Signal boosts

[petrea_mitchell]

A couple of things you probably haven't seen reposted a zillion times already:

Campaign Zero has been collecting the research on what works and what doesn't to reduce police violence. Whether you want to demilitarize the police, fix their training, or replace them with some other people entirely for non-life-threatening situations, Campaign Zero has the details on how.

"Pride, Policing, and the Conservative Politics of My Hero Academia" at Anime Feminist picks apart a worldview you may recognize from a fair amount of Western media.

(Also, My Hero Academia is terrible for other reasons too, please stop helping promote it, sf fans. If you want to encourage people to watch a foreign show using Western superhero tropes, then here are a couple of recommendations: Tiger & Bunny, where the guy who wants to outright execute all criminals is a secondary antagonist and the heroes include an extravagantly non-tragic nonbinary person; and Concrete Revolutio, which is about the messy intersection of freedom, justice, and truth set against a background of 1960s turmoil.)

Comments

[athenais]

Oh gosh, I have a friend who is super into MHA. I think I'll send her that link.

[petrea_mitchell]

Thanks.

[joseph_teller]

I heard a piece earlier today on the radio talking about requiring police to carry personal professional liability insurance for their job as requirement for employment as a way to achieve better accountability by sidestepping the political power of the police unions over the system.

Like marks against a physician or professional vehicle driver, the intent is to basically price the bad cops out of their jobs for lesser infractions before they commit a big one.

Its an idea that I've heard before but never really seen given a whole lot of consideration by the legislatures.

[petrea_mitchell]

I've seen some discussion of it recently, too. It was pointed out that individual police officers can be sued, but the city they work for typically winds up actually paying the settlement.

[delosharriman]

"The nail that sticks up gets hammered down."

The notion that social cohesion trumps the interest of the individual is probably as ingrained in Japanese culture as in any in the modern world, & Japanese media such as anime & manga reflect that. Even those which are most sympathetic to the marginalized individual rarely provide a "win condition" which is not in the direction of conformity & integration. I think, for example, of Frolbericheri Frol in They Were Eleven. The results will generally be appalling to someone whose value system is that of 1970s white America, in which self-actualization is the supreme good, to be pursued at all costs — although I would argue that this results from psychological advertising techniques more than any genuine intellectual movement.

I have no brief to defend or promote My Hero Academia, a show toward which I am basically indifferent, but it does seem to me fairly pointless to criticize something on the grounds that it uncritically embodies widely-recognized underlying assumptions of the culture of the creator. No doubt shonen anime can serve as a vehicle for incisive cultural commentary, but it usually doesn't, & to expect otherwise is to be chronically disappointed.

[petrea_mitchell]

I feel that understanding another culture's biases can make it easier to see our own, especially if they are similar ones. For instance, I have long listened to minority voices calling out persistent problems with depiction of non-white people in Western media, but there is a level at which I did not truly understand it until I saw the anti-white racism that's part of the background noise of anime.

[delosharriman]

Mind you—

Under those social assumptions, where one group of superpowered people is using their powers/"quirks" in a way which they assert to be for the benefit of society as a whole, they are automatically the heroes. Another group opposes them, & are automatically the villains. A better show than MHA would pull on that string, let the protagonist get in deep with the "hero" faction & then lead him to question whether it is in fact what it claims to be; but no more than about 20% of shonen anime, I'd say, have that level of self-awareness.