff you can blow up. Their reach may also often exceed their thematic grasp without the project being condemned. Games are really hard to make after all! But when a very recent and very traumatic moment in history is dressed up as just another FPS and the developers then have the gall to gaslight us into believing their narrative that this is a higher or more prestigious order of story telling, that’s a bridge to far, to use the military parlance. The US military doesn’t need any more propaganda, and video games don’t need another product that vindicates the racist undertones that have plagued the industry for too long. -Tristan
Amazon Should Do The Right Thing
This past Friday Amazon won a monumental battle in Bessemer, Alabama as employees for its warehouse voted down unionization. This isn’t shocking. Amazon did everything they could to dissuade this from happening.
From Recode:
Amazon pushed hard to convince workers to vote against unionization. The company set up an anti-union website that harped on the fact that union dues would cost full-time workers close to $500 a year. What the company didn’t say on the website is that, in Alabama, unions can’t require workers to pay union dues. So a union at Amazon’s BHM1 wouldn’t be able to force workers to become members and pay dues or fees. Even in such a situation, these employees would still be covered by a union contract and would be represented by the union if the company violated the agreement in a way that harmed the worker.
Amazon also convened mandatory in-person meetings during worker shifts to stress the downsides of unions, sending frequent texts to workers with anti-union messages and encouraging them to vote no. The company went so far as to post anti-union flyers on employee bathroom stall doors.
The retail giant also did something else that appears to be even more controversial. Amazon pressed the United States Postal Service to install a mailbox on the grounds of the Bessemer warehouse right before voting started — and after the NLRB denied the company’s request to place a ballot drop box on the property. Some workers have said they were intimidated by the installation of the mailbox, as well as the messages from Amazon to use it, and believe that the company wanted to monitor who voted.
Having a seat at the bargaining table shouldn’t be such an issue in our society, but for some reason it is. One of the largest single employers on Earth has a chance to show the rest of the world that, yes, we can be a trillion dollar company, but we can also be an excellent employer. Sure they pay a minimum $15 per hour and they’ve hired thousands this past year, but why not go further? Why not accept this responsibility and help shrink the growing gap between the rich and the poor? And I mean lets face it, the majority of employees who work for Amazon make this paltry minimum. What kind of life is that? It’s unfortunate those workers voted this opportunity down, this could have been the start of something. I mean look what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made last week.
We live in a world where this is accepted. This needs to change.
A few things to consider here as well.
From the Economic Policy Institute:
Unions raise wages for both union and nonunion workers
On average, a worker covered by a union contract earns 11.2% more in wages than a peer with similar education, occupation, and experience in a nonunionized workplace in the same industry; this wage advantage is known as the “union wage premium.”16And unions don’t just help union workers — they help all of us. When union density is high, nonunion workers benefit, because unions effectively set broader standards — including higher wages, as noted by Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird (2016) — that nonunion employers must meet in order to attract and retain the workers they need (and to avoid facing a union organizing drive themselves).
The combination of the direct effect of unions on union members and this “spillover” effect to nonunion workers means unions are crucial in raising wages for working people and reducing income inequality. Research shows that deunionization accounts for a sizable share of the growth in inequality between typical (median) workers and workers at the high end of the wage distribution in recent decades — on the order of 13–20% for women and 33–37% for men.
Unions help raise wages for women and lessen racial wage gaps
Unions help raise women’s pay. Hourly wages for women represented by a union are 5.8% higher on average than for nonunionized women with comparable characteristics. Rigorous research shows that unions reduce gender wage gaps within given employers: For example, Biasi and Sarsons (2020) show that the expiration of teacher collective bargaining agreements led to a gender gap in wages between male and female teachers with similar credentials.
Unions also help close wage gaps for Black and Hispanic workers. Since collective bargaining lifts wages of Black and Hispanic workers closer to those of their white counterparts, Black and Hispanic workers get a larger boost from unionization. White workers represented by union are paid “just” 8.7% more than their nonunionized peers who are white, but Black workers represented by union are paid 13.7% more than their nonunionized peers who are Black, and Hispanic workers represented by unions are paid 20.1% more than their nonunionized peers who are Hispanic.
This is far from over for Amazon. I’m hopeful a union will form someday. You should be too, it’s better for society overall. - Jamie
Living Just To Live — The Effects of Minimum Wage And Poverty
photo credit: Alan MacBain
There’s this truthful line Johnny Depp recites from the movie Blow which I’m always reminded of whenever I think about my life and those around me. I always wonder how closely it fits with each person’s reality.
“Most people’s lives pass them by as they are making grand plans for them.”
From Vox:
“Eating, paying for health insurance, all the bills that normal people have — those don’t go away just because you don’t make a lot of money, those things all exist,” he says.
“I want to know how much the people make who say $15 is too much and minimum wage is livable, or how much they’ve ever made,” Laura says. “I’ve tried to have this discussion with people that I’m living off of $11 an hour and it’s barely livable only because I’m not having to pay my own rent, and they call me stupid because they say I should get a different job or manage my money better.”
“It feels like it’s keeping me from moving on in my life”
That last quote is the one I want you to focus on.
Opportunity for so many in this world isn’t just driven by the American ideal, that if you just work hard, pay your dues, you can rise up and develop a great life for yourself. For a small few, yes, this is a reality. But for the vast majority, think again. The 2019 College Admissions Scandal is a shiny example of what privilege can get you — access to a better life. They may have been caught, but there’s been many more who have not and will not.
Those quotes above come from a Vox column that came out this past Wednesday. It’s titled Life on the minimum wage.The feature is an expose into the lives of countless Americans who work and just want a chance at something better. But there’s a catch to it all, a truth they’ve come to accept so well. The world is a cruel place, with inequality and injustice all around. A plight lost amongst a sea corruption and greed. They tolerate minimum wage because they have no choice. There’s an irony to this though, which is that their meagre livelihoods so often don’t start there in adulthood. They begin much, much earlier.
From The Tyee:
They are the kids who show up for school hungry, who wear clean clothes only when there is extra money. They’re the ones who don’t talk about weekend activities or visits with friends. They’re the ones who struggle to learn, not because they’re less able, but because they’re malnourished, haven’t had opportunities and find the whole school experience overwhelming and exclusionary.
We love a rags-to-riches story, the kid from a poor family who cashes in on an invention or launches a business. But the reality is usually rags to rags.
Childhood poverty is a lifelong curse. The largest factor in adult health, for example, is not whether you smoke, or exercise or even your genetics. It’s whether you lived in poverty as a child. Living in poverty as a child limits your educational opportunities and achievements, reduces your employment prospects and, as a result, limits the future for your children in turn, if you have any.
Those consequences don’t just affect the children’s lives. We all pay for the increased costs to the health-care system and other social supports and in the lost contributions of people who never had the chance to make the most of their abilities and interests.
But the economic benefits of improving life for children shouldn’t be the main factor in offering children being raised on assistance a fair life, not one of deprivation. This is a moral issue.
Imagine the lives of parents trying to deal with life on assistance. The fear, the guilt, the daily struggle, the knowledge that despite their best efforts their children were suffering.
Imagine the lives of those children, knowing they were falling behind before their lives had barely begun, knowing they were already marked by poverty, different from their peers in so many ways.
I’d like you to return to the quote at the top. “Most people’s lives pass them by as they’re making grand plans for them.”
Growing up in poverty has a profound affect not only on a child’s upbringing but also on their perceived scope of what they can achieve. I know this firsthand as I was a child of poverty. I grew up on welfare. We had limited means, access to opportunity and little to no food. What Paul Willcocks, the author of the above Tyee excerpt has detailed here is shown a glimpse of the sheer size of how this issue hurts us all, even if we don’t know it. It took me a long time to realize the magnitude of opportunity that lie before me in life and even though I’ve come out and done rather well, there are still days where I still struggle with the lingering effects of child poverty.
I remember vividly how ashamed I used to feel when I entered the first day of school each year, how each kid had grand stories of summer days up at camp or at the lake, both scenarios far out of my mother’s scope or ability to provide. They all had new clothes and even shinier new shoes. You felt left out, behind, and out of step. Trivial as these instances might feel now some 30 years later, over time, with subsequent moments pilling on top of each other, your worldview of what your possibilities are starts to form. You begin to believe it’s smaller than those of your peers.
Because you’ve had less opportunity, you’ve thus had less experience. In a world that’s vicious and uncompromising, any misstep can alter one’s course for a lifetime, hence the College Admissions Scandal. Those parents knew the gravity of excellence and were hell bent on doing whatever it took to give their children that proverbial leg up — even if it meant doing something illegal. They weighed the risk of being caught versus a possible lifetime of greater advancement for their children. We were appalled when news broke of their crimes, but I imagine many parents all around, who, put in that position might have done the same thing for their child. It’s this myopic view of our society which gets us at this point.
Quotes such as this one should not have to exist: “It feels like it’s keeping me from moving on in my life.”
From Canadian Medical Association Journal:
Recently, the World Health Organization concluded, “Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale.”3There is a rationale for taking action to improve the lives of those living in poverty. Social determinants and health inequalities pose a substantial challenge to health care systems around the world.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development stated, “Failure to tackle the poverty and exclusion facing millions of families and their children is not only socially reprehensible, but it will also weigh heavily on countries’ capacity to sustain economic growth in years to come.”4
Poverty has been highlighted as the most important social determinant of child health in high-income countries.5–7 A recent United Nations Children’s Fund Report Card examined a children’s well-being index, looking at the average of 26 indicators across 5 dimensions: material well-being, health and safety, education, behaviours and risks, and housing and environment.6 Canada’s overall rank was 17th of 29 wealthy developed nations.6 It ranked 15th in material well-being, 27th in health and safety, 14th in education, 16th in behaviours and risks, and 11th in housing and environment. League tables for each of these dimensions, and for each indicator within the dimension, measure and compare progress for children across these countries.
We also need to understand that children are often not in a position to speak out for themselves, and every child is therefore entitled to special protection under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The argument is not just about evidence underlying the interventions, or their cost-effectiveness; it is that making genuine effort to reduce child poverty is morally and legally the right thing to do.5,7
Minimum wage is just a symptom of our callous affinity for workers and what we deem them worthy of paying. The fact that a corporation isn’t beholden as a human entity but merely a board whose lone mission is shareholder value, bonuses and stock buybacks is appalling. The more we learn, the greater our ability to understand and empathize.
People’s lives shouldn’t pass them by because all they do is work to live. Wouldn’t you agree? - Jamie
FLUX FIVE
This Week:
Jon Hopkins “Autumn Hill” 2008 Inside
Amelia Curran ”The Reverie” 2014 They Promised You Mercy
Tim Maia “Where Is My Other Half” 1972 Tim Maia
Aurelien Trigo “Headroom” 2019 The Acoustic Mind
Neno Exporta Som “Deixa a Tristeza” 1977 single
Enjoy! - Mick
Things From The Internet We Liked
Loki Continues To Look Like The Most Interesting Thing The MCU is doing
The second trailer for Loki has dropped and between the subtly hostile banter, Terry Gillam vibe, timey wimey hijinks and Tom Hiddleston’s infectiously sinister charm, the series is hopefully on track to be one of the best Disney Plus shows to date.
Some Crazy Bastard Played Around The World By Daft Punk On Tesla Coils
Tesla coils, beyond being the perfect intersection of cool as hell and bloody dangerous can heat currents of air, thus conducting arcs of electricity. One of the off shoot out puts of such energy transformation is a cackling sound. By adjusting the pulse and width of the air heated into energy, one can also modulate the wavelength of sound. Frabicio H. Franzoli has used this occult knowledge to program several coils to play to the classic hit Around The World by Daft Punk. Not only did he not blow himself up, but it sounds really darn good.
How Cancel Culture Became A Mega Phone Instead Of A Consequence
Over at Jezabel, Robin James has a fantastic article detailing how the amorphous term ‘cancel culture’ was appropriated and perverted by those in the conservative media ecosystem as a means to defiantly force their obnoxious view points onto the world under the disingenuous guise of defending free speech. Her connections between the reality of its intended purpose and their hypocritical repurposing of such concepts is vital in understanding their toxic manipulation of the idea. Definitely worth your time to read.