Three Gates: Spoiling the Game

There is a game they used to play in grade school: “keep away.” They’d grab your hat and throw it from person to person, just as you reached your last tormentor. “Hey!” they’d say. “I don’t have it any more!” And you’d run to the next one, who would throw it, and grin. And on and on.

One day, I tired of the game. Got to the last guy who had my hat, and when he grinned at me, I punched him in the stomach. Got to the next one, and when HE threw my cap, I hit him in the face. The third guy gave me my hat.

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I heard a story about discipline in the British army. If someone stole a cake from the mess, and no one confessed, EVERYONE was punished until the culprit confessed.

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The statistically obvious fact that in media images black men are killed more often, and wiped out more often, when there is for all practical purposes no contrary image (all white characters with dialogue killed if anyone else survives), as well as things like sexuality (disproportionately uncompetitive reproductively), or white men pictured with black women more often than the opposite (reversing statistical reality)…all clearly evident if you look at the 300–400 top box office films, or films released in the last five years. But in every single case, every movie, it is possible to explain why it happened in THAT movie as a matter of artistic choice.

There are great, great films where it happens, and its ALWAYS explainable as something other than some unconscious…